Stephen Gerringer
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Robert,
Once again I appreciate your stream-of-consciousness meditation on the hand, which resonates more with mythic imagery than a literal reading.
This image is from the Cueva de las Manos, Perito Moreno, Argentina, dated from 9,000 to 13,000 years ago (created by multiple artists over time), one of countless examples found in prehistoric cave art.And the very first cave art image we know of is a red hand stencil in the Maltravieso Cave, Cáceres, Spain, dated through a uranium-thorium chemical analysis to over 64,000 years ago – 20,000 years before Homo Sapiens Sapiens, our branch of the family, entered Europe – which means those faint images are the hand prints of Neanderthals!
Seems to go hand-in-hand (pun intended) with your post . . .
shaheda rizvi
What wonderful observations, especially regarding the meaning of hamsa in Arabic as the Hand of Fatima. As far as I can tell, there’s no direct connection between haṃsa in Sanskrit and خمسة (khamsah) in Arabic, but the resonance is compelling (I’ll touch more on the hand as a mythic image in a response to Robert, since that plays through his stream-of-consciousness post).
What really speaks to me, however, is how that image lives in your heart. That is the value of a potent mythic image – it keeps opening out, on to ever greater depth and dimensions. And the same holds for words when we move beyond the literal, as in poetry – or myth; so much below the surface, working on our unconscious.
One relatively minor correction re the following passage:
This is a song we all sing. If you focus on your breath, you’ll hear the sound ‘ham,’ just barely audible, every time you inhale—and the syllable ‘sa’ sounds with every exhale. ‘Ham-sa, ham-sa,’ sings our breath all day, all night, all one’s life, making known the inner presence of this wild gander to all with the ears to hear. ”
Those aren’t Joseph Campbell’s words, but Stephen Gerringer’s (though I am thrilled to have my elucidation mistaken for Joe!). I can understand that can be hard to tell, given the lay-out on the page (appears our design team faced a challenge trying to navigate the text around the images).
Something similar happens for me in the four volumes, published posthumously, of Heinrich Zimmer’s work [Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization (1946), The King and the Corpse (1948), Philosophies of India (1951), and The Art of Indian Asia (1955)], all edited by Joseph Campbell. In the essay I liberally cite Zimmer, whose books I think think of as “proto-Campbell”: can’t help but hear Joe’s voice coming through in the rhythm of his words and the delight he takes in the subject – which I find missing in Zimmer’s Artistic Forms and Yoga in the Sacred Images of the East (Kunstform und Yoga im indischen Kunstbild), translated into English by Gerald Chappie and James B. Lawson (an excellent work, by the way – but missing that Campbell charm).
The point that’s made, though, is what’s important, and that you get right – there is more to a mythic image than what’s contained on the page.
💜I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Norland Téllez for once again coming to spend a week with us in Conversations of a Higher Order. Norland, your generosity of spirit, especially considering all the time and attention to detail you’ve devoted to this discussion, is much appreciated.
Of course, even though the week Dr. Téllez agreed to give us is long up, that doesn’t mean the conversation needs to end here.
Norland’s essays shine a light on the deep, dark underbelly of “living myth,” very much in sync with Campbell’s mythological perspective. There is all too often a tendency to gloss over the dark deeds of our mythic past (and present) in favor of Happy Happy Joy Joy prescriptions of bliss. That one-sided approach, however, was not Joseph Campbell’s way. Joe was not afraid of the dark; whether discussing myth, psychology, or art, he never ignored the shadows (even “following your bliss” calls for a willingness to endure much suffering and pain to stay true to one’s path – something generally overlooked by those who promote it as a form of wishcraft).
Those shadows are all part of being human – we can’t just ignore or banish them by an act of will. Norland’s contributions to the discussions of his December, January, and February MythBlasts these forums offer invaluable clues on how to acknowledge, understand, integrate, and transcend those energies.
But this is not just the domain of myth scholars: those new to this thread are invited to add your thoughts and observations and continue the conversation (I suspect artists, in particular, might have much to share).
I’d like to express our gratitude to Professor Andrew Gurevich for coming to play with us here in Conversations of A Higher Order – what a profound, thought-provoking discussion we’ve been having!
