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Death: the good version and the bad version
As I love telling my fellow associates and colluders in myth: “If death’s not your favorite part of this stuff, then you’re just not studying hard enough.” Granted, my zealous ultimatums have been known to prompt concern—especially from the more literal-minded—who then take steps to deescalate my passion through masterfully rendered rebuttals cloaked in neutral tones like: “I don’t think so” or “Maybe you should sit down for a minute?” or “Here, have some of this non-caffeinated herbal tea.” I gladly comply because I see the unconscious affirmation concealed in their reactions. They are all reducible to notions of death and underworldly directions whether through a nonplussed disagreement intentionally engineered to have as little to do with the matter (cf., the realm of the living) as possible, or through a striving toward calmness, stillness—an out, so to speak, from the heated blood of life for which the shades of Hades so yearn in the Odyssey. Oh, the irony.
For once one gets past its literal face, there’s something about how the content of and around death deepens downward (and concurrently grows upward) the more one looks at it, watches it, reflects on it—something about its fertile richness, its dark mystery that is so present and necessary to the fullness of psyche. Technically the full topic is “death and renewal,” but as far as mythology’s concerned, renewal is the inseparable complement and completion to death.
More pressing for the moment, however, is all this glib talk, my light tossing around of such a heavy term. Precisely what makes “death” so amenable and easy on my tongue is simply the notion that I am talking here about metaphorical death, which means I am encountering the concept of death through the innumerable attributes and entailments of whichever sources are fitting comparisons (e.g., sunsets, waning moons, winter, sleep, etc.). Let that foundational fact sink in, please. For surely there is that other death, literal death—the kind we read about in headlines, and that we all have witnessed one way or another, and been touched by. I mean the kind of death that we have crumbled before on those ruinous occasions when it came and took everything and left in its wake not a thing but the poignantly tangible absence of what once was present and dear and warm and suddenly, irrevocably gone. I will not presume to investigate this literal version—a separate thing altogether—before which I cover my mouth, lower my head, and am silent.
Coming to life through metaphor
Meanwhile, back to the metaphor, which presents a very different perspective and which renders a depth of experience by providing contexts of association through relationships in place of denotative definitions. Before proceeding, let’s do a quick refresh on metaphor so we can sate the logos (our trusty and necessary threshold guardian) and get on with the mythos…
Simply put, a metaphor works by making a comparison between two things (and a “thing” can be an image, an action, or a concept), in which attributes are borrowed from one thing (the source) and applied to another thing (the target). On a deeper level, however, attributes are not borrowed from only the source itself, but from the “domain” of that source—meaning, from that source’s whole environment. This includes all the other phenomena that inhabit that same environment and all the relationships that the source has with those other phenomena!
This very complex network of relationships (entailments) within a particular source-domain is then mapped onto the equally complex domain of a target. Thus metaphor is not just a comparison of one thing to another thing, but a comparison of the innumerable relationships within one thing’s “life” (to employ a type of metaphor called “personification”) to the equally innumerable relationships within another thing’s life. In short, metaphor puts relationships into relationship with each other. Whew, that was hard work. But don’t worry, there’s more…
As an example, one can say that a sunset is a metaphor for death—or even an archetype for death, as it is seen, for example, as marking the beginning of the sun god’s journey through the “twelve hours” of the Ancient Egyptian underworld. For our purposes here, archetypes are simply metaphors that are universal, metaphors that register across cultures. As Jung reminds us, “An archetype expresses itself, first and foremost, in metaphors” (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, pg. 157). Whether we call it metaphor or archetype, the many entailments that accompany a sunset can easily be applied to the concept of death: a sunset is a transitioning event that eventually ends; a sunset sinks down into a horizon and disappears; a sunset is a thing of warmth that becomes cold, a thing of light that becomes dark. And speaking of entailments within domains, “light” is a subcategory of the broader category of sunsets. Within this subcategory, light is (independently) a metaphor for “consciousness” and for “being alive.”
Perpetual depth in metaphor
If I may take things one step further, let me suggest that metaphors are not the one-way journeys of entailments from a source to a target. Rather, metaphors are simultaneously the reciprocal journeys of entailments from the target back to the source. Why is this important? Because it emphasizes a chief concern of individuated consciousness: Relationship—or, worded differently: “interaction with the cosmos that an individuated consciousness finds itself in.” Moreover this concurrent reciprocity imagines a dialogue between source and target. Unlike the monologues of literal fact that simply put a bow on the matter and end it, dialogues iterate. They actually “go” somewhere—as in two feet working in tandem, striding, the one and then the other, carrying the attention of the witness (i.e., us) deeper and deeper into the ever-unfolding terrain of their perpetual interaction.
