The Imaginal Institute

* The word "archetypal" refers to the deep self, to complexity and fundamental ambiguity, to plurality and polymorphous structures, to depth, to the fact that things have more than one side, many sides, like the many gods of mythology. The logic of the term is that of metaphor.

 

* The word "activism" refers to some ego or egos taking a stand, a singular stand, at least for the moment, acting in the everyday surfaces, one-sidedly, like the monotheism of the religions noted for law, for morality and for ethics. The logic of this term is literal.

  * If an activism attempted to be authentically archetypal, it could not and would not act.

  * If an archtypalism took a stand and acted, it would no longer be archetypal.

  Archetypal activism is an oxymoron. It doesn't refer to any physical behavior in the real world. The phrase makes no sense. It is non-sense. There is no such thing as "archetypal activism." Putting the words "archetypal" and "activism" together in the same phrase is like comparing apples and Thursdays, or peanut butter and chess.

James Hillman has said that the archetypal idea of anima mundi compels activism. He has also written that we always behave a fantasy. It would be hard to quarrel with these points. But when we behave, what we behave, for the moment, is one of the many fantasies or archetypes of a complex life and world. When reflection on the soul of the world turns into a particular activism, it is no longer, for the moment, archetypal. It is egoic, not deep. It is not plural. It is some monolithic singularity. It is not aesthetic. It is willful. If it is called "archetypal." it only means that archetypalism has in this moment become a monolithic perspective and point of view. It then is one more dogmatism and ideology along side all the other fundamentalisms: archetypal fundamentalism. We laugh when Yogi Berra says, "If you come to a fork in the road, take it," because we know that no one can do that. One cannot simultaneously enact singularly a multiplicity. "Archetypal activism" is a laugh!

When "archetypal activism" is claimed for some behavior, it is often a rationalization, an attempt to sanctify, a defense of, one's own acting out of a particular singular ideology. It is my so-called soulfulness over against your so-callled lack of soulfulness. The phrase "archetypal activism" has the same problem as the phrase "religious ethics."

To use words this way and to claim that they mean something is to act like Humpty Dumpty, who, in Alice in Wonderland, said that words mean "whatever I want them to, neither more nor less." But Alice knows better. She knows that language has its own force and meaning, that it plays with us, not we with it. It is well to be as sensitive to language as one is to people, because language is where people's meaning resides. Violence to and violation of language is ugly and it makes for dysfunction. It was not for nothing that Confucius called for a rectification of names in China when violence and war and immorality had erupted everywhere.

The title of this conference was chosen after I agreed to be a part of it. So now I am in the awkward position of speaking on behalf of something that I do not understand, something that I do not believe in, and something that, by my lights, in principle cannot be made understandable. Nevertheless, a promise is a promise. I agreed to speak and so I will. But what am I to do? And how am I to do it? I am committed to speak and I have nothing to say.

The situation is neither unique nor unusual. And there is an "on the other hand" to what I have so far said. One is often caught between a rock and a hard place, as between activism and archetypalism, between ego's perspective and the perspective of a deeper self. It is not for nothing that poets intentionally construct oxymorons in order to awaken sensibilities to paradoxical truths of everyday existence. Perhaps poets did not write about apples and Thursdays or peanut butter and chess, but surely they did write phrases like ...

• Loving strife
• Joyously shuddering emotions
• Thunderous silence
• Deafening silence
• Sweet sorrow
• Cruel kindness
• Laborious idleness
• Frozen flame
• Pointedly foolish (i.e., "oxy" = shape + "moron" = dull)

In Midsummer Night's Dream, just befor the performance of the play within the play, Thesueus uses several oxymorons in a row: hot ice, tragical mirth, brief and tedious, wondrous strange snow, etc.

Voltaire called oxymoron a figure of speech with a lot of truth in it. So it may be that there is truth in the phrase "archetypal activism" precisely because of its impossible nonsense, because of its oppositionalism.

So, the question becomes: How does one respond appropriately to an oxymoron, to the juxtaposition of two oppositional truths, each of which needs to be honored, and for which there is no third position? i.e., two truths like archetypal and activism, each of which in itself is very important. How does one speak to the poetry of the idea of "archetypal activism."

