The Mythic Perspective

Playlist

2009-08-31T09:35:00.000-07:00

http://bluefire9.com/playlistplayer.swf" width="400" height="145" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="false" flashvars="height=145&width=400&file=http://bluefire9.com/includes/sources/playlistxml.php?id=6b42d00c4ca6ddc33a604c54b8ce4adc&backcolor=0xCCCCCC&displaywidth=125&searchbar=false&showicons=false&showeq=true&showdownload=true&thumbsinplaylist=false&autostart=false&autoscroll=true" />
http://bluefire9.com/" target="_blank">Create your own FREE music playlist for your profile!

Psyche, Eros and Aphrodite

2006-05-27T09:26:00.000-07:00

Psyche was a mortal woman born long ago to a King and Queen of Greece. Although not immortal, she was the most beautiful child in the land, and as she grew into her teens, every man that saw her was amazed by her beauty. But instead of courting her, men idealized her and worshipped her. Her earthly beauty was too bright to touch, and no man felt worthy of her. So Psyche was lonely and in her loneliness, wondered why no young man would let her know him. Because she was young and inexperienced, Psyche was innocent in the ways of the world and men, and thought her loneliness was her fault.

The Goddess of the Kingdom was the Great Goddess Aphrodite. Aphrodite watched Psyche grow up with mounting jealousy of her beauty and in her thoughts wanted to humble the young beauty. So when the King and Queen, disturbed by their daughter's lack of
courtiers, went to her Oracle for a "seeing" about who Psyche should marry, the Goddess spoke through her Oracle saying that Psyche should marry Death.

The Goddess's Word was Law, and so the King and Queen prepared Psyche for her marriage. They carried her to the top of a mountain, chained her to a rock, and left her to be ravished by Death. Because Psyche's fate was to meet Death, the mood of the marriage procession was somber and more like a funeral than a celebration. So she was taken up the mountain in her beautiful dress and left alone in the darkness to meet her mate.

Aphrodite watched this terrible ceremony with satisfaction. And wishing to inflict even more suffering on the young bride, directed her young son, Eros, to go to the mountain top and pierce the maiden with one of his magic arrows. Eros was her young son by Zeus, and was not viewed favorably by the assembly of gods, causing unending
trouble with his mischievious darts. Anyone pierced by Eros' arrows would fall madly in love with the first being they saw, and Aphrodite wanted Psyche to fall in love with the monster Death as a final insult and torture. But when he surreptiously approached the chained Psyche, he was startled at the Earthly beauty of the young
woman, fumbled with his arrow, and accidentally pricked his own finger on the arrow. So Eros fell in love with Psyche.

Not wanting Psyche to be the bride of Death, Eros secretly asks the West Wind pick the young woman up and float her gently into a nearby valley where she will be safe. The valley is a paradise and, carried gently down into the valley, Psyche is very grateful at being saved from her fate. But she has no idea who has saved her.

Eros comes to her at night, hiding his face, fearing that his powerful mother will discover his betrayal. In the dark of night, he tells Psyche that that he is someone who loves here, but he can come to her only at night. He insists that she must never ask him questions nor ask to see his face. Each night he comes to her and she sleeps beside him, wondering about him, who he is, where he has come from. But Eros steadfastly refuses to tell her who he is or why he must hide his face from her.

Psyche had two sisters, who were not particularly beautiful. They too grew up alongside Psyche, but being ordinary became ever more jealous of their beautiful sister. After her disappearance on the mountain top, they started searching for her to discover what had happened to her. They soon discovered her living in the valley, but could not get down to her. So they stood on the heights and talked
to her.

Eros warned Psyche against her sisters, saying that their questions would cause trouble. If she honors his request to ask no questions and allow him to remain unknown, she will bear a son who will be immortal. But if she insists on asking questions or disobeys him,her child will be a mortal daughter. If she disobeys, he will be forced to leave her.

Psyche promises to honor his request, but is lonely for her family. So she begs Eros to allow her sisters to visit her in the valley. He finally relents.

Her sisters scheme to destroy the happiness of their more beautiful sister by plotting to deceive her. They see that Psyche is living in a fantasy about her lover, and they wish also to destroy her happiness. So when they come to visit, they tell Psyche a lie, saying that her suitor is a serpent, a monster, who is deceiving her, and that when she bears its child, it will consume her. In her confusion and innocence, Psyche believes her sisters. That night, she secrets a lamp beside her bed and a knife under her pillow. When he falls asleep, she plans to light the lamp and cut off the head of her monster lover.

But once he fell asleep and she lit her lamp, she saw that her lover is a god—more, he was the god of love—the most beautiful male god on Olympus. Aghast at her mistake, she dropped her knife and stumbled, pricking her finger on one of his arrows. She is suddenly deeply in love with him. But the hot oil from the lamp in her other hand spilled onto his shoulder.

Eros awakes and sees the one he loves standing over him in the lamp light. She has betrayed him! Being a winged god, he leaps up into the air, but Psyche clings to him. As he flees from her, she is dragged out of the valley and falls onto the barren slopes of the mountains around the secret paradise. Eros returns to the House of his Mother.

Psyche is emotionally destroyed. She first thinks about committing suicide, but after awhile goes within herself to attend to her chaos. After a period, she walks to a nearby river. Here, she meets the cloven-footed god, Pan, who is sitting beside the flowing water holding Echo in his lap. Soon, Psyche is coaxed into telling Pan her sad tale. She asked him what she must do to find Eros again to ask him to come back.

Pan tells Psyche that she must pray to the god of love, the god who understands when someone is inflamed by his arrows. Of course, the god of love is the very god she loved and lost. She must humble herself before her lover.

In order to find Eros, Psyche must confront the terrible power of Aphrodite, the mother of Eros. But Psyche fears the Goddess and does not want to confront her, so she goes first to all the other temples to ask other gods to intervene. None will for all fear the wrath of the Goddess. So finally, Psyche gives in and goes to one of Aphrodite's Temples. There she is confronted by the powerful Goddess, who totally humiliates Psyche, reducing her to a scullery maid and demeaning her until she is in tears. But because Psyche asks to see her son in a sacred way, she gives Psyche four tasks to test her.

For the first task, Aphrodite shows Psyche a huge pile of assorted seeds. To accomplish the first task, she must sort these seeds into separate piles before nightfall. If she fails, she will be put to death. Aphrodite leaves. At first, Psyche thinks of suicide, but then she is approached by an ant in the chamber. They talk and the ant agrees to help with her task. Shortly, an army of ants comes to her rescue and helps Psyche sort the seeds. Aphrodite returns at nightfall, sees the task has been accomplished, and grudgingly admits that the good-for-nothing Psyche did tolerably well.

For her second task, Aphrodite tells Psyche she must go to a field nearby and gather golden fleece from the rams gathered there. She is to be back by nightfall, on pain of death! Again, Psyche despairs and thinks of suicide, but by the river she is addressed by the reeds on the bank of the river, which tell her not to go near the rams during the daytime hours for she would be battered to death. Instead, she should go to the meadow at dusk and find the fleece which the rams have lost on the brambles and branches of their meadow. This way she can retrieve what she needs without directly confronting the dangerous rams. At nightfall, she returns to the Temple and gives Aphrodite the fleece. Again, Aphrodite is surprised by the achievement of the young woman.

For her third task, Aphrodite tells Psyche that she must fill a crystal goblet with the water from the River Styx. With this task, Psyche faces certain death, for the Styx is a circular river which tumbles from a high mountain, disappears into the Earth, goes down into the depths of Hell, and circles back up within the Earth to the top of the world. Psyche collapses, overcome by the impossibility of the task. But when Aphrodite leaves, the eagle of Zeus drops out of the clouds and, alighting beside her, asks to the goblet. Clutching the goblet, the eagle flies to the waterfall and fills it with water. Returning, it presents the filled goblet to the shaken Psyche. This time, the great Goddess is astonished at Psyche's resourcefulness!

For her fourth and final task, Psyche faces her most difficult task—a task impossible for a mortal. She is to go to the Underworld and ask Persephone –goddess of the Underworld and Queen of Mysteries—for a cask of her beauty ointment and to return it to Aphrodite. Psyche, again despairing, goes to a tower from which to hurl herself to her death. She knows that she cannot do this task unaided. A spirit in
the tower, though, stops her and promises to help her. She must find the breathing hole of the Underworld and entering into the cavern, follow the tunnels down into the Earth. She is to carry two pieces of barley cake in her hands, two halfpenny coins in her teeth, and sufficient fortitude to pass several difficult tests. She is warned not to help anyone, for in the Underworld, her energy will constantly be drained away. If she does not care for herself, she will not be able to make it back to the world of the living!

Psyche finds her way to the cavern, and follows the "pathless path" down into the Earth. She reaches the River Styx, and there, meets a lame man driving a lame donkey laden with sticks of wood. Some of the sticks fall to the ground. Despite what she has been told, she stops to help the lame man pick up his wood, giving some of her
precious energy away.

Then, she comes to the ferry man, Charon, with his patched boat. He demands one of her coins to carry her across the river. During the passage over the river, a drowning man calls out to her for help, but she remembers the spirit's instructions and refuses. The man drowns.

