Joseph Campbell..

[Lyfing]

http://www.dansmind.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/1928_joe-at-university-of-p.jpg

Here is the long awaited Joseph Campbell thread..

This man has influenced my way of thinking about Heathenry more than anyone else. I've posted on-line versions of his books around here (http://www.theapricity.com/)..

The Hero with a Thousand Faces (http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=997&highlight=joseph+campbell)
Primitive Mythology (http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=999&highlight=joseph+campbell)
The Power of Myth (http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1000&highlight=joseph+campbell)
Myths to Live By (http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1002&highlight=joseph+campbell)

The first I ever saw of him was one magical day in a dumpy motel room when I happened upon The Power of Myth on PBS..I liken it to..


Supernatural Aid

After the hero has accepted the call, he encounters a protective figure (often elderly) who provides special tools and advice for the adventure ahead, such as an amulet or a weapon.[5]

Classic example: In Greek mythology, Ariadne gives Theseus a ball of string and a sword before he enters the labyrinth to confront the Minotaur.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth

..here (http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showpost.php?p=22617&postcount=2) are the videos..

Power of Myth Part 1 (http://www.mythsdreamssymbols.com/POM1.html) The Hero's Adventure
Power of Myth Part 2 (http://www.mythsdreamssymbols.com/POM2.html) Myth and the Modern World
Power of Myth Part 3 (http://www.mythsdreamssymbols.com/POM3.html) The First Storytellers
Power of Myth Part 4 (http://www.mythsdreamssymbols.com/POM4.html) Sacrifice & Bliss
Power of Myth Part 5 (http://www.mythsdreamssymbols.com/POM5.html) Love & the Goddess
Power of Myth Part 6 (http://www.mythsdreamssymbols.com/POM6.html) Masks of Eternity

Some of my favorite quotes of his are ( the bold titles or whatever are mine )..



Priest and Poet

A distinction must be drawn, through all our studies of mythology, between the attitudes toward divinities represented on one hand by the priest and his flock, and on the other by the creative poet, artist, or philosopher. The former tends to what I would call a positivistic reading of the imagery of his cult. Such a reading is fostered by the attitude of prayer, since in prayer it is extremely difficult to retain the balance between belief and disbelief that is proper to the contemplation of an image or idea of God. The poet, artist, and philosopher, on the other hand, being themselves fashioners of images and coiners of ideas, realize that all representation—whether in the visible matter of stone or in the mental matter of the word—is necessarily conditioned by the fallibility of the human organs. Overwhelmed by his own muse, a bad poet may imagine his visions to be supernatural facts and so fall into the posture of a prophet—whose utterances I would define as “poetry overdone,” over-interpreted; wherefore he becomes the founder of a cult and a generator of priests. But so also a gifted priest may find his super-natural beings losing body, deepening into void, changing form, even dissolving: whereupon he will possibly become either a prophet or, if more greatly favored, a creative poet.

Three major metamorphoses of the motifs and themes of our subject, therefore, have to be recognized as fundamentally differing even though fundamentally related, namely: The true poetry of the poet, the poetry overdone of the prophet, and the poetry done to the death of the priest. Whereas the history of religion is largely a record of the latter two, the history of mythology includes all three, and in doing so brings not only poetry but also religion into a fresh and healthily vivified relationship to the wellsprings of creative thought. For there is a tendency (“poetry underdone”) to rest in the whimsies of personal surprise, joy, or anguish before the realities of life in a universe poets never made; whereas in religion the opposite tendency may prevail—that of rendering no personal experience whatsoever, but only authorized cliches.

Occidental Mythology, pages 518-519



The Four Functions of Mythology

The First

The first and most distinctive--vitalizing all--is that of eliciting and supporting a sense of awe before the mystery of being. Professor Rudolf Otto has termed this recognition of the numinous the characteristic mental state of all religions properly so called. It antecedes and defies definition. It is, on the primitive level, demonic dread; on the highest, mystical rapture; and between there are many grades. Defined, it may be talked about and taught; but talk and teaching cannot produce it. Nor can authority enforce it. Only the accident of experience and the sign symbols of a living myth can elicit and support it; but such signs cannot be invented. They are found. Wherupon they function of themselves. And those who find them are the sensitized, creative, living minds that once were known as seers, but now as poets and creative artists. More important, more effective for the future of a culture than its statesmen or its armies are these masters of the spiritual breath by which the clay of man wakes to life.

Occidental Mythology, Page 519


The Second

The second function of mythology is to render a cosmology, an image of the universe that will support and be supported by this sense of awe before the mystery of a presence and the presence of a mystery. The cosmology has to correspond, however, to the actual experience, knowledge, and mentality of the culture folk involved. So we note that when the priestly watchers of the skies in ancient Sumer, c. 3500 B.C., learned of the order of the planets, the entire mythic system of the nuclear Near East stepped away from the simple primitive themes of the hunting and planting tribes. The grandiose vision of a mathematically impersonal temporal and spatial order came into being, of which the world vision of the Middle Ages--no less than that of ancient India, that of China, and that of Yucatan--was but a late variant. Today that vision has dissolved. And here we touch upon a crucial problem of the religions of our time; for the clergies, generally, still are preaching themes from the first to fourth millenniums B.C.

No one of adult mind today would turn to the Book of Genesis to learn of the origins of the earth, the plants, the beasts, and man. There was no flood, no tower of Babel, no first couple in paradise, and between the first known appearance of men on earth and the first buildings of cities, not one generation ( Adam to Cain ) but a good two million must have come into this world and passed along. Today we turn to science for out imagery of the past and of the structure of the world, and what the spinning demons of the atom and the galaxies of the telescope’s eye reveal is a wonder that makes the babel of the Bible seem a toyland dream of the dear childhood of our brain.

Occidental Mythology, Pages 521-522


The Third

A third function of mythology is to support the current social order, to integrate the individual organically with his group; and here again, in the long view, we see that a gradual amplification of the scope and content of the group has been the characteristic sign of man’s advance from the early tribal cluster to the modern post-Alexandrian concept of a sing world-society. Against the amplitude of this challenging larger concept numerous provinces still stand out, as, for example, those of the various national, racial, religious, or class mythologies, which may once have had their reason but today are out of date.

The social function of a mythology and of the rites by which it is rendered is to establish in every member of the group concerned a “system of sentiments’ that can be depended upon to link him spontaneously to its ends. The “system of sentiments” proper to a hunting tribe would be improper to an agricultural one; that proper to a matriarchy is improper to a patriarchy; and that of any tribal group is improper to this day of developed individuals crossing paths from east to west and from north to south.

The older mythic orders gave authority to their symbols by attributing them to gods, to culture heroes, or to some such high impersonal force as the order of the universe; and the image of society itself, thus linked to the greater image of nature, became a vessel of religious awe. Today we know, for the most part, that our laws are not from God or from the universe, but from ourselves; are conventional, not absolute; and that in breaking them we offend not God but man. Neither animals nor plants, not the zodiac or its supposed maker, but our fellows have now become the masters of our fate and we of theirs. In the recent past it may have been possible for intelligent men of good will honestly to believe that their own society ( whatever it happened to be ) was the only good, that beyond its bounds were the enemies of God, and that they were called upon, consequently, to project the principle of hatred outward upon the world, while cultivating love within, toward those whose “system of sentiments” was of God. Today, however, there is no such outward. Enclaves of national, racial, religious, and class provincialism persist, but the physical facts have made closed horizons illusory. The old god is dead, with his little world and his little, closed society. The new focal center of belief and trust is mankind. And if the principle of love cannot be wakened actually within each--as it was mythologically in God--to master the principle of hate, the Waste Land alone can be our destiny and the masters of the world its fiends.

