For my son Leo, who loves Frog and Toad.
Children’s stories, unless they are ephemeral trash, always convey something of the realm of the archetypal, the mythical, or the symbolic (not bothering, at this point, to define or distinguish these terms). The acid test is if the kids just can’t hear the story told often enough, and Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad series has certainly passed this test in my house. Children are closer to the Origin or the Unconscious, and are therefore better judges than adults in most cases.
Sometimes the symbolic material arrives in a very attenuated way though, as we might expect for tales meant for young minds. But in the best stories the symbols always shine through.
Typically, the more contemporary, the more the attenuation. Like many parents I sometimes find the versions of fairy tales collected in the early 19th century to be shockingly brutal, but on the other hand more recent versions to be condescendingly toned down. For example, here are some different endings of "Little Red Riding Hood," from oldest to newest:
Red is eaten by the wolf.
Red is eaten by the wolf, but she is rescued alive from the wolf’s stomach by the Woodsman.
Neither Red nor the Grandmother is eaten by the wolf, but are saved or escape before the wolf can eat them.
The wolf does not even threaten to eat them, but only tries to scare them.
Here we have an attenuation of content, but even in more their more primal form the stories will have attenuation of ideas (for instance, the oedipal theme in "Little Red Riding Hood," discussed by Bruno Bettelheim in The Uses of Enchantment). Even stories for adults contain attenuated symbols. Symbols are basically impossible to understand in entirely rational terms, but reason is not the only level on which understanding operates. The force that symbol adds to narrative, or that narrative adds to symbol, depends on both understanding and not understanding. Again, children are very well positioned here.
A symbol almost always contains its own opposite. The world’s master religious symbols (the Cross, Star of David/Seal of Solomon, or Taijitu/Yin-Yang) are practically mere signs for the coincidentia oppositorum or unity of opposites.
In the case of animal symbols (a subject I am considering writing a book on), observed behaviors and qualities are imbued with universal metaphysical significance, but often the related negative aspects of the symbol will be projected onto a secondary creature of similar form, which bears an infernal or sinister character, which serves as a kind of Jungian shadow. So it is with, respectively, the bee and the wasp, the mouse and the rat, the frog and the toad.
"Sinister" literally means “the left side,” which is symbolically “the wrong side.” Even to say something is “correct” etymologically refers to its right-sidedness. The Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser’s The Ever Present Origin contains a lot of interesting commentary on how & why this side obtained moral and logical superiority over its opposite, especially in the West. He points out, for instance, that one of the earliest pieces of writing that goes from left to right instead of right to left, or top to bottom (symbolizing the connection of Heaven and Earth), is on the temple of the Greek sun god Apollo at Delphi, and the inscription is "Know thyself." He takes this as indicative of the emergent Mental consciousness structure. Gebser writes,
"Since ancient times, the left side has stood for the side of the unconscious or unknown; the right side, by contrast, has represented the side of consciousness and wakefulness."
Although his book is a history of consciousness, he’s too much an idealist to be very interested in a mere piece of meat like the brain. Nevertheless, some of his theorizing here seems to anticipate aspects of Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind by nearly 30 years. I will be explaining and applying some of the ideas from both books below, but right now what's important to remember is that the brain's two hemispheres are cross-lateralized, so that the right brain controls the left side of the body and vice-versa. “Sinister” things, I am maintaining, come from the right brain, which is to say that they ultimately come from the unconscious. (I am not saying that right brain processes are all unconscious, but that the right brain is more attuned to the unconscious.)
Jung believed that movement along a circle in a rightward or clockwise motion was towards consciousness, while leftward or counterclockwise moved towards the unconscious. (Obviously if you are moving clockwise, from 9 o'clock to three, you will be moving to the right, but then from 3 to 9 again you'll be moving left, so directionality is defined by the top and not the bottom, a preference which also implies a metaphysical orientation upward. Circular motion is paradoxical, and this makes possible all of Jung's ideas like "enantiodromia" and coincidentia oppositorum. Two people start walking, each in the opposite direction; eventually they meet one another. I walk so far in one direction that I find myself where I started. Circularity is paradoxical. Logic tells you avoid circularity of argument, a principle which Gebser claims belongs exclusively to the Mental consciousness structure, while circularity is the main symbol of the Mythic structure. But more on these later . . .)
World mythology often divides animals into those of a solar or lunar character of the animal, but I think the more relevant opposition is not sun/moon but more often sun/earth. We will therefore speak of the "solar" and "chthonic" energies. The frog has been usually regarded as a lunar animal, but Lobel's Frog is definitely solar, indeed Apollonian as we shall see.
Clearly we are dealing with complimentary binaries here. Frog and Toad, I maintain, correspond to the following opposed pairs:
Sun and Earth
Apollo and Dionysus (Nietzsche)
Left and Right Brain Hemispheres (Jaynes)
Consciousness & the Unconscious (Jung)
Mythic/Mental and Archaic/Magical Consciousness (Gebser)
Yahweh and Jesus (The Bible)
I am not operating under the assumption that all of these antinomies are perfectly aligned with each other, and certainly not that they can be exchanged for one another without doing damage to their specific meanings and associations, only that they can all be assimilated to the figures of Frog and Toad, respectively. But, in a rough sort of way they do align.
