Annihilation Addendum: The Shadowy Abyss of the Ego
Diving deeper into shimmery waters...
NOTE: Because of time constraints, I had to trim back the sections on ego death and the Shadow in my Annihilation livestream far more than I would have liked. I think these concepts are central to the film’s message, so I’ve reformatted them and am posting them here.
An argument can be made that Alex Garland rewrote Jeff VanDerMeer’s novel Annihilation as a mystical (or even psychedelic) initiation allegory, focused on the goal of “ego death.”
Ego death is a “complete loss of subjective self-identity.”
The experience seems to entail a destruction of all previous reference points in the individual’s life.
Muslim Sufis call it “fana” – annihilation – and medieval Jewish Kabbalists termed it the “Kiss Of Death.”
The annihilation concept is also used in Eastern religions to describe a “permanent loss of attachment” to a “separate sense of self.”
For instance, there’s a long tradition of the ego death concept in Buddhist thinking.
“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.” – Buddhist saying.
“Consciousness evolves when the self dissolves.” - James Austin, Zen and the Brain
New Age spiritual and psychological gurus and movements also work with the concept.
Jungians use the term “psychic death” — a fundamental transformation of the psyche.
In death and rebirth mythology, ego death is a phase of self-surrender and transition. Ego death is the second phase of Joseph Campbell’s concept of “the Hero’s Journey,” which includes phases of separation, transition, and incorporation.
“(Passage through the threshold) gives emphasis to the lesson that that passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation. But here, instead of passing outward beyond the confines of the visible world, the hero goes inward to be born again.”
— Joseph Campbell, Hero With A Thousand Faces
There’s also a long — and somewhat more troubling — tradition of annihilation in shamanic initiations:
“The main aim of shamanic initiation among the Yanomami people of the Upper Orinoco River region in Venezuela is the metamorphosis of the human body into a cosmic body… (d)uring the initiatory ordeal, the neophyte undergoes an intense experience of death through dismemberment by the spirits and subsequent rebirth, thus overcoming the human condition and becoming an individual living spirit.
“But, at the same time, he becomes a “collection” of other spirits who leave their natural habitats—located on the mountaintops and in the forest—and move into the initiate’s body, which becomes their abode.”
— “Yanomami Shamanic Initiation: The Meaning of Death and Postmortem Consciousness in Transformation,” by Zeljko Jokic
Considering these initiations are commonly performed on preadolescent boys, it has to be mentioned that this questionable practice was given a modern facelift in the mid-20th century, with the work of the monstrous Lauretta Bender at New York’s Bellevue Hospital:
In 1947, Bender published on 98 children aged between four and eleven years old who had been treated in the previous five years with intensive courses of ECT. These children received ECT daily for a typical course of approximately twenty treatments.
This formed part of an experimental trend amongst a cadre of psychiatrists to explore the therapeutic impact of intensive regimes of ECT, which is also known as either regressive ECT or annihilation therapy.
That being said, there’s also an annihilation tradition within Christian Mysticism, as seen in the lives of saints like Teresa of Avila…
