Course: Fantasy & Religion
Lecture #1: Introduction
MYTHOLOGY
At the beginning of this century the specialist mythologists were fond of assuring us that myth was related to a specific state of primitive human thought. They said that every human society in the course of its evolution goes thru a pre-logical period in which myth was a normal mode of thought. After that, we leave myth behind in favor of " rational and objective truths".
To study myths was to review the errors and follies of humankind. In the past few years, myth is no longer considered a mode of thought reserved for primitive societies. it is far from opposed to scientific thought.
Just like science, the object of myth is to explain the world, to make it intelligible. its purpose also is to supply humans with a means of influencing the universe, given a universe full of uncertainties and mysteries.
Myth and the provisional truths of science are only different approximations to Truth, which even with so many discoveries, still remains closed to us.
The myth really answers a fundamental need of the human mind. just think of your own childhood impressions. Scientific truths play only a small part in our most intimate daily life and what we KNOW completely rationally is little compared with what we believe or suppose. myth on the whole, is essentially a working hypothesis an attempt to escape from the powerless ness that is our fate.
A myth starts to take shape at the very moment when someone supposes that a "god" (such a Jupiter) is there to comply with the demands made in a ritual. Then details accumulate, based on the first hypothesis. If a ritual fails, then a reason is given (some rules weren’t followed). This frees the mind and soul of anxiety by guaranteeing it the aid of truth.
Bit by bit the mythical universe comes to rule all aspects of life. We may think that a society that regards myth as reality itself is pathological. However, with the help of myth many people resolve a thousand and one everyday problems and attain moral equilibrium and even wisdom
The question is not whether the supernatural universe exists or not: this the problem doesn't arise, for it is as meaningless as the material representation of the atom or the molecule for the rationalist scientist, who must accept their existance because he adheres to a certain system of laws and hypothesis.
Another of myths fundamental characteristics is an established link between the past and the present. Bronislaw Malinowski described it as follows: "Myth as it exists in a savage community, that is, in its living primitive form, is not merely a story told but a reality lived. It is not of the nature of fiction such as we read today in a novel, but is a living reality, believed to have once happened in primeval times, and continuing ever since to influence the world and human destinies.
The myth most often relates an ancient memorable act attributed to a god, hero or even ordinary mortal, but always destined to have never ending consequences. For example, Adam and Eve eating the fig brought about "original sin". Jesus born in a stable led to the Christians view of redemption.
Myth is both an inspiration and protection for anyone who believes it. It is a model for present action and a justification of it.
The Place of myth explains why all races w/o exception have possessed a mythology--because w/o myth, action becomes impossible. It also explains why even the most enlightened people are not without myth. Political, religious, social.
Like everything human, language, laws, etc. myths become spent and lose their effect. There comes a time when myths play a lesser part in the lives of individuals but myths do not die. THEY ARE TRANSFORMED.
This happened in all those countries where poets shaped mythology into sagas or epics, and where priests incorporated its substance in holy books to nourish religion. When mythology ceases to be a living thing, it becomes enveloped in mystery and its inner truth and efficacy are no longer apparent, then its meaning is questioned.
The object of a myth, whatever its place and time, is rarely to formulate a physical or astronomical theory, and myth is never--and never has been--a gratuitous physical theory. Its domain is spiritual and moral reality, the inward world.
It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those other constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back. In fact, it may well be that the very high incidenace of neuroticism among us moderns follows from the decline among us of such effective spiritual aid.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL, in his "Hero with a thousand faces" discusses the hero or heroine as a person who has self-achieved submission, who had been able to battle past their own personal and local historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms.
These ideas come in pristine form from the primary springs of human life and thought. Hence a source thru which society can be reborn.
The hero/ine has died as a modern man but has been reborn as an eternal--perfected, unspecific, universal person: The task then is for that person to return to us transfigured, and teach the lesson s/he has learned of life renewed.
Thus the heros and heroines of all time have gone the labyrinth and the idea is that we, if adventurous enough, have only to follow. Where one thought to travel outward, one travels inward to the center of ones own existence.
As a result, we are not disposed to assign to comedy the high rank of tragedy. Comedy as satire is acceptable but the fairy tale of happiness ever after cannot be taken seriously. It belongs to the realm of Childhood which is protected from the realities that will become terribly known soon enough.
The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiciton, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of being human.
The objective world remains what it was, but, because of the hero/heroines shift.in. emphasis it is beheld as the transformed. Where before life and death contended, now endurance is made plain, indifferent to the accidents of time.