In the Jewish tradition there is a way prescribed. When a rabbi, a teacher, is confronted with a question about an ultimate matter, about something that is a mystery, about a point of the Law that is puzzling, a question about the coming Messiah, the rabbi is supposed to respond according to the formulaic structure which says, "On the one hand .... On the other hand." (2) So, I will follow this old spiritual advice in these remarks.

I. On the One Hand ... The World is Godless and Mythless ... perhaps too much so!

I begin with a picture ... two pictures, actually. Picture this:

    * The location is at Bayreuth in Germany. The years were 1976 to1980. It was the Wagner festival's performance of The Ring Cycle. Wolfgang Wagner, grandson of the composer, appointed Pierre Boulez as conductor and Patrice Chéreau, aged 30, as director. Here's the picture. In the opening scene, the Rhine daughters were represented as three prostitutes cavorting around a hydro-electric power dam on the Rhine. Industry is the modern myth. Capitalism is the mythology. It is not a German romantic, story-book, mythic world. According to Linda Hutcheon's report on this remarkable postmodern production of the Ring, the audience booed. They didn't like it that people might go to the theatre and not escape reality, but escape illusion, the illusion that the myths are still alive. It gets worse in the second picture. (3)

    * The place is still Bayreuth, but now from 1988 to1992. Daniel Barenboim was conductor and Harry Kupfer, then an East German, was director. The conceit was that Götterdämmerung, the twilight of the gods, refers to the ruin of the world ecologically and nuclearly. Environmental disaster reigns. An utterly bare, empty stage is lit up every ten feet or so by side lights. The sets show modern ruins, twisted girders and the torn-up concrete, that is, a landscape after a nuclear bomb or meltdown or some chemical disaster. Brünnhilde's cave becomes a mine shaft. Everyone wears plastic. Wotan's eyepatch is sunglasses. The gods carry lucite suitcases and spears, and they are capitalist consumers of the first order, as are those who believe in them. This is a world without redemption, especially without redemption through the aestheticization and mythologization of Wagner's music. (4)

The artists who invented these two stage productions of Wagner's Ring had intuitive sensibility. There is something right about their portrayal of the twilight of the gods and the idols. Mythic productions are irrelevant, on this view. The poets for a century have been in agreement about this. Remember Eliot's Wasteland. Five additional examples will make the point that Eliot's hollow men and the dive bombers in place of angels of Four Quartets are not isolated or idiosyncratic images:

* Yeats' Second Coming:

     Turning and turning in the widening gyre,
     The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
     Things fall apart, the center cannot hold;
     Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. (5)

* Aiken's Time in the Rock:

     We need a theme? Then let that be our theme:
     That we, poor grovellers between faith and doubt,
     The sun and north star lost, and compass out,
     The heart's weak engine all but stopped, the time
     Timeless in this chaos of our wills--
     That we must ask a theme, something to think,
     Something to say, between dawn and dark,
     Something to hold to, something to love. (6)

* Arnold's Dover Beach:

     Listen! You hear the grating roar
     Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
     At their return, up the high strand,
     Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
     With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
     The eternal note of sadness in

            .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

     The Sea of Faith

     Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
     Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
     But now I only hear
     Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
     Retreating, to the breath
     Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
     And naked shingles of the world.

            .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

     ... we are here as on a darkening plain
     Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
     Where ignorant armies clash by night. (7)

 

  * Steven's Loneliness in Jersey City:

     The steeples are empty and so are the people. (8)

      

  * Steven's A Mythology Reflects its Region:

     A mythology reflects its region. Here
     In Connecticut, we never lived in a time
     When mythology was possible .... (9)

The mythlessness and godlessness of the world is observed also by the artists of image as well as by the artists of the word. Giorgio de Chirico, the Italian painter, wrote: "Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were the first to teach the deep significance of the senselessness of life, and to show how this senselessness could be transformed into art.... The dreadful void they discovered is the very soulless and untroubled beauty of matter." (10) Similarly, in On the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky wrote: "Heaven is empty. God is dead." (11) These artists find their work now to be "the search for explanation knowing that there is none," as Helen Vendler put it, writing in the New York Review of Books recently about the contemporary Belgrade poet, Charles Simic. Mythological consciousness from traditional times and peoples seems greatly removed from the computer and consumer culture of today.

