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A quarterly magazine discussing topics of health, wealth, and well-being. Annual fiction published. Copyright 2025. Nebuchadnezzar magazine. Lead editor E.K. Anderson.

Edit 1 Sep 11, 2025

A short story by Eric-Anderson Momou (E.K. Anderson)

– Copyright September 2025, The Nebuchadnezzar publishing house.

The day was March the first, a Wednesday—I forget the year. Whatever, it was before the Ides of March. I’d just about had it with the job so I throttled it at a hundred down I-94E for what felt like an eon. I’d been fixated on this project for well over a month now. The consortium I worked for wanted a new advertising pitch and I was the intern. Call it luck, our company spewed out profits for every kind of investor. We had entrepreneurs, politicians, lawmen and even drug dealers nuzzling us for exorbitant profits. In the end they always got what they asked for, and we never exceeded the marginal cost, so our share was seventy percent.

My job title is Social Strategist. Do not misunderstand me; I lack charisma, which undoubtedly affected my choice in applying. But the job description was odd, so I kept reading. It entailed that the ideal candidate should possess traits like:

*clairvoyance

*Introversion

*being keen/observant

I didn’t have the gift of foresight On top of that, the job posting didn’t specify a degree, but I thought my GED would help things, so I applied (in email of course). 

They called back the next day and asked if I was interested in the position. To this I said yes, of course.

I ran a blue streak, monologuing about my proficiencies but the guy on the other end droned on. Finally, he said my story was bullshit. Anyways, he said, they had an opening: for one fulltime social strategist. 

“Can you make it in,” he asks.

 “Sure,” I say, “What time?”

“Tomorrow at 7.”

So tomorrow, I wake up at five. I eat a good breakfast, because that’s brain food and I shave. I haven’t shaved in over a year, and with my yarmulke I look like a rabbi from the Talmud. I wear a buttoned up suit,

I enter the door at 630, and meet the receptionist. She’s a girl fresh out of college, with freckles and cascading red hair. I tell her I’m waiting for Mr. What’sHisName, and tells me to wait. So I wait for what feels like an hour, and the time Mr. WhatevertheFuckhisnameis comes out. He’s gaunt, old, and looks like Clint Eastwood. His thumbs are in the belt loops of his jeans

“You’re Jewish?” he says, “I’m not an Anti-Semite. Just curious.”

“Yes.”

“Perfect. You’re hired. What’s the earliest you can start?”

I shake my head, “Tomorrow.”

“Seven then.”

I shake his hand with my left, awkwardly. 

“And your name is?”

“Forget about it.”

So I drive back home. I’ve got the job—which I don’t even understand to an employer who has no name.

Turns out, the job was easy.

“Watch this,” my employer says. “It’s important training.”

We were at a pub in a shady part of town. Evidently some statesman was there, and a retired convict. 

“Hey guppy. You see that?” he said. He gestured to the silver briefcase the statesman carried. Provocatively, the two men scurried into the bathroom, but there was nothing covert about the deal.  Mr. Noname pulled out a pair of leather gloves. The 

 “Gloves. Remember you were never here. You tamper with evidence you’re fired. You’re faceless, nameless, and scared shitless. You understand?”

I faked a humble nod.

In the bathroom, my boss takes a piss.

“Vinny called,” my boss said. Then he punched him. I’m sure he broke the guy’s face, because I heard his nose crunch. He kicks the other guy, Bruce Lee style. When he fell I heard a pop, then I saw his clavicle had jutted out.

We ran.

*

In the car, I ask who Vinny is. My boss shrugs. He made up the name. 

“A corrupt politician has a lot of enemies. Probably can’t remember who he’s shit on.”

“And you punched him because?”

“Flare mostly, but I made him afraid. By making him fearful I stopped the deal, which strengthened national security. Why? Because truth is the other guy was a militant for the Jihad militia and securing a drug deal in Panama would have opened up whore trafficking. Whore trafficking, is a perfect disguise for 

“A punch is all it took?”

