Cynthia made this comment to yesterday’s Michael Richards post:

My Scottish father was inducted into the Freemasons before migrating to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) after WW2. He was totally racist and I was raised that way. As you know, the “white colonials” never won that war. Zimbabwe is now black ruled.
My journey has been through that inherited racist rage, to the point where I realised that the dark (or the black)is within one’s self and as long as it is not dealt with, it will appear as a projection outside of one’s self. Isn’t that how we see ourselves – “as in a glass darkly” ? ie the mirror! Getting rid of it on the outside doesn’t clean up the inside. I mean how can you clean up an image in the mirror? The work has to start inside one’s self first and no one is exempt; we all share the same shadow qualities. With regard to the Masons, and other exclusive cultish sects, the esoteric spirituality that stands behind them must surely be about the transformation of one’s own dark shadow; otherwise they’ve lost the plot.

Racism isn’t limited to the white culture, it exists within the dark-skinned cultures as well: as the caste system in India and as a color-coded hierarchy in African cultures and cultures of African descent. The splitting off of the shadow self into “black” and “white” led also to the development of the devil and hell. The darker side of the psyche is felt to be the source of all evil and is relegated to realms of the unconscious, where it takes on a life of its own and is projected as fear of the very darkness that lives within us. Jung said, “The shadow is that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-ridden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors and so comprise the whole historical aspect of the unconscious.”

In polytheistic societies such as the Greeks and Romans from whom the gods of our planets come, each of the gods had a dark and a light side that expressed the full scope of human consciousness. Transformation of the shadow requires no less than the courage to step inside the darkness within us and claim it as our own and cease the endless projection that causes us to blame others for our pain.