We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love by Johnson Robert A

Author:Johnson, Robert A. [Johnson, Robert A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Itzy, Kickass.to
ISBN: 9780061960031
Amazon: B00B72CFR6
Publisher: Harper
Published: 2013-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

12

The Fourth Year of Morois

The spell of the love potion was to last for three years:

La mere Yseut, qui le bollí,

A trois Am d’amistié le fist.

“The mother of Iseult who brewed it, for three years of love she made it”—so said the poet Béroul in the first and oldest tale of Tristan and Iseult.

It is no mere happenstance that the spell lasts for three years. It is no accident that Tristan and Iseult leave the Forest of Morois in the fourth year. Numbers are symbols: The numbers three and four represent particular stages of consciousness. Four is a symbol of wholeness, unity, and completion. The four elements, the four directions, the four seasons, the four divisions of the mandala—all were universal symbols of the unification of consciousness before historical time began. In dreams and myths, the occurrence of four—whether four objects, four people, or time divided into four—shows that a unification is possible, that the psyche is moving toward a synthesis or that an evolution is drawing toward completion. A new level of consciousness is possible, if one will pay the price; a new beginning is at hand.

By contrast, three is the symbol of incompleteness—that stage of consciousness in which we are aware that we are incomplete, that we don’t know ourselves, but are unable as yet to solve the riddle of life. Three is dynamic, never at rest, always searching for the missing element, the unknown fourth member of the quaternity. Three is the stage in which we are not yet conscious of ourselves as a wholeness or a totality. We strive and we search, looking for the meaning, the answer, the unseen path to our true selves. Three becomes four by the addition of the missing part of our life, and four can become one: the consciousness of our wholeness and individuality as fact.

We see Blanchefleur languish three days after the death of Tristan’s father, and on the fourth day Tristan is born. We hear the Morholt shout three times from the islet where Tristan is fighting him; then his fate is accomplished. We will yet see three and four repeated many times in our myth, even in the last moment of Tristan’s life.

For three years Tristan and Iseult abide in the Forest of Morois. But in that wood they live as under a spell. We see them living like wild creatures—faces pallid and drawn, clothes torn and ragged from brambles—eating wild game and roots. Yet they are unaware of their hardships, for they are drunk with a magic wine, drunk with the sight of one another, awake only to their mutual dream. The lovers believe Morois to be the whole of life, to be the “enchanted orchard.” But we who stand watching know that the projections of romance are not the whole of life, they only seem to be. The lovers dwell under the sign of three, and we know that outside the forest is a wider world.

When three years have passed, the spell is suddenly broken.

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