Now in Hades, Psyche walks on towards the palace of Hades and Persephone. Shortly, she meets the Three Fates weaving the strands of fate on a loom. For the price of a barley cake, they offer Psyche an opportunity to weave on the loom herself, but she remembers the spirit's instructions and walks by, refusing to weave her way out of
her task.

Next, Psyche confronts the guardian three-headed dog of Hades, Cerberes. To escape this terror, she throws one of her two barley cakes off the path and while the three heads of Cerberes fight over the bit of food, she slips by and goes on up the path.

Finally, she reaches the Hall of Persephone, the Queen of Mysteries, and is invited to participate in the feast. She knows that eating the food of Hades will bind her to these realms however, so she refuses gracefully. She approaches and asks Persephone for the cask of her beauty ointment. Persephone agrees to gift her the cask without asking any questions, but tells Psyche that the cask she will carry with her "carries a mysterious secret."

Then, Psyche retraced her trip back out of Hades. She uses the second barley cake to pass by Cerberes and the second coin to buy her passage back across the Styx.

In sight of the light of the world, she pauses, remembering the unearthly beauty of Persephone and wondering what the box might hold. Tempted, she stops to open the box, but within was nothing at all! The nothing issues forth and she falls into an infernal and deadly sleep. She falls onto the path, in sight of the light, in a senseless sleep.

At this point, Eros, her young lover, comes back into the picture. Eros had, after awhile, escaped from the imprisonment of his mother, Aphrodite. He learns of Psyche's distress and flies to her side. He wipes the deadly sleep from her face and puts it back into the cask; awakens her with a prick of one of his arrows; and admonishes her for having succumbed to her curiosity, which nearly killed her. He then leaves her to her task of taking the cask to Aphrodite.

Meanwhile, Eros flies to Olympia and approaches his father, Zeus, to plead the cause of Psyche. Zeus reprimands Eros for his poor behavior, but finally honors him as his son and promises to help. All the gods are called together, and Hermes is sent to bring Psyche to the court. Zeus announces to the assembled gods that Eros' tyranny of love has gone on long enough, and that it is time that he settles down. He is to be married to Psyche that they may grow together. Zeus gives Psyche a goblet of immortality and instructs her to drink from it. This brings her immortality and the promise the Eros will never again be parted from her.

The marriage was held with all the pomp and ceremony that the gods are known for. Even Aphrodite relented and felt well about her son and new daughter-in-law.

In time, Psyche bore a daughter, who was named Pleasure.

*******************

Want to learn more about the archetypal characters of this myth?
Purchase and enjoy Robert A. Johnson's little book, "She:
Understanding Feminine Psychology", from HarperPerennial Publishing.
$10.00.

The Legend of Sisyphus

2006-04-28T04:37:00.000-07:00

Legend has it that the gods condemned Sisyphus to Hades, where he had to ceaselessly roll or lift a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought, with some reason, that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. So what was this myth all about?

If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. Sounds a bit like Mercurius!

Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he was accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. One story goes that Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by the kidnapping and complained to Sisyphus, who knew of the abduction, and offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. (Unimpressed by the possibility of retaliation by the gods, he was willing to tattle for the gift of water for his city). Of course, he was punished for this in the underworld.

Homer also tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Hades, god of the Underworld, could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. So he dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror. That story goes this way:

It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.

You may have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved.

Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain. It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out:

"Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Edipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What!---by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

---Albert Camus---

What Kinds of Gods Have We?

2006-04-15T05:38:00.000-07:00

Two mythologies are found in the story of the Flood. One is that of the planting culture, the old-city mythology of cyclic karma—of the ages of gold, silver, bronze, iron, during which the world’s moral condition deteriorated. The Flood then came and wiped it out to bring about a fresh start. India abounds in flood stories of this kind, for the flood is a basic story associated with this cyclic experience through what we might term a year of years.

The second mythology is that of a God who created people, some of whom misbehave. He then said, “I regret that I have created these people. Look at what I have done! I am going to wipe them all out.” That is another God, and certainly not the same God as in the first mythology. I emphasize this observation because two totally different ideas of God are involved in the word “God.”

The latter God is one who creates. One thinks of that God as a fact, That we say, is the Creator. We conceptualize that God as an IT. On the other hand, in the impersonal dynamism of the cycles of time the gods are simply the agents of the cycle. The Hindu gods are not, therefore, creators in the way that Yahweh is a creator. This Yahweh creator is, one might say, a metaphysical fact. When he makes up his mind to do something, it is promptly accomplished. This one of the mythologies of God in the Bible was brought in by the nomads who, as herding people, had inherited the mythology of the hunting process in which God is considered out there. The planting people have a mythology of God in here as the dynamism that informs all of life.

To give a sense of the real meaning of this agricultural mythology, one must examine the actual number of years it takes for the spring equinox to pass through all the signs of the zodiac. Called “the procession of the equinoxes,” it takes 25,920 years to complete a cycle of the zodiac. Divide 25,920 by 60, and you get 432. This number, as we shall see, provides the link between the agricultural mythology and the actual cycles of time.

Some years ago, a friend of mine gave me a book, Cooper’s Aerobics, that told how many laps a man would have to swim every day in order to stay healthy. A footnote read: “A man in perfect physical shape, at rest, has a heartbeat of about one beat per second.” At sixty seconds to a minute, and sixty minutes to an hour, in one day of twenty-four hours the heart beats 86,400 times. Divided by two, it is 43,200. The heartbeat matches the beat of the universe; they are the same. That coincidence of rhythm was the point of the old cosmic mythologies. The latter envisioned this microcosm, or little cosmos, and the macrocosm, or the Big Cosmos, as resonating to the same beat. When a person tells the doctor “I’ve got a fever,” the doctor takes his pulse to see if it registers in harmony with the 43,200 beats—that is, to find out if the patient is in tune with nature.

These numbers, anchored in the Sumerian discovery that the order of the universe can be discovered mathematically, are found almost everywhere. In the Hindu sacred epics, the number of years calculated to the present cycle of time, the Kali Yuga as it is known, is 432,000, the number of the Great Cycle (mahayuga) being 4, 320,000. In the Icelandic Eddas, one reads of the 540 doors in Othin’s (Wotan’s) hall, through which, at the end of the current cycle of time, 800 divine warriors would pass to battle the antigods in the “Day of the Wolf” to mutual annihilation [i.e. the end of the world: duality!]. Multiplying 540 by 800 equals 432,000.

An early Babylonian account, translated into Greek by a Babylonian priest named Befrossos in 280 B.C., tells us that 432,000 years passed between the time of the rise of the city Kish and the coming of the mythological flood (the biblical story derives from this earlier source). In a famous paper on “Dates in Genesis,” the Jewish Assyriologist Julius Oppert, in 1877, showed that in the 1,656 years from the creation to the Flood, 86,400 weeks had passed. Divided by two, that again produces 43,200.

That is a hint, buried in Genesis, that two notions of God are to be found in its pages. The first was the willful, personal creator who grieved at the wickedness of his creatures and vowed to wipe them out. The other God, in complete contrast, is found hidden in that disguised number, 86,400, a veiled reference to the Gentile, Sumero-Babylonian, mathematically cosmology of cycles, ever recurring, of impersonal time. During this cycle, kingdoms and peoples arise and recede in seasons of the multiple of 43,200. We recall that the Jewish people were exiles in Babylon for half a century and could, indeed, have absorbed these notions that, exquisitely hidden, provide a subtext of recurring cycles of time in their scriptures.

The mysterious procession of the night sky, then, with the soundless movement of planetary lights through fixed stars, had provided the fundamental revelation, when mathematically charted, of a cosmic order. The human imagination reacted from its core, and a vast concept took form: The universe as a living being in the image of a Great Mother, within whose womb all the worlds, both of life and death, had their existence. The human body is a duplicate, in miniature, of that macrocosmic form. Throughout the whole a secret harmony holds sway. It is the function of mythology and relevant rites to make this macro-microcosmic insight known to us just as it is the function of medicine to keep us in harmony with the natural order.

These old mythologies, then, put the society in accord with nature. Their festivals were correlated with the cycles of the seasons. That also put the individual in accord with the society and through that in harmony with nature. There is no sense of tension between individual and society in such a mythological world. The rules as well as the rituals of such a society put persons in accord not only with their social world--the world of nature without--but also with their own human nature within.

In the course of the second millennium B.C., a strange thing occurred in the Near Eastern realms, “the great reversal,” as I term it. As you know, when you have people who think the world is heating up, their subjective reaction is to want to cool it off. At that period, one observes the beginnings of meditation, the effort to disengage the self from the world. Another reading of this reversal reveals the spirit of Jainism, which is based on the ideals of nonviolence. The familiar question, “How can one live and be nonviolent?” has a familiar answer, “You can’t.” So, the law of Jainism is to die. And not come back. This is a radical pullout from an increasingly overheated world.