Occidental Mythology, Pages 520-521

3. The Social Prospect

Nor is the situation more comforting in the moral, social sphere of our third traditional mythological function: the validation and maintenance of an established order. In the words of the late John Dewey (1859-1952)

Christianity proffered a fixed revelation of absolute, unchanging Being and truth; and the revelation was elaborated into a system of definite rules and ends for the direction of life. Hence “morals” were conceived as a code of laws, the same everywhere and at all times. The good life was one lived in a fixed adherence to fixed principles.
In contrast with all such beliefs, the outstanding fact in all branches of natural science is that to exist is to be in process, in change…
Victorian thought conceived of new conditions as if they merely put in our hands effective instruments for realizing old ideals. The shock and uncertainty so characteristic of the present marks the discovery that the older ideals themselves are undermined. Instead of science and technology giving us better means for bringing them to pass, they are shaking our confidence in all large and comprehensive beliefs and purposes.

Such a phenomenon is, however, transitory. The impact of the new forces is for the time being negative. Faith in the divine author and authority in which Western civilization confided, inherited ideas of the soul and its destiny, of fixed revelation, of completely stable institutions, of automatic progress, have been made impossible for the cultivated mind of the Western world. It is psychologically natural that the outcome should be a collapse of faith in all fundamental organizing and directive ideas. Skepticism becomes the mark and even the pose of the educated mind. It is the more influential because it is no longer directed against this and that article of the older creeds but is rather a thematic participation on the part of such ideas in the intelligent direction of affairs.
It is in such a context that a thoroughgoing philosophy of experience, framed in the light of science and technique, has its significance…
A philosophy of experience will accept at its full value the fact that social and moral existences are, like the physical existences, in a state of continuous if obscure change. It will not try to cover up the fact of inevitable modification, and will make no attempt to set fixed limits to the extent of changes that are to occur. For the futile effort to achieve security and anchorage in something fixed, it will substitute the effort to determine the character of changes that are going on and to give them in the affairs that concern us most some measure of intelligent direction…
Wherever the thought of fixity rules, that of all-inclusive unity rules also. The popular philosophy of life is filled with desire to attain such an all-embracing unity, and the formal philosophies haved been devoted to an intellectual fulfillment of the desire. Consider the place occupied in popular thought by search for the meaning of life and the purpose of the universe. Men who look for single purport and a single end either frame an idea of them according to their private desires and tradition, or else, not finding any such single unity, give up in despair and conclude that there is no genuine meaning and value of life’s episodes.
The alternatives are not exhaustive, however. There is no need of deciding between no meaning at all and on single, all poses in the situations with which are confronted-one, so to say, for each situation. Each offers its own challenge to thought and endeavor, and presents its own potential value.

In sum: the individual is no on his own. “It is all untrue! Anything goes!” (Nietzsche). The dragon “Thou Shalt!” has been slain-for us all. Therin the danger! Anfortas too was installed thorough no deed, no virtue of his own, upon the seat of power: Lord of the World Center, which, as Cusanus knew, is in each. The wheel on the head of the Bodhisattva, revolving with its painful cutting edge : Who can bear it? Who can teach us to bear it as a crown, not of thorns, but of laurel: the wreath of our own Lady Orgeluse?

The nihilist’s question, “Why?” {wrote Nietzsche} is a product of his earlier habitude of expecting an aim to be given, to be set for him, from without- I.e. by some superhuman authority or other. When he has learned not to believe in such a thing, he goes on, just the same, from habit, looking for another authority of some kind that will be able to speak unconditionally and set goals and tasks by command. The authority of Conscience now is the first to present itself (the more emancipated from theology, the more imperative morality becomes) as compensation for a personal authority. Or the authority of Reason. Or the Social Instinct ( the herd ). Or History, with an immanent spirit that has a goal of its own, to which one can give oneself. One wants, by all means, to get around having to will, to desire a goal, to set up a goal for oneself: one wants to avoid the responsibility (-accepting fatalism ). Finally: Happiness, and with a certain Tartuffe, the Happiness of the Majority.

One says to oneself: 1. A definite goal is unnecessary, 2. Is impossible to foresee.

And so, precisely when what is required is Will in its highest power, it is at its weakest and most faint-hearted, in Absolute Mistrust of the Organizational Force of the Will-to-be-a-Whole.
…
Nihilism is of two faces:

A. Nihilism, as the sign of a heightened power of the spirit: active nihilism.

B. Nihilism, as a decline and regression of the power of the spirit: passive nihilism.

Attempts to escape from nihilism without transvaluing earlier values only bring about opposite escape: a sharpening of the problem.

Pages 621-623


The Fourth

The fourth function of mythology is to initiate the individual into the order of realities of his own psyche, guiding him toward his own spiritual enrichment and realization. Formerly--but in archaic cultures still--the way was to subordinate all individual judgment, will, and capacities absolutely to the social order: the principle of ego ( as we have seen in Oriental Mythology ) was to be suppressed and, if possible, even erased; while the archetypes, the ideal roles, of the social order were impressed upon all inexorably, according to their social stations. In a world of static forms, such a massacre of the creative personality was acceptable, and where the archaic mind prevails today such patterning still goes on. One may take it as a point in evidence of the advanced position of Europe in the way of respect for the individual that, whereas Hitler’s Massacre of some 5,000,000 Jews evokes ( and properly so ) horror from all sides, Stalin’s of 25,000,000 Russians passes almost without notice, and the present Chinese orgy is entirely overlooked. Both by the Orient and by the Occident such inhumanity is recognized as normal for the great East, whereas better things are expected of ourselves--and rightly so. For it was in Europe alone that the principle of individual judgment and responsibility was developed in relation not to a fixed order of supposed divine laws, but to a changing context of human actualities, rationally governed. The fostering in Europe, first among the Greeks, then the Romans, of the principle of ego--not as the mere “I will,” “I want,” of the nursery ( Freud’s “Pleasure Principle” ), but as the informed, rational faculty of responsible judgment ( “Reality Principle” )--has endowed us and our particular world with an order of spirituality and psychological problematic that is different in every way from that of the archaic Oriental mind. And this humanistic individualism has released powers of creativity that have brought about in a mere two centuries changes in the weal and woe of man such as no two millenniums before had ever worked. The result being that where the old patterns of morality are retained they no longer match the actualities even of the local, let alone the world, scene. The adventure of the Grail--the quest within for those creative values by which the Waste land is redeemed--has become today for each the unavoidable task; for, as there is no more any fixed horizon, there is no more any fixed center, any Mecca, Rome, or Jerusalem. Our circle today is that announced, c. 1450, by Nicolaus Cusanus ( 1401-1464 ): whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere; the circle of infinite radius, which is also a straight line.

Occidental Mythology, Pages 521-522

4. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SPHERE

And so we are brought infallibly to the fourth sphere, the fourth function, of an adequate mythology: the centering and harmonization of the individual, which in traditional systems was supposed to follow upon the giving of oneself, and even giving up of oneself altogether, to some one or another of Nietzsche’s authorities named above. The modern world is full of survivals of these reactionary systems, of which the most powerful today is still the old Levantine one of the social order. However, as Loren Eiseley states: “The group ethic as distinct from personal ethic is faceless and obsure. It is whatever its leaders choose it to mean; it destroys the innocent and justifies the act in terms of the future.” But the future, as he then points out ( and one might have thought such a warning unnecessary), is not the place to seek realization. “Progress secularized, progress which pursues only the next invention, progress which pulls thought out of the mind and replaces it with idle slogans, is not progress at all. It is a beckoning mirage in the desert over which stagger the generations of men. Because man, each individual man among us, possesses his own soul [ Schopenhaur’s ‘intelligible character’] and by that light must live or perish, there is no way by which Utopias--or the lost Garden itself--can be brought out of the future and presented to man. Neither every man lives but one life, it is in himself that he must search for the secret of the Garden.”

Pages 623-624



Traditional and Creative Mythology

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.

