The 7 Ages of the Prisoner (pt. 5)

Episode 4--Free For All

Written and directed by Patrick McGoohan, the next episode, Free for All, is among the series' best. The plot is simple, The Prisoner is convinced to compete in the Village's election for the new Number 2. As biting social commentary, Free for All is first rate. Its critique of democracy in the burgeoning information age is still relevant, and in some ways, extremely prescient.

Tally-Ho News Network: We Report, We Decide

But that, unfortunately, is a discussion for another time. As this is an extraordinarily rich episode, we have enough on our plate just sticking to our main exploration of the Prisoner's initiation drama.

Our sleepy infant Prisoner from the last episode has grown into a petulant toddler whose mother surrogate is the winsome, Russian-speaking nursemaid, Number 58 (Rachel Herbert).

Peek-a-boo, I see you!

Despite Number 58's affectionate attentions, through the first quarter of the episode the Prisoner is the prototypical undisciplined, unrepentant little brat. A classic case study of what parents will recognize as the terrible twos. The Prisoner's whole demeanor is given over to expressions of three concepts: "Mine," "No," and "I want!" He is the prototypical libertarian toddler rebelling against the oh-so tellingly labeled 'nanny state.'

But in order to be a productive member of the family village, the child must be socialized, disciplined, and taught, often through fear and the threat of pain if necessary. "Obey the rules and we'll take very good care of you." A similar process takes place for the initiate, who has to learn the rules of his grade and adapt to strange new things. The following passage from Steven C. Bullock's Revolutionary Brotherhood is worth quoting in full:

For gentlemen such as Washington, politeness required careful restraint of outward expressions. In the high grades [of Masonry] breaking decorum was precisely the point. Physical contact and pain broke down the surface of calm and stability that had been the goal of genteel education. The rituals sought to penetrate directly to a person's moral center, now defined, not as outward self-presentation, but as inner character. The exhaustion, the physical pummeling and the terror experienced in the degrees all sought to encourage the emotional responses necessary to change deeply ingrained habits and tendencies.

These changes went deeper than simply moving the center of educational attention. They also helped create a new way of thinking about the foundation of human identity, about the self. Locke and the Enlightenment discredited the centuries-old model of human psychology as a collection of disparate feelings, attitudes, and desires struggling for dominance. In place of these warring faculties, the Enlightenment posited a more unified mechanical consciousness. Post-revolutionary thinkers kept this sense of relative consistency, but pushed the center inward. Instead of a seething mass of conflicting tendencies or a machine driven by sense experience, this new model suggested humans had an internal core of identity that could be educated and relied upon for guidance.

George Washington as Royal Arch Mason

It is the uncovering of this internal core of identity, and its source, that is the key reason for the various conditionings and de-conditionings that make up the perilous path of not just initiate friends such as Bimbo or Number 6, but cowans such as ourselves, as we strut about the stages of our own lives.

There is still much to cover, so we will have to wait to delve deeper into this core of identity until the Prisoner crosses into the vault of the adepti, but for now he still has far to go. It is decided that the Prisoner has to go take his medicine. For his own good, doncha know. Obey the rules and we will take very good care of you.

The Prisoner Makes His Descent (HTWSSTKS)

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There's a white diamond gloom on the dark side of this room and a pathway that leads up to the stars./If you don't believe there's a price for this sweet paradise, remind me to show you the scars--Bob Dylan

In The History of Magic, Eliphas Levi writes:

The doctrine [of metempsychosis] here set forth is formulated by the Kabalists in a single axiom: The spirit clothes itself to come down and unclothes itself to go up. The life of intelligence is ascensional. In the body of its mother the child has a vegetative life and draws nourishment through a cord to which it is attached, as the tree is attached to the earth by its root and is also nourished thereby. When the child passes from vegetative to instictive and animal life, the cord breaks and henceforth he has free motion. When the child becomes man he escapes from the trammels of instinct and can act as a reasonable being. When the man dies he is liberated from the law of gravitation, by which he has been previously bound to earth. When the soul has expiated its offences it grows strong enough to emerge from the exterior darkness of the terrestrial atmosphere and mount towards the sun. The unending ascent of the sacred ladder begins therein, for the eternity of the elect cannot be a state of idleness; they pass from virtue to virtue, from bliss to bliss, from victory to victory, from glory to glory. There is no break in the chain, and those of the superior degrees can still exercise an influence on those who are below....

