Myth.Creative, was: How to!

[Guest guest]

Following that post from Campbell, I want to give you the opening section

of his 4th volume, _Creative Mythology_. This covers roughly the period of

the Grail stories to the present time, in which East and West are coming

together. Campbell says that modern man is radically different, in that

mythology is now being consciously created. We make our own mythology.

 

I'll include the Table of Contents, so you can get an idea of what the book

covers.

 

>The Masks of God:

> CREATIVE

> MYTHOLOGY

>

> Part One

> THE ANCIENT VINE

>

> Chapter I

> EXPERIENCE AND AUTHORITY

>

> I. Creative Symbolization

>

> In the earlier volumes of this survey of the historical

>transformations of those imagined forms that I am calling the "masks" of

>God, through which men everywhere have sought to relate themselves to the

>wonder of existence, the myths and rites of the Primitive, Oriental, and

>Early Occidental worlds could be discussed in terms of grandiose unitary

>stages. For in the history of our still youthful species, a profound

>respect for inherited forms has generally suppressed innovation.

>Millenniums have rolled by with only minor variations played on themes

>derived from God-knows-when. Not so, however, in our recent West, where,

>since the middle of the twelfth century, an accelerating disintegration

>has been undoing the formidable orthodox tradition that came to flower in

>that century, and with its fall, the released creative powers of a great

>company of towering individuals have broken forth: so that not one, or

>even two or three, but a galaxy of mythologies - as many, one might say,

>as the multitude of its geniuses - must be taken into account in any study

>of the spectacle of our own titanic age. Even in the formerly dominant,

>but now distinctly subordinate, sphere of theology there has arisen, since

>the victories of Luther, Melanchthon, and the Augsburg Confession of 1530,

>a manifold beyond reckoning of variant readings of the Christian

>revelation; while in the fields of literature, secular philosophy, and the

>arts, a totally new type of non-theological revelation, of great scope,

>great depth, and

>infinite variety, has become the actual spiritual guide and structuring

>force of the civilization.

> In the context of a traditional mythology, the symbols are presented

>in socially maintained rites, through which the individual is required to

>experience, or will pretend to have experienced, certain insights,

>sentiments, and commitments. In what I am calling "creative" mythology, on

>the other hand, this order is reversed: the individual has had an

>experience of his own - of order, horror, beauty, or even mere

>exhilaration - which he seeks to communicate through signs; and if his

>realization has been of a certain depth and import, his communication will

>have the value and force of living myth - for those, that is to say, who

>receive and respond to it of themselves, with recognition, uncoerced.

> Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the

>reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion. The light-world modes of

>experience and thought were late, very late, developments in the

>biological prehistory of our species. Even in the life-course of the

>individual, the opening of the eyes to light occurs only after all the

>main miracles have been accomplished of the building of a living body of

>already functioning organs, each with its inherent aim, none of these aims

>either educed from, or as yet even known to, reason; while in the larger

>course and context of the evolution of life itself from the silence of

>primordial seas, of which the taste still runs in our blood, the opening

>of the eyes occurred only after the first principle of all organic being

>("Now I'll eat you; now you eat me!") had been operative for so many

>hundreds of millions of centuries that it could not then, and cannot now,

>be undone - though our eyes and what they witness may persuade us to

>regret the monstrous game.

> The first function of a mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness

>to the _mysterium tremendum et fascinans_ of this universe _as it is_, the

>second being to render an interpretive total image of the same, as known

>to contemporary consciousness. Shakespeare's definition of the function of

>his art, "to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature," is thus equally a

>definition of mythology. It is the revelation to waking consciousness of

>the powers of its own sustaining source.

> A third function, however, is the enforcement of a moral order: the

>shaping of the individual to the requirements of his geographically and

>historically conditioned social group, and here an actual break from

>nature may ensue, as for instance (extremely) in the case of a castrato.

>Circumcisions, subincisions, scarifications, tattoos, and so forth, are

>socially ordered brands and croppings, to join the merely natural human

>body in membership to a larger, more enduring, cultural body, of which it

>is required to become an organ - the mind and feelings being imprinted

>simultaneously with a correlative mythology. And not nature, but society,

>is the alpha and omega of this lesson. Moreover, it is in this moral,

>sociological sphere that authority and coercion come into play, as they

>did mightily in India in the maintenance of caste and the rites and

>mythology of suttee. In Christian Europe, already in the twelfth century,

>beliefs no longer universally held were universally enforced. The result

>was a dissociation of professed from actual existence and that consequent

>spiritual disaster which, in the imagery of the Grail legend, is

>symbolized in the Waste Land theme: a landscape of spiritual death, a

>world waiting, waiting - "Waiting for Godot!" - for the Desired Knight,

>who would restore its integrity to life and let stream again from infinite

>depths the lost, forgotten, living waters of the inexhaustible source.

