Loralee Scaife | Return of the King Within, Tolkien, and the Guiding Myth of Our Time
Loralee Scaife is an astrologer who uses Jungian techniques to analyze mythology, using stories to map the collective unconscious. She's created a video series using The Lord of the Rings films and books as a mystical mythic lens through which we can better understand our troubled times. In our discussion on Tolkien's tales, we analyze the nature of evil and our responsibility to stand up as the good folk of the world, in defense of the Life Force itself.
In the Plus+ Extension, we talk about Tolkien's cosmology, the universal creative purpose of tragedy, lies, and sorrow, the light and shadow of the King archetype, cymatics and the secrets of sound & light, ancestors living in our language, the Age of Aquarius, and the myth of Prometheus. A jam packed extension if there ever was one!
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In this episode
Core themes
Myth as the Dream of a Culture
Loralee Scaife builds her approach on the Jung and Campbell idea that myth is to a culture what dreams are to the individual, and she reads the Lord of the Rings films through amplification, a Jungian dream technique that gathers the connotations of a symbol. Applied to a meme that turns the Statue of Liberty into the Eye of Sauron, it surfaces Prometheus carrying his torch and Galadriel holding her light. The talk frames Prometheus bringing fire home to his people against Sauron stealing it to wield power over others.
A Myth for Our Time and Its Ancient Roots
Loralee says she met Tolkien in December 2001, a few months after September 11, and was struck by how the story confronted evil. She argues the tale helps modern so-called men of the West reconnect with ancient roots, echoing Galadriel's line that much that once was is lost. Chance wonders aloud about America's transplanted mythology and, citing a researcher he is reading, floats the contested idea that some old buildings were found rather than built. In his solo outro Chance recommends an article, Tolkien at the End of Time, and speculates that Tolkien's command of ancient languages may have let him read a real takeover in old texts.
Saturn, Pluto, and the Shadow Cycle
Speaking as an astrologer, Loralee traces the 35 to 38 year Saturn and Pluto cycle, noting an opposition just weeks before September 11 and a conjunction in 2020, and she interprets both periods as moments when shadow and evil press into public view. Her practical point is that personal shadow work leaves less room for archetypal evil to take over a personality. She presents her reading of recent events as her own view of a fearful, manipulated population. The conversation adds a nineteen year lunar cycle linking 2001 and 2020, and the wordplay that Sauron sounds like Saturn, the planet with the ring.
The Ring as Circle, Torus, and Life Force
Unpacking the One Ring, Loralee starts with the circle, moves through the ouroboros, the zodiac and the zero, then into sacred geometry and the torus, which she describes as the structure behind everything from particles to galaxies. She argues that knowledge of the torus is kept from people and that this explains why forces of evil would crave the ring. Chance contributes a reading of ouroboros as the infinite emerging from nothingness, with the zero as the repressed feminine and shadow, and Loralee points to the six pointed star and caduceus in Arwen's jewel.
Evil as Anti-Life and the Weight of Kingship
Loralee observes that evil is live spelled backwards, a wordplay Chance says he points out all the time, and she describes evil as anti-life, something that cannot create and instead feeds on what others make. She finds it startling how naive most people are about evil. In her view, waiting for white hats or any outside savior is projection, because Gandalf refused the ring out of awareness of his own shadow, and the answer is personal responsibility and an inner king. Chance adds that evil works less through lies than through obscuring the truth, so people must reclaim ancestral knowledge.
Quotes
“Myths that stick with us as a people are the expression of our collective psyche reflecting itself back to us.”
“My approach in the beginning was based on Jung and Campbell's idea that myth is to a culture what dreams are to the individual.”
“There is certainly a prophetic quality to Lord of the Rings.”
“What we have in America is a mythology that's been transplanted from another land onto this land.”
“If we as individuals are doing our own personal shadow work, then we're less likely to be leaving the door open for archetypal evil to creep in and essentially take over the personality.”
“Evil is live or live spelled backwards. There's a pretty powerful word play right there.”
“There's an anti-life force in existence right now. And it is literally on the march because so many people simply will not even consider that there is evil.”
“Even something that was made just for convenience and had no ill intent could weaken us in the long run by making us dependent on it.”
Loralee Scaife is an astrologer who uses Jungian techniques to analyze mythology, particularly Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, as a lens for understanding the collective unconscious and archetypal themes like the 'King within.'
See all Loralee episodes→Kyle and Serena Denton are community herbalists creating wild-crafted and organic plant medicines out of Milwaukee since 2015. I have used their teas and tinctures on an almost daily basis for years now. Kyle is a great friend of InnerVerse and has appeared on the channel more times than I can count. These products work, not in the allopathic "pharma-medicine" way, but in a terrain-support, consciousness bolstering plant-teacher sort of way.