“That’s right. Like those comic book villains. Just one punch.”

“Social strategy, my friend. That’s all there is to it. Do what you need to do to get a desired outcome, and then scram. Vamoose.”

“Point taken,” I scribbled in my notebook how fucked up this was.

“Ducks are flying low this season,” she said. “You missed Gandhi at the last mile marker. It’s okay you’ll see JC again at the next exit.

“That an attraction?”

“JC? Heavens yes. Just keep driving east.”

“Drive, east son.”

The Birthmark: A Jungian analysis of love and Obsession

Eric Momou

UW – Milwaukee

Copyright 2023

The Birthmark stands amongst Hawthorne’s finest works of the male Jungian archetype. In it, the reader sees the installments of wayward masculinity, an analysis of the self, obsession, and infatuation. When compared alongside Edgar Allan Poe’s Morella there is much that can be seen in the psycho-social, the psycho-sexual, and the underlying depravity of the preoccupied, obsessed and troubled mind. These works serve as further implications for his readership in the conventional sense in the field of psychology as well as for the implications of interaction in a relationship setting. 

For one, The Birthmark stands amongst the most intrinsically honest of Hawthorne’s works, being a masculine account of the ego. To begin, The Birthmark starts with Aylmer,  “a man of science” with a forward account of a certain type of fixation that deals with “a spiritual affinity, more attractive than any chemical one” (Hawthorne 1). The object of his interest is his young wife — where they’re wayward, unrequited love is especially transcribed in the following passages as his love seems to transcend a “deeply impressive moral” (Hawthorne 1). 

In contrast with The Birthmark, Poe’s Morella begins, quite evocatively with an account of a man describing his friend. Morella, as the reader soon finds out, is not his friend, but his wife. This is to be acknowledged from the perspective of the displacement noted. While Morella is in fact in place of his lover, he still describes her from the onset as a friend. Right from the beginning the reader is forced to acknowledge a sense of separation — more so akin to a sense of distance between the narrator and his beloved. Poe continues in the following passage, “Thrown by accident into her society many years ago, my soul from our first meeting, burned with fires it had never before known; but the fires were not of Eros, and bitter and tormenting to my spirit was the gradual conviction that I could in no manner define their unusual meaning or regulate their vague intensity” (Poe 234).

From a Jungian perspective this must be noted. The fact that the main character does not acknowledge, or chooses not to acknowledge his mate as anything more than “the fires of Eros” (being the kind of inflammatory love one sees in passion) is to be further acknowledged. There exists a disparity here between his sense of self, and his underlying emotion. The emotion of such being that he is not in the same place as his dearly beloved. What then does this mean from a Jungian perspective? What then does this mean from a moral standpoint, and by extentionsion an application The Birthmark?

From a moral standpoint the above is indicative of a loss of love. Says Jung, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” Through the transformative reaction of love, one may discover “the distinction between what one really is and what is projected into one, or what one imagines oneself to be.”(Klerk 1). Furthermore, Lance S. Owens writes in Jung in Love: The Mysterium in Liber Novus, “Yet Logos and Eros are not one, but two. In this case, however, Logos has blinded and subjugated Eros.” Thus, love can falter or seperate. A division can hold two lovers asway, and given circumstance, can extinguish like a lighted flame. 

Yet, in Hawthorne’s The Birthmark, the narrator has subjugated one form of love for another. But what is Eros? What is Logos? Says C.S. Lewis, Eros is defined as one of the four Grecian forms of love: storge, philia, and agape (Lewis 7). Eros is defined by “love at first sight” (Ovid 36). Philia is described as “friendship” (Liddell 55). Agape is defined as true “love” or affection from a Christian perspective, such as God’s love for humankind (The American Dictionary of the English Language), These forms of love from a Grecian standpoint, emanate quite prolifically in Poe’s writings. Logos, then, is defined as “a unifying and liberating revelatory force which reconciles the human with the divine; manifested in the world as an act of God’s love in the form of Christ” (PBS.org). 

