The Narcissist’s Secret Pact With Death
Ring Around the Rosie, We All Fall Down
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.
Through celebrating anniversaries or repeating specific rituals which mimic an event, humans aim to access the spiritual value of the occurrence in question. Perhaps all life comes into being as a ‘ritual repeating’ of the Big Bang?
The death and resurrection of Christ symbolises the universal experience of human suffering and its capacity to bring about ego death. With that comes a spiritual rebirth, heralding in our psychological ‘resurrection’. The symbol of Christ on the cross empowers us to ‘choose our cross’ by stoically accepting inevitable suffering — whichever form it may take.
Marking the end of World War II can help us remain rooted in the beauty of living in a new world built on the ashes of the old. It can also remind us of the value in sacrificing ourselves for a cause greater than ourselves.
So what does all of this mean when looking at the narcissist’s idealise-devalue-discard ritual? What do they derive from repeating it? And most importantly, what event are they repeating?
Let Me Show You My World
The narcissist’s game of ‘ring around the rosie’ centres not around a rose tree, but a relationship. In this game, the target plays a dual role, representing both the rose tree and the other ‘child’ circling the rose tree with the narcissist.
A relationship is made alive only through the emotional investment of both parties. Yet the narcissist is not emotionally invested in the relationship, they are invested only in the game itself. Therefore, the target is alone in the relationship. That is why they are the rose tree — they are the only one who is ‘alive’. Meanwhile, the target is also being forced to partake in the narcissist’s fantasy world — lured in by the sweet scent of the narcissist’s posies. What the target does not know, is that they are being led by the hand into a ritual recreation of the narcissist’s origin — to the narcissist’s foundational relationship, which made them who they are.
Going back to childhood, the narcissist’s parent was the rose tree. This is usually the mother, but can also be the father. Or both. The narcissist, full of life, orbited their parent with a pocket full of posies to please them. This is the archetypal child-parent relationship. The child being born transforms them into a separate human; a bunch of posies detached from the rose tree. This bunch of flowers then continues to circle the ‘rose tree’ in childhood, until the inevitable separation and individuation comes, where the child becomes a rose tree of their own — a process which the narcissist never completed.
Instead, something tragic happened. The narcissist turned to ‘ashes’, and ‘fell down’, sinking deeper and deeper into death. The rose tree they believed to be the source of life was not what it first seemed.
It takes time for reality to register in a child’s emerging, fantastical mind. They orbit the parent, spinning in circles around them, looking for love, attention and nurture. In the case of the narcissist, they received little warmth or even recognition from their parent. The parent looked like a rose tree, yet there was no life in them. Their face never lit up when the narcissist stumbled into the room; it remained anxious or unimpressed. Rather than gush with delight from their child, the parent remained depressed, angry or critical.
Months and years passed by for the narcissist, as they grew gradually more frustrated and shame-filled by their parent’s constant rejection of them. And on they continued to circle the parent, growing more and more desperate, clinging tighter to the rose bush, before slamming suddenly into the harsh concrete of reality: The rose tree was withered. It was never fully alive.
Death seeped into the narcissist’s veins, and they felt themselves turning to ashes. They lost their psychological footing, and panicked as they began falling down into the abyss.
“Hey you,” came the voice of Death. “Look over there.”
The narcissist temporarily ceased their downward spiral and peered across, spotting the abundant world of their imagination. Suddenly, they felt the life returning to them.
“I’ll make you a deal,” said Death, pushing the false self forward. “Hold hands with this guy, go into the fantasy world together, and you can live.”
Stunned, yet knowing that they had no choice, the child agreed, and together with their false self, took the road of narcissism, walking towards the fantasy world without looking back. Their parent may have physically remained in their life, but the narcissist’s psychological connection to them was severed forever.
The Pact
The narcissist lives a ‘profane’ life of constant desperation. Rather than separate from the rose tree which birthed them and become a tree of their own, they turned to ashes instead. To survive, they made a pact with Death, opting to live through fantasy.
This is the narcissist’s origin story, the primordial event which brought them into being. At this moment in time, the narcissist ‘died’ and was reborn as a false self.
Behind their grandiosity, the narcissist is a void. Nothing in their life holds meaning — except for the time before they discovered their ‘dead’ parent. From birth until the moment the narcissistic child ‘discarded’ their parent, they idealised them. During this time, the child was gushing with life and hope. Their life held meaning.
By repeating the idealisation phase of the ritual with a new lover, the narcissist is ‘alive again’. Yet the ritual must come to a close in a state of death, just as the original event did. This horrific reality replays over and over, fuelled by the narcissist’s pact with Death. A meaningful future filled with hope gradually decays, revealing the harsh reality behind the fantasy. All of the narcissist’s budding relationships are fantasy projections, which gradually decompose into death, just like the original relationship.
Behind this repeating ritual, the narcissist is clinging to the only sense of meaning they ever felt. They are desperately seeking a time when they felt alive, and through that, are able to remain alive in the moment. This is the pact they made, to which they bound themselves for eternity.
This is the reason everything a narcissist touches turns to ashes. Every relationship. Every investment. Every home. Every business. Every success. Even when something is working out, and is objectively alive, the narcissist will sabotage and kill it through their recklessness. Fuelling this recklessness is Death itself.
Behind every glimmering fantasy in the narcissist’s imagination, Death is a permanent presence, filling the narcissist’s heart with heaviness and apathy. Within this emptiness also lies burning rage, seeking to turn all life into ashes. The narcissist’s linear timeline began with their conception and birth, and ended at the point they realised their parent was never truly ‘alive’, i.e. the discard. Everything after that point became profane — void of any meaning.
And so, the narcissist formed a new religion with its own ritual, with the narcissist at the centre. The narcissist became a deity; Death disguised as a bunch of posies. By inviting outsiders into their ‘church’, and allowing them to take their place on the rose tree altar, the narcissist recreated their sacred origin, demonstrating to their target their foundational myth. Hand in hand, the narcissist and target circle around the rose tree, before the inevitable realisation: Just like the narcissist’s original parent, the narcissist too is dead in their core.
And down fall both narcissist and target, the relationship ending in either a discard or a perpetual state of decay.
A Mythology Of Hope
A narcissist’s ‘foundational myth’, in my opinion, need not remain as an infinite death spiral. Awareness is a crucial first step. Once the reality has sunk in, the narcissist might explore this pact they have made with Death. From this, their spiritual journey begins.
While there are no easy answers, I find myself wondering if within this space, new myths can be formed. Buddhists believe that cyclical, ‘sacred’ time is also profane. Many rituals aim to replay a creation myth where life flourished as a result. In the case of a narcissist, the result is always death. Buddhists believe the sacred’s place is not just in the ‘mythical age’; it exists outside all ages. It emerges when we transcend time altogether.
Whether target or narcissist, the least we can do is seek out new, formative experiences in the present moment, while being mindful of falling back into the death spiral of the narcissistic relationship ritual. And during our healing journey, we might also seek to imitate the children on the playground, seeing death as not the end, but as an opportunity to launch into new life.
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