Andy, you have been more than generous with your time and attention (far longer than the week we expected!). Though you of course have other commitments, don’t be surprised if the conversation continues without you – and of course, your presence in COHO is always welcome whenever you have the time to spare. In fact, I trust we’ll have the opportunity to do this again the next time you write a MythBlast essay.
Namaste
Sunbug,
Thank you for that upbeat reverie!
You sing “We need the poetry. We need the myth…in that heart beat…in that rhythm.”
Here’s Campbell, in sync with that message:
Music has an awakening function. Life is rhythm. Art is an organization of rhythms. . . . The rhythm of the music awakens certain life rhythms, ways of living and experiencing life.” (The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work, p. 223)
This no abstract reasoning on Campbell’s part; he’s speaking from experience. From 1922 to 1926, while attending Columbia, Joseph Campbell played alto sax in a seven-piece jazz band with Paul Winkopp, in venues ranging from fraternity dances to the Plaza Hotel (no mere hobby, that – Joe banked $3,000 from playing in the band in 1925 alone – a considerable sum for a college kid nearly a century ago!).
Like you (a tap-dancer – talk about rhythm!), that experience for Campbell holds a key for engaging life.
Music is nothing if not rhythm. Rhythm is the instrument of art . . . It’s wonderful to see a jazz group improvise: when five or six musicians are really tuned in to each other, it’s all the same rhythm, and they can’t go wrong, even though they never did it that way before” (A Joseph Campbell Companion, p. 249).
And neither can we.
The World is embodied music, and we are all playing in the band.
6. “You are yourself the divine mystery you wish to know.”
This isn’t original to Joseph Campbell; it’s Campbell quoting the Chāndogya Upanishad.
Marianne,
You write “Thank you for bearing with me here in my response which was also to bear with me in my search for a response.” I know the feeling: I write to find out what I think. Hence the value of journaling, which we have discussed in other threads on these discussion boards.
Campbell too was very much into journaling. In fact, I once had the great good fortune to transport several volumes of his journals from one place to another many years ago – long, complicated story, but they were in my possession for a few nights – so I stayed up around the clock and went through several sets of white archivists gloves reading everything I could.
The written word meant so much to Campbell. Here is an excerpt where he speaks to that (from the yet-to-be-published manuscript I’ve been editing):
The Muses are the personifications of the energies of that unconscious system that you touch when you sit down as a writer. You just have to find them.
When I’m writing, there are two ways that I write. One is badly, and the other is well. And when it’s badly it’s dictated from up here, and that’s the stuff that goes into the scrap basket. There’s often a period of trial, pushing around to see where I can get that trapdoor to open. And when I hit it, it’s almost—physical—the feeling of opening a door, holding it open, not giving a damn for the critics, what they are going to say or think. Meanwhile, I’ve thought out what’s going to be in this chapter. All that has to be planned first. . . .
The wonderful thing is when I get on a certain beam that hits the level of mythic inspiration. From there on I know about three words ahead what I’m going to say. When the writing’s going like that I know I’m in the groove; it feels like riding a wonderful wave.”
We’ve all read enough of Campbell’s work to know he found that groove more often than not.
Thank you, jamesn, for sharing your thoughts.
You write
This is the place of creative incubation where one can bring forth who and what they might be. It is also the creative space of the artist; and whether in movement or stationary this enclosed mind-space is the tabernacle of the individual’s creative soul expression; the holy space out of which the individual identity expresses itself.”
Absolutely right, James! Though we’re ostensibly talking his work desk, that photo is a pallid re-creation of Joseph Campbell’s sacred space (“pallid” because it’s just a mock-up in the basement at OPUS Archives – and though there was more magic to it once it was transported to the Cherry Art Center in Carmel [rather than Monterey, as my caption states], it was still lacking that which gave it life – the man himself). But you’ll notice he surrounded himself with items full of significance – works of art by friends and colleagues, the image of a Geisha and a set of wooden Kokeshi dolls he picked up during his six months in Japan in 1954, the crude bookcase he built himself to hold his set of Encyclopedia Britannica (which is where he began the research for every one of his books), “The Shaman and the Sorcerer ” yarn painting given to him by a Huichol shaman that he included in The Historical Atlas of World Mythology to illustrate the section discussing the Huichol peyote pilgrimage, a Tibetan bell, tiny corn husk figurines, a hand carved antler letter opener, and a Mother Goddess figurine, and of course a picture of young Joe and Jean together – these provided comfort and helped transport him out of the mundane world to that “place of creative incubation” you describe.