Creative Mythology, page 4



Odin and the Runes

The norms of myth, understood in the way rather of the “elementary ideas” (marga) than of the “ethnic” (desi), recognized, as in the Domitilla Ceiling (Figure 1), through an intelligent “making use” not of one mythology only but of all the dead and set-fast symbologies of the past, will enable the individual to anticipate and activate in himself the centers of his own creative imagination, out of which his own myth and life-building “Yes because” may then unfold. But in the end, as in the case of Parzival, the guide within will be his own noble heart alone, and the guide without, the image of beauty, the radiance of divinity, that wakes in his heart amor: the deepest, inmost seed of his nature, consubstantial with the process of the All, “thus come.” And in this life-creative adventure the criterion of achievement will be, as in every one of the tales here reviewed, the courage to let go the past, with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of “meaning” and its gifts: to die to the world and to come to birth from within.

Creative Mythology, pages 677-678

Odin sacrificed his eye in, and grasped the Runes from, Mimir's Well ( that being where the root did rise..he is Bestla's brother..and Odin has his head ). The "ethnic ideas" like Hvergelmir, Buri licked from the ice-block, giving form, the "elementary ideas" like the Well of Wyrd ( and vice versa )..Yggdrasil, Mimir's Tree, half-alive and half-dead, trembling for Ragnarok..our Self-sacrifice. Odin and Loki. Order and Chaos. Beautiful and Tragic. The tension of opposites out of which what is Gimli hight.


Then in the grass the golden figures,
the far-famed ones, will be found again,
which they had owned in olden days.

Voluspa 60, Hollander trans.

...:wink

Here (http://home.earthlink.net/~asatru/campbell.html) are his "Ten Commandments for Reading Myth"..



Joseph Campbell's Ten Commandments
for Reading Myth

I

Read myths with the eyes of wonder:
the myths transparent to their universal meaning,
their meaning transparent to its mysterious source.

II

Read myths in the present tense: Eternity is now.

III

Read myths in the first person plural: the Gods and Goddesses
of ancient mythology still live within you.

IV

Any myth worth its salt exerts a powerful magnetism. Notice
the images and stories that you are drawn to and repelled by.
Investigate the field of associated images and stories

V

Look for patterns; don't get lost in the details.
What is needed is not more specialized scholarship,
but more interdisciplinary vision. Make connections;
break old patterns of parochial thought.

VI

Resacralize the secular:
even a dollar bill reveals the imprint of Eternity.

VII

If God is everywhere, then myths can be generated anywhere,
anytime, by anything. Don't let your Romantic aversion to
science blind you to the Buddha in the computer chip.

VIII

Know your tribe! Myths never arise in a vacuum;
they are the connective tissue of the social body
which enjoys synergistic relations with
dreams (private myths) and rituals (the enactment of myth).

IX

Expand your horizons! Any mythology worth remembering
will be global in scope. The earth is our home
and humankind is our family.

X

Read between the lines! Literalism kills;
Imagination quickens.


I'll post a bunch more quotes and the chapters he devoted to us later. I hope this thread will bring questions and answers..??

Later,
-Lyfing

[Lyfing]

Here is one of my favorite quotes..


CAMPBELL:..That is one of the great messages of mythology. I, as I now know myself, am not the final form of my being. We must constantly die one way or another to the selfhood already achieved.

MOYERS: Do you have a story that illustrates this?

CAMPBELL: Well, the old English tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a famous one. One day a green giant came riding on a great green horse into King Arthur's dining hall. "I challenge anyone here," he cried, "to take this great battle-ax that I carry and cut off my head, and then, one year from today, meet me at the Green Chapel, where I shall cut off his head."

The only knight in the hall who had the courage to accept this incongruous invitation was Gawain. He arose from the table, the Green Knight got off his horse, handed Gawain the ax, stuck out his neck, and Gawain with a single stroke chopped off his head. The Green Knight stood up, picked up his head, took back the ax, climbed onto his horse, and as he rode away called back to the astonished Gawain, "I'll see you in a year."

That year everybody was very kind to Gawain. A fortnight or so before the term of the adventure, he rode off to search for the Green Chapel and keep faith with the giant Green Knight. As the date approached, with about three days to go, Gawain found himself before a hunter's cabin, where he asked the way to the Green Chapel. The hunter, a pleasant, genial fellow, met him at the door and replied, "Well, the Chapel is just down the way, a few hundred yards. Why not spend your next three days here with us? We'd love to have you. And when your time comes, your green friend is just down the way."

So Gawain says okay. And the hunter that evening says to him, "Now, early tomorrow I'm going off hunting, but I'll be back in the evening, when we shall exchange our winnings of the day. I'll give you everything I get on the hunt, and you give me whatever will have come to you." They laugh, and that was fine with Gawain. So they all retire to bed.

In the morning, early, the hunter rides off while Gawain is still asleep. Presently, in comes the hunter's extraordinarily beautiful wife, who tickles Gawain under the chin, and wakes him, and passionately invites him to a morning of love. Well, he is a knight of King Arthur's court, and to betray his host is the last thing such a knight can stoop to, so Gawain sternly resists. However, she is insistent and makes more and more of an issue of this thing, until finally she says to him, "Well then, let me give you just one kiss!" So she gives him one large smack. And that was that.

That evening, the hunter arrives with a great haul of all kinds of small game, throws it on the floor, and Gawain gives him one large kiss. They laugh, and that, too, was that.

The second morning, the wife again comes into the room, more passionate than ever, and the fruit of that encounter is two kisses. The hunter in the evening returns with about half as much game as before and receives two kisses, and again they laugh.

On the third morning, the wife is glorious, and Gawain, a young man about to meet his death, has all he can do to keep his head and retain his knightly honor, with this last gift before him of the luxury of life. This time, he accepts three kisses. And when she has delivered these, she begs him, as a token of her love, to accept her garter. "It is charmed," she says, "and will protect you against every danger." So Gawain accepts the garter. And when the hunter returns with just one silly, smelly fox, which he tosses onto the floor, he receives in exchange three kisses from Gawain -- but no garter.

Do we not see what the tests are of this young knight Gawain? They are the same as the first two of Buddha. One is of desire, lust. The other is of the fear of death. Gawain had proved courage enough in just keeping his faith with this adventure. However, the garter was just one temptation too many.

So when Gawain is approaching the Green Chapel, he hears the Green Knight there, whetting the great ax-whiff, whiff, whiff, whiff. Gawain arrives, and the giant simply says to him, "Stretch your neck out here on this block." Gawain does so, and the Green Knight lifts the ax, but then pauses. "No, stretch it out -- a little more," he says. Gawain does so, and again the giant elevates the great ax. "A little more," he says once again. Gawain does the best he can and then whiffff -- only giving Gawain's neck one little scratch. Then the Green Knight, who is in fact the hunter himself transfigured, explains, "That's for the garter."

This, they say, is the origin legend of the order of the Knights of the Garter.

MOYERS: And the moral of the story?

CAMPBELL: The moral, I suppose, would be that the first requirements for a heroic career are the knightly virtues of loyalty, temperance, and courage. The loyalty in this case is of two degrees or commitments: first, to the chosen adventure, but then, also, to the ideals of the order of knighthood. Now, this second commitment seems to put Gawain's way in opposition to the way of the Buddha, who when ordered by the Lord of Duty to perform the social duties proper to his caste, simply ignored the command, and that night achieved illumination as well as release from rebirth. Gawain is a European and, like Odysseus, who remained true to the earth and returned from the Island of the Sun to his marriage with Penelope, he has accepted, as the commitment of his life, not release from but loyalty to the values of life in this world. And yet, as we have just seen, whether following the middle way of the Buddha or the middle way of Gawain, the passage to fulfillment lies between the perils of desire and fear.

A third position, closer than Gawain's to that of the Buddha, yet loyal still to the values of life on this earth, is that of Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra. In a kind of parable, Nietzsche describes what he calls the three transformations of the spirit. The first is that of the camel, of childhood and youth. The camel gets down on his knees and says, "Put a load on me." This is the season for obedience, receiving instruction and the information your society requires of you in order to live a responsible life.

