Review: "A Short History of Myth"

In her brief but compelling book, "A Short History of Myth," the historian of religion Karen Armstrong presents a succinct introduction to mythology. She traces its function and development for human society from the dawn of history up to the modern scientific view of myth as false, and the absolute need for a return to mythic thinking in the post-modern world. While her introductory definition of mythology draws heavily on the work of Mircea Eliade and his notions of hierophanies and the "eternal return," as well as the ever-popular monomythologizing of Joseph Campbell, it does not however fall pray to the faults of either a rabid comparative mythology that refuses to acknowledge the importance of distinct cultural contexts in the development of myth, or the even more insidious notion that mythology represents a primitive mentality and un-rational explanation of natural phenomena. Instead, Armstrong describes myth as an art form or "counter-narrative," which allows man to "cope with the problematic human predicament" and "live more intensely" in the world (1-6). As such, her definition of myth harks more towards the idea that myth describes not history, but a symbolic or metaphoric relationship that orients mankind in reality. Looking at the earliest examples of religious expression in Neanderthal graves, Armstrong posits five important aspects or functions of myth: they are rooted in the experience and fear of death, are inseparable from ritual actions and re-creations, force their participants to go beyond the extremes of their experience, prescribe how humans ought to behave, and speak of a transcendent reality that mankind is always seeking for in order to affirm their existence (4-5). Starting from the earliest religious myths of hunter-gathering societies, replete with shamanistic behavior and supreme sky gods, Armstrong takes us through the violent mother deities and dying consort gods that accompanied the discovery of agriculture, the cyclic wars and floods that described the conquest of the gods of order over chaos during the rise of the city-states, the blossoming of the ethical sages and religions around the axial turn of the first millennium, the immanent descent into the historical doctrines and mysticisms of the big three monotheistic religions, and the inevitable death of myth at the hands of Western rationalism and science in the modern age. While her discussion of this history of mythology once again relies on Eliade's own theories in his "Patterns In Comparative Religion" and "Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries," Armstrong's glance at the modern uses of mythology strikes home, critiquing fundamentalists who would interpret the Bible literally, the lack of stories that help us understand the nihilistic despair of modern warfare and terrorism, and the misplaced worship of pop-culture icons, suggesting that "myth must lead to imitation or participation, no passive contemplation" (135), or worse, sterile rationalization. In order to offer some sense of hope, and to suggest a place where myth may indeed be thriving, Armstrong wraps up with a discussion of the use of mythic themes in modern literature and art, from T.S. Elliot to Malcolm Lowry. While she laments that the modern novel is at best profane and far removed from the spiritual and ritual context that engendered mythology, she suggests that reading can still be highly transformative and orienting, and that "if it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another..." and that if "professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, [then] our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world" (148-9). Despite this pronouncement that myth is primarily dead it may however be possible that we still live under the thrall of mythological tropes even today, in the guise of movie action heroes, the need for an edenic eternal youth, the desire to demonize our strangers and enemies, even in the scientific quest itself to know all that there is to know and build all that there is to build. But nonetheless, mankind seems to want to remain blissfully (or brutally) unawares of this eternal return to the mythic condition, and it may indeed be as of yet unwritten works of literature, and art, that could allow us to once again understand our selves in this world.

Active Dreaming

Among other fantastic images like last night's flying fish, I have been dreaming for the past week about climbing up the endless stairwells of an enormous tower, traveling to space, and trying to find a way to unlock a solitary window at the end of a long hallway. Certainly these symbols, and the often comic ways they are framed, have some relation to things I have been paying attention to in my waking life recently, and if not, could be considered dream signs akin to attempting to turn on a light. However, I am not trying to psychoanalyze myself, or have a lucid dream, but to have an active dream (or as I might jokingly put it, to go on a dream quest), dreaming of symbols and narratives of ascension in order to dream myself to the heaven of my mythological dream world, much the way that last year I used descension narratives to dream myself "to hell and back." This original idea had come after years of studying techniques of dreaming and symbolizing, Campbell's hero's journey monomyth, Géza Róheim's "The Gates of the Dream," James Hillman's "Dream and the Underworld," and some of the classics of epic and mythology wherein a character journey's to the underworld in order to bring back some family member, lost idea, etc... Having dreamt myself to my own personal hell, to face my deepest unconscious fears head on before getting back into school and moving on with my life, I figured it was time to continue the journey in the other direction, especially since the question of gods and spirituality has been a much larger, imminent unknown for so much of my life.