And no surprise that, in addition to the sentimental value, each object on and around his desk from the mythologies of many cultures hold profound symbolic significance, serving as tools that activate the mythic imagination . . .
Happy Day, philspar (and everyone else as well),
Thank you for the kind words. I considered replying to everyone in one long post, especially given some overlap, but massive blocks of text on message boards tend to discourage the fainthearted reader (especially given how social media platforms have successfully re-programmed shorter attention spans in their users the last several years), so I’ll respond to each of you in turn.
I wholeheartedly agree with your observation about Joseph Campbell’s titles. From The Masks of God (which Campbell described as a “natural history of the Gods”) to The Historical Atlas of World Mythology (which emphases the historical and geographical distribution of mythic motifs), each title captures and conveys the essence of that work.
As for a three-dimensional virtual reality rendering of Joe’s desk, I would have needed to take pictures with something other than the ancient Blackberry I was still using at the time. However, here are a few close-ups to go with the photo above:
Thanks, Robert,
The link should work now. Campbell is only mentioned in the paragraph pasted into the post, but the rest of the article provides the context.
Robert – intriguing questions, as is Norland’s response.
Best as I can tell from J. Van Baal’s exhaustive volume Dema, there are several mythic elements represented (as well as different versions of this rite, some less lethal, depending on which branch of the Marind-anim one belongs), one of which relates to Yawi, whose head is cut off and buried – from which sprouts the coconut tree (the head about the size of a coconut), a central myth. But there are many other layers to this ceremony as well; seems to be about way more than just one thing.
Point is well taken, Jufa. Of course, you are using “myth” in the popularly understood sense of a lie, rather than the way Joseph Campbell employs the term (as metaphor for a deeper truth).
Your words ring true. That is why, when teaching secondary school students, I would point out that “the American Dream” is more an aspiration than a fact; though we have fallen far short of the American Dream, it is a direction and destination worth pursuing.
Thank you so much, Norland!
“Lighter” is a term that clearly falls short here – but what you have shared allows forum participants to learn more about your background, personal as well as professional, and affords an opportunity to ease into the material you cover.
Joseph Campbell did not like to dwell on his personal history and resisted writing a memoir, believing that one’s body of work matters more than one’s biography (ironically, in his lengthy, detailed Introduction to The Portable Jung he spends considerable time discussing aspects of Jung’s life that played a role in his personal and professional development); it took the concerted efforts of multiple friends to persuade Campbell to agree to participate in the documentary The Hero’s Journey: A Biographical Portrait.
My sense is very different – I believe one’s background and experiences inform one’s work, especially in the creative sphere. One needn’t know the intimate details of Picasso’s complicated relationships with Dora Maar, Marie-Thérèse Walter, and other lovers to appreciate his work, but such awareness does add a layer or two to one’s understanding.
Your experiences remind me of what a privileged life I’ve led as a white male born a U.S. citizen – and underscore that your essays are more than just abstract attempts to understand and interpret humankind’s distant and difficult past past, but have immediate relevance for our present.
Forgive the rambling that will follow. Your MythBlast triggers all sorts of thoughts and impressions; rather than spending another week or two organizing that into some cohesive whole, I’m just going to spill all sorts of observations out across the page.
Turning to your most recent work, “The Fires of Love-Death,” you state
Setting aside our spontaneous anachronistic horror at such gruesome spectacles, we would have to recognize that, at some basic level, these collective rituals worked. That is, they performed the vital existential function they were meant to perform. But what was that function?”
You note that Campbell observes
“the link between sacrificial rites and the real feeling of communitas that binds the existence of a people or tribe. There is little doubt that a fundamental root of our sense of transcendence lies in the archetypal experience of the ‘living spirit’ in communitarian union.”
I’ll admit I much prefer the sense of communion that arises from the Christian mass – which still involves eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a sacrificed god, but only in the abstract (transubstantiation notwithstanding).