> The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of

>history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and

>cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but

>aspiration is the motivater, builder, and transformer of civilization. A

>mythological canon is an organization of symbols, ineffable in import, by

>which the energies of aspiration are evoked and gathered toward a focus.

>The message leaps from heart to heart by way of the brain, and where the

>brain is unpersuaded the message cannot pass. The life then is untouched.

>For those in whom a local mythology still works, there is an experience

>both of accord with the social order, and of harmony with the universe.

>For those, however, in whom the authorized signs no longer work - or, if

>working, produce deviant effects - there follows inevitably a sense both

>of dissociation from the local social nexus and of quest, within and

>without, for life, which the brain will take to be for "meaning." Coerced

>to the social pattern, the individual can only harden to some figure of

>living death; and if any considerable number of the members of a

>civilization are in this predicament, a point of no return will have been

>passed.

> Jean Jacques Rousseau's Discours sur les arts et sciences, published

>1749, marked an epoch of this kind. Society was the corruption of man;

>"back to nature" was the call: back to the state of the "noble savage" as

>the model of "natural man" - which the savage, with his tribal imprints,

>was no more, of course, than was Rousseau himself. For as faith in

>Scripture waned at the climax of the Middle Ages, so at the climax of the

>Age of Enlightenment, did faith in reason: and today, two centuries later,

>we have T. S. Eliot's _The Waste Land_ (published 1922, with footnotes):

>

> Here is no water but only rock

> Rock and no water and the sandy road

> The road winding above among the mountains

> Which are mountains of rock without water

> If there were water we should stop and drink

> Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think

> Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand

> If there were only water amongst the rock

> Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

> Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

> There is not even silence in the mountains

> But dry sterile thunder without rain

> There is not even solitude in the mountains

> But red sullen faces sneer and snarl

> From doors of mudcracked houses

>

> The fourth and most vital, most critical function of a mythology,

>then, is to foster the centering and unfolding of the individual in

>integrity, in accord with d) himself (the microcosm), c) his culture (the

>mesocosm), b) the universe (the macrocosm), and a) that awesome ultimate

>mystery which is both beyond and within himself and all things:

>

> Wherefrom words turn back,

> Together with the mind, not having attained.

>

>Creative mythology, in Shakespeare's sense, of the mirror "to show virtue

>her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the

>time his form and pressure," springs not, like theology, from the dicta of

>authority, but from the insights, sentiments, thought, and vision of an

>adequate individual, Ioyal to his own experience of value. Thus it

>corrects the authority holding to the shells of forms produced and left

>behind by lives once lived. Renewing the act of experience itself, it

>restores to existence the quality of adventure, at once shattering and

>reintegrating the fixed, already known, in the sacrificial creative fire

>of the becoming thing that is no thing at all but life, not as it _will

>be_ or as it _should be_, as it _was_ or as it _never will be_, but _as it

>is_, in depth, in process, _here and now_, inside and out.

> Figure 1 shows an early Christian painting from the ceiling of the

>Domitilla Catacomb in Rome, third century A.D. In the central panel, where

>a symbol of Christ might have been expected, the legendary founder of the

>Orphic mysteries appears, the pagan poet Orpheus, quelling animals of the

>wilderness with the magic of his Iyre and song. In four of the eight

>surrounding panels, Old and New Testament scenes can be identified: David

>with his sling (upper left), Daniel in the lion's den (lower right), Moses

>drawing water from the rock, Jesus resurrecting Lazarus. Alternating with

>these are four animal scenes, two exhibiting, among trees, the usual pagan

>sacrificial beast, the bull; two, the Old Testament ram. Toward the

>corners are eight sacrificed rams' heads (Christ, the sacrificed "Lamb of

>God"), each giving rise to a vegetal spray (the New Life), while in each

>of the corners Noah's dove bears the olive branch telling of the

>reappearance of land after the Flood. The syncretism is deliberate,

>uniting themes of the two traditions of wqhich Christianity was the

>product, and thus pointing through and beyond all three traditions to the

>source, the source-experience of a truth, a mystery, out of which their

>differing symbologies arose. Isaiah's prophecy of the Messianic age, when

>"the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard lie down with the

>kid" (Isaiah 11:6), and the Hellenistic mystery theme of the realization

>of harmony in the individual soul, are recognized as variants of one and

>the same idea, of which Christ was conceived to be the fulfillment: the

>underlying theme in all being of the life transcending death.