In order to do this, I have been giving my focus to symbolisms that surround such mystical or shamanic ascents (cf. Eliade's writings on the topic in Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries and Images and Symbols): climbing ropes, stairs, towers, the cosmic tree, birds (and angels), the spheres of the heavens, rainbows, etc... visualizing these kinds of scenes each night before going to bed, and attending to such images as they might turn up in my waking life. So far I have had a rather stunning success finding myself working my way up through the tower of sleep (always a potent symbol in my dreaming), but I also know that I could get stuck here, that some other image is needed, like a puzzle that needs its key in order to move on. During the early stages of my descension dreaming I found myself similarly confronted with and stuck in scenes reminiscent of the accompanying narrative symbols I was trying to evoke until I finally realized that one of the dream characters was asking me for three coins, much like those given to the ferryman by the dead. Consequently I took three coins with me into the next dream (under my pillow, with other similar dream tools), and was finally able to descend to the depths I had sought. Of course, I'm not quite sure what sort of similar symbol or tool accompanies ascension narratives, perhaps being much less familiar with the literature, but my dreams keep suggesting that music might unlock the window so that I can leap out and fly.

The End of the States as We Know them

Writing my research paper on the failure of the 1890 Ghost Dance of the Lakota Sioux, it seemed that though the Lakota had been unable to bring about a millenarian destruction of the invading European-Americans, their fierce sense of independence and traditional religious practices still held strong, and has carried their culture through Western dominance till today. In this light it is fairly amazing, but not at all surprising to see that the Lakota People have declared independence from the U.S. government, finally able to overcome 150 years worth of broken treaties, and are inviting anyone who lives in the five surrounding states to join them in their new Nation. Furthermore, the Navajo are also seeking support for their own tribal Constitution, and it seems that there is a broad push across the country for American Indian tribes to take up the mantel of self-governance. I think this is splendid, and it's about time that peoples who have been oppressed for the last century and a half are finally able to take a stand for their autonomy. We can only wonder if states like Vermont will now make their own pushes to secede.

Over the summer I had a chance to check out the new National Museum of the American Indian, part of the Smithsonian Institute in D.C., and was informed of the some of the difficult problems faced with trying to establish representation for a people who are not one central body-politic, but countless tribes, each with their own distinct culture and mytho-historical milieu. While the museum is run by a tribal council, it turns out that only the richest tribes responded to the open call for artifacts, leading to claims of unfairness by the unrepresented tribes. Consequently, the museum exhibits suffered from trying to give the broadest view to the most distinct of tribes across the Americas, often loosing any sense of context that didn't seem to do any justice to the wealth of cultures, or the influence of Western European ideas and practices on traditional patterns of behavior, such as this ritual prayer circle marked with quotes from the Book of Revelations:



Such apocalyptic fantasizing may not always have a place in American Indian mythologies (the Mayans aside, but when you believe time is cyclical, would you predict that the world will end in 2012?), but the icy climes of Norway certainly lend themselves to their Ragnaroks, which might be why the Norwegians have built a 'doomsday vault' to house a collection of all the world's seeds. When Lif and Lifthrasir inherit the earth after the doom of the Aesir at the jaws of the Fenrir wolf and the Jormungand serpent, the surviving humans will surely want something to eat, and the means necessary to continue culture.

Personally I am in support of such "7th Generation" contingency plans, and while I'd like to believe I have a more enlightened (and less terrified) view these days of what the future holds, there's never any telling if crazy idiots with itching fingers wouldn't just release a nuclear apocalypse. Perhaps more likely, in my opinion, would be an immanent break down of technology. It frightens me that the world is moving all of its media onto digital, and that if one day the parts for computers are no longer available, or the tools to repair them, or any combination of technological failures, then what will become of culture? While storing seeds is a valiant idea, I would also like to see a "time-proof" vault created to store paper copies of the world's greatest literature, philosophies, scientific manuscripts, dictionaries, a true hermetic(ally sealed) library, so that in some distant age people can still maintain an idea of the history of culture, without having to figure out what to play these shiny little discs on.

