[Stephen Gerringer]

So many rich exchanges from everyone! I would love to respond to them all, though that’s hardly possible (nor desirable, given my tendency toward excessive verbosity).

One housekeeping note for everyone: when posting a link, please don’t post the raw URL (our site sometimes interprets raw URLs as bots posting spam, and then the post is held for approval). Instead, give your link a title (whether the title of an article, an internet page, or just saying “visit this link” or “here” or some such), then highlight that and click on the hyperlink icon in the menu at the top of your post (looks like a diagonal paperclip). Paste the URL into the field provided, and click on the gear icon at the end of that field, which gives you the option of opening your link open in a new window (please choose that option, so folks can open the link without navigating away from the forums).

Since, as admin, I do have some superpowers, I have tried to fix that when it happens, but I’d really rather not make changes to posts other than my own, so thanks in advance (there should be instructions as well in our FAQ, pinned to the top of every forum).

Also, please keep in mind the Forum Guidelines, which are pinned to the top of every forum as well – particularly #5:

“Avoid Contemporary Politics – Given the volatile nature of contemporary political discourse, we ask that members steer clear of candidates or current political controversies. Forum members come from across the political spectrum. There are other fora across the internet for discussing myth and politics.”

Richard, I’d like to thank you for the care with which you have danced around this subject. I appreciated your article on differences between liberals and conservatives (though I’m a bit younger than you, I do remember when there were conservative Democrats, as well as a very vocal liberal wing within the Republican Party : e.g. New York Senators Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating, Governor/Vice-president Nelson Rockefeller, Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith – who served from 1939 to 1973 – Congressman and New York Mayor John Lindsay, etc.). You delineate the differences well, which is fine as long as we exercise care to avoid the appearance of favoring one party over the other (again, I believe in general you carefully thread that needle).

Times have indeed changed. Tribalism (“my team, right or wrong”) does seem to be resurgent today, and not just in politics. Campbell believed this was inevitable on the way toward a more global society. Here are his thoughts on the subject, from a yet-to-be-published Q & A manuscript I’ve been working with:

We’re in a period, in terms of history, of the end of national and tribal consciousness. The only consciousness that is proper to contemporary life is global⁠. Nevertheless, all popular thinking is in terms of loyalties to the local communities to which all are members. Such thinking is now out of date.

What we face is a challenge to recognize one community on this earth, and what we find in the face of this challenge is everybody pulling back into his own in-group. I don’t want to name the in-groups, but we all know pretty well what they are. In our country we call them pressure groups. They are racial groups, class groups, religious groups, economic groups, and they are all tangling with each other⁠.

For any people to say, “We are it and the others are other”—these are dangerous people. And there are religions still doing this. The new thing that is very difficult  for people to realize is our society is the human race. And our little suburb is the globe. Spaceship Earth⁠.

Will we be able to surmount those obstacles, cross that bridge? For Campbell, the jury was still out. From the same manuscript:

Now the horizon is the planet⁠. The only question, and this is a big one, is whether this great new heritage of man will finally dissolve away as the building of the pyramids did when Egypt lost its power?  . . .

How long that next movement will endure is the question that arises out of what we’ve just been talking about. Is it going to be a phase that will disappear,  and then will all these separate cultures go back into their own little boxes again, or is it something that actually represents the beginning of a totally new age of man on the planet⁠?

In recent years, especially given the nature of politics discourse, there may seem little cause for optimism. We are even politicizing medical advice these days in the middle of a pandemic!

But that same global crisis may well prove a game-changer in the long run. We have plenty of evidence of transformation after sweeping catastrophes. Perhaps the most obvious is the Black Death. Society wasn’t “challenged to change,” and certainly there was no conscious intention to create a different world in its wake, no coming together as a human society to make a choice – but the plague created the conditions that gave rise to the Renaissance. Nevertheless, the Renaissance didn’t burst fully formed on the scene all at once at 4:32 a.m. on the first Thursday following the final death; rather, it’s a process that unfolded gradually over the course of a generation or so.

I sense the same dynamic in play today.