However, I can’t help but wonder about the example you cite from Primitive Mythology, where, at the culmination of the puberty rite of the Marind-anim on New Guinea, all the lads who have come of age have their first sexual experience in a very public ritual setting with a girl playing the role of a female dema (a mythological being) who, along with the last adolescent male in line for her favors, is crushed to death in sexual embrace. (Paul Wirtz, whom Campbell cites, uses the term “orgy” to describe this practice, essentially projecting modern libertine attitudes onto the event; Dr. J. Van Baal, in his 1966 volume Dema, prefers the Marind term otiv-bombari to describe ritual couplings – this ceremony isn’t the only example, though others don’t end with death – as it’s not a frenzied orgy but an institutionalized ritual stretching many days, with prescribed actions before and during intercourse for both initiates and the chosen female to follow that correspond to an associated myth – which is not to deny this is an ordeal for females even in ceremonies that don’t end with human sacrifice).
This ritual brings together sexuality and death. More than just a means of organizing society into a communitas, I can’t help but think of the subject of your December MythBlast (“In the Stillness of Love’s Madness”), where you point to the primordial twin impulses of libido (the self-generative life-force) and todestrieb (the death death drive) within the psyche:
In their native soil of possibility and pure potentiality, the archetypes of the collective unconscious are the nocturnal creatures of nightmarish fantasy, hidden deep in the dark primeval forests of cosmic matter and its universal unconsciousness. This is why archetypes, when properly understood, do not become fixed objects of empirical cognition. They are accessible only to a peculiar ‘dark mode”’ of consciousness — an existential hermeneutic of myth which takes place near the threshold of being and nonbeing in the ‘noumenality’ of time.”
Acknowledged or not, these unconscious forces have the power to compel our actions: are not these the forces underlying the violent and bloody human sacrifices you reference in the current MythBlast and in “Sacrificial Origins”, your January essay?
If I understand you, such sacrificial acts serve as a means of containing and channeling these archetypal energies. In the discussion in these forums following your December piece, you quote René Girard, who posits these acts as a form of scapegoating:
The victim is not a substitute for some particularly endangered individual, nor is it offered up to some individual of particularly bloodthirsty temperament. Rather, it is a substitute for all the members of the community, offered up by the members themselves. The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself. The elements of dissension scattered throughout the community are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice. (Violence and the Sacred 8)
And, in our January discussion of “Sacrificial Origins,” you also reference Wolfgang Giegerich’s description of sublation, applying it to the process that brings us from the sacrifice of humans standing in for gods – practiced by our ancestors on a massive scale – to the foot of the Cross, where one human conceived of as god is symbolically sacrificed over and over again:
Clearly we can see how it has performed the three-fold function of sublation. The literal killing and anthropophagic rite is canceled in its literalism. At the same time, the image of the crucified God rescues the primordial sense of the sacrificial act. And finally, through its ‘negative interiorization’ (Giegerich) it places its anthropological meaning at a higher level of development.”
And yet, these archetypal energies of libido and todestrieb (or “love-death”) still course through our psyche, individual and collective.
Six million Jews sacrificed in the death camps during World War II – speaking of scapegoating – along with millions of Roma (aka “gypsies”), Slavs, communists, trade unionists, homosexuals, and others; nearly two million Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in the mid-1970s,;at least half a million Tutsis in Rwanda; the slaughter of the Rohingya in Myanmar and Uighurs in China; the atrocities of your youth in Nicaragua – all have me doubting we have truly escaped the echoes of eons past.
Sublation and sublimation may have a practical effect, but I can’t help but wonder if these aren’t a bit like squeezing part of a balloon: might be smaller on one end, but the balloon then bulges out somewhere else. The reasons and justifications vary, but sacrificing fellow humans seems very much with us still. We may be more enlightened in some arenas, but collectively are just as unconscious as ever of this part of our nature. Despite the efforts of many to make the unconscious conscious, this doesn’t seem anywhere about to change.
Frankly, in the discussions in these forums of your last three MythBlasts, what I’m most drawn to is your appeal to Art:
It is indeed an experimental mode of knowledge which brings the mind of the artist to the Primal Matter, or in Michelangelo’s language, the marble block that hides within it the design of transcendence. . . .
