A Taste of Bacon Sir? - The Secret of Shakespeare

[Steve Franklin]

One subject she has not included in her account, however, and one that deserves attention is the correspondence of the Fool with Odin/Wotan who also had the title of the Wanderer, and who was accompanied not by one dog snapping at the Fool's heels, but by two dogs (or wolves) and who roamed the primeval forest. Odin was the Norske God of magic and poetry and sacrificed an eye to gain the mastery of Rune magic. He is also the Fool with a thousand faces, each bubbling and shifting and vying to reach the surface (therefore a shape-shifter), and if you ever meet him, you will find this to be a quite shocking experience.

Well, you really can't seem to leave this alone, so, I find no need to sugar coat it anymore.

You really need to read my book to which you linked earlier.

The Fool, far from having any occult or Jungian significance, is simply a representation of the 365th day of the year, the odd man out, so to speak, beyond its 13 normalized 28-day sidereal lunar months and 52 even weeks, both of which bring the year to 364 days. This is the day spoken of in the English term "a year and a day" used in sentencing people during the Middle Ages. April Fool's Day is a remnant of this earlier even-week year formerly used in parts of France and elsewhere, though it more likely was originally celebrated between the end of February and the beginning of March. The point of the even week was that holidays always fell on the same day of the week, hence no need for the rigmarole resorted to by the Church to locate Easter. Good Friday could be celebrated on the same of the year and would always fall on a Friday, and Easter Sunday could be celebrated on the same day every year and that would always be a Sunday. It also allowed an exact 9-month interval between the death of the sun at the beginning of spring and its rebirth at the winter solstice, a metaphor that is obscured by the ridiculous method used by the Church.

As for Jung, though I have read him, I find him unconvincing. I lean more toward Freud, in that Freud relied upon much less mystical postulates and fewer undemonstrable ideas like the collective unconscious, which Jung never got around to clearly defining, let alone proving. My impression of Jung is that he was attempting--unsuccessfully--to rescue religion from the clutches of rationalism. Freud couldn't do hypnosis and therefore resorted to dream analysis. Jung couldn't do logical thought and therefore resorted to mysticism and--dare I say it--mumbo jumbo. In that sense his ideas were no more cogent than a Medieval theologian trying to save people's "souls" by burning them at the stake. All of these Dark Age systems derive from the inability of their practitioners to understand the fragments that survived into Roman and post-Roman times from the Classical world, whose explanations were restricted, even then, to initiates and students of great teachers like Pythagoras. That Jung could try to explain the devices and systems of analysis developed by one of the greatest scientific and mathematical minds of the ancient world by resort to Medieval distortions and pure inventions borders on the laughable.

Let me be clear about this. I have no problem with people practicing the religion of their choice, whether it be the religion of Shakespeare from Stratford or the religion of Analytical Psychology. What I object to is the assertion that these are based on anything resembling science and honest scholarship. They are not. The proof is that, unlike honest scholarship, they lead to the discovery of no new knowledge. They simply "explain" what is already believed by the use of circular reasoning and appeal to authority.