Sure, partisan and in-group attitudes are remaining the same for so many – but much of that is driven by my generation and older (the demographic for whom this coronavirus is most lethal). We were already on our way out, clearing the stage for succeeding generations. The pandemic is not only hastening that process for some, but underscoring the inadequacy of troglodyte attitudes in a variety of areas, including race relations, taking scientific evidence seriously, etc. It may take many more deaths before this touches everybody, but the most stubborn among us will bear the consequences (e.g. Herman Cain: Covid may have been the instrument that dealt the fatal blow, but his death appears directly attributable to his rejection of science.).

Covid has already changed the world – permanently – and will continue to do so, albeit in ways that aren’t immediately apparent in our day-to-day lives, and likely won’t be a fait accompli until long after my cohort is dead and buried. And it won’t appear a conscious choice: the UN isn’t going to hold a global vote where everyone agrees on a new direction – but, whether we consciously want to or not, I suspect humanity will move in that direction (which is not to say utopia lies dead ahead – there will be new problems, new crises, new forms of suffering, for that is the nature of our mortal existence).

I tend to agree with Campbell when he tells Emilios Bouratinos that he is “pessimistic with respect to the present or the day after tomorrow, but optimistic with respect to, let’s say, fifty-odd years from now.”

Perhaps we can find some comfort in this New Yorker article, which looks not just at the Bubonic Plague, but also the game-changing effects of pandemics throughout history: How Pandemics Wreak Havoc and Open Minds.

[Stephen Gerringer]

Welcome, Shaheda!

Your story about finding The Mythic Image and then shelving it, not realizing what treasures it contained, syncs with my own experience.

Back in my college days I took a year-long undergraduate course called Ancient Mediterranean History. The primary text was Sir Arnold Toynbee’s final work, Mankind and Mother Earth (an elegant volume with a lot of history compressed into it, that also took into account humankind’s effects on its environment, and where we are headed in the future). However, the class only met once a week, and there were no grades, papers, or tests, and at the end of each semester we graded ourselves – but we were expected to read multiple comprehensive, self-selected academic tones within our individually chosen areas of interest, and meet for half an hour each week with our instructor in his office to discuss what we had read.

Though no tests, papers, or grades from the teacher seemed oddly disconcerting at first, I was surprised that this turned out to be my favorite class (you may have noticed the format is similar to Campbell’s course on mythology at Sarah Lawrence). The professor, J.W. Smurr, with a distinguished beard and tweed patches on the elbows of his jacket, was nearing retirement and a bit dry as a lecturer (none of Campbell’s verve and sparkle – though in lectures he did impart a wealth of knowledge, albeit in a densely-packed monotone), but he would dive deep, asking penetrating questions in our informal office dialogs. Our session was at 2:30 on Fridays, so at the end of our half hour in his office we would continue the conversation over a beer in the tavern on campus.

Those were heady times. I chose several ambitious works (such as Russian historian Mikhail Rostovtzeff’s masterpiece, The Social & Economic History of the Roman Empire, published in 1926 – hundreds of pages of dry writing and valuable insights interspersed with details of grain shipments from Alexandria, industrial centers in Italy and the provinces, and such – and 141 pages of tiny, detailed endnotes). One book I read that literally fell into my hands off the top shelf of the university library was called Changing Images of Man – a futuristic study crafted by a team of six scholars for SRI – Stanford Research Institute – that looked at the the central images of humankind that have shaped past cultures, and how the way modern culture perceives itself can shape the future.

I loved the entire work, which rings true today, but especially the first two chapters, penned by the scholar whose name came first, alphabetically, in the card catalog – one J. Campbell. That book, along with the Toynbee volume above, played a major role in shaping my own perspective. However, can’t say I paid particular attention to the authors, none of whom I’d ever heard of.

It wasn’t until a few years later, while working my way through the early volumes of The Masks of God series, that I experienced heavy deja vu – I realized I’d come across these concepts somewhere before! I finally traced that back to insights from the Changing Images of Man, and was astounded to realize that Joseph Campbell was the J. Campbell listed among the authors. Little did I know that work, which I spent a week zipping through in college and discussing over a beer with my professor, would have such a profound influence.