Now, to the second question: does everyone or the public at large have any use for this type of knowledge? Absolutely they do. There is a multi-million dollar industry whose sole purpose is to create fictions and thus transmit, albeit in an unconscious manner, the mythic knowledge of the transcendent One. . . .
Nevertheless, in the archetypal forms of myth and art, as in the entertainment industry and the culture at large, this special ‘knowledge’ remains unconscious, and thus in a peculiar epistemological state to say the least. Early on, psychoanalysis faced criticism for the audacity of the paradox involved in the notion of ‘unconscious knowledge.’ But so it is. In the collective mind of the culture at large, this ‘knowledge’ or gnosis remains hidden, in exactly the way Michelangelo understood it, waiting to be released from the Primal Matter of the Stone—hence the ‘practical’ need for the Artist in society as the one who ‘knows’ consciously how to set it free!”
[NOTE: for those who have not viewed these discussions, the ellipses have left so much out – I’m just stitching together a few highlights here]
followed a little later by your reply to Marianne:
It is a general insight about Art that it functions as a kind of mirror of society and the historical epoch in which it was created. Of course, this ‘leadership’ of Art remains mostly unconscious and it requires a further step to bring what the artist has formulated in aesthetic terms back into the conceptual element of the understanding to become part of our conscious life.
That last is the part I’m unclear about: apart from plastering a moral onto every sculpture and at the end of every movie, how does the artist bridge that gap between the aesthetic creation and our conscious life? Are we talking about didactic art, designed to convey specific values or inspire action (the “socialist realism’ of Soviet art or the novels of Ayn Rand perhaps the clumsiest examples, which smack of propaganda)?
Or are we talking about art that mirrors, and yet transcends, the human condition?
I think of Picasso’s Guernica, born of the brutal Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. Looking back on that moment, it’s clear which side captured the artist’s heart – but long after the details of that local conflict are forgotten his work endures, evoking an experience in the viewer of the loss and heartache, death and destruction of War itself, rather than this war.
Clearly, Guernica did not end violent wars; art does not have the power to end “man’s inhumanity to man,” any more than it has the power to end death – but it does have the power to help one transcend death.
Once more I turn to an observation of Campbell’s I cited in one of our previous MythBlast conversations:
There’s that wonderful picture of Death playing the violin to the artist, by a Swiss painter named Böcklin. The artist is there with the palette and brush, and Death is playing the violin. That means that the eyes should be open to something of more cosmic import than simply the vicissitudes and excitements of your own petty life. Hearing the song that is beyond that of your own individual life cycle is the thing that opens you to wisdom. You can hear it in your life, interpreting it, reading it, not in terms of the calamities or boons of your individual existence, but as a message of what life is.”
“Mythic Reflections: an interview with Joseph Campbell,” by Tom Collins,
Please forgive me for taking such big bites! I hope I don’t come across as taking issue with your points, which is not my intention. I do, though, want to draw attention to the through-line in your essays, and how they resonate with one another: taken together, they present a multi-dimensional picture, a Whole that adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
Andy,
Brevity has its place, but really, no worries about that with your posts. In my mind, one of the advantages Conversations of a Higher Order has over social media like Facebook is the luxury to develop and play with a thought. When JCF was sponsoring the Mythic Salon on Facebook, I and others would often contribute posts that dove deep and sparked multiple profound responses – but the thread would then scroll off the screen and disappear into the ether in a matter of hours or days.
Here, in contrast, we have the leisure to think and write, rather than just react – and our posts aren’t just for an audience in the passing now; someone who registers with the forums six months from now, or six years, will be able to find riches galore.
I don’t have any burning questions per se, just a couple of observations.
As you describe the intersection of mythology, psychology, physics, and anthropology, and other fields in both your personal and professional development, I am reminded of what has become a standard criticism of Joseph Campbell: that he’s a generalist, not a specialist (or, to use the imprecise vernacular, a lumper, not a splitter).
Joe’s response?
Then there is the problem of what’s known as the generalist against the specialist. Just as in medicine, sometimes it’s better to go to a generalist than to a specialist—depends on what your problem is. A specialist can come up and say, in all seriousness, ‘The people in the Congo have five fingers on their right hand.’ If I say, ‘Well, the people in Alaska have five fingers on their right hand,’ I’m called a generalist. And if I say that the people in the caves in 30,000 B.C. had five fingers on their right hand, I’m a mystic!”