Sinister (Cthonic) Forces
We can begin with a simple analysis of Frog and Toad's physical appearance. They are broadly similar in features, particularly in the face, which indicates a common "humanness." Lobel in no way makes Toad more alien or animal-like than Frog. But Frog is taller and more agile than Toad. (The difference is subtle, or "attenuated" as I have said, but it is important.) Frog's height reaches up to the sun, which symbolizes the waking consciousness, while Toad is literally closer to the Earth, and therefore the unconscious origin of man. We might expect a creature that is closer to nature to have a greater physicality, but Frog's agility (exemplified in the story "A Swim") is really symbolic of the positive qualities of consciousness, its greater freedom from natural processes; it is mental, and also manifests in his knowledge of things like how to fly a kite (in "A Kite") or ride a sled (in "Down the Hill") or the knowledge of "Will Power" (in "Cookies").
Toad is brown-toned, linking him to the mud and dirt of the earth, while Frog is green-toned, linking him to that part of the plant kingdom which is capable of utilizing the sun for food. Green is also associated with the season in which plant life appears to be regenerated: Spring.
It is symbolically apt that the very first Frog and Toad story is "Spring." It tells the story of spirit's difficult task of rousing the slumbering soul out of the unconsciousness of matter. It is April, and Toad has apparently been hibernating since November. We are unsure if Frog has kept awake all winter, or has merely woken earlier than Toad. In either case, Frog pays a visit to Toad's house to wake him up, only to be greeted with a cranky "Blah" and "Go away!"
Toad reasons to Frog that he has been asleep so long that a little more will not hurt him, and tells him to wake him up at "half past May." Frog, to anxious to greet the Spring, is unable to wait and rips all the pages off of Toad's calendar until he gets to May, tricking Toad into waking up early.
Throughout the series, we will see that Toad is always ready to go to sleep, while Frog seemingly never sleeps. In "The Story," Toad has a difficult time thinking of a story to tell Frog while he is in bed sick. When they switch places and Toad gets in the bed while Frog tells the story, Toad immediately goes to sleep. In "A Garden," Toad has a difficult time getting his seeds to grow, trying to coax them out (like the earliest agricultural myths and rituals) with songs and poems. The seeds do not begin to grow until Toad falls asleep exhausted and is woken up by Frog.
Now, let’s briefly review what I’ve described in my podcast series regarding frog symbolism:
The frog is a symbol of man's dual or "amphibious" nature: a creature made of matter but imbued with spirit or the spark of divinity. Even without the metaphysical hypothesis of a soul, viewing the human entirely naturalistically, you can still see man as the one animal that lives simultaneously in mind and body, at once the product of evolutionary forces but at the same time the producer of our own unique environment by which we shelter ourselves, which we call culture, or perhaps the Noosphere. We have leaped halfway, as it were, out of nature.
The frog is a symbol of man, and sometimes has been associated with the most perfect man, Jesus, who was amphibiously a man and God at the same time. We have seen many instances of crucified frogs, in modern art exhibits and in a magical ritual by Aleister Crowley. And let us not forget all of the frogs continually and ritually sacrificed to science in high school biology classes.
The frog symbol sums up the story of man's evolution, which is the story of the emergence or liberation of consciousness from matter. The toad, on the other hand, symbolizes a particular disease of consciousness, namely its tendency to revert to unconsciousness or to be seduced back into the automatism of nature.
Toads traditionally have featured prominently in stories of black magic and hypnotism. Shakespeare’s Macbeth--which was influenced by the book Daemonologie, written by none other than James I (an armchair witch-hunter before becoming one of the most notable Kings of England)--features the toad first in its notoriously catchy witches’ brew song (the recipe also includes a frog’s toe):
Round about the cauldron go,
In the poisoned entrails throw.
Toad that under cold stone
Days and nights has thirty-one
Sweltered venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’th’ charm’d pot.
Or how about this line from a more recent popular song:
There's a killer on the road.
His brain is squirming like a toad.
In an occulted version of Joseph Smith’s discovery of Mormonism’s founding document, the Golden Plates (obviously an alchemically-inspired object), the prophet-to-be labored with the telltale preparations of a magical rite, dressed in a black suit and riding a borrowed black horse, to locate the charmed book, only to discover that it was being protected by “something like a toad, which soon assumed the appearance of a man, and struck him on the side of his head.”
The cartoon Futurama has a recurring character called Hypnotoad, the star of a television program called “Everybody Loves Hypnotoad,” nothing more than a large toad crouched completely still except for his eyes, red irises and black pupils that move in uneven pulses and vibrations, keeping viewers mesmerized and frozen before the TV screen. Hypnotoad is transparently a self-referential metaphor for television programming.
A desert toad, Bufo Alvarius, secretes an extraordinarily potent hallucinogen classified as 5-MeO-DMT, which is prized as a kind of holy grail for psychedelic devotees, supposedly providing the quickest route to ego-death, forgoing the visual fireworks that accompany LSD, Mushrooms, and less powerful strains of DMT, in order to bullet-train the user right into the White Light of the Void. Duncan Trussell, a long-time avid user of psychedelics and other drugs, said that with his first 5-MeO trip, he temporarily “deleted himself from existence.”