But when the camel is well loaded, it struggles to its feet and runs out into the desert, where it is transformed into a lion -- the heavier the load that had been carried, the stronger the lion will be. Now, the task of the lion is to kill a dragon, and the name of the dragon is "Thou shalt." On every scale of this scaly beast, a "thou shalt" is imprinted: some from four thousand years ago; others from this morning's headlines. Whereas the camel, the child, had to submit to the "thou shalts," the lion, the youth, is to throw them off and come to his own realization.

And so, when the dragon is thoroughly dead, with all its "thou shalts" overcome, the lion is transformed into a child moving out of its own nature, like a wheel impelled from its own hub. No more rules to obey. No more rules derived from the historical needs and tasks of the local society, but the pure impulse to living of a life in flower.

The Power of Myth, Pages 188-191

"That is one of the great messages of mythology. I, as I now know myself, am not the final form of my being. We must constantly die one way or another to the selfhood already achieved."..:thumb001:

Later,
-Lyfing

[Treffie]

Sorry to be so pernickity, but us Ancient Brits take umbrage to this :( :D


Well, the old English tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a famous one

[Psychonaut]

Sorry to be so pernickity, but us Ancient Brits take umbrage to this :( :D

To be fair, the story (or at least the most well known version of it (http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/62.html)) is written in Middle English. :shrug:

[Treffie]

To be fair, the story (or at least the most well known version of it (http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/62.html)) is written in Middle English. :shrug:

Oh yes, I didn't see it like that. Perhaps I was being overly patriotic. (tries to insert smiley (stupid machine))

[Psychonaut]

Oh yes, I didn't see it like that. Perhaps I was being overly patriotic. (tries to insert smiley (stupid machine))

Perhaps Lyfing can shed some light on this since he's more familiar with Campbell than probably anyone else on the forum, but I always did wonder why Campbell didn't pay as much attention to Celtic mythology as he did the other pantheons, particularly since he himself was either a Celt or a Celto-Germanic!

[Lyfing]

Hey Psychonaut,

Mythology is a pretty broad subject..


Jung's ideas of the “archetypes” is one of the leading theories, today, in the field of our subject. It is a development of the earlier theory of Adolf Bastain (1826-1905), who recognized, in the course of his extensive travels, the uniformity of what he termed the “elementary ideas” (Elementargedanke) of mankind. Remarking also, however, that in the various provinces of human culture these ideas are differently articulated and elaborated, he coined the term “ethnic ideas” (Voelkergedanke) for the actual, local manifestations of the universal forms. Nowhere, he noted, are the “elementary ideas” to be found in a pure state, abstracted from the locally conditioned “ethnic ideas” through which they are substantialized; but rather, like the image of man himself, they are to be known only by way of the rich variety of their extremely interesting, frequently startling, yet always finally recognizable inflections in the panarama of human life.

Two possibilities of emphasis are implicit in this observation of Bastain. The first we may term the psychological and the second the ethnological; and these can be taken to represent, broadly, the two contrasting points of view from which scientist, scholars, and philosophers have approached our subject.

Primitive Mythology, pages 32-33

Joseph Campbell approached mythology with an understanding of both of these perspectives. Leaning towards the psychological, or elementary, he always sought to find in the mythology of everyone The Hero with a Thousand Faces (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth).

I do wish sometimes he had said all he could have said about a certain mythology or two. But , that would have been to miss his point..



Its main result for me has been its confirmation of a thought I have long and faithfully entertained: of the unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but also in its spiritual history, which has everywhere unfolded in the manner of a single symphony, with its themes announced, developed, amplified and turned about, distorted, reasserted, and today, in a grand fortissimo of all sections sounding together, irresistibly advancing to some kind of mighty climax, out of which the next great movement will emerge.

The Back of The Mask of God Books

He never showed any favoritism to any one mythology at all, instead, throughout his writings, he has presented to us a certain blue-print made out of play-doe that we can create any Thing that we see fit with..


The norms of myth, understood in the way rather of the “elementary ideas” (marga) than of the “ethnic” (desi), recognized, as in the Domitilla Ceiling (Figure 1), through an intelligent “making use” not of one mythology only but of all the dead and set-fast symbologies of the past, will enable the individual to anticipate and activate in himself the centers of his own creative imagination, out of which his own myth and life-building “Yes because” may then unfold. But in the end, as in the case of Parzival, the guide within will be his own noble heart alone, and the guide without, the image of beauty, the radiance of divinity, that wakes in his heart amor: the deepest, inmost seed of his nature, consubstantial with the process of the All, “thus come.” And in this life-creative adventure the criterion of achievement will be, as in every one of the tales here reviewed, the courage to let go the past, with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of “meaning” and its gifts: to die to the world and to come to birth from within.

Creative Mythology, pages 677-678

The story above (http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showpost.php?p=46973&postcount=2) being a perfect example..


That is one of the great messages of mythology. I, as I now know myself, am not the final form of my being. We must constantly die one way or another to the selfhood already achieved.

Later,
-Lyfing

[Lyfing]

There is more to it than that though..

His perfect example was the Holy Grail..


He completed his M.A. in Medieval Literature in 1926 with a thesis on The Dolorous Stroke, the origin of the Wasteland symbolism in the Grail legends. His advisor was Roger Loomis, a leading Arthurian scholar.

http://www.folkstory.com/campbell/scholars_life.html

From The Power of Myth..



MOYERS: There is a wonderful image in King Arthur where the knights of the Round Table are about to enter the search for the Grail in the Dark Forest, and the narrator says, "They thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. So each entered the forest at a separate point of his choice." You've interpreted that to express the Western emphasis upon the unique phenomenon of a single human life -- the individual confronting darkness.

CAMPBELL: What struck me when I read that in the thirteenth-century Queste del Saint Graal was that it epitomizes an especially Western spiritual aim and ideal, which is, of living the life that is potential in you and was never in anyone else as a possibility.

This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else's. In the traditional Orient, on the other hand, and generally in all traditionally grounded societies, the individual is cookie-molded. His duties are put upon him in exact and precise terms, and there's no way of breaking out from them. When you go to a guru to be guided on the spiritual way, he knows just where you are on the traditional path, just where you have to go next, just what you must do to get there. He'll give you his picture to wear, so you can be like him. That wouldn't be a proper Western pedagogical way of guidance. We have to give our students guidance in developing their own pictures of themselves. What each must seek in his life never was, on land or sea. It is to be something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.

Pages 302-303

And further, ( actually preceding )..


For even in the sphere of Waking Consciousness, the fixed and the set fast, there is nothing now that endures. The known myths cannot endure. The known God cannot endure. Whereas formerly, for generations, life so held to established norms that the lifetime of a deity could be reckoned in millenniums, today all norms are in flux, so that the individual is thrown, willy-nilly, back upon himself, into the inward sphere of his own becoming, his forest adventurous without way or path, to come through his own integrity in experience to his own intelligible Castle of the Grail—integrity and courage, in experience, in love, in loyalty, and in act. And to this end the guiding myths can no longer be on any thnic norms, No sooner learned these are outdated, out of place, washed away. There are today no horizons, no mythogenetic zones. Or rather, the mythogenetic zone is the individual heart. Individualism and spontaneous pluralism—the free association of men and women of like spirit, under protection of a secular, rational state with no pretensions to divinity—are in the modern world the only honest possibilities: each the creative center of authority for himself, in Cusanus's circle without circumference whose center is everywhere, and where each is the focus of God's gaze.

The norms of myth, understood in the way rather of the “elementary ideas” (marga) than of the “ethnic” (desi), recognized, as in the Domitilla Ceiling (Figure 1), through an intelligent “making use” not of one mythology only but of all the dead and set-fast symbologies of the past, will enable the individual to anticipate and activate in himself the centers of his own creative imagination, out of which his own myth and life-building “Yes because” may then unfold. But in the end, as in the case of Parzival, the guide within will be his own noble heart alone, and the guide without, the image of beauty, the radiance of divinity, that wakes in his heart amor: the deepest, inmost seed of his nature, consubstantial with the process of the All, “thus come.” And in this life-creative adventure the criterion of achievement will be, as in every one of the tales here reviewed, the courage to let go the past, with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of “meaning” and its gifts: to die to the world and to come to birth from within.

