The shadow aspect of this (collective) gluttony is an unbalanced and voracious greed for more, for bigger, what today we call “affluenza”. We see it in the appetite for drugs and oil and ever larger cars and houses and other concrete things. It is a manifestation of our culture’s deep insecurity and alienation from the ground of life, and it has disastrous consequences. We gorge and too often fear to give over, give back, give up, disgorge, and find our reverent balance, as the Dagda can.
Nonetheless, we can also see the representation of an archetypal appetite for life’s fullness and ever-emergent process also helps to structure the heroic egoic consciousness. The heroic ego ideal, with its emphasis on domination, must repudiate whatever is uncontrollable. It cannot tolerate change, which brings felt threats of chaos (Pisces/Neptune). We brand the discomfort and fear we associate with chaos as dangerous and negative.. We push them away, so they fall out of our ego ideal and into the shadow.
While this process is the price paid for a certain kind of binary consciousness and self discipline, such aversion and superego imperatives required to maintain it, split off and repress instead of incorporating. As part of our repertoire, we need discriminating, consciousness. But if we can only process mentally from a separating perspective, we cannot encompass or accommodate the non-rational or learn to relate to otherness and the unconscious. We cannot thrive creatively, to become the unique and multi-valent individuals we are meant to be.
The Dagda’s swollen state presents us with an extraordinary image – an appetite for life, and a flexible, containing body/Self vessel that can accept and assimilate all it is given, even when force fed, and still say : “good food this.” Here the Dagda surrenders to the life process, rather than willfully opposing any part of it’s overwhelming fullness. He does not order, discriminate or set rational boundaries against what is doled out. Instead he takes it in and waits for the inchoate, natural process of digestion to sort out what to incorporate and what to evacuate. He trusts and organic process. The Dagda’s assimilation here represents a valid, deeply empathic means of processing emotional material. It images the radical openness needed for dealing with the pre-symbolic unknown. It models the humility that allows us to be truly open to the present In T.S. Eliot’s words
the knowledge derived from experience
imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been…..
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
The Dagda’s incorporative way is slow and “ignorant” because discrimination of what belongs and can be integrated and what must be rejected operates through autonomous, digestive processes that work in darkness (on the level of the inner psyche). This means of processing lies outside the capacity of our rational (mind) consciousness, yet we can develop some awareness of it somatically and psychologically. We can taste a flavor or sniff and atmosphere. We can learn to sense that we are shifted out of a previous state, feel the influence of an emotion. In this intimately participatory, incorporative mode, we can experience the food as filling, expansive and life enhancing, but we can also find it sickening. Unfortunately, it is often inside us before we know its effects. Thus we face the possibility of ingesting material that is poisonous. We know a great deal clinically about the long term negative effects of the incorporative mode as is operates between members in a family, group, or even therapeutic relationship. Nonetheless, such intense attunement with the feeding other is a source of important awareness (as we recover). “I feel her moods as if from within her,” said one partner of her lover. “I can never get away from that demanding intimacy – as if he put his feelings in me to digest” said another.
Sylvia Brinton Perera
The Irish Bull God : Image of Multiform and Integral Masculinity
Emerging From The Dark Night 