Yet another reading may be found in the mythology of the Zoroastrians, those associated with Zoroaster, whose date we do not know. One view is that he lived about 1200 B.C. and another that he lived six hundred years later, about 600 B.C. He is roughly from the same period as Homer and perhaps, like him, should be regarded as symbolic of a tradition rather than as an individual person. Zoroaster was the prophet of the Persians, the people who restored the Jews to Jerusalem, the same Persians who later gave rise to the Chaldeans. The basic idea in Zoroaster’s teaching is that there are two Gods, one good, the other evil. The good God is a God of Light, of Justice, of Wisdom, who created a perfectly good world. His name is Ahura Mazda, “First Father of the Righteous Order, who gave to the sun and stars their paths.” The mazda bulbs were named after this God of Light. Against him, stands a God of Evil, Angra Mainyu, “the Deceiver,” who is the god of lies, darkness, hypocrisy, violence, and malice. He it was who threw evil into this good and well-made world. Thus the world in which we live is a mixture of light and darkness, of good and evil. This worldview is the mythology of the Fall. In its biblical transformation, it is the Fall.

There is then a nature world that is not good and one does not put oneself in accord with it. It is evil and one pulls out or away in order to correct it. From this view arises a mythology with this sequence: Creation, a Fall, followed by Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), who teaches the way of virtue that will bring a gradual restoration of goodness. On the last day, after a terrific battle known as Armageddon, or the Reckoning of Spirits, Zoroaster will appear, in a second incarnation, the evil power will be wiped out, and all will be peace, light, and virtue forever. This mythology is surely familiar to all.

When the Dead Sea Scrolls and the other desert scrolls were unearthed at mid-century, scholars discovered that one of these early Jewish writings, called “The War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness,” was sheer Zoroastrianism. The Zoroastrian influence, particular on the Hebrew community, is represented in the work of the Essenes. We have, therefore, in the Bible itself, this concept of the world as wrong. Consequently throughout the Old Testament one reads of the kings who, in the sight of Yahweh, do well to wipe out the nature religions. These stories represent a tension between two totally different mythologies. One is of the goodness of nature, with which individuals try to harmonize themselves. That is considered a virtuous and healthy and humanly sustaining act. The other sees nature negatively and the person’s choice is to say “no” to it, and to pull away from it. [The first is the spirituality of the so-called Goddess religions and cults, who worships the Great Mother under an assortment of names. The second is the spirituality built around a God, arising from several patriarchical nomadic/tribal cultures of the Middle East mostly, who referred to the Great Mother as “an abomination” and called Her priestesses “harlots.” Those religions were, of course, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.][1]

Metaphor is the language of myth that remains as we have observed, a still widely misunderstood term. Even many so-called well-educated people think that myth’ means something that is false—that is, a lie or distortion about some person or event.

But that misunderstanding arises, as we know, only when we misread metaphorical language. All of our religious ideas are metaphorical of a mystery. It is vital to recall that if you mistake the denotation of the metaphor for its connotation, you completely lose the message that is contained in the symbol.

God is a symbol. The connotation of the symbol lies beyond all naming, beyond all numeration, beyond all categories of thought. One often asks, “Is God one, or is God many?” These, however, are categories of thought and do not serve well in talking about what is beyond all speech.

Jesus dies, is resurrected, and goes to Heaven. This metaphor expresses something religiously mysterious. Jesus could not literally have gone to Heaven because there is no geographical place to go. Elijah went up into the heavens in a chariot, we are told, but we are not to take this statement as a description of a literal journey.

These are spiritual events described in metaphor. There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts.

No good is accomplished by throwing the message out. All the messages of myth, from the period of the agricultural people on, are talking about that which constitutes the values of one’s life, and of all lives. Finally, the message is right there, in this very thing that seems to be blocking you because it is taken literally instead of metaphorically. Then, especially as all the different horizons within which myth has grown up are broken, we realize that, since we are all together on one planet, we must begin to read our own mythology as something that refers not just to us, but, as in conjunction with all mythologies expressed through metaphor, to everyone.[2]

Footnotes:
****************************************************************
[1] Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That (New World Library: Novato, California, 2001), pp. 43-47.
[2] Ibid, pp. 48-49.

Understanding the Handless Maiden

2006-04-12T06:12:00.000-07:00

The Handless Maiden is a story about the taking of power from women by their fathers and husbands and about men's insensitivity to woman's need to be free to be themselves.

The Devil's Bargain is the bargain fathers make to take their daughters power-to-do by over-protecting them or by choosing their own priorities over the very different needs of their wives and daughters. They expect their daughters and wives to be "little princesses," and to do women's work, but not to have any real control over their lives. Men should make the important decisions, they too often believe.

In this story, the daughter attempts to break free of her father--who has disempowered her--to go into the forest (her solitude and naturalness)--to find herself and learn how to do for herself. But of course, she soon encounters her "prince" who also sees her as beautiful, pathetic and powerless. Like a knight, he "rescues" her by marrying her and expecting her, like her father, to conform to his needs.

She finds herself confined again and denied the ability to do as she pleases, right back under the control of a man and expected to meet his needs. In the end, she takes her baby--who also symbolizes her own innerchild--and plunges back into her solitude, running away from those who control her life. Unable to get her husband to understand that she needs control over her life and that her naturalness lies in thenatural things of the Earth rather than society's wealth and power, she at last chooses her self over her life with her husband and saves herself by retreating again into the forest alone. Here she realizes her own power-to-do and comes to love herself enough to live her life her way without others telling her what to do. Complete and whole at last, she does not give her power over her life back to her husband or to society, but lives in her naturalness (the forest) alone but free. Freedom is always won at the cost of aloneness. Feeling lonely is the price of being human.

Understanding the Fisher King

2006-04-09T06:19:00.000-07:00

The Wounded Feeling Function within the Masculine.

Introduction.

Myths tell important stories about mankind in the same language as dreams--through symbols. Both dreams and myths emerge from the Collective Unconscious--that part of the psyche of mankind that constitutes a higher level of our mind; a level that we do not know because we are not conscious of what goes on there. Yet the Unconscious is known to be the "bedrock of our existence." It holds the greater part of who we are and from it we are birthed. Our conscious egos bob along on the surface of this vastness like a canoe on the ocean. In our daily lives, we see and focus on only what lies above the surface, but beneath us lie vast depths of the Unknown, and we are primarily That.

Both dreams and myths form stories that reveal imbalances in our lives. Our personal dreams tell us that our conscious lives are out of balance with our "ground of being"--who we are in actuality. Myths speak of imbalances lived out by the species of Man. The Myth of the Fisher King therefore speaks to us of a major imbalance in the thinking, attitudes and behaviors of all men and women.

Myths in the time of Ancient Greece described how the gods were constantly embroiled in the affairs of mankind, to mankind's constant regret. In the days of ancient Greece, the great thinkers recognized and accepted that mankind was not in control of his individual fate. As the gods acted within human affairs, each person "acted out" the same grand stories over and over again--no matter which culture, nation, religious background, or race. With the advent of the Renaissance, mankind seized upon the idea that rationality could solve all our problems, and we've continued that perception ever since. Today, we still hold to the belief collectively and individually that we can, we should, and must, individually be in control of our lives in order to be secure, and that reason is the key to that control. This is the quandary of Man's existence: that he must accept responsibility for his own life, and yet, at the same time, be substantially unconscious of the very forces which guide his choices in life.

In fact, it is the Unconscious that guides us in our evolution, just as before, and not our rationality. Our rationality has not solved our problems, but having lost the mystical belief that Mankind is more than it perceives and that our lives are guided by forces beyond our understanding, it seems to those of us who have staked everything on reason to be all we have that might save us. So rather than accepting our lives and what happens to us as "fate" as did the Greeks, we Westerners resist our changing fates with our minds, our emotions and our bodies.

We constantly struggle to find security and happiness and then try to hold onto it. Consequently, most of the time, we stay caught in "not enough", not happy, not secure, not liked, not satisfied states of mind and emotions. Rather than accepting our lives as they are, and ourselves as we are, we keep trying to change things. As a result, suffering is our normal state, and we don't know how to do anything else. We keep thinking, if only I could find a better job, a better income, a better car, a better girl or boy friend, and so on, I would be happy. But we are wrong. We are unhappy because our whole approach to life is wrong. And we don't recognize that this is because of our culture and its assumptions about life and how to live it.

The Wounded Feeling Function

First, consider the possibility that the word "feeling" does not mean what you assume it to mean. English is a miserable language for clear expression of some concepts, and "feelings" is one of those terms where English fails. The English speaking peoples in fact are not by and large "feeling" people. And the impoverishment of our language in its capacity to distinguish among different shades of meaning of feelings demonstrates this poverty. Sanskrit for example has 96 words for love. Persia has eighty. The Greeks had three. Americans have one.

So consider this. By "feeling", we do not mean happy, sad, depressed, angry, guilty, shameful, fearful, stressed, envious. Nor do we mean enthusiastic, proud, or any of the other positive emotional feelings that we might name. This "feeling" is not any emotion at all although it is an enabler of positive emotions.

This "feeling" performs the same function as "thinking" but it does so without facts or reason. It is a sensation or urgency that one experiences in the body. "Thinking" is grounded in left-brained reason. "Feeling" is grounded in a right-brained, but bodily sensation of rightness and value.