This book is rare and difficult to find today – but is intriguing how our destiny is shaped by what we read. Maybe literature is fate . . .

[Stephen Gerringer]

Welcome Aboard! Wonderful to hear your voice in these forums, Shaheda!

Conversations do unfold at a more leisurely pace than on Facebook, or even our old Joseph Campbell Mythology Group (JCMG) on Yahoo (two decades later and I’m still moderating discussion boards devoted to Joe’s mythic perspective!), while allowing for greater depth. Discussions might sprawl over days or weeks or months, maybe appear to fade off, and then be revived when someone with a fresh perspective stumbles across those threads.

Feel free to jump into any discussion that captures your fancy, start a thread on a topic that interests you, or just kick back and enjoy reading what’s posted.

What we don’t seem to have so far is a  decent dream thread. Eventually I’ll get around to raising the subject in The Conversation With a Thousand Faces forum (our catch-all category for whatever doesn’t comfortably fit into any of our other forums), but haven’t been in any rush – figure one or two other folks might get there first, which is fine with me.

Bliss On!

Stephen (aka bodhibliss)

 

[Stephen Gerringer]

Norland,

Thanks for bearing with my request for clarification about what you mean by the archetypal psyche (hardly fair to ask that you put it in the simplest way possible – trying to define the archetypal is akin to stapling one’s shadow to the wall).

Your response exceeded my expectations:

In line with Jung’s original idea, I want to broaden our view of the psyche as an encompassing reality well beyond the confines of an individual consciousness.

Despite a congruency, Jung’s term – the collective unconscious – strikes me as a touch inadequate today: I find any discussion of these concepts among those unfamiliar with Jung (and even with some who are) often needs to begin with the caveat that the unconscious is not deaf, dumb, directionless and blind, but is called such because consciousness (in my case, me – my waking ego, if you will), is unconscious, at least directly, of its workings.

The archetypal psyche is a term unladen with that baggage – nor, as you point out, is it tethered to an individual consciousness. Yes, there are individual expressions of the archetypal psyche that manifest in each life, in the same way you can taste the ocean in a single drop, but the focus of your essay looks beyond that single drop to the entire sea:

. . . the manifestations of the collective psyche are in spectacular display everyday on the broad stage of history, not necessarily always hidden in the bowels of an individual consciousness.

That distinction is my key takeaway – and I find that refreshing. When we think of Joseph Campbell today, the hero’s journey is what most often comes to mind: how do I apply the elements and trajectory of that oft-recurring motif to understand and improve my own life (or write a compelling screenplay)? I don’t intend to sound cynical about the hero’s journey, as it is a part of his legacy that has made a difference in so many lives, including my own – but Campbell did not focus exclusively on the Hero archetype alone. His rich and detailed Masks of God tetralogy is an historical survey of so many living mythologies  when they were, indeed, “alive”

. . . which brings me back to your essay. If I understand correctly, you are saying that a living mythology isn’t something one believes in, like choosing a religion today, but is experienced simply as “what is” – part of the warp and woof of a culture – what a member of that culture knows to be true, perhaps akin to the way we experience gravity or know the world to be round.

This really stands out for me when you point out the “harshest aspects of true myth.” Besides your example of the treatment of dalits and other members of the śūdra caste in India (which continues to varying degrees on parts of the subcontinent today), I think of the “suttee” burials of whole courts in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt (and the evidence, which Campbell raises, of ritual regicide before that), or the ubiquity of human sacrifice in Mesoamerican cultures. We shudder today at these examples of man’s inhumanity to man – yet the kings who sacrificed themselves every 8 or 12 years (depending on the orbit of either Venus or Jupiter), whether in ancient Egypt or 18th century Rhodesia, appear to have submitted voluntarily.

And why not? A living mythology informs the perceptions and experience of one’s role in the universe: if one knows, as certain as I know the sun is yellow and the sky is blue, that death is just a transition that releases one to a better realm, or allows one to return to put on another body and live life anew, and every ruler before me, or every captain of a team sacrificed at the end of a ritual ball game in the Yucatan, has experienced the same, then maybe it’s not perceived as quite the tragedy it would be for you and me.