(from a yet-to-be-published draft I’ve edited, drawn from dozens of obscure interviews and Q & A sessions at the end of Campbell’s lectures)
Joseph Campbell was not opposed to specialists, whose work often informed his; it just was not his approach. In fact, I think of Campbell as one of the pioneers of interdisciplinary studies. I know the pendulum swings back and forth within academia, with specialization often in the ascendent – so it does my heart good to see scholars such as yourself making common cause with others outside their immediate field.
And then a powerful line, as you described your personal history: “Joe kicked open the door for me to start the work of soul recovery.”
That, to me, is key to Campbell’s wide appeal: he’s not just researching and writing for the sake of expanding human knowledge on a macro scale, but also looking at how what he studies resonates for the individual, answering the question of what is its value to our lives today?
And one final observation: I know I’m belaboring the obvious, but in case anyone has missed a major theme running through your “Artist Origins” essay and your contributions to this discussion, I’d like to draw attention once again to the emphasis you place on experience, and embodiment. We are not talking head knowledge: the ancients didn’t pull books off the library shelf and read about a myth – they lived their myths
. . . which, in a roundabout way, brings me back to ritual.
Today we tend to think of rites as those accompanying critical transitions – birth, coming of age, marriage, death, sacraments all – but ritual once permeated every aspect of life:
[T]he archaic world knows nothing of ‘profane’ activities: every act which has a definite meaning – hunting, fishing, agriculture, games, conflict, sexuality – in some way participates in the sacred . . . the only profane activities are those which have no mythical meaning. . . . Thus we may say that every responsible activity in pursuit of a definite end is, for the archaic world, a ritual.
Every ritual has a divine model, an archetype . . . ‘We must do what the gods did in the beginning.’ ”
(Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, p. 27-28, 21)
Eliade illustrates his point by providing examples of construction rituals in early cultures – required, for example, in ancient Mesopotamia, whether laying the foundation of temple, palace, or peasant’s house. These rites replicate “the primordial act” of the creation of the cosmos (traces of such construction rituals echo today in the rites of the Masonic Order). Yet other examples of “the divine model” abound in rituals still observed, from the Judeo-Christian Sabbath (God rested on the seventh day, after six days of creation) to the marriage ceremony (the divine Hierogamy of the union of Heaven and Earth).
Campbell arrives at a parallel conclusion:
Well, the value of mythology in the old traditions, one of the values, was that every activity in life had been mythologized. You saw something of its relevance to the Great Mysteries and your own participation in the Great Mysteries in the performance – in agriculture, in hunting, in military life and so forth. All of these were turned into spiritual disciplines. Actually they were. There were rituals associated with them that let you know what spiritual powers were being challenged, evoked, and brought into play through this action.”
(Joseph Campbell, The Wisdom of Joseph Campbell, New Dimensions Radio Interview with Michael Toms, Tape I, Side 1.)
You note in your initial post above, “Individually and collectively, the myth must be enacted or experienced for the person or the group to truly expect to share in its transformative bounty” – and a little later, “So, finally, it is my suggestion that through a full, authentic, and open engagement with the rituals, rites, and ceremonies of living myth, we are able to return to a prelinguistic mode of experience that allows us to step away from our preoccupation with death and our linguistically confined categories of binary opposition and reenter a space where we can, like the child, encounter the sacred directly, immediately, and without a chaperone” (emphasis mine).
Of course, there’s a lot of context in between I’ve skipped over – but, considering so much of the dominant traditions in our cultures seems tired rather than inspired, and many individuals drawn to Campbell’s work do not participate in any mythological tradition, I’d like to focus on the question of how you define “living myth” today. What is a living myth, and how does one find it? Would you recommend an individual attach themselves to an existing tradition that speaks to their soul, even if outside their own culture, or perhaps construct their own rituals, maybe draw from a number of mythological and cultural traditions stories, rituals, and other elements that activate centers within their own being (what I think of as the cafeteria model, which Campbell seems to recommend on occasion).
Or does something else come to mind?