TRAGEDY is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to forms. COMEDY is the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.
Thus, the two are the parts of a single mythological theme and experience which includes them both and which they bound. The down going and the upcoming, which together constitute the totality of the revelation that is life, and which the individual must know and love if one is to be purged of the sin (disobedience to some divine will) and death (Identification with ones mortal form).
Thus, it is the business of mythology proper, and of fairy tales, to reveal the specific dangers and techniques of the dark interior way from tragedy to comedy. Thus the incidents are FANTASTIC and UNREAL: They represent psychological, not physical, triumphs.
Even when the myths or legends are about an actual historical person the deeds of victory are rendered, not in lifelike, but in dreamlike figures. For the point is not that something was done on earth; the point is that, before something could be done on earth, this other, more important, primary thing had to be brought to pass within the labyrinth that we all know and visit in our dreams.
The passage of the mythological hero or heroine may be in the world but fundamentally it is inward, into the depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world.
DIVINITY AND THE HERO/HEROINE
The standard path of the mythological adventure of the hero/ine is a magnification of the formula represented in the rites of passage: Separation-initiation-return. This could be called the nuclear unit of the myth.
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: Fabulous forces are there encountered, and a decisive victory is won: The hero/ine comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his/her fellow humans.
PROMETHEUS, for example, ascended to heaven and stole fire from the gods.
Jason sailed thru the Clashing Rocks into a sea of marvels, among other adventures, and obtained the Golden Fleece. There are many others..
In the East, the story of the BUDDHA and his enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, is the single most important moment in oriental mythology. It is a counterpart of the
Crucifixion in the west. The Buddha beneath the Tree of enlightenment and Christ on the tree of redemption are analogous figures, incorporating an archetypal World Savior, World Tree motif, which is of immemorial antiquity. There are many variations on this theme in all mythology.
The Hebrew scriptures record comparable deeds in the legend of MOSES, who took the people to Mt. Sinai: Moses "Went up to God" where he was given the tables of the Law. Jewish folk legend records that during the day of revelation, diverse rumblings sounded from Mt. Sinai "flashes of lightening," with God's splendor passed thru the four portals of Fire, earthquake, storm and hail. The Earth was not calmed till she heard the first words of the Decalogue.
Whether presented in the vast oceanic images of the orient, in the vigorous narratives of the Greeks, the majestic legends of the Bible, or the great fantasy of Tolkien, Williams, C.S. Lewis or J.K. Rowling, the adventure of the hero normally follows the pattern of the nuclear unit above described: a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life enhancing return.
Everywhere, no matter what the sphere of interest (whether religious, political, or personal) the really creative acts are represented as those deriving from some sort of dying to the world, and what happens in the interval of the hero's nonentity so that he/she comes back as one reborn, made great and filled with creative power.
The composite hero of the mythical prototypes is a personage of exceptional gifts. Frequently s/he is honored by society, frequently unrecognized or disdained. S/he and/or the world suffer from a symbolic deficiency. In Fairy tales this may be as slight as the lack of a certain object, whereas in apocalyptic vision the physical and spiritual life of the whole earth can be represented as fallen, or on the point of falling, into ruin.
Typically, the hero of the fairy tale achieves a domestic MICROCOSMIC triumph, and the hero of the myth a world-historical, MACROCOSMIC triumph. The HERO brings back from his/her adventure the means for the regeneration of his society as a whole. Tribal or local heroes commit their deeds to a single folk; Universal heroes bring a message for the entire world.
Whether the hero be ridiculous or sublime, Greek or barbarian, gentile or Jew, man or hobbit, his journey varies little in essential plan. Popular tales represent the heroic action as physical; the higher religions show the deeds to be moral; nevertheless, there will be astonishingly little variation in the make-up of the adventure, the character roles involved, the victories gained.
If one or another of the basic elements of the archetypal pattern is omitted from a given fairy tale, legend, ritual, or myth, it is bound to be somehow or other implied--and the omission itself can speak volumes for the history and pathology of the example.
The cosmogonic cycle: unrolls the great vision of the creation and destruction of the world which is vouchsafed as revelation to the successful hero/ine.
This cosmogonic cycle is presented with astonishing consistancy in the sacred writings of all the continents and it gives to the adventure of the hero a new and interesting turn; for now it appears that the perilous journey was a labor not of attainment but of re-attainment, not discovery but rediscovery.