Creative Mythology, pages 677-678

I venture to say that the Holy Grail is Mimir's Well, and that in it are the Runes..

Those elementary and ethnic ideas are..


But that the mythology presumed the existence of such a world follows already from the fact that Urd's fountain, which gives the warmth of life to the world-tree, must have had its deepest fountain there, just as Hvergelmir has its in the world of primeval cold, and Mimir has his fountain in that wisdom which unites the opposites and makes them work together in a cosmic world.

http://www.northvegr.org/lore/rydberg/078.php


Odin's character as the lord of poetry has not the faintest idea in common with the contents of the strophe. His character as judge at the court near Urd's fountain, and as the one who, as the judge of the dead, has authority over the liquor in the subterranean horn, is on the other hand closely connected with the contents of the strophe, and is alone able to make it consistent and intelligible. Further on in the poem, Egil speaks of Odin as the lord of poetry. Odin, he says, has not only been severe against him (in the capacity of hilmir Fáns hrosta), but he has also been kind in bestowing the gift of poetry, and therewith consolation in sorrow (bölva bætur). The paraphrase here used by Egil for Odin's name is Míms vinur (Mimir's friend). From Mimir Odin received the drink of inspiration, and thus the paraphrase is in harmony with the sense. As hilmir Fáns hrosta Odin has wounded Egil's heart; as Míms vinur (Mimir's friend) he has given him balsam for the wounds inflicted. This two-sided conception of Odin's relation to the poet permeates the whole poem.

From Völuspá 27, 28, and from Gylfaginning 15, it appears that the mythology knew of a drinking-horn which belonged at the same time, so to speak, both to Asgard and to the lower world. Odin is its possessor, Mimir its keeper. A compact is made between the Asas dwelling in heaven and the powers dwelling in the lower world, and a security (veð) is given for the keeping of the agreement. On the part of the Asas and their clan patriarch Odin, the security given is a drinking-horn. From this "Valfather's pledge" Mimir every morning drinks mead from his fountain of wisdom (Völuspá 28), and from the same horn he waters the root of the world-tree (Völuspá 27). As Müllenhoff has already pointed out (D. Alterth., v. 100 ff.), this drinking-horn is not to be confounded with Heimdal's war-trumpet, the Gjallarhorn, though Gylfaginning is also guilty of this mistake.

Thus the drinking-horn given to Mimir by Valfather represents a treaty between the powers of heaven and of the lower world. Can it be any other than the Hades-horn, which, at the thingstead near Urd's fountain, is employed in the service both of the Asa-gods and of the lower world? The Asas determine the happiness or unhappiness of the dead, and consequently decide what persons are to taste the strength-giving mead of the horn. But the horn has its place in the lower world, is kept there - there performs a task of the greatest importance, and gets its liquid from the fountains of the lower world.

http://www.northvegr.org/lore/rydberg/073.php


Thus in the Eddas, no less than in the Celtic hero tales, we have, as it were, the serpent-lions of The Book of Kells without the Gospel text: the setting ( one of faith might say ) without the jewel of price. However, to those who had learned the reading of the runes--for which Othin gave himself in gage--nature itself revealed the omnispresent jewel.

Occidental Mythology, Page 490

..:wink

Later,
-Lyfing

[Svarog]

Fantastic thread, had all of this already tho and might be able even to contribute with some material, thank you Lyfing.

[Lyfing]

While I'm at it..

Joseph Campbell didn't so much focus on this mythology or that, but, rather, he categorized them along certain lines such as those of the hunters and those of the planters ( and, also, those of the poets like Odin )..

I've went over this before in the Loki Thread (http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2985)..but here goes it again..


The highest concern of all the mythologies, ceremonials, ethical
systems, and social organizations of the agriculturally based societies
has been that of suppressing the manifestations of individualism;
and this has been generally achieved by compelling or
persuading people to identify themselves not with their own interests,
intuitions, or modes of experience, but with the archetypes
of behavior and systems of sentiment developed and maintained in
the public domain. A world vision derived from the lesson of the
plants, representing the individual as a mere cell or moment in a
larger process that of the sib, the race, or, in larger terms, the
species so devaluates even the first signs of personal spontaneity
that every impulse to self-discovery is purged away. 'Truly, truly,
I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies,
it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." n This noble
maxim represents the binding sentiment of the holy society that
is to say, the church militant, suffering, and triumphant of those
who do not wish to remain alone.

But, on the other hand, there have always been those who have
very much wished to remain alone, and have done so, achieving
sometimes, indeed, even that solitude in which the Great Spirit, the
Power, the Great Mystery that is hidden from the group in its
concerns is intuited with the inner impact of an immediate force.
And the endless round of the serpent's way, biting its tail, sloughing
its old skin, to come forth renewed and slough again, is then
itself cast away often with scorn for the supernormal experience
of an eternity beyond the beat of time. Like an eagle the spirit
then soars on its own wings. The dragon "Thou Shalt," as Nietzsche
terms the social fiction of the moral law, has been slain by the
lion of self-discovery; and the master roars as the Buddhists
phrase it the lion roar: the roar of the great Shaman of the mountain
peaks, of the void beyond all horizons, and of the bottomless
abyss.

Primitive Mythology, page 240


I do not know of any myth that represents more clearly than
this the crisis that must have faced the societies of the Old World
when the neolithic order of the earth-bound villages began to make
its power felt in a gradual conquest of the most habitable portions
of the earth. The situation in Arizona and New Mexico at the
period of the discovery of America was, culturally, much like that
which must have prevailed in the Near and Middle East and in
Europe from the fourth to second millenniums B.C., when the rigid
patterns proper to an orderly settlement were being imposed on
peoples used to the freedom and vicissitudes of the hunt. And if
we turn our eyes to the mythologies of the Hindus, Persians,
Greeks, Celts, and Germans, we immediately recognize, in the
well-known, oft-recited tales of the conquest of the titans by the
gods, analogies to this legend of the subjugation of the shamans
by the Hactcin. The titans, dwarfs, and giants are represented as
the powers of an earlier mythological age crude and loutish, egoistic
and lawless, in contrast to the comely gods, whose reign of
heavenly order harmoniously governs the worlds of nature and
man. The giants were overthrown, pinned beneath mountains,
exiled to the rugged regions at the bounds of the earth, and as
long as the power of the gods can keep them there the people, the
animals, the birds, and all living things will know the blessings of
a world ruled by law.

Primitive Mythology, pages 238-239



The prophecy is the same as that of the Eddic Twilight of the
Gods, when Loki will lead forth the rugged hosts of Hel:

Then shall happen what seems great tidings: the Wolf
shall swallow the sun; and this shall seem to men a great
harm. Then the other wolf shall seize the moon, and he also
shall work great ruin; the stars shall vanish from the heavens.
Then shall come to pass these tidings also: all the earth shall
tremble so, and the crags, that trees shall be torn up from
the earth, and the crags fall to ruin; and all fetters and bonds
shall be broken and rent. . . . The Fenris-Wolf shall advance
with gaping mouth, and his lower jaw shall be against
the earth, but the upper against heaven, he would gape yet
more if there were room for it; fires blaze forth from his eyes
and nostrils. The Midgard Serpent shall blow venom so that
he shall sprinkle all the air and water; and he is very terrible,
and shall be on one side of the Wolf. . . . Then shall the
Ash of Yggdrasil tremble, and nothing then shall be without
fear in heaven or on earth.65

The binding of the shamans by the Hactcin, by the gods and
their priests, which commenced with the victory of the neolithic
over the paleolithic way of life, may perhaps be already terminating
--today--in this period of the irreversible transition of society
from an agricultural to industrial base, when not the piety of the
planter, bowing humbly before the will of the calendar and the
gods of rain and sun, but the magic of the laboratory, flying rocket
ships where the gods once sat, holds the promise of the boons of
the future.