The toad’s poison was reputed in folklore to have an antidote that also originated in the toad's body (a hair-of-the-dog phenomenon) in the form of a gemstone extracted from its head, called bufonite or the "toadstone". They were considered to be "perfect in form" and were set by European jewelers into magical rings and amulets from Medieval times until the 18th century. Again, we can pull a relevant Shakespeare quote (from As You Like It):
Sweet are the uses of adversity;
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head.
Interestingly, toadstones (now known to be fossilized fish teeth) were also said to protect against epileptic seizures. Epilepsy is a problem with the signals sent between the brain’s two hemispheres, and is often treated by cutting the bridge between them, the corpus callosum.
This is all clearly “sinister” and originating in the Other Side of ordinary conscious experience, and it may seem a rather heavy trip to lay on the charming, loveably hapless Toad created by Lobel. But we should remember the indisputably occult origin of the word “charm,” a word whose meaning has undergone the same process of attenuation I’ve identified in contemporary children’s tales. When a children’s story works, it is pure and literal magic and, again, the kids are better prepared to understand this (not necessarily with the accompanying verbal performance which is the sole indicator by means of which we are prepared to evaluate “understanding”) than adults.
The practical (read: magical) objects around which the plot thread of many of the adventures of Frog and Toad are wound tend to belong to Toad (though often given to him by Frog, a fact which we will discuss later): seeds in "The Garden," the letter in "The Letter," or the hat in "The Hat." We can see them as variations of the toadstone. Toadstones have a “buttonlike” appearance, and one story concerns Toad’s lost button, naturally titled “A Lost Button.”
Frog and Toad search for the button Toad believes that he has lost on their walk together. Frog finds buttons, and other animals bring buttons they have found, each in turn offering them to Toad. Toad complains that they are not like his original button, yet putting each one in his pocket. Nearly furious at the failure to find the button, he arrives home to find it on the floor, and is immediately filled with regret for the trouble he has caused Frog. Toad then takes the buttons he has collected and sews them onto his jacket as a present for Frog. The renewed coat will not lose its buttons because “Toad had sewed them on very well.”
The toadstone comes from the toad’s own brain, and it heals the damage done by the toad’s own venom. The venom in the story is Toad’s mounting anger. In the end the coat is not merely restored to its original state but improved, recalling WB Yeats’ epiphany at the end of “Crazy Jane and the Bishop”:
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.
Without diverting into an interpretation of that poem, let me say that I believe that the contemporaries Yeats and Jung were working along remarkably similar lines, though in different disciplines, and present a similar defense of sin and suffering (here taking on explicitly sexual terms) as a necessary part of the work of cosmic progress, a repair of the fallen world or tikkun olam, and each has a heretical understanding of original sin as a felix culpa.
Once lost, like the pearl of the spirit sunk into matter, and found again, it is multiplied into many buttons. When Frog dons the coat at the end he leaps for joy, and this is his most solar moment. The many different colors and sizes of the buttons recalls the various materials of the Fool’s motley, as well as Joseph in his Coat of many colors, and in this moment Frog resembles nothing so much as the Fool as represented on the Rider-Waite deck, perhaps the most famous image of the Tarot. The Fool is often interpreted as the protagonist of the tarot conceived as a book. Frog is Christ or the Self. We have traversed in this story from the toad’s venom to its healing stone (lapis, also a symbol of Christ), from the wrathful god of the Old Testament Yahweh to the New Testament’s savior and redeemer of all mankind, Jesus. “What a lot of trouble I have made for poor Frog,” we may imagine God the father saying to his son dying on the cross. And then He sews the buttons back on so well that they can never fall off again, and Jesus escapes his tomb with his incorruptible flesh, risen in glory.
Jean Gebser's Five Consciousness Structures
The Swiss philosopher Jean Gebser outlined 5 structures of human consciousness which have thus far emerged in human history (but note that these aren't phases of history per se, and that each remains potentially present at all times):
The Archaic
In this structure, man's consciousness is more or less contiguous with what Gebser calls Origin, the source of all consciousness and possibly identical with God. Archaic consciousness is "zero-dimensional" (I assume that Gebser does not use the notion of dimensionality in a literal way in regards to the structures--just as they are not historical phases; they are timeless and spaceless--but I am not entirely sure about that). At this point man can cannot distinguish himself from the world which he inhabits, or which inhabits him. (Interestingly, this is exactly what the consciousness of an infant is supposed to be like, though Gebser may be unaware of any studies about this, and makes no analogies in this regard.)
It's not really clear to me why this should be considered a structure of consciousness, rather than a pre-conscious or unconscious phase. I'm tempted to identify the Archaic with what Jung called the "collective unconscious," except that Gebser explicitly denies that there is any such thing and that man has only different structures of consciousness. At any rate, we're definitely in the realm of the pre-historic, and there's just not that much to say about Archaic consciousness.
The Archaic structure is generally represented when Toad sleeps, which is pretty much Toad 's favorite thing to do.
The Magic
The Magic consciousness structure is "one-dimensional" and represented by a single point. Within this structure, man becomes something distinct from his environment. However, everything within this environment is entangled or interconnected. If you make a picture of a buffalo and your tribe flinging arrows into it, this will lead to a successful hunt, because the picture does not merely represent the buffalo, but it some mysterious way is the buffalo.