In the early sixties, Rollo May and Joseph Campbell and I were invited more than once by radio and television in New York City to have public conversations explaining the Time magazine cover: God is Dead (Easter issue, 1963), as for example in a long interview-discussion on WNYC and a Sunday on NBC's "The Open Mind." The topic given us to discuss always was the same: namely, what is the "mythology" of this latter-day world? What are the "myths" of a mythless time?

Here in Santa Barbara, back in early eighties, and on numerous occasions in Dallas, James Hillman said about anima mundi something to the effect that it will do little good to do psychoanalysis with people in the privacy of the analytic hour if they have to return to a world that is lacking in feeling and sense. The point is still the same. It will do little good to educate students in ancient myth, romantic fairy tale, religious narrative and vision, if people have to return from their lessons in the protected groves of academe to a world of mythlessness, soulessness, technicity, violence, money, warring ideology and hate ... which is indeed what is out there.

Let me quickly give four reports of our world, two by culture critics, one by a philosopher, and one by a Jungian

    * Walter Rathenau, who was murdered in 1922, in Germany, had the view that mechanical production has long since overshot the elementary goals of food, clothing, self-preservation, and the protection of life. In continually expanding circles of production and consumption, it creates new desires, a measureless hunger for commodities that is increasingly directed at artificialities. Mechanical production has elevated itself to an aim in itself. Labor is no longer an activity of life, no longer an accommodation of the body and the soul to the forces of nature, but a thoroughly alien activity for the purpose of life, an accommodation of the body and the soul to the mechanism. (12)

    * Hermann Rauschning, writing in Vienna, thirty years later, and still forty years ago observed that advertising, the media, social institutions, the state, and the military are great promisers of meaning, but in fact they are the principle agents who "broadcast unconscious nihilism behind a façade of apparent order and forced discipline." (13) His sentiment was prophetic of our own time.

    * Peter Sloterdijk, in Critique of Cynical Reason, describes compellingly a postmodern disenchantment with Enlightenment optimism about progress. He writes that there are "massive currents of ... antidemocratic and authoritarian ideologies that knew how effectively to organize the public sphere; an aggressive nationalism with a desire for revenge; an unenlightenable confusion of stubborn conservatisms, displaced petty bourgeois, messianic religious sects, apocalyptic political views, and equally realistic and psychopathological rejections of the demands of a disagreeable modernity." (14) This philosopher's description is echoed by a Jungian analyst.

    * Wolfgang Giegerrich, in The Soul's Logical Life, among many other writings, has noted that the present day economy makes the industrial revolution look harmless. We face now a rationalization of industry through continuous downsizing and restructuring wherein workers become transient material, human being becomes superfluous, the pursuit of profit is the highest good, there is not individuation, but globalization, that is, the elimination of personal identity and the subjugation of everything individual under the one great abstract goal of profit maximization. Profit must increase, but I must decrease. The logic of money rules. Electronic and information technology, computer, cyberspace and internet pervaes. It is not that we are at odds with certain myths, but today we have broken with the status of soul that made myths possible in the first place. Now, to talk of gods is a "glamorizing jargon." When we try to live in soul and in myth, "we live in a superterrestrial world of ideas, cocooned in irreality, and psychology does its best to help install and envelop human existence in this bubble." But this bubble bursts easily in the face of Littleton, Colorado, or Kosovo, or when the doctor announces to you that you have terminal cancer, or when your wife or husband takes a lover or is abusive. Working in and with mythology is anachronistic, atavistic, regressive. Gods are lifeless relics. They are the result of learning, not of religious or mythological experience. Giegerich is echoing Jung who saw this godlessness. Religious and mythic symbols have been squandered, he wrote; spiritual dwelling has fallen into disrepair, and we should not go in for mummeries (Collected Works, vol. 9.i. paras.27-31). (15)

Since the wanning of the middle ages, the gods have been in retreat, and so have mythologies. Already in the 14th century Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, made the point (and I am indebted to Wolfgang Giegerich writing for reminding me of this text):

When good King Arthur ruled in ancient days
(A king that every Briton loves to praise)
This was a land brim-full of fairy folk.
The Elf-Queen and her courtiers joined and broke
Their elfin dance on many a green mead,
Or so was the opinion once, I read,
Hundreds of years ago, in days of yore.
But no one now sees fairies any more.
For now the saintly charity and prayer
Of holy friars seem to have purged the air;
They search the countryside through field and stream
As thick as motes that speckle a sun-beam,
Blessing the halls, the chambers, kitchens, bowers,
Cities and boroughs, castles, courts and towers,
Thorpes, barns and stables, outhouses and dairies,
And that's the reason why there are no fairies.

