The Holy Mother
must eventually decompose. These ideas will certainly play a substantial role in Anakin's descent into the dark, as he refuses to accept them as well as to allow the rest of the galaxy to suffer the same fate as his mother. This will of course be in complete opposition to the manner of his birth, as well as the lessons Shmi tries to impart.
After all, in The Phantom Menace, it is the ten-year old Anakin who races back to his mother's open arms, almost unable to leave her even if it means losing his dreams of being a Jedi. Yet as Shmi tenderly explains to him, he cannot stop change, anymore than he can "stop the suns from setting." As audiences already know, for all his merits Anakin will not be very good at letting go and allowing life to move ahead freely and spontaneously, and will try to stop more than one sun from setting.
The scene of their initial parting on Tatooine is reminiscient of various aspects of myth as well. Campbell once noted that there is a certain Hindu rite in Bengal, India, in which a mother has to gradually give up her most treasured possessions one by one until the day she will finally have to give up her children. This is necessary in a way, for there is likewise a dark aspect of the mother archetype often played out in the form of an ogress or a witch or a terrible goddess. This is the mother who will not let go, who doesn't embrace with love but rather strangles with it. This is demonstrated in a Persian text of Zoroastrian origing, which tells of the first two parents of the human race who loved their children so completely and blindly that they literally devoured them. Watching this play out, God rightly reduced human beings' capacity for parental love by some ninety-nine percent, and so humankind was able to survive.
Clearly, there is something of this in Anakin, for he becomes the seminal demon-father as Darth Vader, torturing and dismembering his own children in the original trilogy. As the Taoist sage Lao Tzu once said, goodness piled on goodness eventually becomes evil. Holiness can only be pushed so far before the demonic begins to creep in. This is known as the "shadow" aspects of life in Jungian psychology, where any stance too greatly exaggerated starts to draw out its own
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