I believe that it is the magical consciousness structure that JG Frazer was primarily trying to analyze in his monumental The Golden Bough. In a very 19th-century, Eurocentric way, he came up with a lot of insights but I don't think he was able to understand Magical consciousness in its own terms. He basically thought that Magic was a primitive form of science that didn't work (but interestingly, Frazer held open the possibility that the scientific worldview would one day be replaced by something we can barely imagine now, just as science was replacing religion and religion had supplanted magic and myth). For Gebser, on the other hand, magic totally works--if you are in Magical consciousness. Frazer laid down what he thought the laws of magic were, which boiled down to a logical but incorrect view of causality in which things that are 1) similar to each other, or 2) associated or contiguous with each other, may affect one another. I think this is true up to a point, but it's importing a metaphysical notion of "causality" that properly belongs to the Mental consciousness structure. I also think that when modern people experience what Jung called "synchronicity," they are essentially tapping into Magic consciousness, which gives an uncanny feeling that everything is on some level interconnected, like the roots of certain trees. Jung called it an "acausal connecting principle," but I think it's really a different kind of causality, where there are so many paths and nodes of causality that it can feel "acausal." But this is by the by.
In the story "The Hat," Frog gives Toad a hat for his birthday that is much too big for his head. Toad says that he will wear the hat anyway, which causes him to fall down since he can't see anything. Frog, as usual, comes up with an apparent solution: Toad should think of the biggest thoughts he can, and this will cause his head to grow larger so that his hat will fit. Frog doesn't really believe this, but it makes perfect sense for Toad. During the night while Toad is dreaming of giant trees and mountains (nothing abstract like "big ideas" for Toad; his thoughts are pure images), Frog sneaks into Toad's house and uses water to shrink his hat. Big thoughts, big head: this is the logic of Magical consciousness.
The Mythical
Mythical consciousness is 2-dimensional, and structured by polarities and cycles. If the discovery of the Magic consciousness was Nature, the discovery of Mythical consciousness is Soul. Where Magic man perceives only forces in nature, Mythical man is able to use stories to shape experience and pass down information through the generations. Stories imply characters, and these are mostly Gods and Demigods. If you are familiar with Joseph Campbell's delineation of the Hero's Journey, you have a pretty good picture of Mythical consciousness.
Gebser is not very interested in tying his structures down to historical periods, and he definitely wouldn't want to say that any economic or technological development caused any of the structures, but I think that from here on we easily see how certain developments in human history are closely associated with respective structures of consciousness.
Something big happened between the Magic and Mythic structures, and that something was agriculture. Magical consciousness is appropriate to nomadic hunter-gatherers with animistic and shamanic religious practices. Just as everything is causally interconnected, so are the paths of the tribe, which can move from anywhere to anywhere. Once man begins to grow his food, he must stay put and wait. Sowing and reaping now happens according to a seasonal rhythm, and the stars must be observed for hints of good and bad weather (eventually extended to foretelling all human and natural events). Two important arts thus come out of Mythical consciousness: storytelling and astrology. The first Hero is probably the seed which goes down under the earth, apparently dying, only to be born again, a prototype of the Dying-Rising God. But the development of civilization doesn't mean just leaping from Magical to Mythical thinking as from one pond into another. If you look at very old civilizations like the Egyptian, you can definitely see a strong influence of Magical thought.
If Toad is the dreamer who thinks in pictures, Frog is definitely the storyteller of the pair. The stories "Shivers," "The Corner," and "The Story," all center around stories told by Frog. This places him squarely in the Mythic structure.
The Mental
Mental consciousness is three-dimensional, and may be visualized as a triangle. We in fact find triangles everywhere in the culture of Mental consciousness: the dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, the trinity, the Eye of Providence placed in a triangle which tops a pyramid (so beloved of Freemasons and other occult societies). The most clever place Gebser finds the Mental triangle is in the famous "vanishing point" of Western art discovered in the Renaissance.
Mental thinking is not cyclical--the circularity of myth becomes a logical fallacy--it is linear, rational, discursive, directed. The roots of Mental consciousness go all the way back to the ancient Greeks, but it really comes into its own after the French Revolution, during which there was a brief attempt to completely tear down all tradition, begin everything at Year Zero, and erect a cult of Reason (the metric system was really the only one of its reforms with staying power—other than removing the monarchy of course).
I have a pretty good guess as to the technology that best facilitated the Mental consciousness structure, and that would be the alphabet. A good supplementary reading to Gebser’s ideas on Mental consciousness would be Marshall McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy, which studies the effects of the alphabet and printing technology on mind and culture. Those effects accord well with what Gebser describes, and they are also similar to the emergence of the left brain hemisphere as the dominant side, which I will discuss below, in the section on the bicameral mind. We will deal with Frog as representative of the left hemisphere in the next section.
The Integral
"In or around December, 1910," Virginia Woolf once wrote, "Human nature changed." This is very much in the spirit of Jean Gebser's consciousness structures, which he insists are "mutations." (They are mutations of an ideal realm, but he suggests that they have had concomitant changes of the human physique and leaves open the possibility of more physical transformations in the future.)