"Could it be possible! This old saint in the forest has not heard
that God is dead!" 66

Nietzsche's word was the first pronouncement of the Promethean
Titan that is now coming unbound within us for the next world
age. And the priests of the chains of Zeus may well tremble; for
the bonds are disintegrating of themselves.

Primitive Mythology, page 281

God is dead..!! As strange at it seems, in our days to say, we are to create new ones. We may call one Odin, we may call one Loki, there ain't no telling what we may call them maybe. They will come out of our hearts from our experiences. We can look back to our ancestors and live what they did again. That is where it all comes from, our blood. It's all new and fresh though. Like spring come again. Our flowers in full bloom..!!


Evidence will appear, in the course of our natural history of the gods, of the gods themselves as supernormal sign stimuli; of the ritual forms deriving from their supernatural inspiration acting as a catalysts to convert men into gods; and civilization—this new environment of man that has grown from his own interior and has pressed back the bounds of nature as far as the moon—as a distillate of ritual, and consequently of the gods: that is to say, as an organization of supernormal sign stimuli playing on a set of IRM's never met by nature and yet most properly nature's own, inasmuch as man is her son.

Primitive Mythology, pages 43-44

I love this stuff. I hope it makes sense to whoever may be reading it..??

Later,
-Lyfing

[Beorn]

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00kvbny)


Six days left to watch.

I am afraid our chums across the channel and the pond will not be able to view this without some sort of proxy.

[lei.talk]

I am afraid our chums across the channel and the pond
will not be able to view this without some sort of proxy.which england-based proxy would be recommended (http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?p=54012#post54012)?
*

[lei.talk]

Originally Posted by BeornWulfWer
...use Hotspot Shield (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1T4GZAZ_enUS281US281&q=%22Hotspot+Shield%22&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10)...
I don't know of any others, I'm afraid.no apricity members know of a proxy-service (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_server)
that is based in their country?
*

[Lyfing]

Just when I think “Joseph Campbell has gotten old to me”..I find myself falling back on his teachings..


Supernatural Aid

Once the hero has committed to the quest, consciously or unconsciously, his or her guide and magical helper appears, or becomes known.

Campbell: "For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the herojourney is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass. What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny. The fantasy is a reassurance - promise that the peace of Paradise, which was know first within the mother womb, is not to be lost; that it supports the present and stands in the future as well as in the past (is omega as well as alpha); that though omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within or just behind, the unfamiliar features of the world. One has only to know and trust, and the ageless guardians will appear. Having responded to his own call, and continuing to follow courageously as the consequences unfold, the hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at his side. Mother Nature herself supports the mighty task. And in so far as the hero's act coincides with that for which his society is ready, he seems to ride on the great rhythm of the historical process." [4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth

Needless to say, he and his teachings where there when I first started. I've went on many journeys through much lore and without fail I find him there. It seems to always be “the forces of the unconscious at my side.” Maybe that is Bastian's elementary ideas. Maybe that is Jung's collective unconscious. Maybe that is Nietzsche's Dionysus. Maybe it is Urd's Well which nourishes the Yggdrasil that I am. Whatever the case may be..

For the past good little while I've studied and thought and thought about just what could be the Christian influences in our mythology. Finding they are so plentiful it's not even funny.. here is what I've come up with to not loose all hope in finding what is genuine with us..

It seems proper to me, if there are such notions, that ethnic ideas are a proper reflection of elementary ideas. How can two different things reflect each other though..??

My favorite Rydberg quote for this one..


But that the mythology presumed the existence of such a world follows already from the fact that Urd's fountain, which gives the warmth of life to the world-tree, must have had its deepest fountain there, just as Hvergelmir has its in the world of primeval cold, and Mimir has his fountain in that wisdom which unites the opposites and makes them work together in a cosmic world.

http://www.northvegr.org/lore/rydberg/078.php

So, really, what I'm getting at..

In Joseph Campbell's Creative Mythology he writes..


The norms of myth, understood in the way rather of the “elementary ideas” (marga) than of the “ethnic” (desi), recognized, as in the Domitilla Ceiling (Figure 1), through an intelligent “making use” not of one mythology only but of all the dead and set-fast symbologies of the past, will enable the individual to anticipate and activate in himself the centers of his own creative imagination, out of which his own myth and life-building “Yes because” may then unfold. But in the end, as in the case of Parzival, the guide within will be his own noble heart alone, and the guide without, the image of beauty, the radiance of divinity, that wakes in his heart amor: the deepest, inmost seed of his nature, consubstantial with the process of the All, “thus come.” And in this life-creative adventure the criterion of achievement will be, as in every one of the tales here reviewed, the courage to let go the past, with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of “meaning” and its gifts: to die to the world and to come to birth from within.

Creative Mythology, pages 677-678

Here is Figure 1..the Domitilla Ceiling..

http://www.metahistory.org/images/OrpheusCeiling.jpg

and what Campbell said about it..


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 lyre 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 which 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, orthadox mind, on the other hand, is always and everywhere focused upon the local, culturally conditioned rendition.

Creative Mythology, page 8


This all brings to mind something I said to Barreldriver in his thread called.. I'm still searching... (http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=2594&highlight=elementary+ideas) a long time ago.. which went like..


What I am getting at with all of that is that here lately I’ve been exploring Celtic Mythology. As I’ve done so I’ve constantly compared it with Germanic Mythology trying to find similarities, and I’ve felt the Germanic god/esses as being very familiar with me, to the point of not even feeling so much at home in with the Celtic. I can’t hardly even pronounce most of the names even. So the other day I was starring at the Gundestrup cauldron thinking about this stuff and it came to me that while I can find the “elementary” ideas within the two, that it is with the “ethnic” that is messing with me. Then was answered y/our question of “to which should I feel loyalty to?” for me with the notion that they are both excellent sets of symbols and that it’s really just the one one is most familiar with that strikes the ultimate chord. I picked the Germanic so long ago it’s burnt into my head and even with such understandings as the above I will always be loyal to them. But loyal ain’t the right word..it’s familiar. In other words one could probably just pick one, as if they were born into it, and it will work pretty much the same..there will be differences in the out-come of course though..so choose wisely and maybe one day you will be like Odin and drink of the mead and become a creative poet (/heathen..) with your own noble heart alone as the guide within.. your self sacrificed to your Self..

So here is the Gundestrup Cauldron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gundestrup_cauldron ..)..

http://robertarood.files.wordpress.com/2007/11/gundestrupkarret1.jpg

It can put one in mind of the Domitilla Ceiling can't it..??

Now how does all of this have to do with finding Christianity in our mythology..??

First there is the Frank's Casket (http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1113&highlight=franks+casket)..

http://www.franks-casket.de/jpg/home.jpg

It looks like the Domitila Ceiling and the Gundestrup Cauldron..??

Here is where I put together what I'm thinking about..

Bugge had the Gosforth Cross (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosforth_Cross) in his head..

http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~catshaman/25pictst/gosforth.JPG

and said this..


Every one who is familiar with Scandinavian mythology must be reminded by this carving of Sigyn sitting beside, or over, the bound Loki. The same cross on which this scene is found also represents, among other things, Longinus piercing the crucified Christ with his lance so that blood flows from the wound. The carvings on this monument argue, then, for the view that the author of Völuspá heard in norther England the story of Loki and Sigyn, or verses which treated that story. He may possibly have seen the Gosforth Cross himself, and have been told the story of Loki and Sigyn in explanation of the scenes carved thereon.

http://www.northvegr.org/lore/poems/000_05.php

And, the kicker which makes the first last and the last first ( I couldn't resist )..is this..


These Norsemen transferred the stories they heard in the West about Christ, the Son of God, to Baldr, the son of their highest god Odin---yet not without change; they transformed them, with the aid of their vivid, creative imaginations, in accordance with special heathen Scandinavian conceptions, so that the new myths thus formed became genuinely national in character.

http://www.northvegr.org/lore/poems/000_03.php

What else is there to say..??

