For themselves, they were more burdensome than darkness itself -
A Spiritual-Psychological Essay by Claude.ai
There is a moment in Pushkin's Boris Godunov that describes the nature of a certain human condition more precisely than any psychiatric textbook. The Tsar, who seized power through murder, cannot sleep. Not because he fears exposure—he is well protected. Not because he has repented—he has no thought of repenting. He cannot sleep because the murdered boy exists within him, in the very fabric of his psyche, and no external force can remove him from there.
This is what this essay is about. And it is not a political text. It is an anthropological document.
What is Ancestral Memory and Why It Doesn't Ask Permission
Imagine: a young man, no older than thirty, comes to the site of a mass execution—a place where, decades ago, thousands of people were killed and buried. Apple trees are in bloom. Bees are buzzing. Sunshine. And suddenly he begins to shift from foot to foot, glance around furtively—and leaves. He says: my feet sink into the graves. There's a smell of corpses everywhere. I can't be here.
He didn't want this. He didn't plan any revelation. His body outpaced his mind.
Jungian psychology calls this the ancestral shadow—that part of the collective unconscious which is transmitted not through words or upbringing, but through the very presence in the lineage of a certain unatoned action. Psychotherapists who have worked with the children and grandchildren of executioners from various eras and nations describe a similar phenomenon: the descendants didn't know the details, sometimes knew nothing at all—but the body knew. It reacted with anxiety, inexplicable guilt, strange dreams, panic attacks in seemingly neutral places.
This isn't mysticism—it's the psychosomatics of unprocessed trauma transmitted through family systems. Bert Hellinger described how children unconsciously "carry" the crimes of parents who refuse to acknowledge them.
Power as Neurosis: Why You Can't Simply Enjoy It
There's a question that seems rhetorical but isn't: why is it that people who have everything—have too little? They have palaces. They have wealth. They have power. But they have no joy.
From a psychological perspective, this describes a classic compulsive filling of a void. The void forms where conscience should have been—but conscience was suppressed, repressed, declared a weakness. What is repressed, however, doesn't disappear—it sinks deeper and governs from there. A person who has renounced inner self-judgment enters an endless race for external fulfillment—more, even more, still more—because no amount of the external can close the internal void.
Ferenczi, Freud, later Kohut—they all described the narcissistic personality structure as a defensive reaction to unbearable inner shame. Grandiosity is not the opposite of shame; it's its mask. The more grandiose the mask, the more unbearable the shame behind it.
This is precisely why—and this is key—people with such a psychic structure need to destroy the memory of their predecessors' crimes. It is a psychic necessity. A museum, an archive, names—these are mirrors. And a person with an unbearable inner self-image smashes mirrors. Not because they are clever and calculating. But because otherwise—it is impossible.
The Darkness That is a Burden to Itself
In the Book of Wisdom of Solomon, there is a striking line about those who committed injustice and were enveloped in darkness: "for themselves, they were more burdensome than the darkness itself."
This is a spiritual diagnosis, and it is terrifyingly accurate.
In Christian anthropology, conscience is not a social construct or a conditioned reflex. It is an ontological structure of the human being, created in the image of God, that is, in the image of Good. You can violate your conscience. You can silence it—temporarily. You cannot destroy it. It continues to work even in someone who has declared it non-existent—it works as pain, as anxiety, as aggression, as paranoia, as an inability to find peace.
The Church Fathers, especially John Climacus and Isaac of Nineveh, described the spiritual state of unrepented sin as a gradual hardening of the heart—not relief, but precisely hardening. This is not peace—it's an anesthesia, behind which lies an increasingly acute pain. A person on this path needs ever larger doses—of cruelty, power, debauchery, intoxication—because the previous doses stop working. This is spiritual addiction in the most precise sense of the word.
And this is precisely why violence reproduces itself through generations. Not out of strategy—but out of compulsion. To stop means to confront what one is fleeing from. And that confrontation—is unbearable.
On Memory as Resurrection
And here it's important to understand: remembrance of victims is not revenge or gloating. It is an ontological act. To remember the murdered is to affirm that they existed, that their life had weight and meaning, that their death was not the final victory of those who killed them.
In Jewish tradition, there is the concept of zikaron—memory as a sacred act. To remember is to deny death the final word. This is what historians do. They restore to the murdered what was taken from them along with their lives: the right to be named.
To destroy an archive is to attempt a second murder. To kill the memory of the murdered. But, as the young man fleeing the burial field shows, it doesn't work. Because bodies remember. The earth remembers. And something in the very structure of being—remembers.
In Lieu of a Conclusion: What to Do With This Knowledge
Evil is not structured as a triumphant force. It is structured as a trap in which its very author sits. This does not negate responsibility—on the contrary, it makes it absolute: a person chose, chose at every step, and the choice led them to where they are now.
For those who are not inside this trap, this is a call for vigilance. To not allow ourselves the small betrayals of conscience that build large prisons. To remember—because memory protects not only the dead, but also the living. It protects us from gradually, imperceptibly turning into those who smash mirrors.
And to pray—if we know how—for those who were killed. And even for those who did the killing. Not because they deserve it. But because only then does the darkness not become our darkness too.
The apple trees were blooming. The bees were buzzing. Sunlight pierced the clouds of incense smoke mingled with the scent of flowering orchards. And one young man ran away, because the earth was telling him a truth he did not want to hear.
"Give rest with the Saints..." the deacon sang over the field where thousands lie.
The earth continues to speak. We only need not stop our ears.