Wherever there was wont to walk an elf
Today there walks the holy friar himself
As evening falls or when the daylight springs,
Saying his mattins and his holy things,
Walking his limit round from town to town.
Women can now go safely up and down
By every bush or under every tree;
Here is no other incubus but he,
So there is really no one else to hurt you
And he will do no more than take your virtue. (16)

The world is not ensouled. It is not animated, spirited. There are no fairies, goblins, little people, angels. And religion is suspect, too, ... if you want to hold onto your virtue!

Giegerich recalls the story of Jung meeting a chief on a visit to East Africa in the twenties. The chief told Jung that after the coming of the white man, no one dreams, and so no one knows from dreams what is going on in war, in the herds, in the weather, etc. Now one doesn't need dreams, because there is the District Commissioner. (17) Now there is globalization whose logic is money. We all live under the District Commissioner.

The World is Godless and Mythless ... perhaps too much so! This is on the one hand.

 

II. On the other hand ... The World is Full of Gods & Myths ... perhaps too much so!

Forty-two years ago this nation responded forthrightly to a wake-up call in education. Sputnik was the alarm. (18) It constituted a clarion call, a mandate for scientific and technological education. In October of 1957, the first of Soviet Russia's spacecraft was launched, not only on the horizon of the planet, but also in the consciousnesses, of Americans everywhere. And America responded. For a third of a century, more than two educational generations, this nation heeded the implicit mandate of Sputnik. The United States achieved superiority and strength in science and technology, able to respond to the needs of the world and to our its needs. But the times have changed.

As Carl Rowan observed not long ago, the Berlin Wall has been smashed into asbestos-bearing souvenirs. The Warsaw Pact nations have packed it up and surrendered in the Cold War. Our once-nightmarish enemy, the Soviet Union, is dismembered and in turmoil. And yet there is still much to be faced that is disturbing.

I already mentioned Kosovo, but this is only one site of ethnic cleansing , and there is not only ethnic cleansing. There is unbounded nationalism in China, and warring religious fundamentalisms in South Asian India, especially in Kashmir and Sri Lanka; Japanese/Korean tension builds in East Asia; nor need I mention South Africa, the Middle East, and Ireland. Even in Europe, there seems to be more divisiveness in the attempt to unite than before when union was unimaginable. Furthermore, there is Neonazism, not only in Germany and France, but in northern Idaho and Washington State. Perhaps even closer to home, the memory of recent right-wing warrings in Georgia (Olympic Park), Florida (Birth Control Clinic), Oklahoma (Federal Building) and continuously on the web continue to scar the imagination. It would seem that there is savage intolerance everywhere. Strange to say, a Peace Institute in Santa Barbara not so very long ago estimated that eighty percent of present ideological conflicts are motivated mythologically and religiously: it is a case of terrorism in the name of my god against your god.

It would seem that the gods are alive and very well, not to mention doing a lot of damage. There are in our world many activisms claiming to be based upon many so-called archetypes, but only one at a time, a singular one which will allow no others.

America is experiencing in these post-modem, postcold-war times a second wake-up call, a clarion call, a mandate that is at least of the magnitude of Sputnik. Nor now are science and technology what is needed, though these too are always important. Now what is crucial, crucial for the survival of our race and planet, has little to do with information and data, with sound bites or megabytes, not even with kilobytes and gigabytes. We now need to know and think through the myths that divide, and understand the mythology that unites. For myth--the stories remembered, beloved, and believed by young and old, male and female, from long ago and from yesterday, north and south, east and west--such stories (however out of date) are vessels which carry the ultimate signification of what is, at its lowest and highest, most human. Myths are not sound bites, not even megabytes of meaning, they are plots emplotting connections. Myths display narrative structure and extension, giving image and character to life, imagining ways to go on; webs of connection spun by mythic tales out of variety and difference, weaving diversity and plurality in multiple modes, a multicultural tapestry, a texture of the thousand faces of one planet, the masks of all the wonderful modulations of divine variety. Mythology gives the understanding we now so desperately need if we are to survive at the end of this millennium in order to experience richly the next one. At least, mythology can give understanding if it can be thought through.