Magic Chords

Taking a break from working on my dream novel, I was trying to catch up on the internet, and decided that I haven't written much under the topics of magic, music, and ritual. These three modalities often go hand in hand, and Dr. Clothey even suggested that it would be interesting for someone to look closer at the intersection of music and religion.

Music and performance in the modern world often take on highly ritual aspects, a charged atmosphere, the priestly musicians encanting powerful rhythms that effect the audience on a deep physiological level. From the reunion of Led Zeppelin a band charged with magical iconography and Crowleyan flair, to a description of watching someone play Guitar Hero as a spiritual experience, people are often caught up in what seems to be the sheer mysticism of music. Certainly rhythms have pervaded ritualizing throughout history, and the act of playing music can seem to transcend time, but it is the effect on the listener that holds the most magic and mystery, whether as a cue for emotional catharsis, ecstatic dancing, social communitas or revolution. Woodstock and the Beatles, punk rock as a determining factor in culture, spilling far beyond the edge of the stage. No one knows quite how the tension caused by the dissonance and resolution of vibrating air molecules can have such profound effects, even to the point of certain chord patterns like the tritone being cast as unholy, and countless stories arising of songs being taught by the devil (from Tartini to Robert Johnson). In my dreams the devil plays the violin, and I am a priest in a rock and roll cathedral.

From my years of experience playing music to packed crowds, I can say that it was always somewhat breathtaking to be able to cast such swaying spells over so many people with just the movement of fingers on a guitar, to see everyone break into song on the chorus and afterwards spill into the streets still singing into the night. Even the act of playing with other people, regardless of an audience, is ritualistic in itself, the way that musicians jamming together will stumble upon a song, and suddenly find themselves transported, carried on waves of sound that seem to come from a much deeper place, where it is not the musicians writing the song, but riding it, the music a great beast writhing to its own rhythm for all eternity that we can just tap into sometimes, like the ancient alchemists debating the harmonic song of the spheres. Talk about a reaffirmation and transcendence of the self, or better yet, sing.

As music guru David Byrne suggests in a discussion of the future of music with Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, "You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends," and in his survival guide for emerging artists, "in the past, music was something you heard and experienced — it was as much a social event as a purely musical one. Before recording technology existed, you could not separate music from its social context. Epic songs and ballads, troubadours, courtly entertainments, church music, shamanic chants, pub sing-alongs, ceremonial music, military music, dance music — it was pretty much all tied to specific social functions. It was communal and often utilitarian. You couldn't take it home, copy it, sell it as a commodity (except as sheet music, but that's not music), or even hear it again. Music was an experience, intimately married to your life. You could pay to hear music, but after you did, it was over, gone — a memory."

Nothing but Annihilation

Over the summer, Sophie encouraged me to try a writing exercise of typing free-association images for a given number of minutes each day, and then putting them away unread to be used for a poem later on. I forgot all about them with the advent of school, and found them today while going through my boxes and files during the process of moving. I immediately had to write a poem, which I realized I haven't done in at least a year now.


Nothing but Annihilation

A dark wolf stalks the forest of tin cans and wire,
Slouching over the guardrail and wood-grain of the night.
A solemn golem hunting the hawk-winged angel; Poisoned
Primroses pinned to his suit jacket, shotgun slung over one clay shoulder,
His howls darkling the streetlamps in this tar-pool rain.
Leopard skin bankbook glistening with the fat sweat of his pleated palms,
His tie a hangman’s noose, a serpent woven from liquid gold and ashes
Poised for flight on an arrow of wooden slats and silver dollars.
The lions of greed drink from these dark labyrinths of blood and roses,
An abyss of birds and buildings, clocks falling into the river.
A small dog in a trashcan sinking into the night’s warmth, trailing
The riverbed sewn with hatchets and revolvers, buttons and petrified sinew.
Language is a body dying in the window of the beast called mouth,
Tongues of flame and honey, a shoe forgotten in the gutter’s memory.