Without a healthy feeling function, a man is left without a sense that he has value or without a feeling of rightness about his life. He feels a coldness in his relationships, a feeling of separateness and loneliness that he cannot broach through any mentally-based relationship. Such a man is "mental" and some might say, "heartless." He who is wounded in this way will be denied an enduring "happiness," although this is the result of the wound and not the same thing as the wound.

Our thinking function is grounded in our left-brain consciousness. Our "feeling function" is grounded in our right-brain, and it guides us to conclusions and choices directly without reliance upon reason, without reliance upon the linear thinking processes of the left brain. "Feeling" is not intuition, but it is often mistaken for intuition. Through "feeling", one "knows" without knowing how he knows. Someone who is strong in this function, feels the rightness of a choice, without facts, without logic. In fact, through the feeling function, the Unconscious Mind--or psyche--gives us guidance directly. To go to our facility of reason immediately stops the feeling function as well as intuition.

Western Culture has emasculated its Feeling Function. Not understanding what it is, it derides this gift of its own psyche, wrongly associating it with emotionality. And so it presses every child so gifted into a world view and an education which unbalances it and denies it its natural gifts and inheritance.

Comments on The Fisher King Story

The story of the Fisher King is the story of the wounding of Western man. Increasingly, as women enter the work force and take on the values and activities of wounded men, they too take on the wound. Like any myth or dream-story, this story should not be read as a normal story, but for what it says about the imbalance between men and women's conscious attitudes and behaviors and their naturalness. Oftentimes, dreams are only fragments of stories, and so too is this story seemingly incomplete. And like dreams, this story has more than one level to it, holding different meaning for different people as well as different lessons for our own lives. Remember, too, that each person and thing in a dream, or myth, is an aspect of the dreamer. This is especially important in this myth.

The young prince spent his time in the Woods, symbolizing his connection with the Unconscious. This connection, when young, gave him his naturalness and innocence as a child and young male, with all the spontaneity, natural warmth, lovingness, and openness which characterizes youth. His wounding, when it came, was by fire, symbolizing spirit, as he tastes a piece of salmon, symbolizing wisdom and knowledge. The fire (of spirit) is encountered within the woods. And like Adam and Even, the knowledge (the salmon) the prince experienced in the Unconscious caused his fall from innocence.

In the language sometimes used by the mystery traditions, the Prince "stood too close to the fire." His wound was in his sex organs, symbolizing the loss of his ability to create. Few of us have personal encounters with the Divine in our left-brained, rational material world. Instead, the Divine is encountered through occurrences of the irrational, the unexplainable, the Unconscious. The force and power of such encounters are often overwhelming. In ancient times, such an experiences were referred to as "Standing too close to the fire," and these occasions have led to fear and insanity, as it did for Neitzche, so modern man fears control by his own unconscious, which he experiences as a manifestation of Divinity.

The wound of the young prince drives him away from the fire and wisdom of the Divine in fear, repelling him as well from the one object which might heal him, the Grail, which symbolized the love of God which is poured out for him. His inability to approach the Grail keeps him separated from God and constantly cold, or without feelings. His inability to accept his Unconsciousness-based feeling function separates him from his own Divine origin and source.

The only past time which relieves the Fisher King of his pain was fishing in the lakes and coves near the castle, symbolizing seeking in the unconscious for understanding and help. No help comes. Time is suspended, and the King and his whole Land lose their substance as they become less material as life ebbs away for them. They are near death for much of their existence, yet cannot die. So, the people of the Grail Castle await a savior.

Our savior is a young innocent named Parsifal, whose name means "Innocent Fool." The young man comes from a family in which all the men have "gone into the business" of knighthood--defending the Faith with their swords and lances--fighting for Right and Goodness against the Wrong and Evil. All died. The mother tries to keep her son innocent--holding him against his wishes to find out what the Real World holds for him. Alas, she can hold him only a short time, and he soon leaves his home in the Woods to seek his fortune. Soon, he too enters the ranks of young squires training to be a knight.

Fate brings Parsifal to the lake where he encounters the Fisher King fishing, and is directed to the Castle, which he finds quickly by turning left--which is to say, turning towards his own Unconscious depths (turning right would be turning towards his reason). At nighttime, he witnesses the elaborate procession and the healing of the sick. But inexperienced and lacking confidence in himself, he does not ask why the King does not receive healing nor what the Grail was or how it could heal.

And so the next day, too late, he realizes his mistake and must spend his next twenty years fighting battles. By mid-life, he realizes that the way he had lived his life had all been a mistake. Now turning gray with age, he understands that those he had battled and killed all his life for king and faith were much like himself and his children--also fighting for their king and faith, survival and illusory causes. At this point of personal crisis, he must face the waste in his past life and the needless suffering he had endured and imposed upon others. Finally, he is ready to ask himself the most important question any of us can ask of ourselves: How is Life to be lived? What is it that gives life meaning and purpose and beauty?

It is at this point of crisis that fate intervenes to bring him to the Fisher King again. He is again invited to the Castle (into the King's heart), and this time speaks his question: Who does the Grail serve? He wants this time to know what might stop his own misery, as well as heal the King's wound, and give his life meaning. And he receives his answer. Serve the Grail King! Serve something greater than yourself.

Modern Man and the Wound of the Fisher King

In modern life, the loss of creativity is one of the losses stemming from the Fisher-King wound. The lesson here is that creativity is a gift of the Unconscious--not reason. Imagination and inspiration are not reason. It was imagination and dreaming, said Albert Einstein, that led him to his discovery of his famous Theory of Relativity. In fact, he reported that he dreamed the theory.

The coldness experienced by the King is the attitudinal characteristic of the Fisher King-wounded man; the man who has consciously chosen coolness, objectivity, rationality, and factuality as the man he must be. In fact, the Castle of the Fisher King symbolized the fortress he erected around his heart: hard-heartedness. The cost of that choice is that Western man is often unable to express warmth, tenderness or relatedness to others--even to his wives and lovers.

The wound also separates man from Nature, causing him to have an exploitative attitude towards the Earth and her bounty. The natural, unwounded male on the other hand knows that Nature is a part of his own Unconscious psyche and that he is connected to it in some mysterious way. He is connected to his body and is totally natural in expressing his natural sexuality, warmth and tenderness in his relationships.

The wound of the Fisher King divides spirit from matter, mind from heart, and spirituality from sexuality. Such men think of themselves as their mind, expressing their spirituality woodenly and in a manner divorced from earthly life--if at all--and often find natural sexual expression uninteresting. Many exploit nature or other men and women in type-A careers, seeking to experience life through seeking power or wealth.

The wound of the Fisher King costs a man his feeling of being vitally alive and his feeling of being of value to others. As the life force leaked out of the King for example, the life bled out of the Land around him. And as he grows colder, the Fisher King-wounded man draws the life out of the people around him. Others are repelled by his coldness and "unfeelingness", and he is left alone. His ignorance of his own self keeps him from accepting healing by serving others and the cost is a vast loneliness and feeling that life has no meaning.

The story is telling us that a dreadful mistake occurred when our culture took the view our security must be attained through an economic system which exploits Nature and denies man's essential instinctual nature. This tells us that a man's true masculine nature is accomplished by the power of his instincts--not his intellect. The Fisher King wound can often be seen on the faces of nearly every man who one passes on the street; the ache of life, the anxiety, dread, loneliness, the corners of the mouth pointing down--all speak of the would of the Fisher King.

Modern man's most pernicious wound is the wound of the Fisher King: its cost is the loss of feeling of value. No outer things--income, wealth, cars, homes--can heal the wound. It is a wounding of the very capacity for feeling.

However, modern man's Fisher-king wound--its pain--is also our teacher, for it prepares us for awakening to our mistaken way of living. We will not escape the pain so long as we are exploitative, overly rational, unfeeling, power-hungry and selfish. When we are weary enough of the pain, we too, like Parsifal, will ask ourselves the key question: Whom does the Grail serve? What will it take to stop this pain? What am I doing wrong? And , like him, we will see that the Grail serves the Grail King. In order to heal ourselves of our own wound, we too must serve something greater than ourselves.

Each of us is the Grail, the Fisher King, and Parsifal.

We are the Healers who must heal ourselves. We are the Seekers of Wisdom and Knowledge who must face our own fear of what we are and grant ourselves Love and Unconditional acceptance. And we are the Innocent Fools who must blunder through life, learning by mistake after mistake, until we recognize that the way we all see ordinary life is an illusion and filled with pain.

It is We ourselves who have the power to heal ourselves, and we have only to ask the question: Who does the Grail Serve?

Woman's Journey: The Legend of the Handless Maiden

2006-04-03T03:48:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time there was a miller. For years, he had been patiently serving his family and community by grinding out flour from grain brought to him by his neighbors and in return, earned an honest living. His horse pulled the great stone wheel around and around and slowly the corn was ground into soft, white flour. For many years, he lived in peace and harmony with his wife and innocent young daughter.