We have no choice, for mythology there will be, with its ideology and theology and philosophy, for which many will kill. Our only choice is whether or not to educate our youth and ourselves in that which divides and separates, so that it can be also the weave whereby we begin to imagine and discover the threads which unite and connect. Mythology can be an antidote for literalism, humorlessness, overseriousness, fundamentalism, doginatism, and hate.

It is this insight that James Hillman has been helping us with since the sixties. Again and again he has told us, not so much to look at myths, as to look mythologically. Psychologizing, or seeing through, he has been arguing, is to see one thing in terms of another. This is not only to see things in terms of myths and mythology, but to move the marbles and to remythologize all life.

Hillman has seen and has shown that mythology now, its serious study, is not an 'elegant ornament,' a luxury, like an earring, as a former vice president once said in Des Moines about humanistic education. It is now an urgent necessity. Like Joseph Campbell, Hillman already knew the importance of the archetypal for an activism from which it so differs. He and Joseph Campbell knew this when Sputnik had our nation's attention.

Campbell was alluding to the holocaust when he wrote in 1959, forty years ago: "Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men [and women] of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations .... The world is now far too small and our stake in sanity too great for any more of those old games ... by which tribesmen were sustained against their enemies in the days when the serpent still could talk." (19)

Campbell and Hillman sensed the need for myth when we were responding to Sputnik with science. Their work turns out to have been that of voices crying in a developing wilderness of mean-spiritedness. Pacifica Graduate Institute is continuing their work of mythological education with felicity and grace. It is in the nick of time. People are hungering and thirsting for an understanding that mythology and its study can make possible, a rich fabric woven out of multicultural diversity, not to mention the humor, imagination, and love myth promotes. We are now called by our postmodern crises to education in mythology just as surely and just as crucially as the Sputnik of a modern time called America to education in science and technology. The world of activisms is giving us an archetypal wake up call.

The American poet, e. e. cummings, once wrote: " ... a myth is as good as a smile ..." (20) Well, perhaps it really is. And if it is, in this day and age especially, we could all of us use a few more smiles. Indeed, we can ill afford less.

The world is full of mythology, People are dying of it. The world is full of gods, perhaps too much so. We had better study this if were are to survive, or smile. This is the "on the other hand."

 

III. Two Mythic Hands and One Real Body

What are we to do with these two hands? ... the right one not knowing what the left one is about, and vice versa. The world is godless and mythless, perhaps too much so; and the world is full of gods and myths, perhaps too much so. How can these be the two hands of one body politic? What we seem to have here is two mutually exclusive and equally valid opposite standpoints.

One person has discovered how the two can be one. Eric Harris got the two hands together in his one body in Littleton, Colorado. His activism hand experienced a world without meaning, without sense, without myth or ritual. It was a world of slick suburban architecture, a slick suburban school, slick jocks and slick cheerleaders being mean to him. But his archetypal hand experienced a world of myth in internet gothic games of doom and apocalypse, and he and his friend created the ritual to go with the virtual reality of cybermyth, a ritual in the face of his world's lack of a ritual of initiation into adulthood, a ritual killing in the face of the lack of the "killing" of the child in traditional cultures' rituals of initiation. In Eric Harris, there was too little myth and too much myth, at the same time. It is no wonder that Jung wrote that the Gods now are sicknesses. Eric Harris was a living oxymoron. He was an archetypal activist. He was attempting archetypal activism, not knowing that it is poetry and not literal behavior. It is a figure of speech to give truth and vision, not a defense of whatever it is that I want to do, that some "I" wants to do.

Harris' archetypal activism was not archetypal activism because it was literal. But poetry and a poetic life is not so simple. The poetic problem with getting the two hands together can be seen in an ambiguity in the Latin motto of Pacifica Graduate Institute.