She sleeps on a bed of crushed velvet and scavenged newspapers,
A ladder made of bones, the morbid sacrality of moist lungs and halos.
The angel’s thigh, draped in white garments stained a pale rose.
She dreams of dollar-fled fields and pounds of corpulent text,
A child’s face of pure joy, illuminated by the subtlest matrices,
A destroyer of time as her hair sweeps the prismatic streets clean.
Stars fall bleeding to the pavement, crying softly at night to go home,
Small lightning bugs of molten metal and mutilated machinery
Dance like jeweled scarves and cinnamon sticks under the half-eaten moon,
Beneath the weight of a thousand plastic worlds twirling on tilted poles.
The beast weeps at his own reflection, falters the gun into the wasteland,
The sky askew and smoke smiting the city with razor-wire clouds,
He weeps alone, binding the hours till sunrise, presents for a time
When the whole feathered mechanism bursts into flames and hosannas.

The mind is the medium

I have recently been considering the possibility that I am agnostic. Certainly, I have had countless experiences that bespeak of some higher force at work, if not in the whole Universe, than at least in my life. On the one hand I once believed that I had met what could be called "God," and was shown the totality of existence and all the various supra-conscious structures that we call deity, and on the other hand, and much later on, when everything was falling to pieces and I quite certainly thought I was going to die, I gave up all sense of control and prayed, and somehow managed to find or be given that which I most needed to continue living. I was raised Catholic, yet never believed in the Christian idea of God, I have read the texts of countless religions, read about the mind, belief, mediums, and have a deep abiding sense of spirituality in my life. And yet, I am really not certain that I can prove that a "god" exists, or that it is even necessary to.

The other day Sophie was reading a book about the Spiritualist community of Lily Dale, which we plan on visiting this summer, and while I've never exactly seen a ghost, I've known plenty of people who claim they have, which albeit is a quantitatively smaller experience than claiming to have met God, is still an interesting example to ask the question, where do these extra-real events happen? More and more I begin to wonder if they are not just an aspect of our subjective experience, or as the psychologist and medium Stan Gooch [via Technoccult] might put it, these events arise from our unconscious minds in the same way that we create an alternative universe in our dreams. While I'm not as inclined to side with Gooch's perspective that ghosts, and presumably dreams and God, are caused by an imbalance of the psyche when we repress our unconscious (though this might explain why so many conservatives are devout Christians), I do think it's fair to say that the only way we can know of these things is through the experience of our senses, and that when all the perspectives are on the table, there will always be more things in heaven and earth than we can ever dream of in our philosophies. I tend to agree with the Lily Dale community's definition of a Spiritualist as someone "who believes, as the basis of his or her religion, in the continuity of life and in individual responsibility," which doesn't ask one way or another for a belief in God, and frankly it seems a very materialist agenda to ask only if God exists or not, when perhaps the real question may resolve in whether or not your life has been open to and touched by more than you can rationally account for.

The Future of Religious Studies

I just had my last talk with Dr. Clothey before the end of the semester and his return to retirement. He mentioned that he has a few more books left in him, including a collected essays on mythology that sounds intriguing, and we debated a little about boundary situations, the need for religious studies to branch into other fields such as literature and music (as well as into other cultures than the current fascination with Hindu and Judeo-Christian religions), modern atheism vs. spirituality, and the necessity of balancing historical vs. comparative studies (a topic that has been increasingly engaging my mind as I struggle to figure out just how it is possible to still give credence to the occurrence of religious phenomena for a particular people while at the same time attempting to understand deeper structures or meta-symbols that may occur throughout human spiritual experience). While Clothey seemed particularly glad of my interest in this field he seemed a bit saddened by the state of Religious Studies both at Pitt and through other Universities. Though many of these programs are growing, most of the interesting journals no longer exist, and any of the really interesting people to study under are either retired or retiring. Furthermore, he suggested that it might be difficult to get a job in the field without a specialization in some particular culture, and even then it's certainly not something to do for the money. Of course, I'm not fascinated by spiritual narratives because I think anyone will pay me to look at them, rather because I think there is something of inestimable value to be learned that may still be useful to understanding human experience, even if this means having to puzzle through all this myself. Thank goodness there are libraries.

