As I was watching the "Return of the King" DVD recently it occured to me, during the Mount Doom sequence, how it could be viewed as a metaphor for the so-called "Ordeal of the Abyss". The lava lakes of Mount Doom, of course, is the Abyss. Frodo is The Fool, the magician struggling to achieve a higher state by the transendence of "Self". Gollum, on the other hand, is the corrupted magician. By this I mean that one must cross the Abyss to reach Kether, not fall into it and take up the false crown of Daath, the qliphoth gradually turning you into a shell as empty as themselves. The ring represents all that obsesses us, all that we cling to, the thing we're afraid to let go because we can't imagine how we can possibly survive without it (in other words, the Self or Ego or Personality we clutch like some kind of metaphysical security blanket). When Frodo stands on the brink of the Abyss he can't bring himself to destroy the Ring, to let go of his obsession, the identity that is the Ring... He is like H.P. Lovecraft, teetering on the brink, unable to move pass the Abyss; He'd rather step away from it all, take the easy way out (which means, in this case, not destroying the ring).
But when he sees Gollum holding the Ring he sees, to his horror, what he will become if he clings to this obsession... a twisted, ruined shell of what was once human. Gollum is the failed magician who is unable to cross the Abyss but rather sinks into it until it consumes him ("gaze not into the Abyss lest it gazes back into you")... This image is perfectly crystalized when Gollum falls into the depths and is consumed by the lava, destroyed by his obsession with... himself? Choronzon, in the end, triumps over Golumn.
Frodo and Gollum wrestling on the ledge is Frodo battling with himself, his Self. Frodo, like Crowley, manages to cross the Abyss... Gollum, tragically, sucumbs to it. It is only by surviving this ordeal that Frodo is able to reach Kether, which in this film is represented by the islands beyond the ocean he sails to in the end... Not sure the name of these islands, I'm not a Tolkien buff at all.
You know Frodo has reached illumination because in the next scene you see Bara-Dur, Sauron's tower, collapse to the ground (obviously symbolic of the Tower tarot card: The collapse of the tower symbolizing change and the birth of a new aeon). And Sauron could be symbolic of the reptilian aspects of our nature (Sauron sounds a lot like a dinosaur name), Sauron, the great unblinking baleful eye of Cthulhu (or maybe Yog-Sothoth). Or something like that. |