Pacifica's motto--anima mundi colendae gratia--does not mean what it says it means in the advertising for this conference. It does not mean "for the sake of tending the soul in the world." The word "in" is a mistake. Let me take a moment to explain this, since it is--as we have seen in Colorado--by no means a merely academic matter.

The translation "for the sake of tending," colendae gratia, is fine. But anima mundi cannot mean "soul in the world." The word mundi is genitive and must be translated "of the world," not "in the world." The word "in" would require the dative case, and it would imply that I possess something called soul and that the world does not, and that I am going to put some soul that is in my control into the world that I imagine to be soulless. But mundi is not dative in form. It is genitive.

But this is not quite the end of the matter. There is one more wrinkle in the language that could lead to troubled understanding. The genitive--the case used to explain the relation of one noun to another--is unstable. Usually, the genitive indicates possession, as in libri Ciceronis, "the books of Cicero," Alexandri canis, "the dog of Alexander," potentiaPompei, "the power of Pompey," or perditorum temeritas, "the recklessness of desperate people." These are all possessive genitives, sometimes called subjective. On this model, anima mundi means "soul of the world," and it implies that soul is possessed by the world, its soul.

But all genitives are not so straight-forward. For example, there is ambiguity in the phrase odium Caesaris, which means the "hate of Caesar" and could mean the hate of Caesar by other people or Caesar's own hatred of others. The latter is possessive and subjective, but the former is an objective genitive. It is like the phrase amor patris, "love of a father," which could mean some child's love for her or his father, or it could mean the love the father has for the children.

In spite of the possible ambiguity in the Latin of Pacfica's motto, it is easy to see that the subject matter makes things clear. There is no possibility of a parallel between the objective genitive, the love towards a father, and anima mundi. It is not possible to say and make sense of the phrase the soul towards the world.

This is not a scholarly quibble of grammar. Get this wrong and it changes the way one studies myth, the way one sees and lives in the world, the way that one thinks and senses and feels and intuits. It is the difference between split off or being full participant. Get it wrong and it could lead me to believe that my task is to put soul or meaning into myth and world. This is what Saint Paul called "spiritual pride." It is, in simple terms, human arrogance over against world and gods.

I am sensitive to this, perhaps too much so, since I myself made this mistake publicly in my book The New Polytheism. In the first edition (1974), I seemed to be suggesting that people behave (ethos) the patterns (mythos) of the stories of the gods and goddesses. For example: I had written "Activism is the work of Heracles" and "Urbanization bears the imprint of Athena" and other such things. I was roundly criticized in reviews for these literalist mistakes, and properly so. This is like writing the words "archetypal activism."

So in the "Introduction" to the next edition (1981), I tried to correct my own inconsistency. Here is what I wrote: "Myths do not describe or prescribe actions. They do not symbolize univocal behaviors. Rather, they express articulately in ways that we often are not able, our feelings or thoughts, our consciousness or sense, concerning any behavior. Oedipus, for example, is not some particular moral or ethical activity, say, between the persons of Father, Mother, and Son. Oedipus is not something sociological at all, or at least not in the first instance. He is more psychological. He is the epiphany that comes to pass when one, anyone at all, a Father or a Mother or a Child, either Son or Daughter, interprets or feels, wittingly or unwittingly, a sense of self or relationship in terms of an intimate, family-like triangle in which love and hate figure prominently at the same time."

"The same would be true for other complexes, other figurings of the gods. Archetypal perspective makes mythos of ethos, not morality out of ancient myth. Each myth has many behavioral manifestations, and every behavior is susceptible of being felt and known in plural perspectives. We do not behave the gods; rather, their behaviors are our senses, our meanings." (21)

This is what I said fifteen years ago. So, fifteen years ago I tried to make myself very clear about my views regarding what some might call "archetypal activism."