The godly powers sought and dangerously won are revealed to have been within the heart of the hero all the time. Thus, from this point of view the hero is symbolical of that divine creative and redemptive image which is hidden within all of us only waiting to be known and rendered into life.
The two--The hero and his ultimate god--are thus understood as the outside and the inside of a single, self-mirrored mystery, which is identical with the mystery of the manifest world. The great deed of the supreme hero is to come to the knowledge of this unity in multiplicity and then to make it known.
THE WORLD NAVEL:
The effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world. Grace, food substance, energy: these pour into the living world, and wherever they fail, life decomposes into death.
The torrent pours from an invisible source, the point of entry being the center of the symbolic circle of the universe, the "immovable spot" the "navel of the world" around which the world may be said to revolve.
Beneath this spot is the divine, life-creative energy and world generative aspect of immortal being. The tree of life, the universe itself, grows from this point. It is rooted in supporting darkness. The figure of inexhaustibility such as a spring or a cosmic mountain, with the city of the gods. Or a figure of a cosmic man or woman seated or standing on this spot or even fixed to a tree like Odin, Jesus or Attis.
For the hero as the incarnation of God is him/herself the navel of the world, the umbilical point thru which the energies of eternity break into time. Thus the world navel is the symbol of the continuous creation: the mystery of the maintenance of the world thru that continuous miracle of life which wells within all things.
THE WORLD NAVEL is everywhere and since it is the source of all existence, it yields the world's plentitude of both good and evil, ugliness and beauty, sin and virtue, pleasure and pain, equally are its production.
Thus the figures worshipped in the temples of the world are by no means always beautiful, kind or even virtuous. Likewise, mythology does not hold as its greatest hero the merely virtuous person.
Virtue is but a prelude to the culminating insight which goes beyond all pairs of opposites. Virtue quells the self-centered ego and makes the transpersonal centeredness possible.
Mythology breaks the whole of life into a vast, horrendous Divine Comedy. Its Olympian. laugh is not escapist in the least, but hard, with the hardness of life itself. Mythology makes the tragic attitude seem somewhat hysterical, and the merely moral judgement shortsighted.
Show Youtube video on Hero’s Journey 3 min version / 11min version
THE CALL TO ADVENTURE:
The call usually comes to someone via a herald of some sort. It can be anything: a blunder, an apparent chance happening which reveals an unsuspected world, a relationship into which someone is drawn. Whatever it is, the "harald" brings a crisis and a "call to adventure.
The herald's summons may sound the call to some high historical undertaking or the dawn of religious illumination (Buddha). Whatever it is, great or small, or what stage of life the call rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration--a rite of spiritual passage, which, when completed, amounts to a dying and a rebirth. The familiar life horizon has been outgrown, the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of the threshold is at hand.
Typical of the circumstances of the call are the dark forest, the great tree, the babbling spring, and the loathly, underestimated appearance of the carrier of the power of destiny. The symbols of the world navel are present here. The herald can often be something scary, or even evil.
Whether dream or myth, in these adventures thre is an atmosphere of irresistible fascination about the figure that appears suddenly as guide., marking a new period, a new stage.
This first stage of the mythological journey--which we call the "call to adventure" --signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his/her spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of society to a zone unknown. This can be represented as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves or above the sky, etc. But it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds and impossible delights.
The hero can go forth on his/her own volition to accomplish the adventure, as Theseus did when he heard of the Minotaur; or may be carried or sent abroad by some benign or malignant agent, as was Odysseus, driven by Poseidon's anger.
REFUSING THE CALL
Often in actual life, and not infrequently in myths and popular tales, the call goes unanswered, for it is always possible to go to other interests. Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Boredom. the flowering world becomes a wasteland and life feels meaningless.
King Minos, thru titanic effort, built an empire of renown but whatever he built became a hose of death: a labyrinth of walls to hide from him the Minotaur. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration.
This refusal is essentially one which takes one's own interests as the only criteria. Ones present system of ideals, virtues goals, and advantages were to be fixed and made secure.
AID FOR THE JOURNEY
For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the journey is with a protective figure(often a little old man or a crone). who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he/she is about to pass.
The helpful crone, or fairy god mother, is a familiar feature in European lore. Spider woman with her web can control the movements of the sun. What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny. The fantasy is a reassurance--a promise that the peace of Paradise, was known first within the mother's womb, is not to be lost.
Protective power is always and ever present within the sanctuary of the heart and even immanent within or just behind, the unfamiliar features of the world. One has only to know and trust, and the ageless guardians will appear.
