The Narcissist’s Secret Pact With Death
Ring around the rosie,
A pocket full of posies.
Ashes! Ashes!
We all fall down!
There’s something about this nursery rhyme which has always fascinated me. Its origins remain unknown, with one long-standing interpretation linking it to the Great Plague of the 17th century.
There is no solid proof of the rhyme’s ‘bubonic’ roots, yet I don’t believe that matters very much. If the symbolism points to something deeper which helps us make sense of difficult truths, then all the better.
In the Plague interpretation, the ‘rosie’ alludes to the colour of the rash caused by the illness, while a ‘pocket of posies’ was what people carried around to ward off the ‘bad smell’ and keep them safe. ‘Ashes’ refers to the burning bodies, and ‘we all fall down’ symbolises the masses dying everywhere.
Needless to say, the Great Plague is long gone. Covid took many of our loved ones from us, yet it had vastly different characteristics to previous pandemics. We may need new nursery rhymes to symbolise our experience of forced vaccinations, haunting isolation with endless binge-watching, and eerily abandoned airports and city streets.
However, there is a context where I feel this nursery rhyme is still apt, and that is when describing a narcissist. So let’s reimagine this classic, and see if we can draw new meaning from it to serve us in the 21st century.
Ring Around The Target
There is something unsettling about ‘Ring Around The Rosie’ being popularly connected to mass death while also being a game played by children.
On the playground, children hold hands and sing the lyrics while moving in a circle, with the climactic collapse coming at the last line. There is a sense of joy to this game, of celebrating the cycle of life, with each game ending in ‘death’, before the inevitable rebirth. In this regard, the meaning is quite beautiful: Death is not the end.
Yet we might also interpret this rhyme as a cautionary tale for narcissists. And rather than death not being the end, what if death was in fact the point?
With this in mind, let us break down the lyrics as follows:
Ring around the rosie: ‘Rosie’ comes from the French word ‘rosier’, which means rose tree. This rose tree offers gorgeous flowers while also having thorns along its stems. We can look at the narcissist’s target as someone with wounds (thorns) who offers something of value to the narcissist (flowers). These flowers represent vibrancy, optimism and energy. They represent life, which the narcissist looks to convert into narcissistic supply. As a result, the narcissist runs metaphorical circles, or ‘rings’ around the target (the rosie), looking to entrap them in their narcissistic realm.
A pocket full of posies: Posies are bouquets which the narcissist offers the target to disarm them. This represents the narcissist’s attentiveness, flattery and charm during the idealisation phase. They offer the target a ‘bouquet’ as a swooning lover might.
Ashes! Ashes!: After the idealisation phase, the devaluation begins. The narcissist syphons their repressed trauma into the target via abuse while extracting narcissistic supply, turning the target’s inner life into ashes.
We all fall down!: This line is self-explanatory. ‘Falling down’ alludes to the target’s life spiralling into depression, destitution and decay.
Yet we need to take a closer look at the word ‘all’ in that last line. Does this not imply that both the target and the narcissist experience a downfall? Doesn’t the narcissist always come out on top?
A Cremated Relationship
There is something ritualistic about a narcissistic relationship. The idealise-devalue-discard cycle seems to repeat over and over, just like in the playground game of ‘Ring A Rosie’. When the narcissist and their target ‘all fall down’ after the discard, the narcissist gathers new ‘posies’, i.e. grandiosity, and seeks out a new ‘rosie’ (target) to circle.
In cases where the relationship lasts decades or a lifetime, the devaluation phase is drawn out indefinitely, as the narcissist’s partner gradually withers into spiritual and emotional ashes. That is, even if the narcissist remains physically in your life, they always emotionally abandon you, leaving the relationship in a perpetual state of decay and mundane routine.
Yet no matter what, discard or not, the result is the same: A howling nothingness.
The Eternal Return
Rituals play an enormous role in human life, even when we have little understanding of their deeper purpose.
‘The Eternal Return’ is an idea proposed by the historian Mircea Eliade to explain the meaning behind the ritualistic behaviours of religious man throughout human history. Eliade argues that by replaying specific behaviours in a particular order, a person can return to a ‘mythical age’. That is, they can go back in time to an event which shaped their existence in a significant way.
Eliade speaks of linear time as being ‘profane’, while ‘sacred’ time is circular, wherein an event infinitely repeats through being acted out again and again. ‘Profane’ time can feel meaningless, such as living in a state of constant boredom where ‘nothing happens’. Sacred time, on the other hand, centres on a specific point where something extraordinary happened.
If we were to lose connection to such ‘uncanny’ or ‘holy’ events, then life would once again lose its meaning, and we would return to the pointless expanse of linear time, where the seconds tick but nothing changes. Sacred time provides a much-needed ‘break’ in linear time, bringing with it radical transformation by a force beyond our usual world. Rituals are how we revisit these significant occurrences, which could have brought utter destruction, or led us towards transcendence and growth.
A Reason To Return
Rituals take us back to a state of chaos, to a time when our world came into being from a state of flux. In such cases, something unexpected and transcendent happened. The Big Bang. The death of Christ. The end of World War II.
