The Shadow of Earthsea
Ursula Le Guin, Jung, Paul, and the Stories that "are" Us
There are stories that explain what the author intends, and there are stories that discover truths their authors don’t fully understand.
The journey of Ged in A Wizard of Earthsea belongs to the second. Although Ursula K. Le Guin believed her real contribution to civilization was giving her young protagonist brown skin, the more subtle spirit she imputed to formative minds everywhere is the specter of Carl Jung.
The pursuit and encounter with one’s own shadow is a defining element of Jungian transcendentalism. One need not know a word of psychology to recognize how this metaphor puts its finger on something profoundly human. But is understanding humanity enough?
The Hunted
The story begins, as many great stories do, with pride.
Ged possesses extraordinary gifts long before he possesses proportion. Like nearly every young man who discovers strength before wisdom, he mistakes ability for maturity. In a contest born of vanity, he attempts a feat beyond his station. A boundary is torn open. Something nameless enters the world. It wounds him, escapes him, and from that moment forward his life is no longer directed by ambition but by pursuit.
At first the shadow behaves exactly as monsters are supposed to behave. It attacks without warning. It appears where it ought not to be. It drives Ged from place to place until his remarkable gifts become almost irrelevant. The greater wizard he becomes, the less capable he is of solving the problem by wizardry alone.
The story quietly removes every ordinary solution. Skill cannot conquer it. Courage cannot outfight it. Flight only lengthens the chase. The reader gradually begins to suspect that the shadow is unlike any enemy normally found in heroic tales.
Stop Running
Only much later does Ged turn his boat around.
At last, instead of escaping the shadow, he chases it. After a great pursuit, at the edge of the known sea, the two finally stand face to face. There is no great magical duel. There is no final weapon. There is recognition.
Ged speaks the shadow’s true name: his own.
The divided boy embraces his darkness and becomes a whole man.
Penumbras and Hauntings
Long before most readers encounter Carl Jung, they have encountered this story. Jung is just the one who gave it a philosophy. He observed that every human being constructs a conscious identity by accepting some parts of himself while rejecting others. The rejected portions do not vanish. They descend beneath awareness, where they continue exerting influence precisely because they are hidden. He called this hidden country of the soul “the shadow.”
The word has been misunderstood. Jung did not mean that the shadow consists only of wickedness. Sometimes the shadow contains cruelty, lust, envy, or pride. But just as often it contains courage that was never permitted to mature, grief that was never allowed expression, righteous anger condemned merely because it was strong, or gifts buried beneath fear.
Jung’s “shadow” is everything the ego refuses to acknowledge as belonging to self. Because it is denied, it begins governing the conscious personality from beneath the surface. Only when it is faced can repentance become part of the being.
This observation is remarkably penetrating. Anyone who has lived long enough has watched respectable people commit astonishing acts while insisting that what everyone has plainly seen cannot possibly describe them. The gossip believes himself devoted to truth. The coward thinks himself prudent. The domineering man imagines himself responsible. The envious woman calls herself discerning. Human beings possess an extraordinary capacity for hiding themselves from themselves. We are often the last people permitted to know who we have become.
Proverbs are not Surprises
Modern Confused readers treat Solomon as a collector of moral sayings or practical advice. Read patiently, another pattern emerges.
Proverbs is populated by recurring figures: the fool, the scoffer, the sluggard, the talebearer, the adulteress, the faithful friend, the righteous man, the simple youth, the violent man, the wise son. These are certainly recognizable kinds of people, but the wise reader soon discovers something more uncomfortable. Every one of them already lives somewhere inside of himself.
The scoffer is not merely the loud man at the other end of the table. He is the voice that mocks correction when pride has already decided the matter. The sluggard is not only the neighbor sleeping until noon. He is the inward reluctance that invents reasons not to begin today’s work. The talebearer is not merely another person’s tongue. He is the subtle pleasure one feels in possessing information that elevates oneself by diminishing another.