Integral consciousness is represented by a sphere, and it renders all the other structures transparent or "diaphanous." Sort of like the layers of an onion, but you are able to look at the different pattern of each layer. Once a consciousness structure has emerged, it always exists, but they all seem to be accessible to the Integral in a way that's not true of the others. That is very convenient, since it is Integral consciousness is what allows Gebser to write his book. Integral consciousness is four-dimensional, with the fourth dimension being time. However,the essence of the Integral is not the presence of time in consciousness, but the freedom from time. (I have to admit that I don't really understand Gebser's comments on time regarding Integral consciousness.)
Perhaps you have guessed that if the first two consciousness structures belong to Toad, and the next two to Frog, then the fifth belongs to Frog and Toad together (the title of the second Frog and Toad collection).
Although Gebser's consciousness structures necessarily emerge in history, they do not constitute, he insists, a form of historicism. There is no teleological arrow or staircase, no ineluctable wheel of historical seasons. He borrows the term "mutation" from biology to indicate that their changes are not predictable (but there is apparently no selecting or editing force on the other side of mutation's productive force within Origin). There just happens to have been 5 of them. And yet, 5 is the number of man, and it does feel as if there is a kind of summing-up in the last, Integral consciousness.
Typically any fourfold division is one which speaks of the earth, of nature and its cycles. Spengler’s complete historical cycle is divided into 4 periods named after the 4 seasons. Frye’s masterwork of archetypal literary criticism, The Anatomy of Criticism, consists of 4 essays. Jung was obsessed with the number 4 and thought it symbolizes wholeness and integration (not exactly with Gebser’s sense but not unrelated either). Jung was critical of the traditional Christian concept of the Trinity, finding every threefold to be incomplete, hiding a fourth somewhere. (Satan, he argued ought to be incorporated into the godhead to form a quaternity.) From a Gebserian perspective we could see this as Jung's a critique of the limitations of the Mental consciousness structure and moving toward the Integral.
A fourfold is indeed more integral than a threefold, but I would raise Jung one and say that in a quaternity is a hidden fifth, a quintessence. The four directions plus the center, for instance.
Things often occur in fours in Frog and Toad stories. One of the collections, Frog and Toad All Year, is explicitly modeled on the seasonal cycle. It contains 5 stories, the first and last both taking place in winter. There are 4 Frog and Toad collections overall, each containing 5 stories.
Of Two Minds
In 1976, the psychologist Julian Jaynes published The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which presented a novel theory of the history of the human mind, an idea which has drawn a lot of interest and debate but has not been really accepted by any field. The bicameral mind theory is based on modern neuroscience's demonstration of the lateralization of brain function. This basically means that the brain's two hemispheres are specialized. For instance, your language centers are located in the left hemisphere. But the ability to process the emotional content of language is located in the right hemisphere. The right is also mostly responsible for the ability to recognize faces.
Jaynes didn't believe that ancient humans were conscious. Consciousness as he understands it is the ability to recognize that you are thinking. (It took all the way until Descartes in the 17th century to establish the "I think" as the foundation of human identity and knowing.) Ancient peoples, according to Jaynes, didn't do this. Instead, they experienced thoughts originating in the right hemisphere as voices appearing from outside their own mind. The two brain hemispheres communicated with one another, but they weren't linked up in a holistic system, so the communications were perceived as something external. These voices, which he sometimes refers to as "command hallucinations," were the origin of God, or the gods.
Jaynes uses many examples from the Iliad to show that for the ancient Greeks, almost nothing happened in the realm of human action that isn't set in motion by the will of some god or another. It's long been remarked that the Greek gods seem to be mostly hypostases of the human passions. In other words, the gods controlled every aspect of human life, but this is only because the gods were man's projection of himself, and as Blake wrote, "all deities reside in the human breast." (Should he have said “brain”? The Greeks thought intelligence came from the heart. We knew very little about how the brain worked until the 20th century.)
Then somewhere around the time of the Bronze Age collapse, this "bicameral mind" resolved into a single mind, and men stopped hearing voices.
Jaynes' theory has recently been revised by Iain McGilchrist, in his 2009 book The Master and His Emissary. McGilchrist says that Jaynes was correct in stressing the importance of brain lateralization on the development of human history, but they way this happened was precisely the opposite. It wasn't that a divided mind collapsed into one, but rather that the two hemispheres have gradually drifted apart. Not only that but-- and this key--the left hemisphere became dominant over time. One apparently trivial effect of this that nearly 90% of people are right-handed. I already mentioned Gebser's noting of the moral and epistemological value attributed to the right side. Remember, when we are talking about the right side we are talking about the left hemisphere.
You're probably familiar with the cliche of the right brain as "the creative side" and the left brain as "the logical side." That's not entirely wrong but it misses the most important difference that McGilchrist emphasizes throughout his book, which is that the right brain perceives things holistically while the left brain perceives only parts and never the whole. The left brain can't see the forest for the trees.
The Master and His Emissary is pretty critical of the left brain, which seems a little strange, like being critical of the nose. But in the modern West seems to have been built on the strengths of the left brain almost exclusively (and moreover, it privileges the eyes and slights the nose). The problem of left-brain dominance is precisely its detail-orientation and lack of context. We lose the sense of meaning and interconnectedness (a descriptor for the Magical consciousness structure, as we've seen) that is provided by the right brain and as McGilchrist writes, "we are thinking more and more like machines, and risk losing what makes us human."
If we think just like machines, we risk being replaced by machines.
