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This month’s MythBlast topics include: “death and renewal,” “the Hero’s Journey” and “horizons.”
Whew.
Now there’s a tricky little puzzle for a winter’s game of connect-the-dots.
Get some hot chocolate, and let’s see if we can fit these together.
Death and renewal
Sometimes during the calendar year, metaphors put on their boots and stomp into consciousness. Here in the northern hemisphere we’re enjoying the darkest time of year, just before Sol returns to light up and renew the manger of our hopes. When it comes to Death and Renewal, the Winter Solstice is easily one of those times.
Horizons
Trickier. Whenever I get into a pickle trying to figure something out, I start by digging into the etymology of whatever it is, and “horizon” has a weirdly contrary genealogy. The word derives from the Greek word horos, stones used to mark boundaries. So, technically, the horizon marks a border.
A lot of borders, some with barbed wire, lie between us and the New-Year-of-our-lives. The most imposing ones seem continually out of reach, however, rolling away from us like the rainbow’s end, out there at the edge of our comprehension. But while we’re used to thinking of horizons as something forever in the distance, they’re still borders, and we still stumble into them–a barrier we thought we’d never even approach can turn out to be, surprisingly <thump> right there in front of us. Borders can be psychological or temporal or geographical–they can even be gastronomical, if you consider “getting through dinner with some of your relatives” a line you have to cross every year.
The hero’s journey
Arguably, after getting past the initial threshold guardians, every initiation on the Path is a kind of death and renewal, a doorway that once marked a limit, the horizon of what we knew or believed. In real life a lot of these initiatory stepping stones can seem impossibly distant or impossible to cross: will I ever find a job I love? Will I ever find my people? Will I ever get out of school? Stuff like that. Personally, I was afraid for a while that I’d never fall in love, it was always out there in the receding distance … and then <thump>. I got run over by Blitzen.
Oops, wrong metaphor. Anyway, you know what I mean.
When I think about horizons, I think about The Truman Show, the movie with Jim Carrey where he plays a guy raised entirely inside a huge artificial world as the subject of a highly-rated “real life” television show. He doesn’t know he’s spent his life inside a huge set until, one day, he overcomes his fears, sails across what he’d taken to be the ocean, and bumps into the horizon.
Thump.
It was a surprise. After that discovery Truman had to leave the world he knew and venture out to meet … well, the rest of the world. Imagine the collisions of expectation and reality.
In a sense, we’re all in the same boat.
Campbell had some thoughts about the loss of horizons in the current era, and the loss of any mythological compass to help us navigate. He wrote:
There were formerly horizons within which people lived and thought and mythologized. There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. ... That is just what we are experiencing; and we are riding it: riding it to a new age, a new birth, a totally new condition of mankind—to which no one anywhere alive today can say that he has the key, the answer, the prophecy, to its dawn.” (Myths to Live By, pg. 254)
He has a point.
It’s a constant theme for Campbell: our mythology puts us into relationship with the universe, but when the universe (and thus, our understanding of the universe) changes, our myths need to change as well. When the sources of our traditional mythological discourse have been washed away by science–when God and the angels have been chased out of heaven–our understanding of ourselves seems lost in a boundless universe, one without a North Star. Our relation to that universe, as well as the meaning attached to that relation, seems to recede into an infinite distance.
I don’t know what the solution is and Campbell is right: no one alive today has the answer to this question. But we’re all seeing the collisions and we can prepare for them.
every initiation on the Path is a kind of death and renewal, a doorway that once marked a limit, the horizon of what we knew or believed.
Crossing horizons
Thinking about horizons as boundary stones puts some of this into perspective.
A boundary is not a thing in itself, although we often think of it that way: as a fence or barbed wire or a line in the sand. But that’s just what it looks like, not what it is. A boundary is really a zone where two territories meet, a line of mediation between ourselves and an often frightening Otherness. Historically a border is where our territory meets their territory. Now, if the relations are good, all border crossings are an occasion for happy and congenial trade and interaction. If relations are unfriendly, or yet to be established, the boundary can pose a threat or an occasion for conflict–which is why we say that boundaries “mark” territory. “Mark” is derived from Mars, the Roman god of war and the god who, naturally, oversaw boundaries between territories. There’s some useful mythology: the god of war oversaw boundaries and borders. This much is still true today, geographically but also psychologically, philosophically, and metaphorically.
One thing we can know about a future without horizons is that we’ll bump into new ones, both out there on The Final Frontier but also inwardly, in the conflict between the self you think you are and the Self revealed to you over time as a result of your pilgrimage through life.
No Horizons? Nope.
New Horizons.
Thanks for musing along.
MythBlast authored by:
Mark C.E. Peterson, Ph.D. is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Washington County and past president of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture (ISSRNC.org). Philosopher, gadfly, poet, cook, writing along the watermargins of nature, myth, and culture. A practitioner of taijiquan and kundalini yoga for over 40 years, Dr. Peterson is also a happy member of the Ukulele World Congress.
This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 6, and The Hero's Journey
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This Week's Highlights
"Out of perfection, nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up. The earth must be broken to bring forth life. If the seed does not die, there is no plant. Bread results from the death of wheat."
-- Joseph Campbell