mythos

What if I bade you leave
The cavern of the mind?
There's better exercise
In the sunlight and wind.

I never bade you go
To Moscow or to Rome.
Renounce that drudgery,
Call the Muses home.

Seek those images
That constitute the wild,
The lion and the virgin,
The harlot and the child.

Find in middle air
An eagle on the wing,
Recognize the five
That make the Muses sing.

Those Images ~W. B. Yeats



Someone wrote asking me: 'What do you mean by we cry out for a new myth? Please elaborate.' And I said (in a fury):

"...The ultimate fate of every dogma is that it gradually becomes soulless. Life wants to create new forms, and therefore, when a dogma loses its vitality, it must perforce activate the archetype that has always helped man to express the mystery of the soul....the psychic archetype .... take form and become accessible to understanding....But the supremely important motive power which is needed .... and which sets the archetypal possibilities in motion at a given historical moment, cannot be explained in terms of archetype itself. Only experience can establish which archetype has become operative, but one can never predict that it must enter into manifestation. ..."
(CGJung, Collected Works, Vol. 14, p. 347, par. 488)

Myth isn't mere dogma. It's vital and living. It apprehends (great word) that myth is a function of the human psyche, that a myth must fit its time or cease to work. Joseph Campbell, Jung, Culianu good resources. Myth functions in the synthesis of what EMForster called the creation in the creation; what, as Culianu reminds us so well, was classically seen as the language of the soul, creating the phantasms and emblems from which we weave our life. Best to know what lives within us--as best you can.


For example, the myth that humans were put on the ready-made earth to use as they will, the universe and all other life but a stageprop as humans sort themselves into some afterlife of heaven or hell, doesn't serve us well. It might have, briefly, in early days of carving out a foothold in existence, creating a mindset of survival of the fittest--a jumpstart that might be necessary in an unknown wilderness. But now this myth only leads to waste. To global warming and war. It rewards the selfish, the greedy, those most willing to run over grandmamma. It keeps us from living deeply, with caution and care. It cheapens existence by making it possible for irrationality and fear to rule. It keeps us from being creative; it activates old power archetypes that lock us into destruction. A better myth is Eros, to know the divine incarnates within us, that the cosmos is of a piece, that our positivism is false, our dogma a shackle. Better the humility of wonder. Better to understand and love deity as something that grows and wakes up with us in consciousness.

So many myths that fit our time better, that could help us see the big picture rather than blind us and allow us to be used.

Good guys, bad guys, the world a Wild West where we wear guns on our hip, God ruling all with his magic book like Sauron, rewarding those who follow blindly with Rapture. It's all darkness and selfishness. When will we see it is one world? Corporations do, though they keep eyes on the bottom line, ever so shortsighted, forgetting that life is a web, that we are made of stars. Corporations don't serve governments. They are multinational. Unconstrained, they function as a cancer.

Human nature, guided by its myths. And Human Nature is the biggest myth of all.

Shall we free ourselves, step back, consider? Try to see beyond the chest pounding and flag waving? Perhaps--Terrorism is a high utility myth in service of the far Right and the oil giants. A myth that allows oil--a mythic gold poison whose day is passing fast--to rule the earth. This is a horribly destructive myth. Genocide is its handmaiden. And where is justice, Justice the ancient goddess that guards the gates of consciousness and death along with the Laws of the Cosmos? Is she the B-2? Is that who we want to be ("the gods you worship are the gods you deserve"), ever doomed to carry the big stick, even if it kills everything? How do we grow terrorists? How do we grow allies? How do we shape our coming together so that the earth can thrive?

Human nature, guided by its myths.

Jung shows us again again that summond or not the gods are present. He meant many things by this, but the part that applies so strongly to the Fundamentalist forces at work in the world right now -- is this...

We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow. And if such a person wants to be cured it is necessary to find a way in which his conscious personality and his shadow can live together.

"Answer to Job" (1952). In CW 11: Psychology and Religion: West and East. P.12

Re alice's piece below: Transformation Symbolism and Mass -- is so key, most terrific and important, especially if you are or are not at all religious.

as one mike dickman said:

The Mass is not a parody of the Magnum Opus. The Mass is an exact manifestation of the Magnum Opus. Most Parisian Catholics have no idea of what they're about. They're Sunday Christians only. Many French people today are fascinated with all things esoteric. But it's only an intellectual fascination. Alchemical wisdom can not be understood intellectually but only experienced...or -better put- Alchemical wisdom can only be understood intellectually IF experienced.

