Walter Prytulak

Through the Eyes of a Beelzebub: a Book of Poems Walter Prytulak

BEELZEBUB, a fallen angel in Milton's Paradise Lost, is a devil ranking next to Satan. He is a symbol of reason and of pure intellectual appraisal of things. C. G. Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist, described the following four functions of a well-integrated, whole, healthy personality: thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuition. God and devil are the symbols of two personality disorders opposing each other; god is feeling, love and passion, but lacking the power of reasoning objectively, and devil represents a psychopath who thinks, calculates things in cold blood, sees objects as they exist, sees around the corners and intuits the possibilities in the future. However, he is devoid of feelings. This is why in biblical mythology he was able to throw the monkey wrench into god's plans. This book of poems describes the human situation as perceived through the eyes of the reasoning and calculating Beelzebub. The views of both protagonists, the god of goodness and the god of evil, are skewed, distorted, biased and therefore incomplete. Salvation resides in the process of individuation in which a person (and his god) becomes one whole integrated Self in whom all the four functions of personality are equally represented.