One day the Devil appeared at their door and told the miller, "For a fee, I will show you how to grind your grain with much less effort and much faster." The miller, intrigued, made a bargain with the devil, thinking, "anything that takes less work and gives greater out-put would make our lives much easier."

"What is your fee?", the miller asked.

"That which stands behind the mill," replied the Devil.

Recalling that the only thing which stood behind the mill was an old tree, the miller quickly agreed.

The Devil then showed the miller how to build a water wheel, create gears, and build the supporting infrastructure so that the flowing river did the work of turning the heavy grinding wheel. The delighted miller found that he could easily grind much more flour than before and the wealth of his family increased. Life was so much easier and all his family members had more leisure time to enjoy their lives. Neighbors all admired the creativity and resourcefulness of the miller for his new invention, and he recognized how he had become so much more important in the community.

One day soon after, the Devil appeared again at the miller's door and demanded payment of his fee. Together, the two walked through the mill, passing through the back door to the mill. There, the miller encountered his young daughter standing beside the old tree. The Devil, to the miller's horror, claimed the daughter as his fee. The miller was disconsolate, but was unwilling to give up the expanded productivity of his mill or his important new status in the community, so he reluctantly gave his daughter to the Devil. The Devil chopped off her hands and carried them away. His daughter stood and said nothing.

For some time, the handless maiden was content with her situation and did not complain. After all, all her needs were met and everything was done for her. There was enough money to have servants in the household, and she did not have to do anything that would require hands. Gradually however, she grew unhappy, depressed and withdrawn. Her mechanically served life became less and less pleasant, until finally, she began to weep and could not stop. Her parents could not see what she had to complain about; they now had their work and community projects and felt life was definitely better.

Finally, one night while her parents and all the servants were sleeping, she slipped out of the house and fled into the forest. Deep in the forest, scratched by the briars and bruised by her flight, she began to learn how to survive on her own. Gradually, she learned how to care for herself and at last found peace and solitude in the quiet naturalness of the Woods.

One day, during her daily walk through the Woods, she encountered a swamp. Struggling through the mud and pools of still water, she stumbled upon a beautiful landscaped garden. Hungry and weary from her struggle through the wasteland, she sees within the garden a pear tree. Without hands, she was only just able to reach one pear with her teeth and satisfy her hunger. Feeling she should not take more than she needs, she ate only one. Tired by her journey however, she stayed in the garden for several days, eating one pear a day to survive.

Unknown to her, her beautiful garden was the king's garden. One day, the king's gardener noticed that someone had been eating pears from the tree and tells the king. Both men then waited in hiding nearby to see who was taking his pears. The two saw the pathetic sight of the handless maiden struggling to eat her single pear of the day, and the king fell head over heals in love with her.

The king took the handless maiden home with him and made her his Queen. She implored him that she could not possibly be his Queen without her hands, but he assured her that he will take care of her and she will not need her hands.

She found nevertheless that it was very difficult to be Queen without her hands. She had to at least be graceful and beautiful, and greet and entertain guests at royal occasions. So the king called his magicians and commanded them to create a pair of silver hands for his queen. With her new silver hands, she became the talk of the court, and the fame of her grace and beauty spread throughout the land. But within the heart of the Queen, something was deeply wrong; she found that she felt isolated somehow, alone, purposeless, useless. She felt that other people lived, but she did not; she only watched from a distance.

In time, the Queen bore the King a son. Without real hands of course, the Queen could not care for the infant, but with all the servants, there was really no need for her to work. As she watched the servants care for her child, the Queen began to weep and could not stop her tears. She wanted to care for her own baby, but could not. So silently, in the dark of night, she wrapped her arms about her baby and slipped back into the forest.

During her flight through the forest, the Queen found that she must ford a rapidly flowing stream. In crossing, she faltered, and her baby slipped from her metal hands into the water. Panicking, she cried to her servants to save her child, forgetting for an instant that she was alone. But realizing that there was now no one else but herself to save her baby, she plunged her useless silver hands into the stream to grasp at the child. Somehow she found the strength to hold the child, and when she drew the child from the water, she saw that a miracle had occurred. Her useless silver hands had been transformed into hands of flesh and blood! Her heart broke, and she held the baby and cried throughout the night, washing the lost years of mechanical living away with her tears.

The Queen never returned to live at the King's castle, but remained in the Forest, living her life close to the Earth. The King, still loving her, built for her a lovely cottage, respecting her preference to do for herself and her need to be true to the simple, natural things of life. Here, close to nature, she found her own true self and the freedom to live as she pleased. And so, he lived the life he needed to be happy, and she did as well, each being true to their own natures and needs.

The Monomyth: The Legend of the Fisher King

2006-03-29T07:30:00.000-08:00

This story emerges from ages past as an example of what Joseph Campbell calls the "Monomyth:" the story of man's search for himself; a mythic journey each of us is called to make during our life--the Hero's Journey.

Once upon a time, there was a mighty King, who was known throughout the World as the Keeper of the Holy Grail. His lineage had inherited the honor and privilege of protecting the Grail when it was brought back from the Holy Land during the Crusades. All who needed healing could come to his castle and ask to drink from the Grail, and upon drinking, receive healing.

This King had a handsome, young son who spent his days scouting the woodlands of his father's kingdom, often alone, hunting and fishing for weeks at a time. He was always happy in the woods, among the sounds and sights of nature; there, he had freedom, time to be himself, and long and happy rides in his father's woodland kingdom. He had friends as well among the woodland creatures and they did not fear his coming, often coming to his hand for treats and petting.

One night during a midnight ride, he came upon a campfire in a wooded glen. Above the fire, a salmon was spitted and was sizzling as it cooked. No one seemed to be around, so the prince waited for a time, waiting for the camper to return. Finally, fearing that the fish might burn, he removed the fish from over the fire and laid it upon the clean grass to cool.

After waiting for a bit longer and deciding that the owner might not return soon, the prince took a small bit of the salmon and thrust it into his mouth. In sudden pain, the prince jerked away, spitting the hot fish out of his mouth, for the fish was much too hot to eat. Then, off balance, he toppled into the fire, screaming in agony as a sharp hot brand impaled his groin, impaling his testicles.

The prince passed out with the pain and fell unconscious to the ground.

He was found in the morning by a patrol of his father's and brought back to the castle. But the wound would not heal. Infected and terribly burned, it festered and resisted all efforts by the court physician to heal it. In time, the boy was crippled--nearly an invalid--and no longer could ride the fields and woods of his kingdom. Soon, he began to complain that he was cold all the time, and couldn't get warm even when sitting in front of the roaring fire in the Great Hall.

He was therefore bound to his court and castle, immersed in the constant arguments, negotiations and courtly conversations with business and government men and women who came and went in the court. His life became filled with the business of the kingdom. No longer could he go on his long solitary rides in the woods, nor relax in the glens and lochs among the hills.

After several years, his aging father stepped down, and the prince became the king, but his wound still would not heal, and as his strength evaporated with his inactivity, his kingdom also fell into waste. The crops stopped growing, disease decimated his great herds of sheep and goats, the cattle would not breed, and even the wildlife disappeared. It seemed that the curse visited upon the king had also fallen upon the land. The only activity that seemed to give the King peace was the time he spent fishing in the lakes and streams close to his castle.

With the coronation of the wounded King, the kingdom seemed to pass into some other dimension. It seemed insubstantial, the castle seeming to float, mist-like above the land, disconnected from the Earth. Eventually, traders would set out for the kingdom, following the same roads as before, and find themselves arriving in some other region of the land. It seemed that the kingdom no longer existed within normal time or place, as though the Earth itself had given up the kingdom and her wounded King to heaven or hell.

Occasionally, some traveler would chance upon the King, fishing in one of the lochs or streams of the vast woodland, and would be directed to his castle, high above her surrounding hills. Only a few received an invitation to enter and stay for the night. Those who were, were told: "It's only a short way down the road, turn left, and cross the bridge."

Few were the travelers invited in, but those who were spoke afterward about the nightly feast served by the King. As the story went, there was a grand procession preceding the feast. A fair damsel would carry the Patton--the plate that carried the bread at the Last Supper. A handsome knight followed carrying the lance used to pierce the side of Christ on the Cross. Still another champion carried the Grail itself, which glowed with a light from within, bringing the procession to a climax.

Each person at the feast, it was said, was offered the chance to drink from the Grail and instantly received the wish most dear to his or her heart--whether he or she spoke their wish or not. Only the King, lying groaning on his litter, was unable to rise and take the healing of the Grail.

In the morning, the traveler would thank his hosts and leave. From these few, the legend grew of the Fisher King--the King of the Lost Kingdom of the Grail.

The Coming of Parsival

In a neighboring kingdom, a young man was living with his mother, Heart's Sorrow, in the forest. They made a living the best they could, for his father had been killed on a knightly quest some years before. Like their father, his brothers also had gone out to seek their fortunes, had become knights, and been killed in battle. The mother, determined that her youngest son would not follow in her husband's or other son's footsteps, had kept her son separate from the community and unaware of the rigorous training programs for knights to be. Nevertheless, she could not prevent him from growing up and demanding to leave as well, so finally he too left, determined to become a knight.