Not infrequently, the supernatural helper is masculine. In fairy lore it may be a little fellow of the wood, some wizard, hermit, shepherd or smith, who appears to supply the amulets and advice that the hero will require.
The higher mythologies develop the role in the great figure of the guide, the teacher, the ferryman, the conductor of souls to the afterworld.
The hero/ine to whom such appears is typically one who has responded to the call. The call, in fact, was the first announcement of the approach of this initiatory person.
When the guide appears to aid the hero/ine he/she goes forth on the adventure until coming to the "THRESHOLD GUARDIAN" at the entrance to the zone of magnified power. These custodians bound the world in the 6 directions, standing for the limits of the hero's present sphere, or life horizon. Beyond them is darkness, the unknown, danger.
The usual person is more than content, even proud, to remain within the indicated bounds, and popular belief gives one every reason to fear so much as the first step into the unexplored. The folk mythologies populate with deceitful and dangerous presences every desert place outside the normal traffic of the village.
The regions of the unknown (desert, jungle, deeps sea, alien land, other planets) are free fields for the projection of unconscious content and fear. Such demons and dangers are encountered by every hero who steps an inch outside the walls of his/her tradition.
The word PARADISE actually refers to a walled garden. The "Wall of Paradise" which conceals God from human sight has a gate being guarded by the "highest spirit of reason" who bars the way until he has been overcome. The pairs of opposites (being/non-being, life and death, beauty and ugliness, good and evil, and all other polarities that bind the faculties to hope and fear, and link the organs of action to deeds of defense and acquisition) are the clashing rocks that crush the traveler, but between which the heros/heroines always pass.
This motif is known throughout the world. Jason sailed between them, The twin heroes of the Navajo legend were warned of the same obstacle by Spider woman.
The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale. The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died.
This popular motif gives emphasis to the lesson that the passage of the threshold is a form of self-annihilation. However, the hero goes inward to be born again. Allegorically then, a worshipper going into a temple is the same as going into the belly of the whale, where he/she will be reminded of who they are, while the temple represents the heavenly land beyond, above and below the confines of the world. The belly of the whale and the temple are one and the same.
INITIATION:
Once having traversed the threshold, the hero/ine moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where s/he must survive a succession of trials. This is the favorite place of the myth-adventure, the place of miraculous tests and ordeals.
The hero/ine is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom s/he met before entrance into this region. Or it may happen that our hero/ine discovers for the first time a benign power everywhere supporting the passage.
The hero/ines journey and the journey of the shaman are very similar. The shaman has to encounter and master a number of differing obstacles which are not always easily overcome. After wandering thru dark forests and over massive mountains s/he reaches an opening in the ground. The most difficult stages of the adventure now begin, when the depths of the underworld with their remarkable manifestations open before him/her.
Like mythology, the shaman makes both visible and public the systems of symbolic fantasy that are present in the psyche of every adult member of their society. The hero’s or shaman’s fight the demons so that others can hunt the prey and in general fight reality.
Thus if anyone, in whatever society, undertakes for him/herself the perilous journey into the darkness by descending, either intentionally or unintentionally, into their own spiritual labyrinth, one soon finds themselves in a landscape of symbolical figures.
In the vocabulary of the mystics, this is the First stage of the journey, the purification of the self, or purgation, when the senses are cleansed and humbled, and the energies and interests are concentrated upon transcendental things.
There are always psychological dangers in this passage and in the past people were guided by the symbols and spiritual exercises of their mythological inheritance. However, today, in so far as we are unbelievers, or, if believers, in so far as our inherited beliefs fail to represent the real problems of contemporary life, must face alone, or at best, with only tentative, impromptu and not often effective guidance. This is the problem of "enlightened" individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence.
Nevertheless, in the multitude of myths and legends that have been preserved one may yet see delineated something of our still human course. To hear and profit, however, one still has to submit or surrender to the process. That is the problem. How to do that. However, modern fantasy fills in where the older myths and legends fail. This is a large part of the popularity of everything from the Lord of the Rings to Star Trek, to Harry Potter
Can quit here if not time
What then is the result of the hero/ine's initiation. It is the motif of the inexhaustible dish, the cornucopia, derived from an infantile fantasy, symbolizing the perpetual life giving, form building powers of the universal source. It is a banquet of the gods that is perpetual and eternal. Basically, it is an indestructible body.