And that brings me to aloberhoulser’s question above, about anchoring this to the NOW. When Joseph Campbell spoke of how there is no active mythology today (at least, not one universally embraced by First World cultures), he was often asked about whether there could be a new mythology. Some who ask seem to think of myth as something to be consciously created and adopted; Joe, no surprise, generally responded that it doesn’t work that way:

[M]yths don’t come into being like that. You have to wait for them to appear⁠. We cannot predict the next mythology which is coming, for mythology is not ideology. It is not generated by the brain, but from those deep creative centers below the human psyche.

I juxtapose that with the conclusion of your essay:

The equation of horrible social oppression with the functioning of a myth that sanctifies it should not escape our eye. It is a kind of transcendent union of physical and metaphysical violence which has been produced by a fierce antagonism that has raged in the collective unconscious from time immemorial. Violence is constitutional of any nation state; rather than being some kind of glitch in the system, such violence underpins its very functioning, the capacity to produce and reproduce itself and its relations of power. As ruling ideology, therefore, real myth casts and recasts the heart of a society, throwing its deep historical shadow into the darkness of human existence.

Mythologizing is always going on, beneath the level of consciousness. How can we say this dynamic is not already in play today?

[Stephen Gerringer]

Indeed, Robert. Equations are themselves metaphors – new metaphors that convey the same underlying experience and realization as the old metaphors.

And so fun to play with! (the new metaphors, and the old)

[Stephen Gerringer]

Interesting question. Of course, the saying is “the Man in the Moon,” not “the Man is the Moon” – referring to an image a lot of people pick out when they look at the moon (though some see a rabbit or a hare).

In classical mythologies across many cultures, the Sun has often been perceived as or associated with a masculine deity (e.g., Shamash, Ra, Helios, Phaeton, Apollo, Mithra, Sol, etc.) and the Moon with a Goddess (Selene, Luna, Artemis, Chang’e, Diana, Abuk, Coyolxauhqui, etc.). However, that’s only been since the Bronze Age, with the introduction of the solar hero and patriarchal traditions. Joseph Campbell makes a strong case that prior to that the Sun was thought of as female and the Moon as male:

Here’s an excerpt on that subject from a yet to be published compilation of Q & A sessions with Joseph Campbell:

 

CAMPBELL: The point that’s coming through to me more and more as I work on these materials—and I’ve worked on them all my life—is that most of our great traditions derive finally from the Bronze Age. And the Mother Goddess is the principal divinity of that time⁠.

QUESTION: THE MOTHER GODDESS PRE-DATES THE EMERGENCE OF THE MASCULINE HERO THEME IN MYTHOLOGY?

CAMPBELL: The earlier tradition, so far as my findings go, is the one where the sun is feminine and the moon masculine. The moon is the image of the sacrifice that dies and is resurrected. The moon dies in the light of the sun, and is again born from the light of the sun. And so the sun is the mother of the moon.

That makes the sun feminine. The fire of the sun and the fire of the womb that converts seed into life are equivalent. Also the fire on the sacrificial altar consumes the victim. These are all associated with a mythic consciousness that dates at least from the early bronze age. Here there is a deep sense of the melancholy and tragic quality in life, since the moon, the symbol of life’s death and resurrection, carries its own shadow within itself, as we all do.⁠

You can see something of the influence of myth on language when you consider the Indo-European family of languages. Here nouns have genders, but it’s strange how these change. In German they have a masculine moon and a feminine sun: der Mond, die Sonne. This accords with a myth that extends all the way from the River Rhine to the China Sea, where in Japan the goddess Amaterasu is the sun, her brother being the moon god. Then there’s a myth about the moon brother and sun sister that is known to practically all the circumpolar peoples of the North⁠.

Q: WHEN DID THE DOMINANT MYTHOLOGICAL IMAGE CHANGE FROM A FEMININE TO A MASCULINE SUN?

CAMPBELL: This is heroic mythology. It comes in around 2500 B.C. with the Fifth Dynasty in Egypt. It was built up throughout the Near East and elsewhere. There the image is of the rising sun in the morning, a hero dispelling darkness and shadows. So there is Sol Invictus, the unconquerable sun, the masculine hero. The sun hero, then, becomes a very important figure.