Parsival found his way to King Arthur's Court, and there asked to enter knight training. The knight Gournemont was assigned to train him. The young knight endured the rigorous training for several years and began finally to be sent on lesser missions commensurate with his skills and experience. Like many others in the court, he was entertained by the stories told by traveling bards of a mysterious castle in the mist, where a crippled king held court and, it was said, the Holy Grail was kept. But no other knight had ever seen the castle.

One night Parsival was on such a mission and was traveling through a woodland area. He came upon a small lake with a lone fisherman in a small boat. He hailed the fisherman and asked if there was an inn close by to spend the night. The fisherman, a crippled gentleman of indeterminant age, told him that there was no place within thirty miles, but he might stay the night at his house: "Just down the road a little way, turn left, and cross the drawbridge."

Parsival did as the fisherman said: he rode a little way down the road, discovering a drawbridge off the left side of the trail, leading into a mysterious castle. He rode across the drawbridge, only to find the bridge snapped up close behind him, nearly causing his horse to throw him in its attempt to avoid being struck from behind. He was welcomed by a page and made comfortable for the night.

Eventually, he was called into the castle's courtyard, where he witnessed a strange procession of ladies and knights carrying several mysterious objects. All present are healed or gifted by the drinking from a glowing cup, except for the strange fisherman who lay groaning on a litter. Parsival wondered what this was all about, what the strange objects were, and why the fisherman should be denied healing, but he unsure whether he should speak or not, so he held his tongue and did not ask for information or explanation. He guessed what the glowing cup was and wondered how it could heal, but felt shy and uncertain, so did not ask. In the morning, Parsival arose. He found the castle deserted, mounted his horse, and rode out the gate. Behind him, the castle faded into the mist and disappeared.

The farther he rode, the more Parsival realized that he had failed his guest and himself. The greatest mystery and quest of his life lay behind him. But the castle was now gone and when he might again come across the old fisherman, he could not guess. Parsival continued his training in knight errantry however and for many years fought and jousted with the knights and armies of Arthur's enemies. Twenty years passed. Gradually, as the years passed, he grew gray and tired of the constant warring and suffering. He lost the certainty that he was fighting for the forces of the light and that the enemy knights he faced were defending the dark. The faces of the enemy began to remind him of his own friends and his younger opponents reminded him of the faces of his own children. He felt the meaning go out of his work and life and began to question whether he should retire to a small house in the forest where he could sit and rethink his life.

Old King Arthur however asked him to go on one more quest, and so he set out late in the afternoon. At twilight, he stumbled across a small lake where none should be, and there near the shore was a small boat with the figure of a man in the stern. It was the same fisherman he had encountered twenty years before, looking unchanged from the first time he had seen him. Parsival hailed the fisherman again, asking for a place to stay the night. Again, the Fisher King invited him to stay the night at his house: "just down the road a little way, turn left, and cross the drawbridge."

That night, Parsival again witnessed the strange procession, the bringing of the Grail, and the healing of the guests. This time, when the King failed to rise, the aged Parsival rose and spoke: "Whom does the Grail serve?"

A voice sounded in the silence: "The Grail serves the Grail King!"

At his question, the crippled King rose from his litter, healed. The court erupted in cheers and all gave thanks. For many years, the castle had waited for a hero who would come and ask this question. Outside, the Land began to change, as fields and pastures began to form in the midst of the forest, crops sprung up, and wildlife returned. Gradually, over the next three days, the castle slowly settled firmly onto its foundation and life returned to the old kingdom. Free of pain, the Fisher King celebrated his healing, but again part of this world, he rapidly aged and after three days, died an old man.

Parsival retired to his forest home with his family and was happy, seeing that his life had led up to this moment: despite all the years he had spent fighting useless battles benefiting no one, he had finally had the opportunity to serve something greater than himself.

Living Your Personal Myth

2006-03-22T07:32:00.000-08:00

Possibly the first modern scientist to realize that myth affected people on a personal level was Carl Jung. Following his studies in psychology, he went to work in a clinic treating psychotics who were predominantly schizophrenics. As he worked with these people, he began to notice that they related not to the outside world but to a world within themselves in which mythic themes repeated. His patients were caught in a view of reality which reflects ancient themes of behavior reminiscent of myths. It was apparent that these mythic themes were rising from the Unconscious realms of the minds of his patients and ‘possessing their thoughts and emotions.’ As a result, Jung began to study mythology so he might begin to recognize the stories his patients felt themselves to be living.

His experiences soon lead Jung into the shamanic experience of “falling into the Unconscious” where he himself experienced what it felt like to be temporarily schizophrenic. Shamanic traditions have spoken about what it felt like to experience this moment of crisis: it has been called “the Knock of the Spirit” in some traditions. Modern psychology would refer to it as an emotional or mental breakdown as the conscious mind loses control and something beyond one’s consciousness catches hold of you and begins to guide your actions.

In old videos of tribal ceremonies in Africa, this experience has been documented again and again as dancers, caught up in a ritual and dance, were seized by energies which made them do irrational and strange things. Ritual calls forth these same energies. Religious experience calls for these same energies. The individual is caught up in a powerful experience in which he or she is moved by power. On the positive side, these experiences gave each individual a sense of the Presence of the Divine—of being touched by the Divine. They integrated each individual into the myths of his tribe, culture and world, created a sense of commonality among members of the tribe, and created a sense of meaning and purpose to the life of each individual. They made individuals feel a part of something beyond themselves and in fact divine in nature. They made “all right” life’s painful experiences, suffering and finally even one’s death as religious, ‘right’, in alignment with the Laws of Creation.

The experience of being caught up in a myth is an extremely powerful experience. It is the primary source of religious experience. In fact, Jung referred to these experience as ‘numinous,’ and having experienced them, Jung knew what he was talking about. Once experienced, an individual is ‘hooked,’ for nothing read in a book or heard in a sermon can compare with the feeling of contact with the power of the numinous.

Before the coming of the Renaissance, people lived by worldviews that were widespread. These were widespread belief systems, usually founded in religious theologies. Thus, myth became associated with religious needs and told the stories of the relationships between mankind and his gods. The combined worldviews of so many humans in the world created in the collective memory images and story lines which continued to affect people long after the original belief systems had subsided. Today, schizophrenics and other psychotically ill individuals continue to react to ancient ancient mythic themes arising in their minds, influencing their worldview and their behaviors, and making them feel out of time, confused about which experience--inner or outer--represents reality.

As a result of the loss of belief in the old religions and the new ‘theology’ of reason and science, the mythic themes of the old religions have lost a lot of coherency. The myths and stories which once swayed large numbers of individuals have been forgotten as modern religions and academic institutions have dropped their teaching of these stories of life and the grand themes of mankind’s relationships with his ‘gods.’ Those stories, symbols and images, however, remain in the energies of Mankind’s Collective Unconscious. They still come to us in dreams and, occasionally, by the Knock of the Spirit.

Today, man largely pushes those themes away as he rushes to secure a life for himself based upon secular views of the Universe. Since the loss of faith in the oldest of the theologies--the animistic beliefs in Earth as the Holy Feminine, man no longer sees the Earth as a Living Presence. He no longer views the gods as being of the Earth, in his life and as accessible. In most cases, man no longer even admits his needs for them. The arising of monotheism has eliminated the gods of nature and spirits of plants, brooks, springs, and forests from his theology. Man no longer feels the presence of the Divine as he walks through forest paths or departs on travels in ships on the ocean. He may recognize the beauty in Nature, but not the divinity. Instead, he perceives inanimate, impersonal, unliving objects--or if living, unconscious things--around him. The animals are no longer his brothers and sisters. The plants no longer demonstrate the innocence and goodness of divinity. Man has become a user of all other life, without respecting it, without honoring it. Divinity to Man has become the invisible, judgmental, punishing, theistic image of his own Father-image.

Modern man has paid a high price for this worldview. To feel secure, he kills everything wild or natural which he feels threatened by. He pollutes his world and his own body without thought because he cares more for his own ‘standard of living’ than for the life all around him. He has no respect for life at all, other than his own. In choosing religious expression which has no Earthly dimension, he has de-spiritualized the Earth and himself as an expression of Divinity.

Man no longer recognizes his own animal nature as basically good, and consequently, he is constantly rejecting parts of himself. He thinks of these rejected aspects as 'bad'. Psychologically, man hides from these rejected aspects within his own mind. He represses thoughts his religions tell him are ‘wrong’, yet his dreams are filled with his own fear and violence against life and himself, and so he forgets his dreams, takes drugs to dull himself, and refuses to think about the way he poisons Earth’s life forms and his own body. He avoids the unpleasant, the insecure, the painful, seeking “rightness”, happiness, security. And when the individual fails to achieve these ideals, he feels that the world has turned against him or that he isn’t good enough to achieve what everyone else is clearly enjoying. Because he doesn't feel 'good enough', he feels rejected--not only by other people and life itself, but by God!