I am working my way back to Frog and Toad, I promise. But first I have do talk a little bit about how we know the differences between the right and left hemispheres. The first way is observing the effects that damage to one hemisphere has on people. People with left brain damage can develop aphasia and other problems with language processing. People with right brain damage can stop recognizing people they know and love.
The second way is via medical "split brain" experiments. The two hemispheres communicate through a long bundle of nerve fibers running through a trough between them called the corpus callosum. Cutting the corpus callosum has been a method for treating epilepsy, since it can help to stop the spread of seizures. But something else that you can do if the corpus callosum is cut is to isolate the hemispheres so that you can "talk" to them. If a split-brain patient is shown a picture only in their left visual field, they will not be able to name it, because the left field is processed by the right brain, but naming ability comes from the left.
As described by McGilchrist, many of these experiments show that the left hemisphere "needs certainty and needs to be right." Its superior reasoning ability is sometimes spent in rationalizing an incorrect view, and it doesn't hesitate to make something up rather than admit that it doesn't know something. It is, in a word, arrogant.
So the left hemisphere's ability to reason and calculate is the mighty engine that made the modern technological world possible, but at the cost of completely writing off every area that contains uncertainties, where knowledge is messy and unclear, the chthonic murk of the unconscious. We can think of the Cartesian project of discovering indubitable knowledge, or the 20th-century philosophical project of reducing language to formal logic, etc. On the other hand, McGilchrist writes, "The right hemisphere makes it possible to hold several ambiguous possibilities in suspension together without premature closure on one outcome.”
The title The Master and His Emissary comes from a retold fable (probably erroneously attributed to Nietzsche) about a ruler who expands his kingdom and finds it necessary to send emissaries to distant lands, but is then usurped by an emissary who took himself to be the master, turning the kingdom into a tyranny. The analogy is clear: for McGilchrist, the right brain is the master (remember that it was literally the origin of the voice of God in Jaynes' account) and the left brain the emissary.
Just shooting from the hip, here are some examples of "left brain" thinking in our society:
The reduction of food to calories or vitamins
The reduction of art to ideological content or “message”
The reduction of economic activity to GDP or the stock market going up or down
The requirement of explicit verbal consent for all romantic encounters
The reduction of intelligence to an "intelligence quotient" (I've written about my bias against this here)
Scientistic ideologies like Utilitarianism, New Atheism, and Eliminative Materialism
Political movements and ideologies which have as their focus the control over language: who gets to say what, what may be deemed acceptable speech, the banning or tabooing of certain words, the attempt to attain default rhetorical victories "by definition" (if you oppose fascism, you must support all of the actions of Antifa because the name means "anti-fascism")-- obviously most of what has been called "political correctness" or "wokeness" on the Left is about this very thing, but the phenomenon is not exclusively of the Left
Now, I am certainly not saying that it’s a bad thing to measure economic growth or to count your calories or that sex be consensual. But I do think it is bad to try to rid inherently complex phenomena of all ambiguity.
If it can’t be expressed by numbers or (prosaic not poetic) language, the left brain not only doesn’t know what what do with it, but it’s not just content to admit that it doesn’t know; it must positively declare that it does know it to be nonsense, or nonexistent.
I know that in this essay I am piling on theories to the point of risking of losing clarity and focus, but I cannot help but observe an analogy between McGilchrist’s idea that the left brain becomes dominant over the right brain in the course of history with what Oswald Spengler thought necessarily happened to societies over the course of their life-cycles: an early, vital and organic society Spengler calls kultur gives way to zivilization (literally the German words for “culture” and “civilization”), a period in which quantity reigns over quality, dominated by money and what Spengler calls the “fact man.”
Just as it might seem like a stretch to identify Toad with the sinister aspects of the unconscious, it hardly seems fair to identify Frog with the problems of the left hemisphere. But in the first place, there are plenty of positive attributes of the left hemisphere; it is only modernity's exclusive privileging of left-brain virtues that is problematic. Secondly, this is another case of attenuation.
Consider the Frog and Toad story "The Kite": the two friends take a kite to a windy meadow, where Frog instructs Toad to run with the kite while he holds the string. But each time Toad tries to fly the kite, it crashes to the ground, after which he is mocked by some robins. Toad returns to Frog and simply echoes the opinion of the birds. When the robins say, "The kite will never fly. You may as well give up," Toad reports back to Frog, "The kite will never fly. I give up." But Frog is undeterred, each time adding a new move to his instructions. On the fourth try, Toad runs, waves the kite in the air, jumps, and yells "UP KITE, UP!" and is able to fly the kite. Frog says proudly,
"If a running try
did not work,
and a running and waving try
did not work,
and a running and waving and jumping try
did not work,
I knew that a running, waving, jumping and shouting try
just had to work."
Their kite seems to touch the top of the sky, as Frog had predicted in the beginning, and it flies higher than even the robins are able to reach. In "The Kite" we have on display all of the virtues of Western technological man, with his left-brain bias, which have allowed him to not only conquer the world but reach into outer space. Within the small world of this children's tale, Frog's ambition to have his kite reach "the top of the sky" is especially Faustian in its ambition. In succeeding, he has bested and even supplanted nature, symbolized by the robins.