In French, the sun is masculine and the moon feminine: le soleil, la lune; and this accords with another myth context.  Apparently this mythic orientation came by way of the Mediterranean into France but not into early Germany. So at the Rhine these two mythic traditions confronted each other. In my estimation that’s why the French and the Germans will never understand each other. The French language has a sunny, bright quality. There are deep mysterious things you simply can’t say in French⁠.

Q: WHAT EXPLAINS THE SHIFT FROM GODDESS-ORIENTED CULTURES TO PATRIARCHAL TRADITIONS ACCENTING MASCULINE GODS AND HEROES?

CAMPBELL: Nomadic herding peoples⁠—the Mongols, the Indo-Europeans, and the Semites—came smashing in on those city areas and you have the period that we know, the heroic age⁠.

Q: WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN?

CAMPBELL: In the second millennium B.C.—actually, it begins earlier than that—with the invasions of these great cultures in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, and the Huang Ho, by the Semites coming out of the Syrio-Arabian desert, the Indo-Europeans⁠ from the northern grasslands⁠ (their base seems to be just north of the Black Sea), and then, later, the Mongols going into China.⁠

 

Clearly you are in good company, Willi!

 

[Stephen Gerringer]

Thank you so much, Juan, for your contribution. Pachamama, the Selk’nam, and Bochica were completely off my radar (I am excited, because now I have “new” myths to seek out and explore; as much as I love classical myths, they offer such a tired and limited perspective if that’s all one knows).

I’ll add to my list above the relatively well documented, rich mythology of the indigenous Haida peoples in North America’s Pacific Northwest (straddling the boundaries of the United States and Canada). One of the best collections of this material is embedded in poet Robert Bringhurst’s A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World (which includes tales of the trickster Raven).

[Stephen Gerringer]

I appreciate your mention of Campbell’s observation about how, say, the Diné (or Navajo) might use a feather as a totem – “as a reference to a psychological aid to hold to and keep from cracking up as the individual goes through their emotional process.”

This reminds me of the film Inception, which is about dreams within dreams within dreams, and entering into other people’s dreams. The lead character, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, carries a totem, a spinning top that belonged to his dead wife. If he spins it and it falls, he knows he is awake; if it continues to spin endlessly, doing what can’t be done in waking reality, then he knows he is in someone else’s dream.

(Taking a brief tangent unrelated to tokens, I was just this morning reviewing the 26 dreams I recorded in my dream journal since the world first became aware of the novel coronavirus in mid-January: in several of the dreams I tumbled to the realization I was dreaming on questioning an element in the dream behaving in a way that would not happen in waking reality – everything from a tiny civet cat morphing into a manatee, to a conversation with my first girlfriend that I eventually recognized could not be “real” as she passed away four years ago; usually that realization led to the dream dissolving as I woke, but occasionally to a period of lucidity – being awake within the dream.)

I do have a few ritual objects that serve as totems for me in waking life. One is a walnut-sized amethyst that was a gift from a very magic, nature-oriented lady over a quarter century ago (well, maybe “girl” is a more accurate description for a senior in high school). The amethyst is rich in color and has an occlusion in the center, where three facets of the crystal come together. The night I received the amethyst, I dreamt it was huge – the size of Yosemite’s Half Dome; the occlusion in the center was a deep, dark cave with an infinite line of Buddhas, all different individuals, all clad in bright, colorful yet different raiment, sitting in meditation and receding into the interior.

Ever since that night it’s been a personal totem that’s been part of my journey – a powerful “psychological aid to hold to and keep from cracking up.”

I’ve always been fascinated by the historical, religious, anthropological, academic discussion of mythology – but Joe adds something extra to the mix, a practical application of myth and ritual to everyday life . . .

[Stephen Gerringer]

Richard – I re-posted your link to the Maria Tatars piece (quoting you and giving you full credit) in Mary’s “Multi-cultural Cinderella Tales; Equals but not the Same” thread in the Campbell in Culture forum. Seems to have more in common with that conversation.

Thanks for sharing!