> We may term such an underlying theme the "archetypal, natural, or

>elementary idea," and its culturally conditioned inflections "social,

>historical, or ethnic ideas." The focus of creative thought is always on

>the former, which then is rendered, necessarily, in the language of the

>time. The priestly, orthodox mind, on the other hand, is always and

>everywhere gocused upon the local, culturally conditioned rendition.

> Figure 2, from a set of pavement tiles from the ruins of Chertsey

>Abbey (Surrey), c. 1270 A.D., shows the youthful Tristan harping for his

>Uncle Mark. No one regarding this in its time would have failed to

>associate the scene with the young David harping for King Saul. "Saul," we

>are told, "was afraid of David because the Lord was with him but had

>departed from Saul" (I Samuel 18:12). By analogy, as Saul's kingdom went

>to David, so Mark's queen to his nephew. The ruler according to the order

>merely of the day (the ethnic sphere), out of touch with the enduring

>principles of his own nature and the world (the elementary), is displaced

>in his sovereignty (in his kingdom / in his queen) by the revealer of the

>concealed harmony of all things.

>-------------

>

> CONTENTS

>

> PART ONE: THE ANCIENT VINE

>

>Chapter 1. Enperience and Authority

> I. Creative Symbolization 3

> II. Where Words Turn Back 9

> III. The Trackless Way 27

> IV. Mountain Immortals 37

>

>Chapter 2. The World Transformed

> I. The Way of Noble Love 42

> II. The Devil's Door 46

> III. Heloise 53

> IV. The Crystalline Bed 65

> V. Aesthetic Arrest 67

> VI. The Potion 75

>

> Chapter 3. The Word Behind Words

> I. Symbolic Speech 84

> II. The Classical Heritage 95

> III. The Celto-Germanic Heritage 110

> IV. The Legacy of Islam 128

> V. The Gnostics 145

>

> PART TWO: THE WASTE LAND

>

>Chapter 4. The Love-Death

> I. Eros, Agape, and Amor 175

> II. The Noble Heart 186

> III. Anamorphosis 193

> IV. The Music of the Land below Waves 200

> V. Moon Bull and Sun Steed 207

> VI. The Legend of the Fair Isolt 220

>

> Chapter 5. Phoenix Fire

> I. O Truly Blessed Night! 257

> II. The Left-Hand Way 262

> III. Puer Aeternus 278

> IV. Chaos 282

>

> Chapter 6. The Balance

> I. Honor against Love 298

> II. The Individual and the State 308

> III. Erotic Irony 321

> IV. Identity and Relationship 333

> V. Beauty Way 349

> VI. The Altar and the Pulpit 358

> VII. Democracy and the Terror 373

> VIII. The Amfortas Wound 383

>

> PART THREE: THE WAY AND THE LIFE

>

>Chapter 7. The Crucified

> I. The Turning Wheel of Terror-Joy 405

> II. The Maimed Fisher King 416

> III. The Quest beyond Meaning 428

>

>Chapter 8. The Paraclete

> I. The Son of the Widow 433

> II. First Intermezzo: The Restitution of Symbols 452

> III. The Ladies' Knight 460

> IV. Illuminations 466

> V. Second Intermezzo: The Secularization of Myth 476

> VI. The Castle of Marvels 492

> VII. Third Intermezzo: Mythogenesis 514

> VIII. The Crowning of the King 554

> IX. Envoy: To Each His Own 563

>

> PART FOUR: NEW WINE

>

>Chapter 9. The Death of "God"

> I. The Crime of Galileo 573

> II. The New Reality 574

> III. Names and Forms 578

> IV. The New Universe 588

> V. The Knight of the Rueful Countenance 600

> VI. Toward New Mythologies 608

>

>Chapter IO. The Earthly Paradise

> I. All the Gods within You 625

> II. Symbolization 647

>

> Reference Notes 681

>

> Index 711