These sentiments echo ( or to use Mimir's Well as an example..are in Odin's eye ) a thread recently posted by Hellasson..called Techno-Heathenry.... A treatise. (http://www.theapricity.com/forum/showthread.php?p=66498#post66498) And many by Psychonaut. They put it from a different perspective than I do.

There is this train of thought ( it ain't the gravy train ) that we are indeed Supermen, and that there is away of inspiring, or even creating, the deepest centers of our being..

Later,
-Lyfing

[Lyfing]

THE LESSON OF THE MASK

The artist eye, as Thomas Mann
has said, 1 has a mythical slant upon life; therefore, the mythological
realm the world of the gods and demons, the carnival of their
masks and the curious game of "as if' in which the festival of the
lived myth abrogates all the laws of time, letting the dead swim
back to life, and the "once upon a time" become the very present
we must approach and first regard with the artist's eye. For,
indeed, in the primitive world, where most of the clues to the
origin of mythology must be sought, the gods and demons are not
conceived in the way of hard and fast, positive realities. A god
can be simultaneously in two or more places like a melody, or
like the form of a traditional mask. And wherever he comes, the
impact of his presence is the same: it is not reduced through
multiplication. Moreover, the mask in a primitive festival is
revered and experienced as a veritable apparition of the mythical
being that it represents even though everyone knows that a man
made the mask and that a man is wearing it. The one wearing it,
furthermore, is identified with the god during the time of the ritual
of which the mask is a part. He does not merely represent the god;
he is the god. The literal fact that the apparition is composed of A,
a mask, B, its reference to a mythical being, and C, a man, is dis-
missed from the mind, and the presentation is allowed to work
without correction upon the sentiments of both the beholder and
the actor. In other words, there has been a shift of view from the
logic of the normal secular sphere, where things are understood
to be distinct from one another, to a theatrical or play sphere, where
they are accepted for what they are experienced as being and the
logic is that of "make believe" "as if."

We all know the convention, surely! It is a primary, spontaneous
device of childhood, a magical device, by which the world can be
transformed from banality to magic in a trice. And its inevitability
in childhood is one of those universal characteristics of man that
unite us in one family. It is a primary datum, consequently, of the
science of myth, which is concerned precisely with the phenomenon
of self-induced belief.

"A professor," wrote Leo Frobenius in a celebrated paper on
the force of the daemonic world of childhood, "is writing at his
desk and his four-year-old little daughter is running about the
room. She has nothing to do and is disturbing him. So he gives her
three burnt matches, saying, 'Here! Play!' and, sitting on the rug,
she begins to play with the matches, Hansel, Gretel, and the witch.
A considerable time elapses, during which the professor con-
centrates upon his task, undisturbed. But then, suddenly, the child
shrieks in terror. The father jumps. 'What is it? What has hap-
pened?* The little girl comes running to him, showing every sign
of great fright. 'Daddy, Daddy,' she cries, 'take the witch away! I
can't touch the witch any more!' "

"An eruption of emotion," Frobenius observes,

is characteristic of the spontaneous shift of an idea from the
level of the sentiments (Gemut) to that of sensual conscious-
ness (sinnliches Bewusstsein) . Furthermore, the appearance
of such an eruption obviously means that a certain spiritual
process has reached a conclusion. The match is not a witch;
nor was it a witch for the child at the beginning of the game.
The process, therefore, rests on the fact that the match has
become a witch on the level of the sentiments and the conclu-
sion of the process coincides with the transfer of this idea to
the plane of consciousness. The observation of the process
escapes the test of conscious thought, since it enters conscious-
ness only after or at the moment of completion. However,
inasmuch as the idea is, ?t must have become. The process is
creative, in the highest sense of the word; for, as we have seen,
in a little girl a match can become a witch. Briefly stated,
then: the phase of becoming takes place on the level of the
sentiments, while that of being is on the conscious plane. 2

This vivid, convincing example of a child's seizure by a witch
while in the act of play may be taken to represent an intense degree
of the daemonic mythological experience. However, the attitude of
mind represented by the game itself, before the seizure supervened,
also belongs within the sphere of our subject. For, as L Huizinga
has pointed out in his brilliant study of the play element in culture,
the whole point, at the beginning, is the fun of play, not the rapture
of seizure. "In all the wild imaginings of mythology a fanciful spirit
is playing," he writes, "on the border-line between jest and
earnest." 3 "As far as I know, ethnologists and anthropologists
concur in the opinion that the mental attitude in which the great
religious feasts of savages are celebrated and witnessed is not one of
complete illusion. There is an underlying consciousness of things
*not being real.' " 4 And he quotes, among others, R. R. Marett,
who, in his chapter on "Primitive Credulity" in The Threshold of
Religion, develops the idea that a certain element of "make-
believe" is operative in all primitive religions. "The savage," wrote
Marett, "is a good actor who can be quite absorbed in his role, like
a child at play; and also, like a child, a good spectator who can be
frightened to death by the roaring of something he knows perfectly
well to be no 'real' lion." 5

"By considering the whole sphere of so-called primitive culture
as a play-sphere," Huizinga then suggests in conclusion, "we pave
the way to a more direct and more general understanding of its
peculiarities than any meticulous psychological or sociological
analysis would allow." e And I would concur wholeheartedly with
this judgment, only adding that we should extend the considera-
tion to the entire field of our present subject.

In the Roman Catholic mass, for example, when the priest,
quoting the words of Christ at the Last Supper, pronounces the
formula of consecration with utmost solemnity first over the
wafer of the host (Hoc est enim Corpus mewn: "for this is My
Body"), then over the chalice of the wine (Hie est enim Calix
Sanguinis mei f novi et aeterni Testamenti: Mysterium fidei: qui pro
vobis et pro multis effundetur in remissionem peccatorum: "For
this is the Chalice of My Blood, of the new and eternal testament:
the mystery of faith: which shall be shed for you and for many
unto the remission of sins' 5 ), it is to be supposed that the bread
and wine become the body and blood of Christ, that every fragment
of the host and every drop of the wine is the actual living Savior
of the world. The sacrament, that is to say, is not conceived to be
a reference, a mere sign or symbol to arouse in us a train of
thought, but is God himself, the Creator, Judge, and Savior of the
Universe, here come to work upon us directly, to free our souls
(created in His image) from the effects of the Fall of Adam and
Eve in the Garden of Eden (which we are to suppose existed as a
geographical fact) .

Comparably, in India it is believed that, in response to con-
secrating formulae, deities will descend graciously to infuse their
divine substance into the temple images, which are then called their
throne or seat (pitha). It is also possible and in some Indian
sects even expected that the individual himself should become a
seat of deity. In the Gandharva Tantra it is written, for example,
"No one who is not himself divine can successfully worship a
divinity"; and again, "Having become the divinity, one should
offer it sacrifice." 7

Furthermore, it is even possible for a really gifted player to
discover that everything absolutely everything has become the
body of a god, or reveals the omnipresence of God as the ground
of all being. There is a passage, for example, among the conversa-
tions of the nineteenth-century Bengalese spiritual master Ra-
makrishna, in which he described such an experience. "One day,*'
he is said to have reported, "it was suddenly revealed to me that
everything is Pure Spirit. The utensils of worship, the altar, the
door frame all Pure Spirit. Men, animals, and other living beings
all Pure Spirit. Then like a madman I began to shower flowers
in all directions. Whatever I saw I worshiped." 8

Belief or at least a game of belief is the first step toward
such a divine seizure. The chronicles of the saints abound in ac-
counts of their long ordeals of difficult practice, which preceded
iieir moments of being carried away; and we have also the more
spontaneous religious games and exercises of the folk (the
amateurs) to illustrate for us the principle involved. The spirit of
the festival, the holiday, the holy day of the religious ceremonial,
requires that the normal attitude toward the cares of the world
should have been temporarily set aside in favor of a particular
mood of dressing up. The world is hung with banners. Or in the
permanent religious sanctuaries the temples and cathedrals,
where an atmosphere of holiness hangs permanently in the air
the logic of cold, hard fact must not be allowed to intrude and
spoil the spell. The gentile, the "spoil sport," the positivist, who
cannot or will not play, must be kept aloof. Hence the guardian
figures that stand at either side of the entrances to holy places:
lions, bulls, or fearsome warriors with uplifted weapons. They are
there to keep out the "spoil sports," the advocates of Aristotelean
logic, for whom A can never be B; for whom the actor is never to
be lost in the part; for whom the mask, the image, the consecrated
host, tree, or animal cannot become God, but only a reference.
Such heavy thinkers are to remain without. For the whole purpose
of entering a sanctuary or participating in a festival is that one
should be overtaken by the state known in India as "the other
mind" (Sanskrit, anya-manas: absent-mindedness, possession by a
spirit), where one is "beside oneself," spellbound, set apart from
one's logic of self-possession and overpowered by the force of a
logic of "indissociation" wherein A is B, and C also is B.