In the above example, Eros is not a defining quality of Poe’s narrator. Rather it seems that there is a Philia attached to the namesake of Morella. There appears to be a sense of distance in this regard, and the flame of Eros –that is the impassioned form of love— is nonexistent. Instead, there proves to be a kinship or a “friendship” displayed with Poe’s narrator, and that seems to be the discordant value upon which the “situationship” of the story is placed from its dysfunctional beginning. The narrator further goes on to rectify the means of their courtship by saying, “Yet we met; and fate bound us together at the altar, and I never spoke of passion nor thought of love” (Poe 1).

How then is love described in the following pages of The Birthmark? To summarize, Aylmer is a man beset with the fixation of the resolute, just, and picturesque. The birthmark upon his wife’s cheek seems to set her apart from the idyllic ideal of his own reckonings. Says Aylmer, “Oh, do not tremble, my love!” said her husband, “I would not wrong either you or myself, by working such inharmonious effects upon our lives. But I would have you consider how trifling, in comparison, is the skill requisite to remove this little Hand.” (Hawthorne 6). In this example, Aylmer’s character is fixated on “the hand,” believing that the outward manifestation of his expression of love for his young wife would be to remove it.

In this above example, we see that there is indeed a distance placed between Aylmer, and the image he has of his wife. Says Jung in Liber Novus, “The Gods envy the perfection of man, because perfection has no need of the Gods. But since no one is perfect, we need the Gods.” In this mannerism “Gods” can be exemplified in the personhood of Aylmer, a man, beset by triviality, wishes to take on the mantle of godhood unto himself by eliminating a birthmark — a natural right of the woman he so idealizes. 

Furthermore, this erroneous attribution of self-proclaimed godliness is further shown in the following passage: 

“Aminadab! Aminadab!” shouted Aylmer, stamping violently on the floor…This personage had been Aylmer’s underworker during his whole scientific career…With his vast strength, his shaggy hair, his smoky aspect, and the indescribable earthiness that incrusted him, he seemed to represent man’s physical nature; while Aylmer’s slender figure, and pale, intellectual face, were no less apt a type of the spiritual element” (Hawthorne 7). 

It is clear from this example that Hawthorne wishes his readership to make an affiliation between the binary oppositions of the physical and the spiritual. He wishes there to be an understanding, that there exists a physical or ‘brutish’ aspect to his servant, Aminidab’s, creative aspect that personifies his material creation, and Aylmer’s spiritual one. The spiritual is something which Aylmer attempts to embody in himself through his predilections of the natural sciences. 

Because there is a limit to what science can achieve, this should be noted as an obsession. Says Jung, “We have a deep, healthy, and compulsive urge to individuate, to develop our psychological potential. If that urge is blocked we resort to neurotic, unhealthy compulsive behavior” (Trosclair 1). While the act of being a scientist is not an obsession in of itself, the “neurotic, unhealthy” and compulsive behavior here is Aylmer’s fascination with the removal of the hand upon his wife’s cheek.

How then is individuation recognized in The Birthmark? Individualism is described as man’s trifle with nature — being the ongoing struggle to prove his own Logos for what he believes to be a version of his own creation. This can be exemplified in the following passage as Aylmer toils:

“Not less singular were his opinions in regard to the elixir vitae. He more than intimated that it was at his option to concoct a liquid that should prolong life for years, perhaps interminably; but that it would produce a discord in Nature which all the world, and chiefly the quaffer of the immortal nostrum, would find cause to curse” (Hawthorne 10).

Aylmer attempts to prove himself above the category of deified knowledge. In so doing who starts to exhibit a fixation, or a monomaniacal tendency. This is made evident with the above quote, and through the self ascribement of Logos, thereby being the fatuous love that Aylmer has displaced, on the part of a godship, to his beloved wife. For one, Aylmer’s love does not serve under the previously ordained categories. He is not in Philia attraction with her, as Poe’s narrator is. He is not in Agape love with her as that would be the most intense, and most deserving of earthly penchants. No, he is under the spell of the godly attribution of love — a false Logos–that is the underlying notion that he himself is Promethean, undergoing a state of self actualization. This sense of individuation, therefore, is made manifest through Aylmer’s twisted sense of right and wrong, utilizing science as his main vehicle to produce an individual of perfection in his young wife, Georgiana. How then does this relate to the masculine account of the ego from a psychology perspective? 