And this, like all things associative and connotative, renders experience to the witness because the attributes and entailments (which, metaphorically speaking, are the contents of the conversation that the source and target pass back and forth to each other) are never captured.
Rather, their perpetual dialogue summons responses and associations from the witness, and so the metaphor is encountered and experienced as living, as protean. In the field of life, everything is relative, encountered and experienced through comparison. The path of the living metaphor simply goes on and on, deeper and deeper towards transcendence and (I like to think) backlit by the pure energy of being that inexplicably emits from transcendence. The only thing that can stop this emittance and perpetual deepening is literal thinking which shifts the perspective from relationships to isolation, from connotative to denotative. And denotation is an experiential dead-end—it is an intellectual solution that stops shy of transcendence. Sure, the connotation never reaches transcendence, either. But unlike the denotation, it does not shut it out completely.
Metaphors cease to be metaphors when they become denotative, when the dialogue ends, when the associations borne by comparison become facts, when figurative thinking becomes literal, when “raining cats and dogs” summons naught but the concept of heavy rain (and leaves neither the images nor the ideas of lovely pets anywhere in mind). Fittingly, these are called dead metaphors, more popularly known as clichés: dead bodies or husks of words over which we might as well throw some dirt, some flowers, mumble something or other, and go back to our cars. Maybe a real metaphor will sprout in the spring.
With all that in mind, let’s take a moment to appreciate Joseph Campbell’s “new” definition of myth: “My definition of myth now is: a metaphor transparent to transcendence … Mythology opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech, beyond words, in short, to what we call transcendence. If the metaphor closes in on itself [i.e., becomes literal] then it has closed the transcendence; it's no longer mythological. It's distortion” (The Hero’s Journey, pg. 40).
And so, a death-and-renewal metaphor that can be applied as an effective approach to metaphor: When we die to the confining urge of literalism, we are renewed in the living spaciousness of metaphor and myth.
When we die to the confining urge of literalism, we are renewed in the living spaciousness of metaphor and myth.
A bird and a stream
Here is something that happened to me a few days ago while I was writing this essay in the mountains. I could call it a small myth about death and renewal. I will not explicate, I will not kill the metaphor or the myth. Instead, I leave you to your associations, the only way they can be: Living and as they are. Hopefully all that metaphor-math above has groomed the trail for frictionless passage to that special kind of experience that Campbell spoke of—the kind that has a little transcendence coming through.
Anyway, I was walking through 10 degrees Fahrenheit along a ploughed path beside a stream cutting through several feet of snow, edged on both shores by sheets of ice protruding like shelves over the busy water. And then there was this bird, a songbird, about the size of a baseball standing on the far sheet looking into the black glassy current. To my horror the lovely creature just hopped into the water and disappeared. Moments later it reappeared, emerging out of the icy water. A flurry of wings, and it was back on its ice sheet. Then back into the water again, and I mean underwater. This went on for some time and I thought, “Well this is fitting content for my essay: a death-and-renewal metaphor wrought not of words nor of concepts, but of ice and feathers, sunlight and snow.” It was my first encounter with the American dipper. Obviously, my new favorite bird.
MythBlast authored by:
Craig Deininger has been a regularly featured writer for the JCF since 2018. He has taught at many institutions including Naropa University, Studio Film School in Los Angeles, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he earned an MFA in Poetry. He also earned an MA and PhD in Mythology and Jungian Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. He has balanced his scholarship with a long history of (what he calls) "fieldwork," ranging from commercial fishing in Alaska, building trail for the Forest Service in the Rockies, commercial farming in the midwest, years of construction and landscaping across the country and, of course, countless outdoor misadventures in backpacking, rockclimbing, mountain biking, and the like. He ranks himself in the top 99% of the world population in the art of digging a hole with a shovel and acknowledges his inflation for thinking this. His poetry has appeared in several literary magazines including The Iowa Review, and his first book of poetry Leaves from the World Tree, was co-authored with mythologist Dennis Slattery and published by Mandorla Books.
This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 6, and The Hero's Journey
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In this episode, recorded in 1974, Joseph Campbell explores the relationship between humans and their gods. The lecture was given just two years after Campbell's retirement from Sarah Lawrence College and five years after the publication of the final volume in his Masks of God series. Host Bradley Olson introduces the lecture and provides commentary at the conclusion.
This Week's Highlights
"Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? "How many can say,' asks the Aztec poet, 'that there is, or is not, a truth beyond?"
-- Joseph Campbell