"One day," said Ramakrishna, "while worshiping Shiva, I
was about to offer a bel-leaf on the head of the image, when it was
revealed to me that this universe itself is Shiva. Another day, I
had been plucking flowers when it was revealed to me that each
plant was a bouquet adorning the universal form of God. That
was the end of my plucking flowers. I look on man in just the
same way. When I see a man, I see that it is God Himself, who
walks on earth, rocking to and fro, as it were, like a pillow floating
on the waves." 9

From such a point of view the universe is the seat (plthd) of a
divinity from whose vision our usual state of consciousness ex-
cludes us. But in the playing of the game of the gods we take a
step toward that reality which is ultimately the reality of our-
selves. Hence the rapture, the feelings of delight, and the sense of
refreshment, harmony, and re-creation! In the case of a saint, the
game leads to seizure as in the case of the little girl, to whom
die match revealed itself to be a witch. Contact with the orienta-
tion of the world may then be lost, the mind remaining rapt in
that other state. For such it is impossible to return to this other
game, the game of life in the world. They are possessed of God;
that is all they know on earth and all they need to know. And they
can even infect whole societies, so that these, inspired by their
seizures, may likewise break contact with the world and spurn it
as delusory, or as evil. Secular life then may be read as a fall a
fall from Grace, Grace being the rapture of the festival of God.

But there is another attitude, more comprehensive, which has
given beauty and love to the two worlds: that, namely, of the
Ilia, "the play," as it has been termed in the Orient. The world is
not condemned and shunned as a fall, but voluntarily entered as
a game or dance, wherein the spirit plays.

Ramakrishna closed his eyes. "Is it only this?" he said. "Does
God exist only when the eyes are closed, and disappear when the
eyes are opened?" He opened his eyes. "The Play belongs to Him
to whom Eternity belongs, and Eternity to Him to whom the
Play belongs. . . . Some people climb the seven floors of a
building and cannot get down; but some climb up and then, at
will, visit the lower floors." 10

The question then becomes only: How far down or up the
ladder can one go without losing the sense of a game? Professor
Huizinga, in his work already referred to, points out that in Japa-
nese the verb asobu, which refers to play in general recreation,
relaxation, amusement, trip or jaunt, dissipation, gambling, lying
idle, or being unemployed also means to study at a university or
under a teacher; likewise, to engage in a sham fight; and finally, to
participate in the very strict formalities of the tea ceremony. He
continues:

The extraordinary earnestness and profound gravity of the
Japanese ideal of life is masked by the fashionable fiction that
everything is only play. Like the chevaterie of the Christian
Middle Ages, Japanese bushido took shape almost entirely in
the play-sphere and was enacted in play-forms. The language
still preserves this conception in the asobase-kotoba (literally
play-language) or polite speech, the mode of address used in
conversation with persons of higher rank. The convention is
that the higher classes are merely playing at all they do. The
polite form for "you arrive in Tokyo" is, literally, "you play
arrival in Tokyo"; and for "I hear that your father is dead,"
"I hear that your father has played dying." In other words, the
revered person is imagined as living in an elevated sphere
where only pleasure or condescension moves to action. 11

From this supremely aristocratic point of view, any state of
seizure, whether by life or by the gods, must represent a fall or
drop of spiritual niveau, a vulgarization of the play. Nobility of
spirit is the grace or ability to play, whether in heaven or on
earth. And this, I take it, this noblesse oblige, which has always
been the quality of aristocracy, was precisely the virtue (dpcnj) of
the Greek poets, artists, and philosophers, for whom the gods were
true as poetry is true. We may take it also to be the primitive (and
proper) mythological point of view, as contrasted with the heavier
positivistic; which latter is represented, on the one hand, by re-
ligious experiences of the literal sort, where the impact of a
daemon, rising to the plane of consciousness from its place of
birth on the level of the sentiments, is taken to be objectively real,
and, on the other, by science and political economy, for which
only measurable facts are objectively real. For if it is true, as the
Greek philosopher Antisthenes (born c. 444 B.C.) has said, that
"God is not like anything: hence no one can understand him by
means of an image," ** or, as we read in the Indian Upanishad,

It is other, indeed, than the known
And, moreover, above the unknown! 1S

then it must be conceded, as a basic principle of our natural his-
tory of the gods and heroes, that whenever a myth has been taken
literally its sense has been perverted; but also, reciprocally, that
whenever it has been dismissed as a mere priestly fraud or sign of
inferior intelligence, truth has slipped out the other door.

And so what, then, is the sense that we are to seek, if it be
neither here nor there?

Kant, in his Prolegomena to Every Future System of Meta-
physics, states very carefully that all our thinking about final things
can be only by way of analogy. "The proper expression for our
fallible mode of conception," he declares, "would be: that we
imagine the world as if its being and inner character were derived
from a supreme mind" (italics mine). 14

Such a highly played game of "as if" frees our mind and spirit,
on the one hand, from the presumption of theology, which pre-
tends to know the laws of God, and, on the other, from the bond-
age of reason, whose laws do not apply beyond the horizon of
human experience.

I am willing to accept the word of Kant, as representing the
view of a considerable metaphysician. And applying it to the
range of festival games and attitudes just reviewed from the
mask to the consecrated host and temple image, transubstanti-
ated worshiper and transubstantiated world I can see, or be-
lieve I can see, that a principle of release operates throughout the
series by way of the alchemy of an "as if"; and that, through this,
the impact of all so-called "reality" upon the psyche is transub-
stantiated. The play state and the rapturous seizures sometimes
deriving from it represent, therefore, a step rather toward than
away from the ineluctable truth; and belief acquiescence in a
belief that is not quite belief is the first step toward the deep-
ened participation that the festival affords in that general will to
life which, in its metaphysical aspect, is antecedent to, and the
creator of, all life's laws.

The opaque weight of the world both of life on earth and of
death, heaven, and hell is dissolved, and the spirit freed, not
from anything, for there was nothing from which to be freed ex-
cept a myth too solidly believed, but for something, something
fresh and new, a spontaneous act.

From the position of secular man (Homo sapiens), that is to
say, we are to enter the play sphere of the festival, acquiescing in
a game of belief, where fun, joy, and rapture rule in ascending
series. The laws of life in time and space economics, politics, and
even morality will thereupon dissolve. Whereafter, re-created
by that return to paradise before the Fall, before the knowledge
of good and evil, right and wrong, true and false, belief and dis-
belief, we are to carry the point of view and spirit of man the
player (Homo ludens) back into life; as in the play of children,
where, undaunted by the banal actualities of life's meager possi-
bilities, the spontaneous impulse of the spirit to identify itself
with something other than itself for the sheer delight of play,
transubstantiates the world in which, actually, after all, things
are not quite as real or permanent, terrible, important, or logical
as they seem.


Primitive Mythology (http://www.archive.org/stream/masksofgodprimit008825mbp/masksofgodprimit008825mbp_djvu.txt), Pages 21-29

Later,
-Lyfing