What I then was and also now am trying to say is that the study of myth is crucial. It gives us a way to think, a way to think about the myths of our time, the myths which are literal bombs in Kosovo, killings in Littleton, ecodisaster, plastic briefacases, cell phones during lunch, blue sun glasses when the sun is not out, and--above all--money as Giegerich says, the economy as Hillman says, or as Ross Poirot said: It's the economy, stupid! These are the religions, the myths, the dreams that we should be studying and trying to understand. But to do this, to find the anima mundi, the soul of the world, in these matters, we will likely need to adjust our notion of soul, since technology, e-mail, and global capitalism are not, I suspect, what we thought soul meant.

We have to face the fact that those who are against myth, those who think our study of myth silly and irrelevant, may be more relevantly mythic than those who are for myth that is disconnected from our experience in the world. Those who are against myth are embodying the world's mythology, the soul of today's world in the proper genitive sense, the anima mundi. It is our work--as Pacifica's motto says--to tend them and their experiences and views.

For Eric Harris, myth was relevant to everyday life, relevant in a deadly literal way, like it was for the terrorists who blew up Pam Am 103 over Scotland with thirty-five of my undergraduate students aboard. For these people, who committed these atrocities, myth was relevant to life.

For me, on the other hand, the study of ancient myth is irrelevant to contemporary culture, which is why I study it, so that I may see and feel the myths of our world: the spirituality and poetics of business, global politics: the narratives and images that unconsciously inform and shape lives and cultures.

I study myth because it is irrelevant to life in the world today. I study it to try to get a clue to the mythlessness, the absurdity, the irrationality, the meaninglessness. It tells me something about what I am, because it tells me what I am not. One can study old mythologies not to learn mythology but to learn to see everything mythologically, and to learn a different way of thinking, a mythopoetic way, a different insighting of the present world.

The world is archetypally activist. We can learn from it where and what the soul of the soulless world is. The world thus gives us who study myths the agenda. We don't give it our agenda from the good old days or from the pie in the sky wish fulfilled future.

It is easy to study the myth of myth, fairy tale, and literature. Anyone can do that, if the effort were worth it. But it is difficult to study the myths of mythlessness, the myths of world. It is easy to pit soul against world; it is hard work, difficult, to find the soul of the world, the soul of money, consumerism, capitalist exploitation, global relativism, violence in schools, rape warfare, ethnic cleansing, military solutions, classism, sexism, racism, the hate, drug rape, binge drinking, all the craziness and pathology. On the one hand, world is without soul. On the other hand, I wonder what is the soul of being without soul,

Some people seem to study myths and the world by bringing their so-called soul with them and laying it on the world, like a trip, like a warm fuzzy Linus blanket, a pair of rosy glasses, like a sugar coating for a bitter pill. Then they think that they have found soul in the world. But that's not it. That's fake soul and fake world. Real soul of the world is the soul of the world.

 

Conclusion

It is like Picasso's Guernica, a portion of which appears on the advertising brochure for this conference. Guernica was a village in northern Spain which was victim to the first instance of saturation bombing. It was a case of Germany and Italy helping a fascist Spain defeat a loyalist government which was leftist. The bull is a symbol of fascism and the naked light bulb indicates that god is dead and that the only light now comes from naked technology and science The theologian, Paul Tilich, referred to Picasso's painting as the most religious art-work of our time. He might also have said most mythological. Tillich wrote about this painting saying that it depicts "pieces of reality, people, and animals in a way so as to make the piece-character of our reality most horribly visible." (22) The painting is a piece of soul because it shows the soul of pieces ... soulfully.

My work is to study old dead myths in relation to our live world, which is also dead. My worry is that when gods go away, they don't really leave. My wager is that they go underground, and return as demons. Mythology then is like a computer program running in the background, like an antivirus program, except in the case of mythology the program may be the disease rather than the cure. However, like an antivirus program, unconscious mythology only surfaces when something is wrong. It is the return of the repressed, as Freud said, or gods casting shadows, as Rilke said. Von den Göttern ein Schatten fällt. (23)   Heidegger referred to this as "traces, of the gods," die Spuren. (24) Éperons, wrote Derrida, "traces," when speaking of Nietzsche's madman declaring the death of myth. (25) One important work today is to track the traces of the gods who have gone, tracing those tracks in the here and now. As the poet, A. R. Ammons, put it:

     ... the gods from the high wide
     potentials of aura, of encompassing nothingness, flash into
     concentration and descend, taking on matter and shape, color,
     until they walk with us, but divine, having drawn down with them
     the reservoirs of the skies: in time the restlessness that is in
     them, the overinvestment, casts the shells of earth to remain with
     earth, and the real force of the gods returns to its heights
     where it dwells, its everlasting home: these are the mechanics
     by which such matters carry out their awesome transactions:
     if the gods have gone away, only the foolish think them gone
     for good: only certain temporal guises have been shaken
     away from their confinements among us: they will return, quick
     appearances in the material, and shine our eyes blind with adoration
     and astonish us with fear: the mechanics of this have to do with
     the way our minds work, the concrete, the overinvested concrete,
     the symbol, the seedless radiance, the giving up into meaninglessness
      and the return of meaning: but the gods have come and gone
     (or we have made them come and go) so long among us that
     they have communicated something of the sky to us .... (26)

The gods may well have communicated something of the sky to us, but they also still astonish us with fear, not only for the damage that they do in Kosovo and Colorado, but also for the havoc they wreck in a person's heart and soul. It is because I am afraid of the lively dead gods that I study and teach mythology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. I do it because I have two hands and not one.

 

Notes

1.   A different and much abbreviated version of this presentation was published by The Salt Journal, 2/1 (1999): 64.

2.   Milka Ventura observes, for example, that "people used to rabbinical literature are acquainted with the expression [devar `aher] and know its worth as a deterrent against hermeneutic dogmatism.   No interpretation can be all-encompassing.   There is always another possibility, a devar `aher," (a different word), a different point of view.   Apparently it contradicts the previous one, but in fact it adds depth to it by shifting the perspective."     ("Biblical Women Who Move Out," Spring 63 (1998): 81.

3.   Linda Hutcheon, Irony's Edge (New York: Routledge, 1994), 160f.

4.   Ibid., 161f.

5.   William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

6.   Conrad Aiken, Time in the Rock (New York: Scribners, 1936), 2.

7.    Matthew Arnold, "Dover Beach," R. Aldington, ed., The Viking Book of Poetry of the English Speaking World, volume two (New York: The Viking Press, 1959), 972f.

8.    Wallacve Stevens, "Loneliness in Jersey City," Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 191.

9.    Wallace Stevens, "A Mythology Reflects its Region," Ibid., 476.

10. Giorgio DeChirico in: Aniella Jaffé, "Symbolism in the Visual Arts," Man and his Symbols (Garden City: Doubleday, 1964), 293.

11.   Wassily Kandinsky in ibid., 295.

12.   Reported on by Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987),   437.

13.   From Masken und Metamorphosen des Nihilismus, reported in ibid, 440

14.   Ibid, 10

15.   Wolfgang Giegerich, The Soul's Logical Life: Toward a Rigorous Notion of Psychology   (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1998),   149f, 167, 176-80;   "Killings," Spring 54 (1993): 6, 12-14; "Effort? Yes, Effort!" Spring 1988, 184.

16.   Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, tr. N. Coghill (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1981), 299f, cited in:   Wolfgang Giegerich, "The Opposition of 'Individual' and 'Collective'--Psychology's Basic Fault," Harvest: Journal for Jungian Studies, 42/2   (1996): 7-27.

17.   C. G. Jung, Collected Works, vol. 10, para. 128.

18.   An earlier version of the paragraphs which follow were presented at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, on the occasion of the inauguration of the Joseph Campbell Foundation (December 14, 1992).   They were published in the Joseph Campbell Newsletter.

19.   Joseph Campbell,   Masks of God: Primitive Mythology (New York: Viking Press, 1959), 12.

20.   e. e. cummings, Poems 1923-1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1954), 294.

21.   David Miller, The New Polytheism (Dallas: Spring Publications, 1981), 16.

22.   Paul Tillich, "Existentialist Aspects of Modern Art," Carl Michalson, ed., Christianity and the Existentialists (New York: Scribners, 1956), 138.

23.   Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, tr. M. D. Herter Norton (New York: Norton and Co., 1942)   28.

24.   Martin Heidegger, Holzwege (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 1972), 250f.

25.   Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979).

26.   A. R. Ammons, Sphere: The Form of a Motion   (New York: Norton, 1974), 48f.