Now, you may not go so far as to dub Frog's confidence in his flying machine "arrogant," and indeed the story seems to have a moral about the value of optimism. But we would be justified if we questioned whether Frog in fact "knew" the method that would make it fly from the beginning; if so, why didn't he begin by telling Toad to run, wave, jump, and shout? Nothing wrong with experimentation, which is after all essential to the scientific method. But we see here in attenuated form left-brain arrogance as analyzed by McGilchrist.
Now look at Toad, on the other hand, and we see some classic negative qualities that are the specialties of the right hemisphere. Not only is he ever-ready to slip back into unconsciousness, but he is distinctly cranky and pessimistic, with his characteristic phrase, "Blah."
From the Wikipedia article "Lateralization of Brain Function":
Depression is linked with a hyperactive right hemisphere, with evidence of selective involvement in "processing negative emotions, pessimistic thoughts and unconstructive thinking styles", as well as vigilance, arousal and self-reflection, and a relatively hypoactive left hemisphere, "specifically involved in processing pleasurable experiences" and "relatively more involved in decision-making processes".
I find it very interesting that the hemisphere that sees all phenomena as inherently interconnected and is always seeking larger patterns is the one that is prone to "negative emotion, pessimistic thoughts and unconstructive thinking styles," while the hemisphere more capable of experiencing pleasure and making decisions is the one that fixates solely on useful objects while suppressing or ignoring any context.
I am reminded of a passage in Nietzsche's first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in which he describes the image of Greek sun god Apollo appearing with "that measured limitation, that freedom from the wilder emotions, that philosophical calmness of the sculptor-god." (Of course, in an attenuated way, we can perceive Frog here.) For Nietzsche, Apollo was the god of light, but the light of beautiful and comforting dreams, not the light of reality. Being a god of dreams and a god of limitations is one and the same, summed up in the principium individuationis by which it is believed that there are any separate things at all.
And so we might apply to Apollo, in an eccentric sense, what Schopenhauer says of the man wrapt in the veil of Mâyâ: "Just as in a stormy sea, unbounded in every direction, rising and falling with howling mountainous waves, a sailor sits in a boat and trusts in his frail barque: so in the midst of a world of sorrows the individual sits quietly supported by and trusting in his principium individuationis." Indeed, we might say of Apollo, that in him the unshaken faith in this principium and the quiet sitting of the man wrapt therein have received their sublimest expression; and we might even designate Apollo as the glorious divine image of the principium individuationis, from out of the gestures and looks of which all the joy and wisdom of "appearance," together with its beauty, speak to us.
Apollo's optimism, his reason and repose, rest on "a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity." And so too with the left hemisphere and its wunderkind, Science. Apropos here is Charles Fort's comment that,
Every science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel its way into disturbing contacts. To a believer, the effect of the contemplation of a science is of being in the presence of the good, the true, and the beautiful. But what he is awed by is Mutilation. To our crippled intellects, only the maimed is what we call understandable, because the unclipped ramifies away into all other things. According to my aesthetics, what is meant by the beautiful is symmetrical deformation.
To feel the "disturbing contacts" is to experience the drunkenness of the god of the vine, Dionysus. Fort's choice of animal here is highly apt, a highly intelligent creature that dwells in dark depths. His attack on science here is just another volley in the old struggle between Dionysus and Apollo.
You may have heard of Isaiah Berlin's idea that writers can be divided into two categories: foxes and hedgehogs. An ancient Greek poet, Archilochus, said "a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one big thing." Hedgehogs have one big idea, to which they assimilate everything else in a grand system, while foxes engage with wide and unsystematic miscellany. In the same like we could speak of frogs and toads, with the former being narrow or naive optimists (Steven Pinker is a good recent example) and the latter profounder but unpractical and self-defeating pessimists (Spengler or Adorno). Nietzsche I would call a toad trying to turn himself into a frog.
You will notice throughout the Frog and Toad books that it is mostly Toad that other animals speak to, and Toad believes them and obeys what they say as if consulting an oracle. Offhand, I can think of two instances of Frog speaking to other animals, and in both he attempts to give instructions, but to ill effect: in "The Letter" he gives his letter intended for Toad, written to cheer his friend up, to a snail, who takes days to arrive so that Frog has to simply tell Toad what he wrote him before the letter arrives; and "A Swim," in which Frog tries to shoo away other animals from a stream so they don't see Toad in his bathing suit, but he succeeds only in piquing their interest. Frog, normally so adept at problem-solving, is at his worst when dealing with his fellow animals. But if I am right that Frog and Toad as a dyad symbolize human consciousness, while the other animals are nature per se, this makes perfect sense.
Nature-oriented societies are the most conservative. Here is Jung on the conservatism of the unconscious (and if you think my extrapolation of such ideas in a kid’s story is odd, this is from his book on flying saucers):
But consciousness, for all its kaleidoscopic mobility, rests as we know on the comparatively static or at least highly conservative foundation of the instincts and their specific forms, the archetypes. This world in the background proves to be the opponent of consciousness, which, because of its mobility (learning capacity), is often in danger of losing its roots. That is why since the earliest times men have felt compelled to perform rites for the purpose of securing the co-operation of the unconscious. In a primitive world no one reckons without his host; he is constantly mindful of the gods, the spirits, of fate and the magical qualities of time and place, rightly recognizing that man's solitary will is only a fragment of a total situation. Primitive man's actions have a "total" character which civilized man would like to be rid of, as though it were an unnecessary burden. Things seem to go all right without it.