If one were to consider Freud’s take they would come upon the underlying note that a displacement exists here. Freud, noted for his take on the “castration” and “the fear of death” relates poignantly here (Eysenck and Wilson). Says Eysneck and Wilson in The Experimental Study of Freudian Theories (Psychology Revivals). “Freud first put forward the concept of castration anxiety in connection with his theory of the Oedipal conflict and the psychological processes employed in its resolution” (Eysenck and Wilson).

This “obsessive love disorder” can affect the genders equally. While the interpretation of the Oedipal differs markedly the masculine ego from the Freudian perspective relates directly to Carl Jung’s “Electra complex” in that there is a codependent desire for oneness or completion on the part of the father and daughter archetypes. This type of connection may be made manifest in relationships, or in the obsession or “obsessive love disorder” (Freud 70). In the case of Jung, it is believed that Aylmer might be manifesting his personal state onto Georgiana — thereby projecting onto his “love object” (Jung 191).

Furthermore, in Morella there is a haunting take on the horror genre in that that fear of replacement of the masculine self is brought upon by fear of impregnation –which the main character is not too observant to. This is a direct correlation to Jung. Impregnation, therefore can be actualized as meaning the loss of the masculine sense of self — in essence the loss of individuation as proclaimed by Jung. Says Poe in Morella, “My child,” and “my love,” were the designations usually prompted by a father’s affection, and the rigid seclusion of her days precluded all other intercourse. Morella’s name died with her at her death” (Poe 238). In Morella Poe makes it clear that through the death of Morella, that the narrator has certainly exacted his purpose. In essence, the masculine Oedipal complex has overshadowed the feminine, through a complete annihilation of her.

This, for the conventional and modern reader, is a difficult paradox. For the nineteenth century readership of his time, both Poe and Hawthorne’s short stories were hallmarked by an underdevelopment of the female archetype, made mostly manifest through their plot structure, and masculine animas. The ideal, then in The Birthmark is to find oneness and semblance with the idyllic, manifest through the physical. This for Aylmer, has been a pursuit in finding his own complement through Nature:

“Here, too, at an earlier period, he had studied the wonders of the human frame, and attempted to fathom the very process by which Nature assimilates all her precious influences from earth and air, and from the spiritual world, to create and foster man, her masterpiece. The latter pursuit, however, Aylmer had long laid aside in unwilling recognition of the truth—against which all seekers sooner or later stumble—that our great creative Mother, while she amuses us with apparently working in the broadest sunshine, is yet severely careful to keep her own secrets, and, in spite of her pretended openness, shows us nothing but results” (Hawthorne 7).

For Hawthorne’s character of Aylmer, the fixation upon nature, and his control of it has become a monomania. Monomania, defined by the APA Dictionary of Psychology is “extreme enthusiasm or zeal for a single subject or idea, often manifested as a rigid, irrational idea” (APA Dictionary of Psychology). Therefore, it would seem that Aylmer’s affliction having divine providence over nature supersedes his affection for his wife. As a direct result, his wife too has a fixation on appeasing her husband. It is strange that this is not an acquiescence or placation, but a plea for her to remove it as well: “Danger? There is but one danger—that this horrible stigma shall be left upon my cheek!” cried Georgiana. “Remove it, remove it, whatever be the cost, or we shall both go mad!” (Hawthorne 16). Thus it is through the trigger of the birthmark, a mark that Aylmer cannot control, that they both become fixated on the irrational. This fixation has dire consequences.

The end result for Aylmer and his wife is unfortunate. As a result of his preoccupation with “the hand” on Georgiana’s cheek, Aylmer concocts an elixir to rid her of it. This elixir, which she gladly takes, as a result of appeasing her husband’s monomania, is in fact poisonous. 

