[Stephen Gerringer]

sunbug,

This observation of yours,

What I find fascinating about the Healing of the land focus in older and newer stories is that journey/s expand to include more than one village. Even though each village still retains importance in its own right.”

. . . for some reason brings to my mind this image Joseph Campbell shares:

In this wonderful book of John Neidhart, Black Elk Speaks, you have an Oglala Sioux, who had in his youth had a mystical vision of, you might say, the destiny before his people and there he saw the hoop of his nation, as he calls it, as one of many hoops, and all the hoops interlocking, all of them expressing the same humanity. And he said, ‘I saw myself standing on the highest central mountain of the world. And so I saw, in a vision, all the nations as one people.’ And he said, ‘The central mountain of the world is Harney Peak, in South Dakota,’ and then immediately after said, ‘the central mountain is everywhere.’

When you take your Harney Peak to be the central mountain, you have lost the reference to humanity and have become stuck with your particular ethnic or national group and that’s what we have with all of these religions. They are taking their symbols historically and concretely and not reading them as metaphors and consequently they’ve lost the connection with humanity. And since we are now in a planet that is one people, one planet, interlocked economically even, to such a way you can’t speak of any horizon as being separate or a separate hoop, it’s time to read all of these things in terms of the human reference, not of the local political one.”

(Audio Archive LO839 – John Lobell Interview of Joseph Campbell – 12.28.83, Radio Show – “Natural Living”)