The following paragraphs demonstrate the Jung is well of the Master and Emissary problem.
The great advantage of this attitude lies in the development of a discriminating consciousness, but it has the almost equally great disadvantage of breaking down man's original wholeness into separate functions which conflict with one another. . . . Through this fragmentation process one or other of the functions of consciousness becomes highly differentiated and can then escape the control of the other functions to the extent that it attains a kind of autonomy, constructing a world of its own into which these other functions are admitted only so far as they can be subjugated to the dominant function. . . . A useful result of such developments is specialism, but that also promotes a disagreeable one-sidedness.
Jung goes on to talk about the effects of specialism in his own field of psychology, where the tendency to monocausal reduction finds everything explained in either environment or heredity, lamenting that "Both explanations tend to turn the psychic apparatus into a machine." McGilchrist said almost the exact same thing.
Now would be a good time to mention that not only Jaynes’ theory but the whole significance of the left/right brain dichotomy has come under a lot of criticism. The argument goes that the two hemispheres are more similar than different, that most processes involve both working together, and that even if there is some specialization of brain function, it doesn’t make sense to speak of left or right brained individuals in the way we commonly do. That’s not really the level at which McGilchrist’s arguments are concerned, which are more societal. But it’s probably an even sketchier endeavor to tie broad social trends to certain neural configurations. In fact this may be our own version of the ancient Greeks attributing all human acts to the will of some god or another.I will go ahead and lay my cards on the table and say that I’m not all that invested in whether bicameral theory is true in a physiological sense. (Jaynes’ version is even a bit unattractive to me because I don’t like thinking of the ancients as schizophrenic robots or whatever.) The social trends the bicameral theory refers to are definitely real. We are becoming more specialized and machine-like. It remains an interesting hypothesis. But even more interesting is the idea such as Gebser suggests that the physiological changes are downstream or merely correlates to other changes in consciousness that have their origin elsewhere.
The Dream
Of all the Frog and Toad stories, "The Dream," a real tour-de-force, is the most Jungian. Of course if we were going to get an exploration of a dream, it would belong to Toad, the one closes to the unconscious. But we are still in the personal unconscious, as we hear the voice of the Ego (we might identify it with the Shadow, since the Ego is part of the conscious while it is the Shadow that lurks in the unconscious).
In "The Dream," we see Toad on a stage, dressed in pompous Shakespearean actor's garb. A loud voice from offstage introduces him as "THE GREATEST TOAD IN THE WORLD" and says that he will, successively, play the piano, walk on a high wire, and dance. Toad performs for an audience of one, his friend Frog. After each event, Toad asks his friend, "Can you do this, frog?" to which Frog replies, "No." Each time Toad looks out at the theatre, Frog seems to be smaller, until finally he disappears. When this happens, Toad becomes afraid that he will be lonely, and instead of doing his next performance, he tells the announcer to shut up. He wakes relieved to find Frog beside his bed, but must have Frog confirm for him that he is "his own right size."
The dream in "The Dream" is about the inflation of the Ego, specifically of the sort that can happen when one begins to delve into the unconscious and have profound, transcendental experiences. The path could be lucid dreaming, psychedelic drugs, prayer and meditation, fasting or other types of asceticism. There are many paths. One begins to discover that one can do remarkable things with ease. But at this point a danger arises. It is here that the personal ego should begin to fade away. If it does, one becomes a saint, a prophet a Boddhisatva, an illuminated one. The Ego could on the other hand start to expand, and one becomes a Magus instead. A Magus can perform miracles, or apparent miracles, but he cannot be trusted. He is a trickster who typically winds up in a trap of his own design. A real enlightened person is known by their good deeds towards others (although this may never be recognized, for they usually prefer secrecy), but a Magus is out for their own gain.
Jung wrote, “An inflated consciousness is always egocentric and conscious of nothing but its own existence. It is incapable of learning from the past, incapable of understanding contemporary events, and incapable of drawing right conclusions about the future. It is hypnotised by itself and therefore cannot be argued with. It inevitably dooms itself to calamities that must strike it dead.”
The announcer in the dream is Toad's Ego, which is trying to direct his personal unconscious. The Ego's inflation, only slightly disguised by the dream, is symbolized not by Toad growing larger, but by Frog growing progressively smaller. Frog, I have said, symbolizes consciousness, and here it is specifically the consciousness of other people. No magician is concerned with losing friends, only with losing followers.
Nietzsche thought that ancient Greek tragedy had its origin in primitive Dionysian musical rituals, which were something meant to be experienced and not understood, which gradually had the solar Apollonian element introduced. They attained the heights of art when a balance was achieved between the Apollonian and Dionysian, and became decadent when the Apollonian eventually took over. This process as described by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy probably influenced Spengler to apply it to history as whole, split into two phases kultur and zivilization. It also sounds a lot like the story of the Master and the Emissary.
Happy are the moments when equilibrium is achieved between Apollo and Dionysus, Jesus and Yahweh, the left and right brains, consciousness and the unconscious, Sun and Earth, mind and body, Frog and Toad.
Frog and Toad split the Gebser's consciousness structures 2 apiece, and when they work together they produce a fifth element, an integrity, and it just happens that Jung used the word integration for man's psychic ideal, the aim of the spirit's life on this earth.