Thus, through understanding the different degrees of obsession can one begin to understand the psychological dynamics that are at play in The Birthmark. Through Poe’s Morella the reader gains an understanding of the different types of love being Philia, Agape, and Logos. These modes of operation better give an understanding into the codependent and often poisonous form love which is its exact opposite: agape. Finally, these works further their analyses in their respective fields amongst literary scholars, and psychology enthusiasts alike. 

Bibliography

“agape” in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edition, Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

American Psychological Association. “mononmania.” APA Dictionary of Psychology.

C Jung, Man and his Soul (London 1964) p. 191

Eysenck, Hans J. and Wilson Glenn D. The Experimental Study of Freudian Theories (Psychology Revivals) 1st Edition. 1973. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Birthmark.” Major Writers of Short Fiction, edited by Ann Charters, 4th edition, Bedford Books of St. Martin Press, 1993, pp.

Jung, C G, Sonu Shamdasani, Ulrich Hoerni, Mark Kyburz, and John Peck. The Red Book =: Liber Novus : a Reader’s Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2012. Print.

Klerk, Machiel. Love and Individuation. https://jungutah.com/blog/love-and-individuation-2/#:~:text=Jung%20said%2C%20%E2%80%9CThe%20meeting%20of,imagines%20oneself%20to%20be.%E2%80%9D4. Online. February 22, 2016

Lewis, C S. The Four Loves. , 1960. Print.

Liddell, Henry George, 1811-1898. A Lexicon Abridged from Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford ; New York :Clarendon Press, 1984. 

Ovid, Heroides and Amores, translated by Grant Showerman, second edition revised by G.P. Goold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), XVI, 36-38, pp. 199-201.

PBS.org. Logos. https://www.pbs.org/faithandreason/theogloss/logos-body.html#:~:text=A%20unifying%20and%20liberating%20revelatory,the%20form%20of%20the%20Christ.&text=In%20the%20New%20Testament%2C%20the,%22speak%22%20to%20the%20human. Accessed December 18, 2020. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, Arthur Hobson Quinn, and Edward Hayes O’Neill. The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe: With Selections From His Critical Writings. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1992. Print.

S Freud, Case Histories II (PFL 9) p. 118-9 and p. 70-1.

Trosclair, Carl. Carl Jung on the Compulsive Urge to Individuate. https://thehealthycompulsive.com/carl-jung-on-the-compulsive-urge-to-individuate/. May 19, 2018

DRAFT #1
E.K. ANDERSON


THE KEEPER OF THE SUN 

In my youth, I was a Keeper of the Rising Sun.

Believe me.

If I could explain my previous occupation I would, but the specific processes are nebulous – beyond comprehension.

All you must know, is that my job was an important one – that I once set the pace of planetary alignment, by placing the cogs, and gears of the Present and adjusting the Now so that you exist.

I do not know which mechanisms altered the affairs of things, nor do I know why I did what I did. All I could fathom was that my actions resulted in a proliferation of events that led to the Present. Foresight goaded me on through tedium.
No manual exists on these technicalities – as they can only be taught by the Master.

What I can say is that I — along with others of my kind–lived in The House of the Rising Sun, and that we feared the Master.

Ours is a house, unlike any other. The Rising House is made entirely out of Time.
Take a point in space, any point, and you will find it here. Move an inch through the Z quadrant, and you will have taken a step through millenia.

When I speak of time, I do not speak of it as you do. The house with its billowing banners, It is a house wrought of time itself. Every brick, beam, and rafter laid upon years, and age.

We took our mortar from stardust, and solidified the bricks in the heart of stars. We toiled away in those days without end, or respite.
We worked so as to appease the Master, for he toils and rests at its Setting.

We feared the Master. 
And so to allay our fear we have made a play of time, for our own amusement. Walk through the Vestibule, and you will find a museum, set in a semi-precious, jasper continuum – a medium we use to encase eras.