Solomon’s wisdom is not satisfied until the reader recognizes these characters as habits of the heart long before they become people of society.
Biblical Psychology
Solomon does not offer an anatomy of the soul in technical language. He teaches the soul to recognize itself through living portraits. We remember stories and persons better than abstractions. He therefore gives us people to meet, only to discover later, often with embarrassment, that we have been meeting ourselves.
Paul proceeds under a brighter light when he reaches Romans 7.
“What I am doing, I do not understand.”
“What I will to do, that I do not practice.”
“What I hate, that I do.”
The man speaking is neither ignorant nor insincere. He delights in the law of God. Yet another law is at work within him.
He discovers opposition where he expected unity.
He walks with his shadow.
Speaking of Ged
Something pursues the wizard of Earthsea, both foreign and familiar. He fights it as though it were another creature until he finally discovers that he has been fleeing himself. This is where Paul and Jung have arrived at the same diagnosis.
But diagnosis is not destination. It is projection.
Both Paul and Jung refuse the comforting fiction that evil belongs only to other people. Both reject the notion that maturity consists in denouncing darkness somewhere beyond the horizon. Both insist that what is hidden governs the man who refuses to acknowledge it. Both expose the terrible ingenuity of self-deception. Both know that there is no freedom while a man remains divided against himself.
That agreement is substantial. There is no fear facing it.
Indeed, Jung’s criticism of much modern Christianity deserves careful hearing. Temptation is not foreign to Christians, as though sin were an unfortunate interruption rather than a deeply rooted inclination. We speak dynamically of the calculus of forgiveness while dealing little in honest love. We confess in unison that we are sinners while quietly begrudging our every peeve. Modern
Gnostic repentance is strangely abstract.
One cannot repent of a desire he refuses to admit he actually possesses. Even Carl Jung understood that! A man who cannot say, “The darkness is mine,” has not yet begun telling the truth.
For Jung, the shadow is a psychological reality. Whatever its moral character, it belongs to the structure of the human personality. The Gospel of Therapeutic Wholeness therefore requires that the conscious self cease pretending the shadow does not exist and “embrace the real me.”
It is this preaching that has made Jordan Peterson so impactful. But Peterson, like Jung, does not tell the Pinterest tale of “letting go and following your heart.” Quite the opposite, wholeness in natural psychology’s shadow means, “you’d pretty darn well get control of yourself before something stupid and terrible happens to you.”
The last thing Ged could do after embracing his dark side was go back to being the prideful little prick that made such a muck of things in the first place. Repentance, even without forgiveness, is a good thing.
The deepest problem facing we poor, miserable Modern people humans is not a lack of wholeness. One might even suggest that the man who believes he can become whole by embracing his shadow has never so much as caught a glimpse of the fleshly thing, much less stared into its depths for any existential length.
Our issue root is not personality repression.
Our Root is Adam
Before there is projection, there is rebellion. Before there is repression, there is exile. Before there is divided consciousness, there is the Fall.
The conflict Paul diagnoses is therefore not merely the mechanics of the psyche. It is the lived experience east of Eden.
The old man is more than the things I dislike about myself. He is my entire human inheritance.
This is why Ged’s victory does not end the story. He must, in another book, now face a dragon. Ask any Peterson acolyte and they will tell you that this is far more diabolical a potential evil than facing your shadow!
Embracing your inheritance is not the same as being saved.
Until it is
Jesus Christ turns all the stories on their heads.
Now the judgment is mercy. Now the foolishness is wisdom. Now death is become life.
Now, being born of Adam is not the end all, be all. Now, the promise is not a healthier personality. It is the crucifixion of your worst past. The claim of the Gospel is not that you will understand, but that God will act. Deliverance is not self-equilibrium but fellowship with the Head of the next creation.
Earthsea is still beautiful. It is the story of a boy reaching the threshold where repentance becomes possible. Manhood begins when Ged stops lying to himself. He turns. He says, “Amen,” to the truth.
That is no small achievement, no matter who you are.