Modern Man has no sense of myth which would reassure him of his own significance or his equality with all other things or that misfortune can come into anyone’s life. He has discarded the understanding that life is a mystery, and bought into the idea that the only thing that is keeping him from being a success at anything he wants is a good plan and some clever thinking. Modern man has no humility, and the myth he has bought into is a greater lie than the mythologies he has abandoned. He has no myth that centers him within his culture, shows him who he is, reassures him that life has meaning, legitimizes his natural needs, shows him what right and wrong is in his culture, guides boys into manhood or women into womanhood, or gives meaning to his death. Instead, in modern cultures, the ego—or conscious subjective mind—is left on its own to grapple with these needs. The individual is thus easily overwhelmed by modern life.

Without the guidance provided by myth and the contact with the Divine provided by myth, the individual is adrift in chaos, holding on while he tries to understand why he is always living for tomorrow and never present in his life, why he feels so alone in society and so without support from his God and others, why in spite sometimes of material success, he feels so desperate and unhappy.

What has been lost can be restored. What has been made sick can be made well. Jung and later, Joseph Campbell, resolved these issues for themselves by asking themselves, ‘what myth am I living?’ And they delved into mythologies until they found the one myth that steered their lives. They found that, in the midst of the most powerful and meaningful portions of their lives, they were unconsciously living ancient mythic themes. Subsequently, they described in their writings how it felt to be guided by their personal myth.

First, being in the grip of a myth begins with the experience of awe. Campbell, in his book Pathways to Bliss, describes this experience:

Now, it’s not always easy or possible to know by what it is that you are seized. You find yourself doing silly things, and you have been seized but you don’t know what the dynamics are. You have been struck by that awakening of awe, of fascination, of the experience of mystery—the awareness of your bliss. With that, you have the awakening of your mind in its own service. The brain can enable you to found a business in order to maintain your family and get you prestige in the community; given the right mind, it can do these things very well. But the brain can also impel you to give all that up because you become fascinated with some kind of mystery.

"Survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, self-development", Campbell wrote, "are exactly the kinds of values that a mythically inspired person doesn’t live for. Mythology begins where madness starts. A person who is truly gripped by a calling, by a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice even his life, will sacrifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development; he will give himself entirely to his myth,” Campbell told us.[1]

The ordinary needs of a man or woman in the grip of his/her myth no longer hold him. He is in the grip of a mystery that consumes him, leads him to fulfill the role destiny has brought upon him.

The beginning of a mythic world is a seizure—something that pulls you out of yourself, beyond yourself, beyond all rational patterns. It is out of such seizures that civilizations are built. All you have to do is look at their monuments, and you’ll see that these are the nuttiest things that mankind every thought of. Look at the pyramids. Just try to interpret them in terms of rational means and aims or economic necessities; think of what it meant in a society with the technology of Egypt—which is to say practically nothing—to build a thing that massive. The cathedrals, the great temples of the world, or the work of any artists who has given his life to producing these things—all of these come from mythic seizure, not from Maslow’s values. That awakening of awe, that awakening of zeal, is the beginning, and curiously enough, that’s what pulls people together.[2]

What has happened to modern Western man is that he has lost his integrating myths, and the functions myth performed for people in the West no longer serve their traditional function. Now it is more likely to be terror that drives people to act in unity rather than inspiration. It is fear that controls them rather than Divine guidance which inspires them. And so the Western nations are divided, while among those who attack us, there is mythic unity.

Sadly, this is what has happened in the United States today. Suspicious, paranoid, consumed by our secular worldview that all conflicts are win-loss in character, we project our shadows out upon cultures and beliefs we do not understand. We withdraw inward defensively and become aggressive towards countries we perceive as an “axis of evil.” The terrorists, of course, are living their myths, and in their zeal and passion for their causes, they cheerfully give away their lives for their causes to give us pain. In martyrdom and death, they find meaning because there is nothing else they can do to escape their despair over their lack of control in their lives.

As individuals, Americans can do little about this. America is caught up in a conflict between cultures which are mythically inspired and our own which has no unifying mythology. Fundamental Christianity is attempting to impose a unifying mythology on our country based upon its interpretation of our 2,000 year-old Bible, but diversity in culture and religion is increasing in the United States—not diminishing. America has become a nation of tribes. Here, we have the traditional anglo-saxon religious traditions, African-American traditions, Jewish traditions, hispanic and Catholic traditions, Islamic traditions, and many secular mythic traditions--such as the warrior-hero cult of the military services and the wealthy businessman myths of our huge business communities.

There are many myths and religious traditions that pull at us and which are often in conflict with one another. So we feel that we are divided and we are confused at this. There is no one myth or religious tradition to guide us by inspiring us, other than the original vision of our founding fathers. Caught in the chaos of these conflicting mythical traditions, only fear serves us as a negative unifying force, and when this happens, fear awakens a military response to all perceived national threats and power defines all international relationships.

However, America has served the world as a 'melting pot' of many cultures, and as all these cultures meet and interact, it may well be that an integration will slowly take shape that will preserve our independent characters within a diverse cultural mix. That integration "in the physical' will eventually seep out into our Collective Unconscious and form an integrated myth we might all relate to. This may also be the world's great hope, for the world is divided in exactly the same ways!

Invisible in the American melting pot of cultures and myth are the original culture and myth of the Americas: the indigenous tribes of people who lived here for perhaps 40,000 years. Here is the original mythology and spirituality of the Land upon which we all live here in America. Here is the mythology of the Divine Feminine: such as the Beauty Way of the Hopi, the Way of the Lakota, the acceptance of the Earth itself as Divine Feminine. Of all the gems in the crown of America, here is the one mythology which includes the Divine Feminine and the spiritualization of Matter. And it is missing and will be withheld, because of the way Americans throughout history have treated its indigenous tribes. To find that gem now, America will have to look back 6,000 years to the ancient goddess religions of the middle east or to the old pagan Celtic myths of 1600 years ago.

It is particularly tragic for this predominantly Christian country that Jesus of Nazareth explicitly tried, before he died, to spiritualize the Earth with his message: in the Book of Thomas, he said, "Heaven is spread upon the Earth, but Man does not see it!" And in the New Testiment, he tells his panicking disciples as his death drew near, "Look within a branch, or under a stone, and there I am also." Jesus also knew that his people were looking away from the Earth for their mythology, and it was here, here, here, in and on the Earth. All along. And mankind would not see this and still refuse to see it.

While a new national myth has yet to emerge in this country, the individual can seek out his own myth to give meaning to his own life, for as both Jung and Campbell made clear, we each have a personal myth. Our myth may emerge from our past traditions or religious training, or may simply arise out of the Collective Unconscious. Man’s needs include these issues, and where these needs for religious experience have been unmet, we constantly look for numinous symbols-images which might evoke awe and mystery within us. We hunger for mystery and recognition from our gods. We constantly seek these things as we live each day, often unconsciously, but often with a constant hunger, a sense of lack, a feeling of emptiness, and an unmet need for love and understanding of one's life events.

As individuals, we must consciously seek out these symbols and meditate upon them; let them ‘work on us.’ Our myths are first encountered in our childhood years. There, when we go back to our childhood years in memory or dream, we find again the memories and stories, the enthusiasms, which moved us to excitement, to intense interest, which awoke needs in us that were all consuming. But in growing up, most of us lost those dreams and put them aside as ‘unrealistic’ or childish. In repressing them, we lost that animating energy they gave us, that passion for life we felt as children. We became lost in the demands of lower needs for economic security, accumulation, sexual expression, relationship, prestige, and other lower needs. In those lost images and forgotten needs of childhood lie our forgotten myths. In those forgotten needs is our own True Self. They lie just below the veil of consciousness, waiting to be remembered and recalled into our lives.

Second, study comparative mythology: read, join internet discussion groups, and subscribe to mythological journals. Go back and find those stories of childhood that excited you. Find again the mythic stories which lighted up your heart and fired your soul with meaning.

Third, begin paying attention to your dreams, for in dreams the myths live. Begin learning dream interpretation and begin journaling your dreams and thoughts as you go through each day. Your myths are constantly trying to break through into your conscious daily life, and it is only your busy-ness of mind and pre-occupation with mundane issues which block them. Begin asking for your myth and guidance before you go to bed. Begin to pray and reach out to the numinous, whatever you conceive the Divine to be.

Fourth, study Jungian psychology and read books written by Jungian psychologists about the process of individuation and becoming whole. Read books by Joseph Campbell and other mythologists about the mythic journey. Learn about what has happened to others as they sought to uncover their personal myth.

Finally, expect these activities to cause a disruption of your existing life. For to engage in these ritual activities of “seeking your true self,” such as asking “Who am I?” invokes a response from the As Above which brings one into crisis. This event can be profoundly unsettling. It is not a journey to peace! Instead, it is a journey into chaos.It is more like the proverbial “Dark Night of the Soul.” If you are in relationship, your partner will need to understand what is happening to you and be supportive. If he or she is not willing for you to experience this journey, you may lose your relationship. You will need sources of emotional support, and perhaps even financial support should you lose your ability to function in a workplace.

If you are one of those who doesn’t wish for their life to be changed by these experiences, then don’t seek your personal myth and don’t become a seeker of your True Self, for evoking this issue breaks the barrier between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind and the contents of the unconscious ‘flood in.’ That flood, like the ancient legend of Noah’s Ark, sweeps the old world and old life away.

