shadow eating's shadow

things don't want to be eaten

people talk a lot about shadow eating on twitter. what people tend to mean by “shadow eating” is finding parts of yourself that you wish were not parts of yourself, and accepting that they are parts of yourself.

what has always struck me about “shadow eating” is the distance between the kind of peaceable, positive-sum interaction it describes, & the violence of the metaphor. people almost never talk about shadow-eating as if it’s something bad that’s happening to the shadow—they will explicitly contrast shadow-eating with trying to destroy your bad qualities. eating something does mean absorbing it, accepting it, integrating it. but eating something also means killing it, destroying it. things don’t survive being eaten

okay, it’s a little more complicated than that. when people talk about shadow-eating theoretically, they don’t bring up destruction. but when people talk about actual personal experiences they had with shadow-eating/shadow-integration/shadow-work, they often describe the feeling that after they accepted [whatever unacceptable part of themselves], it stopped existing. put a pin in that.

shadow eating sort of comes from jung, who sort of takes it from alchemical allegory. basically everything i know about alchemical allegory is from that slate star codex essay. here’s the relevant quote:

The unconscious is full of bizarre and shameful repressed material, and the seeker’s instinct is to run away. Instead, he must slay the dragon, at which point the dragon rises again as an ally. The seeker then unites with the unconscious in the first “chemical wedding”, ending in a sudden revelation of blinding whiteness – the second stage of the Work.

so obviously here, alexander is writing about the great work in a post-jung world, & the way he’s writing about this is super informed by jung. but anyway

i notice two things going on here: the first thing is that this seems pretty clearly related to shadow-eating. the second is that the metaphor is exactly the opposite of the shadow-eating metaphor.

this “kill the dragon so it rises” trope shows up a lot in c. s. lewis so i’m going to give you a couple of narrative examples from him so you have something to chew on

in the pilgrim’s regress, which is basically an allegory about reconversion to christianity, there are two dragon slayings. an angel instructs john (the representation-ish of aesthetic longing) to slay the cold northern dragon “that you may be hardened” & tells vertue (the representation-ish of trying to be a good person) to slay the hot southern dragon “that you may steal her heat and be made malleable.” so they’re both trying to incorporate their opposites which is very shadow-integrationy

the alchemical dragon-slaying also shows up a little disguised in the great divorce which is—this is not an accurate description of the plot but it’s the best i can do—a book about visiting purgatory, & eavesdropping on conversations between saved souls & yet-unsaved souls as the saved souls try to convince the others to come to heaven.

one of the sinners has a little red lizard on his shoulder, constantly whispering lewd fantasies. a fiery angel offers to kill the lizard for the sinner. at first the sinner demurs, but eventually agrees. when the angel kills the lizard, the sinner is in agony. but moments later the lizard rises again as a beautiful stallion, & the sinner—now saved—gallops off towards god on the stallion’s back.

with the shadow-eating framework, the action you take is to accept the unacceptable thing (& then, sometimes the story ends at acceptance, but often the consequence is that the now-accepted thing ceases to exist). with the dragon-slaying framework, the action you take is to destroy the unacceptable thing, & the consequence is that the unacceptable thing comes back as something acceptable

i feel like this is one of those situations where it’s hard to tell if shadow-eating & dragon-slaying are exactly the same thing or exactly opposite. in both cases there’s the paradoxical acceptance/destruction. but it seems like the actual action you’re taking in each case is totally at odds with the other?