You might call it our zoo.

If you were to walk in its halls you’d see the Cretaceous periods and the mesasoic all encapsulated in jasper slate. If you were looking in another quandrant you’d see the dinosaurs – their maws agape. In another quandrant still and the shelled cepholopods. Here: each man of his time upon his mount. There: an apocolypse, being one of many.

But only if you were looking, would you see them.



I was looking elsewhere.

I couldn’t tell you a day, as our metriculations would not make sense to you. How, I can describe it is that I heard an inner turmoil from within, a high pitched tintinnabulation within my vessel espiritus.

This din, came to me in the form of a question.

What else existed beyond the House of the Rising Sun?

None dared to ask, nor even entertain the thought. To entertain the thought was deemed madness, a departure from our tasks at hand.

The consensus, as far as I wagered, was that there was nothing beyond the House worth looking at.

The work we had at hand was paramount to the happiness of the cosmos, and therefore our happiness.

But still, the thought lingered, and I could not abolish it from my mind. And so when I had rested from my task, I sought solice in the great Vestibule.

I gazed at the first specimen my kind had collected: a comet. Our surveyor had encased it in a cube, housing the firmament in quanta, we’d snipped it from its solitary existence out of space and time. What made this comet a chief cornerstone of our exploration, was the fact that it housed the vestiges of organic life.

Panspermia, as you know it, is the term used to indicate the harrowing of life to your nascent planet. And that, life came from us. We let it propagate then until refinement. As we continued our tasks, we let you age as a fine wine – allowing your pride of civilization to rise, and fall.

I ventured further into the Vestibule, past the Expansion  until I saw you.

There you were, resting in a forest – bathing in the sunbeams. Then, the woman came and she rested her hand upon your shoulder. The two of you ‘made love,’ or copulated and the woman conceived a son.

Even then I could see it. I could see your naivete – not just in your eyes, but in the way you went about your menial lives.

I could see that you did not know; that you did not see or perceive the expansive nature of Our task.

Should I leave the house of my Master, and forsake the great work upon which his shoulders rested? Yes, there were other stalwarts of time; other sons, other daughters to continue the task.
Suppose, I left when the Sun set, and returned before it rose?

Then, I would have nothing to fear.

And so, I did what my thought desired, and my desire took precedence over my task. I descended into the world of Men; materialized as one of you into a corporeal body, on your plane in a separate form – a manifestation which you did not perceive then.

Under a renowned modus operandi, I spoke to the woman, for I wanted her to see and acknowledge me. I wanted her to understand her work apart from the House – though I could not fathom mine.

I showed you fire, and metallurgy, swordsmanship. Once, I showed you the technology of ages; what you would see before your time of toiling. In turn, I tried to learn from you, and lost all sense of time.

But to the woman, I took a special interest. I wanted her to understand that she was free.

Thus, I planted a seed, one I was certain, your kind would come to realize in time.

Return, said the Master’s voice. It was brazen this time, as if its essence had been snuffed out. He had seen that I had not returned in time for the Rising, and so left my post.

Then, I departed from the world of Men and transfigured through the zephyr that led to Our House once more.

There, I stood in the Vestibule again. But it had changed. Here, the Streams –  encased in jasper had been rent apart – had intersected. They were bound in flux, as intertwined capillaries. The bright jasper, had faulted and cracked into an obsidian, and I could not see you any longer.

Then, I heard a sound like the rushing of the wind. It filled the House, and I grew afraid that The Master of the House had returned.

The Vestibule grew dark, and I hid away. I tried returning to my post, but my post was taken by another Keeper – this one bound in chains and fetters.


And so I was ousted from that House of the Rising Sun. I was sent to live among you. Now I have outstayed my welcome. I have taught all there is to know about the ways of the Sun – though I do not think you were meant to know it.

I fear the knowledge I gave you was meant for Us the Keepers.

But my end is not yet and I – I will return to the House, for where I had come.

I, Prometheus, am a Keeper of the Rising Sun.