Before our talk I checked out "The Forbidden Forest," Mircea Eliade's epic novel which weaves together in a narrative many of his thoughts on myth and symbol, and was quite pleased to find these thoughts in his introduction, which seem to sum up so much of my own desire to study narratives of dreams and beliefs:

"...literature is, or can be, in its own way an instrument of knowledge. Just as a new axiom reveals a previously unknown structure of the real (that is, it founds a new world), so also any creation of the literary imagination reveals a new Universe of meanings and values. Obviously, these new meanings and values endorse one or more of the infinite possibilities open to man for being in the world, that is, for existing... The specific mode of existence of man implies the need of his learning what happens, and above all what can happen, in the world around him and in his own interior world. That it is a matter of a structure of the human condition is shown, inter alia, by the existential necessity of listening to stories and fairy tales...

"Quite as revealing in my view are the experiments carried out... in connection with the psychology and physiology of sleep... they confirm the organic need of man to dream- in other words, the need for "mythology." At the oneiric level, "mythology" means above all narration, because it consists in the envisioning of a sequence of epic or dramatic episodes. Thus man, whether in a waking state or dreaming... has need of attending upon adventures and happenings of all sorts, or of listening to them being narrated, or of reading them. Obviously, the possibilities of narrative are inexhaustible, because the adventures of the characters can be varied infinitely. Indeed, characters and happenings can be manifest on all planes of the imagination, thereby making possible reflections of the most "concrete" reality as well as the most abstract fantasy...

"...man- is continually fascinated by the chronicling of the world, that is, by what happens in his world or in his soul. He longs to find out how life is conceived, how destiny is manifest- in a word, in what circumstances the impossible becomes possible, and what are the limits of the possible. On the other hand, he is happy whenever, in this endless "history" (events, adventures, meetings, and confrontations with real or imaginary personages, etc.) he recognizes familiar scenes, personages, and destinies known from his own oneiric and imaginary experiences or learned from others."

While two gods skip court, another faces imminent execution

In a move somewhat reminiscent of the goats ritually sacrificed to fix a Nepalese jet, but with far greater implications for the modern validity and legality of myth, an Indian judge has summoned two Hindu gods to court to help resolve a 20-year-old property dispute [via Technoccult]. While they are still waiting for Ram and Hanuman to show up so they can decide who owns the land adjacent to temples dedicated to the two gods, this raises a host of serious question for the modern world.

Can mythic beings own property? What is the legal status of godhood? Where do the gods actually live so they can be contacted? Will the mothers of all the heroic demigods finally file paternity lawsuits? How intricately is human life still wrapped up in the stories of religion?

Earlier I came across an the first two essays on Shadow Democracy of a planned ten part series titled: "Does God Have a Future?" The second article had some interesting points about the rise of spirituality versus the decline of religious participation, a suggestion that modern man (I can only assume the article refers to Americans in particular) is moving towards a view of spirituality that does not necessarily include the worship of distinct deities. While organized religious participation may be down, it is also worth noting that ritual behavior is up, and hundreds of new religious movements have been created in the last few decades. However, I was a bit disappointed with a few perspectives from the first article, not the least of which was that it only focuses on the Christian God, as if He were the only deity active in the world right now. Furthermore, the article suggested that God has mainly been a means for explaining natural phenomena, a point that I recently tried to address my problems with, and suggests that God and religion are inseparable, which also makes me wince. While I generally appreciate any current discussion on the subjects I fear that perspectives like this only add fervor to the "new atheist" movement. Not that it's necessary, or possible, to prove whether or not gods actually exist, but it is certainly disheartening to know that a lot of bright minds, and a lot of everyday yahoos, are belittling religious feelings and practices as nothing more than a quirk of human consciousness that should play no part in the modern, rational world. It makes me feel that, among all the otherwise interesting projects I have planned for my life, I will have to spend an inordinate time defending the validity and efficacy of myth, ritual, and spiritual experiences, both in their historical contexts and as a real, lived existential condition that still pertains to the modern world.