What is desired, of course for the indestructible body is a Paradise in which to dwell with milk and food that never fails. Mt. Olympus rises to the heavens, gods and heros banquet there on ambrosia (a= not, brosia =mortal)
Within the fairy hills of Erin the deathless Tuatha De Danaan consume the self renewing pigs of Manannan, drinking a special ale. And the redeemed of YHWH in their roof garden, are served the inexhaustible, delicious flesh of the monsters Behemoth and Leviathan while drinking the liquors of the four sweet rivers of paradise. In the book of Revelation, the church meets for a banquet with Christ the Lamb.
It is obvious that the infantile fantasies which we all cherish still in the unconscious play continually into myth, fairy tale and the teachings of the Church, as symbols of indestructible being.
The ineffable teaching of the beatitude beyond imagination comes to us clothed, necessarily, in figures reminiscent of the imageined beatitude of infancy; hence the deceptive childishness of the tales. Hence, too, the inadequacy of any merely psychological reading.
Humer is the touchstone of the truly mythological as distinct from the more literal-minded and sentimental theological mood. The gods as icons are not ends in themselves. Myths transport the mind and spirit not up to them, but past them into that unknown beyond. "There goes neither the eye, nor speech, nor the mind: we know IT not; nor do we see how to teach one about IT. Different IT is from all that are known, and IT is beyond the unknown as well." (kena Upanishad, 1:3)
Dante's final verses, where the illuminated voyager at last is able to lift his courageous eyes beyond the beatific vision of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to the one Eternal Light (Ayn Sof in Jewish Kabbalah).
The gods and goddesses are to be understood as embodiments and custodians of the elixir of Imperishable Being but not themselves the ultimate in its primary state. What the hero/ine seeks thru intercourse with them is therefore not finally themselves, but their grace, i.e., the power of their sustaining substance. It is this miraculous energy substance and this alone that is the imperishable.
The names and forms of the deities which embody, dispense and represent it come and go. This is the miraculous energy of the thunderbolts of Zeus, YHWH, and the Supreme Buddha, the virtue announced by the bell rung in the Mass at the consecration, and the light of the saint or sage. Its guardians dare release it only to the duly initiated or proven.
RETURN: When the hero/ine quest has been accomplished, thru penetrating to the source, or thru the grace of some male or female, human or animal, personification, the adventurer still must return with his life -transmuting trophy.
The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the "runes of wisdom", the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation the planet or the ten thousand worlds.
However, the responsibility has frequently been refused. Many have simply taken up residence forever in the blessed isle of the unageing gods or goddesses rather than take the responsibility of returning.
FLIGHT: If the hero in triumph wins the blessing of the goddess or god and is commissioned to return to the world with some elixir for the restoration of society, the final staage of the adventure is supported by all the powers of his supernatural patron.
On the other hand, if the trophy has been attained against the opposition of its guardian, or if the hero/ine's wish to return to the world has been resented by the gods or demons, then the last stage of the mythological round becomes a lively, often comical, pursuit.
A popular variety of the magic flight is that in which objects are left behind to speak for the fugitive and thus delay pursuit. Yet another well-known variety of the magic flight is one in which a number of delaying obstacles are tossed behind by the wildly fleeing hero.
If the monomyth is to succeed and fulfill its promise, not human failure or superhuman success but human success is what we shall have to be shown. That is the problem of the crisis of the threshold of the return.
RESCUE FROM WITHOUT:
The hero may be brought back from his/her supernatural adventure by assistance, i.e. the world may have to come and get him/her. Why? because the bliss of the gods is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state. Society is jealous of those who remain away from it and will come knocking at the door.
This brings us to the final crisis of the journey to which the whole miraculous excursion has been a prelude: namely the paradoxical, supremely difficult threshold crossing of the hero's return from the mystic realm into the land of common day.
Whether rescued from without, driven from within or gently carried along by the guiding divinities, the adventurer has yet to re-enter with his boon the long forgotten atmosphere where humans who are fractions imagine themselves to be complete.
CROSSING THE RETURN THRESHOLD:
The two worlds, divine and human can be pictured only as distinct from each other, like life and death, day and night. The hero/ine ventures out of the land we know into darkness, accomplishes the quest, and returns.
Nevertheless, and here is the key to understanding the myth and symbol--the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. and the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero.
How does one teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand times throughout the millenniums of humankind’s prudent folly? This is the hero/ine's ultimate difficult task. How to represent a three or multi-dimensional form on a two-dimensional surface. How to communicate to people who insist on the exclusive evidence of their senses or to Yes/No revelations the message of the all-generating void? The returning hero, to complete his adventure, must survive the impact of the world.