Or Culianu:

Magic is not about disorder. On the contrary, it reestablishes a peaceful
coexistence between the conscious and unconscious when coexistence is under
attack. ~Ioan Couliano

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Individuation.... one X one. from alice

CREDO LXV
Sacrifice

The word sacrifice comes from the Latin and means ‘to make holy’. It was a concept that I struggled with for many years. During Lent, the idea was to give up something one especially liked. At one point in an English boarding school in Italy, I decided that my favorite food was bread. So I gave up bread only to be placed in a double-bind by the Lord’s Prayer in which we pray “Give us this day our daily bread”! So I gave up giving up right then and there and decided sacrifice made no sense. In addition, the custom in olden times of sacrificing great numbers of animals to God smacked to me of bribery and cruelty. None of it seemed logical. That is until I read Jung’s magnificent essay on “Transformation Symbolism in the Mass”. This is a piece that I have reread several times over the years and which I plan to reread this Lenten season.
Somewhere Jung solves the purpose of sacrifice in the following way: we cannot offer up something we do not already have. So in the symbolic and psychological sense, it is in sacrificing that we become conscious of what we have. That makes sense to me and puts my confusion to rest.
The giving up of food is an act of self-discipline carried to extremes of fasting, especially in Islam. During the month of Ramadan, Muslims deny themselves food and drink, from the moment before dawn when one cannot distinguish the color of a thread to sundown, with exceptions for children and the sick. Catholic Christians used to be obliged to give up meat on Fridays, generally, and during Lent , except for Sundays.
I remember the agony my father’s father, a Bostonian agnostic, put the Irish family cook through by ordering her to roast beef on Good Friday! I found her in tears in the kitchen fearing she was committing a mortal sin. It did not endear this grandfather to me at the time. My mother’s father, an Episcopal priest and a vessel of kindness, would never have dreamt of doing such a thing. But Grandpa Billy seemed to relish her discomfort as she carried in the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding but it took away my appetite.
There is, of course, another way of looking at the whole matter. How can giving up something material make it holy? The act of self-denial is more a matter of self-discipline. But what if were to give up a fault or a destructive habit, some negative psychological tendency, like anger or gossip or criticism? By giving up these, we would be transforming them by making them conscious, thus perhaps making them a holy offering. One could start by examining one’s unconscious projections such as labeling other people or defaming them..........
Well, today is Mardi Gras, so I now will go in and have lunch and enjoy every bit that at my age I can chew and before nap, I will commence the great pleasure of rereading Jung’s Transformation Symbolism in the Mass. As he was a Swiss Protestant, it is a remarkably profound explanation.
Jung had a fascinating ‘complex’ it seems with Rome. He could not bring himself to go there and yet, he studied and commented extensively on Roman Catholicism and carried on an extraordinary and lengthy correspondence with Father Victor White. It seems, on one occasion Jung and Toni Wolff visited Ravenna when the following incident occurred:

Even on the occasion of my first visit to Ravenna in 1913, the tomb of Galla Placidia seemed to me significant and unusually fascinating. The second time, twenty years later, I had the same feeling.... We went directly from the tomb into the Baptistery of the Orthodox... There were four great frescoes of incredible beauty which, it seemed, I had entirely forgotten. I was vexed to find my memory so unreliable. The mosaic on the south side represented the baptism in the Jordan; the second picture, on the north, was of the passage of the Children of Israel through the Red Sea; the third, on the east, soon faded from my memory. It might have shown Naaman being cleansed of leprosy in the Jordan; there was a picture on this theme in the old Merian Bible in my library, which was much like the mosaic. The fourth mosaic, on the west side of the baptistery, was the most impressive of all. We looked at this one last. It represented Christ holding out his hand to Peter, who was sinking beneath the waves... I recall the most distinct memory of the mosaic of Peter sinking, and to this day can see every detail before my eyes: the blue of the sea, individual chips of the mosaic, the inscribed scroll proceeding from the mouths of Peter and Christ which I attempted to decipher.”

I went to Ravenna, and the mosaics made a deep impression on me. MDR pps 286-288]

Jung then goes on to say that later he asked a friend to send him postcards of the mosaics. The friend responded that he was told that no such mosaics existed! And yet both Toni and he saw them in a strange blue light! This combination of events: the vision and the inability of Jung to travel to Rome during his lifetime suggest, to me, some traumatic event perhaps in a previous life connected to the Roman Catholic Church. I am so struck by this that I am hunting down an article by A. Plaut titled Jung and Rebirth. Perhaps Plaut had the same idea.

It is now almost a week since Mardi Gras and I have decided I am becoming conscious of a tad of negative scrupulosity! It comes in the form of dealing with all my sins of omission! The things I ought to have done and have not done! This is one of the psychological abysses. Another, as I may have mentioned before, is the little phrase “If only..........” Aaaaaaaaargh!

We are in the midst of a mega-snowstorm – actually beautiful to look at through a window in a warm house, but bad news for all who drive.

lovingly,

ao

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deb:

Had an email this morning--

On Wed, Jun 29, 2011 at 2:20 AM, Left Behind wrote:
Having trouble viewing this email? Click here.

"Tim LaHaye's books always entertain, educate and thrill but Thunder of Heaven takes it to a new level. I never thought the End of Days would cost me so much sleep!"

LaHaye has a new left behinder novel coming out. How timely. His partner wrote me that left behind was just a story, but Jung would mention self fulfilling prophecy. At least they aren't selling the special Tribs membership online for kids anymore (yes, they really did).

Question. When one's faith becomes one's reality, how is this not psychosis? Reality to the John Hagee point, the Michele Bachmann point, where it will shape policy?

The old road to hell, as my dad used to say.