Jung did this and experienced what his colleagues called “a nervous breakdown,” but that his students and historians have since recognized as a ‘shamanic journey into the Unconscious.’ He had to stop work for years as he worked through his experience of change and rebirth. But he began living his myth, and it became the most important and meaning experience of his life.

The breakdown comes because one has to give up trying to be the person one has tried to be one’s whole life. Normally, this event is scheduled for midlife. This is the mid-life crisis. The persona, or false self, has to be given away. Personal weaknesses have to be confronted. Lies one has told oneself one’s whole life have to be given away. And new ways have to be slowly put together to live one’s life in a new way.

Living one’s personal myth means a total revision of one’s life and way of life. The experience is both destructive and creative. What must be destroyed are all those facets of life which stand in the way of one living their life as who they really are. And then a new way of living life must be created, often from scratch, so that one can go on with life in a new way by living the personal myth.

It must be noted that to live one's personal myth involves this issue of "possession by an the archetype." In the grasp of the divine, a person will be driven to totally irrational lengths to fulfill his mythic role. Carl Jung cautioned us about allowing oneselves to be possessed by their myth, archetype, because instead of man living his mythic sense of purpose, he can become the victim of possession by it instead. Therefore, anyone seeking to discover, or to rediscover his or her personal myth, must maintain a sense of balance so that the archetype enriches his life with meaning without taking command of it and driving him into harmful acts to himself or others.

A person, for example, who has not done his shadow-work, cleansing his subconscious of repressed, negative memories and wishes, may fall victim to his myth because he is so needy for love they've never received in childhood, or power he never achieved in life (for example) that he takes on a "messiah' complex--promoting mythic or religious causes without regard to whether they themselves get hurt or others are harmed. This illustrates the delicate path that the myth-walker treads: recalling the myth without becoming the victim of the myth by possession of the archetype. It can be done, but a teacher or counselor who knows the risks is a valuable resource to have on-call.

Footnotes:
[1] Joseph Campbell, “Personal Myth”, in Pathways to Bliss (New World Library: Novato, California, 2004), p. 89.
[2] Ibid, page 91.

Living Myth

2006-03-15T15:09:00.000-08:00

Myth is not history, nor fables, nor imagination, nor fantasy, nor teaching stories, nor lies. Myth is the transcendent coming into manifestation, the collective dreams of the people becoming manifest as the personal lives of individuals. Myths are the transcendent energies of the Unconscious determining the patterns of experience we live, the tragedies we live, the births and rebirths we experience, and the stories told by our lives. It is no suprise that ordinary people, busy with their lives, unaware of the forces which shape their experience and worldviews, view myths as children's tales. But they are not.

In this column, we will write about these stories which we live, what purposes they serve, who we become as we live the mythic epics of our cultures, and how the myths we live bring meaning to our lives. Myths, and the deities/archetypes who live them, serve as models of character, show us our strengths and weaknesses, tell us what is right and wrong, give us life roles, show us our frailties and dependencies, clarify our self-serving lies to ourselves, and show us how the transcendent interacts with the mundane. Myth leads us into realizations that our lives do have meaning, even where life itself is full of tragedy and sorrow; even when it seems incomprehensible or without purpose.

Joseph Campbell often spoke about his studies of mythology. He identified four purposes for myth. He told us:

(1) The first function of mythology is to reconcile us to our fates and ultimate death in an apparent reality where life feeds on life, where we can live only if other living beings die. As Campbell says, "the only way to affirm life is to affirm it to the root, to the rotten horrendous base." One learns to say "YES!" to everything in life; one accepts life with all its sorrow and incomprehensible events as a mystery and an ecstatic experience.

(2) The second function of mythology is to generate a vision of cosmic order which explains the world and our places in it, and which fills society and the individual with mystical awe. Only if this function is fulfilled does the individual have the sense of having a relationship to the Divine. Only when this function is fulfilled does society hold up its spritual values as a guide for the ethical treatment of its citizens.

(3) The third function of mythology is to validate social relationships and maintain order within society; creating shared perspectives on what is right and what is wrong; defining which behaviors are taboo; defining common law and social mores; and giving moral legitimacy to the rights of each individual within the tribe. Such agreements hold societies together and help people know what the rules are for relating to authority and demanding their freedom.

(4) The fourth function of mythology is to guide each individual through the stages of his life--from birth to death--in accord with society, family and clan expectations. It is by living one's myth that one becomes an individual, that takes a child through childhood, out from under parental control or protection, into young adulthood with all its challenges, into maturity with its disappointments and achievements, through the crisis at mid-life when one discovers the meaninglessness of material gains and social success, and feels the loss of lifetime dreams and hopes, and then into one's senior years, when new challenges to meaning are encountered, and finally into confrontation with and acceptance of death. Myth has the job to make it all worthwhile and acceptable. Myth has the job of making the journey meaningful.

There are two ways by which the individual may make his psychological journey through life. One is by the tribe crushing his individuality, his rebeliousness, his ego to press him into service and conformity with the requirements of the tribe. This is the way of duty, service to others, repression of individuality, imposition of guilt or shame as social control and education into group consciousness.

The other way is the way of the hermit, isolation, separation, antisocial attitudes. Here, the individual believes that there is no freedom within society and no being "himself" under the authority of tribal organizations.

In fact, these two ways are not polar opposites, but are often sequential. Moreover, usually neither is entirely true, but holds both truth and falsehood. At first, youth follows the way of the tribe, but comes to a crisis in which the tension of mental and emotional neuroses can not longer be maintained by the individual. Then, the individual goes into crisis. He can fight and refuse to change, clinging to the hopes of security and group support from the tribe. Or he can surrender to the crisis, realize that he has lost himself and the meaning he had pursued within the tribe. And so the individual becomes a seeker.

Here, all journeyers must choose whether to stand alone or to turn outward seeking an outer authority. Many--probably most--choose spiritual 'paths' which simply turn them towards other tribal values. Some will choose another religion. Some western seekers will turn to Eastern spiritual traditions, occasionally Eastern religious adherants abandon their heritage and seek out Western ideas. Some agnostics will turn fanatical spiritual seekers. But the Way will be the way of the tribe, another tribe, another authority to which one must submit.

Few will turn within to find a way to live by their own authority. This is the Quest for the Holy Grail, the Journey of the Hero, like Galahad and the Knights of the Round Table, each seeking his own way, alone, into the forests of the Mind in search of the thing that is missing in life, each going a Way no other has taken: the way of the individual with only the Great Mystery to guide. If the quest is successful, the journeyer returns from the forests of the mind. If the quest is a failure, the seeker may lose himself in schizophrenia or madness, or else run back to the security of the past.

If successful, the seeker having rediscovered his own power and uniqueness, may choose to remain alone, outside the controls of the social order, or return to society as one's own "man" or "woman". Returning, the individuated person no longer is attracted to the old lures or threats which kept him in servitude and subject to the authority of the tribe. He can not be threatened, or seduced, or silenced, or ignored. He is a power of one, and is content with that. This is living one's myth, becoming God, learning to be content with one's own story and life.

Western society at least appears to be emerging into a new social order--one in which society is disposed to support the independence and development of individuality. This new myth is evolving, changing old mythic themes, but is yet unfinished. We are in our age making a new mythic theme, of loving self-regeneration, of living in a social order without need to be in control, but of living from one's own power and authority without domination, and of loving without need to be loved.

Meanwhile, Americans and other business-oriented societies are living without a contemporary mythology which links the way they live their lives to the mythic stories of their gods. In fact, we are spiritually isolated by a spirituality which looks back into history rather than to Nature and the Universe-as-Spirit. Science has de-spiritualized our Universe, and we are without a sense of Divine Presence in our lives. Religion has been reduced to following rules in a book, without direct gnosis by each individual, in hopes of being rewarded with 'eternal life' by a god who does not show himself to man. The sense of abandonment by a loving parent is overwhelming in our Western cultures, and the corresponding desire by individuals to give themselves away for love and recognition is powerful, if unconscious. The result is religious fanaticism, cultural infantilism, and intolerance of those who do not follow our religious rules.

Until a new mythology arises to take individuals into gnosis, a mythology which spiritualizes society's relationship to Nature and cosmos, Americans are indeed in spiritual pain--evicted from the Garden of Eden where once we knew God. And so we are a nation of seekers. We mosttly give ourselves away to tradtional spiritual traditions which hold up a tribal consciousness rather than support or tolerate individual spiritual autonomy.

The East lies by another archetypal process of spiritual maturity than the Quest. Older, spiritually more mature, and more mythically conscious that the West, the Eastern spiritual traditions just sit down and watch their minds, stop seeking, and wait for their minds to grow quiet. Losing ego is the goal of these traditions, while we in the West seem determined to keep our egos. Perhaps we'll find time to delve into those spiritual tenets as well before we're through. Many in the West are being pulled by those traditions because they, at least, hold out the potential for personal gnosis.

Here, we will hold to the tradition that Earth is Man's Heavenly Garden, that we may live here in hell or in heaven. It is up to us.