[Stephen Gerringer]

I thought I would post a link here that Richard Sumpter (or pilgrim1) posted in The Air We Breathe thread in the MythBlast forum. To quote Richard, “This article was in my Alumni Bulletin and seems relevant for this group. It is Maria Tatar’s collected versions of the tale Snow White from around the world and explains how they give us a way to think about what we prefer not to.”

Seems fitting for this thread, and worth the read:

The tale of Snow White and what the various versions mean to us

[Stephen Gerringer]

I am enjoying your “spoilers,” pulling us up out of the dirt and heavenward. Might also shed some light on your cyber-moniker: could be referring to a deity, or could just be the next step out into wide open spaces for humanity . . .

[Stephen Gerringer]

Thank you, Mark, for opening up this topic. It’s an endlessly fascinating subject. I’m sure at some point I’ll share some of my more profound experiences on psychics (I could write at length on the subject – and have – but you do such a wonderful job of sharing your key experiences that I don’t see a compelling need to turn this merely into a compendium of past trips).

However, speaking to the spiritual aspects, here are a couple more quotes from Campbell on the subject:

 

Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception (1954), describing his own visionary experiences under the influence of mescaline, opened the way to a popular appreciation of the ability of hallucinogens to render perceptions of a quasi, or even truly, mystical profundity. There can be no doubt today that through the use of such sacramental revelations indistinguishable from some of those reported of yoga have been experienced.”

Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, p. 90

“Some very interesting research concerning the plants associated with these cults has shown that the people who were going to go through the great ceremony consumed a barley drink before attending the rites. One of the historically important hallucinogens is ergot, which is produced by a fungus that grows parasitically on barley. Since one family was for centuries in charge of the rites, many now believe that this barley broth contained a bit of the ergot. There is a very fine study called The Road to Eleusis, written by Albert Hofmann, who discovered LSD; R. Gordon Wasson; and classical scholar Carl A. P. Ruck. This book deals with the entire ritual of Eleusis in detail as a ceremonial matching of the rapturous state of the people who have taken the drink with a theatrical performance that is rendered as an epiphany. So there is an inward readiness to an outer fulfillment.”

Joseph Campbell, Transformations of Myth Through Time, p. 193

 

Joe was not enamored of the hippies in the sixties, thanks no doubt in part to their portrayal in the media. In the pages of Life magazine the lack of structure to the hippie lifestyle seemed obvious: hordes of barefoot, bedraggled, yet colorfully clad adolescents milling about the corner of Haight and Ashbury getting high, then wandering over to Golden Gate Park to get high, have sex, eat free food, get high, dance to free music, find a crash pad and have more sex and get high. No aims, no ambitions – a generation lost and adrift (mirroring the portrayal in the Harry Reasoner documentary you link to; Reasoner – my favorite 60 Minutes correspondent of all time – at least made an attempt to be objective).

It’s easy to understand how Joseph Campbell sometimes lumped LSD users in with schizophrenics, whom he describes as drowning in the same waters in which mystics swim. That may indeed have been the experience of some; though LSD has never been demonstrated to be the source of mental illness, it can unmask underlying disturbances in those already psychologically fragile.

But, it turns out, not all who wander are lost.

The drug culture of the sixties faded into oblivion; Campbell’s encounters through the seventies and eighties were with serious practitioners in psychology, anthropology, biology, and other fields who approached the subject of psychedelics not as a lark, but as one tool among many that expand our understanding of the nature of consciousness. Campbell certainly valued the research and insights of these recognized experts, whose observations often paralleled his own.

One of the key figures in expanding Campbell’s understanding of psychedelics was his good friend, Stanislav Grof, known for his research into the nature of consciousness (including observation and documentation of thousands of LSD research sessions at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague and the Maryland Psychiatric Research center in Baltimore), and a frequent collaborator with Campbell at Esalen seminars.

