Eros & Thanatos
Life is full of polarities that give our existence meaning. We know pleasure because we have felt pain. We revel in beauty because we have witnessed destruction. We experience happiness only because we have known despair. The emotional energies that fuel our lives spring out of this grand dichotomy that separate the light from the dark, the constructive from the destructive.
Sigmund Freud awarded these opposing forces mythological labels: Eros was established as the “life instinct” and, later, Thanatos for the “death instinct”. Freud articulated these two instincts as being hopelessly locked in a state of eternal battle.
Eros encapsulates the will to survival and the desire to create. What blooms out of this instinct are the potent forces of love and ambition. Allegorically, Eros can be expressed as Renaissance art — creations that prioritized elegance, the exquisiteness of the human form, and classical notions of man’s nobility. It seeks to rise out of the muck of chaos and to fashion order. It endeavors to surface above messy animalistic impulses and put something more palatable and more attractive in its place. Eros is life and love, vigor and purpose, cooperation and civilization.
Thanatos is the drive towards obliteration; it is aggression manifest. It is the heady lure of destruction, the greedy pursuit of confrontation with our own mortality. It is flirtation with death; it is a testing of our human ability to destroy that which we have patiently labored to create. It is decay immortalized. It is the drive to return to the dust, to kill the self. Dissolution is the objective of Thanatos — the temptation to revert back to an inanimate, motionless state.
Eros and Thanatos come from the same source, which is called negation. The negation of life is death; the negation of death is life. God desires to be born; and having been born, he desires to die. What is born must die, what dies must be born again. That is an endless loop of līlā, divine play.
Not only do the Eros and Thanatos impulses come from the same cause, they are both the same, identical stuff. Hence the attraction of both—the only difference being that one attraction is conscious, while the other is unconscious and suppressed as fear. Yet the attraction of fear is undeniable: sex sells, but so does horror.
Fire in the yoni is the symbol for lust and anger—Eros and Thanatos, the life and death instincts.
Freud developed a “pleasure principle”, which maintained that humans were so magnetized to pleasure mostly because such a state was defined by the absence of tension. Tension had to be eradicated in order to experience this elusive pleasure. Freud mulled over the notion that the “death wish” was so appealing in part because it contained the heady promise of a tensionless state. A truly tensionless state, after all, is only achievable in death.
Sources: "Gifts from the Goddess: Selected Works of Sri Amritananda Natha Saraswati" by Michael M Bowden;
"The Ancient Dance Between Eros and Thanatos"