I realize how arcane all of this is, but what is opaque to the rational mind is illuminated clearly in the mind through symbols, images, and ritual. An illustration can be seen in the 1st Degree Tracing Board below:

You may observe that many of these symbols appear with some frequency in The Prisoner. It's not necessarily the time or place to discuss each in turn, I'd rather wait until it's germane to a specific episode. In that spirit, though, it's the perfect time to give a few words to a specific concept, that of the sacred ladder. This is the stairway to the stars, which the soul must first climb down, before it can climb back up. It is Jacob's ladder in the Bible, as well as Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven. It is where the journey of Initiation begins, where the journey takes place, and where the journey leads.

R. Swinburne Clymer, in Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis, tells of the initiate into the Mithraic mysteries, whose ceremonies were performed in sacred caverns. He writes:

The learned Celsus informs us that in the rites of Mithras the Persians proved by symbols the two-fold nature of the stars, the fixed and the planetary; and by the doctrine of metempsychosis, which was first taught in Persia, they endeavored to show the passage of the Soul through the celestial bodies. The Mithriac priests illustrated this doctrine by erecting in their caves a high ladder, with seven gates or steps corresponding to the number of the planets (still retained in the symbolism of Masonry).

In The Masonic Ladder, John Sherer writes:

The Degree of Entered Apprentice is the initial letter of the Masonic alphabet, the first round in the ladder of grades, variously numbering three, seven, nine, eleven, twenty-nine, one hundred and twenty-five, or whatever figures the fancy of modern ritualists may assume to embrace all the Degrees of Freemasonry. An Entered Apprentice is a beginner, a neophyte. All that is explained to him in the First Degree must be in the sense of laying down a foundation; for he can have no previous information or instruction upon which to base it. Yet the Entered Apprentice, in theory, is already a Mason, even before he enters the Lodge; that is, he must be already prepared in heart, for there is nothing in Masonic science that can do the work of heart-preparation.

Halfway through Free For All the Prisoner descends this stairway into the cavern of the mysteries, to be taught another lesson, and begin his Initiation in earnest.

You may be saying now, "Wait a second, the initiation hasn't even started yet? What about all this other jazz? I thought we were already well on our way."

To which we reply, "Welcome to Chapel Perilous, baby. Wanna be a member, wanna be a member?"

However, as amusing as that may be, my daimon points out that a clearer definition of initiation should still be offered. According to the online etymology dictionary the word stems from the Latin inire, "to go into, enter upon, begin." This is the church door which Number 6 is always passing through (coming up again in our next episode, The Schizoid Man), and the threshold he is always crossing. By definition, then, initiation never ends, as it is perpetual beginning. The Fool is always stepping off the cliff-face.

Guenon breaks initiation down into three stages, which he defines as corresponding to 'potentiality', 'virtuality,' and 'actuality.' His details of these stages are:

1. 'qualification' consisting in certain possibilities inherent in the nature of the individual, which is the materia prima upon which the initiatic work is to be effected;
2. transmission, by means of filiation with a traditional organization of a spiritual influence giving to the individual the 'illumination' that will allow him to order and develop those possibilities that he carries within himself;
3. interior work by which, with the help of 'adjuvants' or exterior 'supports' (as needed and especially in the first stages), this development will be gradually realized as the individual passes stage by stage through the different degrees of the initiatic hierarchy and is led to the final goal of 'Deliverance' or the 'Supreme Identity'

An odd analogy can be found in bubble blowing. The breath of God, the liquid of the initiate, and the wand of the portal interact and transmute into the circle. The bubble thus produced is the degree the new body of the initiate enters into, but at the appropriate moment the bubble bursts, the breath whispers again, and the initiate crosses a new threshold, which is exactly the same and totally different from the previous one.

When we left him for this substantial detour through the thickets, our dear friend the Prisoner had been judged fit to move past the nursery, and the rest of Free For All is given over to this tumultuous journey.

He stands at the altar beneath the Royal Arch, as the Worshipful Master bangs the gavel and announces the Prisoner must undergo the test. I don't wish to go into much more tiresome detail, so I will let the pictures tell the story, only drawing your attention to the reds and the blues, the eyes and the triangles, the arches and the altars.

His platform of "Less work and more play!" having been a resounding success, the Prisoner is elected the new Number 2 and crosses the Third Threshold (see above). But of course he's just a kid, so his subsequent effort to free the village consists of helplessly pushing buttons willy-nilly and announcing over the loud speaker the brilliantly ironic message, "Obey me and be free!"

After one last trial, he is able to understand what Number 58 is saying, and she asks him, as he's being carted away from the latest ass-whooping, "Are you ready to talk?"

Her baby boy has grown up. School is ready to start.

to be continued--be seeing you!