Dr. Grof has found (and I find this extremely interesting) that the differing imageries of the various world religions tend to appear and to support his patients variously during the successive stages of their session. In immediate association with the birth trauma, the usual imagery brought to mind is of the Old and New Testaments, together with (occasionally) certain Greek, Egyptian, or other pagan counterparts. However, when the agony has been accomplished and the release experienced of “birth” – actually a “second” or “spiritual” birth, released from the unconscious fears of the former, “once born” personal condition – the symbology radically changes. Instead of mainly Biblical, Greek, and Christian themes, the analogies now point toward the great Orient, chiefly India. “The source of these experiences,” says Dr. Grof, “is obscure, and their resemblance to the Indian descriptions flabbergasting.”

Campbell, Myths to Live By, p. 262

 

Joseph Campbell first met Stanislav Grof in the early seventies – but it was Grof’s meticulous research into LSD and other entheogens in the fifties and sixties that first documented mythological imagery revealing the contents and structure of the unconscious psyche, thus providing independent scientific confirmation of many of Campbell’s insights and observations.

It turns out the psychedelic experience mirrors the hero’s quest – departure from the world of every day experience, followed by a crisis of initiation (death/rebirth), and a return – and not just in the broad outline, but in exquisite detail. No wonder The Hero with a Thousand Faces was adopted as a guide to the LSD experience by many (Campbell was shocked in the sixties when his publisher told him that royalties from his seminal work had jumped up “one full decimal point!”); the book embraces the entire cast of characters across mythologies, mapping the multiple expressions of the hero motif as it unfolds across cultures, and in the individual life. Trippers in the sixties turned to The Hero with a Thousand Faces not because it imposes structure on a formless experience, but because the myths and rituals Campbell describes therein correspond with the inherent nature of the psychedelic experience:

That was the era of inward discovery in its LSD phase. Suddenly, The Hero with a Thousand Faces became a kind of triptych for the inward journey, and people were finding something in that book that could help them interpret their own experience. The book is the presentation of the one great mythic theme – that of the journey, of the quest, and of the finding, and the return. Anyone going on a journey inward or outward to find values will be on a journey that has been described many times in the myths of mankind, and I simply put them all together in that book.

“Living Myths: A Conversation with Joseph Campbell,” Parabola, Volume I, Issue 2, Spring 1976

 

Campbell’s work certainly helped me process my most potent, poignant, and profound experiences on LSD. Those experiences are what convinced me that the archetypes of the collective unconscious aren’t just abstract ideas, but very real, and very much, well, alive, for lack of a better term.

More to come, I’m sure . . .

 

[Stephen Gerringer]

Hi Mark,

I looked for your post and didn’t find it – so I went into the admin side of the forums and looked up New Topic, and there was your post, listed as a draft (not quite sure how that happened). I switched it from “Draft” to “Published.”

I also removed the separate link to the Harry Reasoner program, instead using the same URL to link the title “The Hippie Temptation” and have the link open in a separate page (highlight the title, then click the paperclip icon in the horizontal menu above the post you are typing, paste the link into the filed that appears and click on the “Open in a new page” option). I don’t know the why of it, but seems the forum software sometimes flags for moderation posts with raw links.

It’s a rich, sumptuous, thoughtful piece of writing. I’ll add a few thoughts, and I trust others eventually will as well. Here is a link to your post.

[Stephen Gerringer]

What you are going through strikes a chord. Sort of feels as if we have moved from Schopenhauer’s “It’s as though the world were a dream dreamed by a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dreamed you” to James Joyce’s line from Ulysses: “History is a nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.”

Of course, the two aren’t mutually exclusive – and the “now” definitely has that dreamlike, nightmarish quality – something we’re all experiencing together, which seems to amplify the experience manyfold. There is no doubt we are living through a significant historical moment: 2020 will be long remembered as a crucial year and a major turning point – but turning to what?

Stay tuned . . .

[Stephen Gerringer]

Spoiled the story? Far from it, Mars – it’s a fine line to walk, but you seem to have the balancing act down.

Sometimes the Hollywood imagineers do get it right. Plenty of engineering and science  conveyed in the cinematic renderings of Apollo 13 and Hidden Figures, couched within the framework of the hero journey. Indeed, that’s what a large part of Jessica’s job with NASA entailed – not asking astronomers, physicists, engineers, and astronauts to dumb down the science, but advising them on how to place it within a compelling, satisfying narrative  . . .

[Author]

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