The Functions of Mythology

​"The first function of a mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is: the second being to render an interpretive total image of the same, as known to contemporary consciousness. Shakespeare's definition of the function of his art, "to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature," is thus equally a definition of mythology. It is the revelation to waking consciousness of the powers of its own sustaining source.

A third function, however, is the enforcement of a moral order: the shaping of the individual to the requirements of his geographically and historically conditioned social group, and here an actual break from nature may ensue, as for instance (extremely) in the case of a castrato. Circumcisions, subincisions, scarifications, tattoos, and so forth are socially ordered brands and croppings, to join the merely human body in membership to a larger, more enduring, cultural body, of which it is required to become an organ - the mind and feelings being imprinted simultaneously with a correlative mythology. And not nature, but society, is the alpha and omega of this lesson."

Page 4, 'Experience and Authority', from 'The Masks of God: Creative Mythology', by Joseph Campbell

Ariadne

Myth and Creativity: Ariadne’s Thread and a Path Through the Labyrinth
Allison Stieger

"The process of living creatively brings new things into the world and to humankind, but there is a monster guarding the gift, because the maze "takes one to the center of one's self, to some hidden, inner shrine, occupied by the most mysterious portion of the human personality".

http://www.creativitypost.com/arts/myth_and_creativity_ariadnes_thread_and_a_path_through_the_labyrinth

Ariadne
A performance with compositions of Clio Karabelias and a butoh:contemporary dance by Marianna Tsagaraki

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW8ZN1X4S9M&feature=youtu.be

Not what you meet on the way

"Then I will speak plainly, like a man. No hero can be destroyed by the world. His reward is to destroy himself. Not what you meet on the way, but what you are, will destroy you, Heraclitus."

Page 27, 'Weight, The Myth of Atlas and Heraclitus', by Jeanette Winterson

Orpheus, and the Descent into Hell

A brilliant review, makes me want to read the book Right Now. :)
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"The book is divided into seven chapters, each chapter representing a "string" of Orpheus's lyre.

The "Fifth string: Death" shows the author at her most powerful and poetical. She seems to agree with medieval theologians in seeing Orpheus's wife Eurydice as his own "lower self", and also, perhaps, as death; in Cocteau's Orphée, she tells us, "Orpheus had gone down to Hell to find her, his own Death, as much as to retrieve his wife."

That phlegmatic savant Maurice Blanchot enters a more ambiguous, darker plea, seeing in the quest to the Underworld an attempt by Orpheus not only to rescue Eurydice, representing truth or art, but also, as Wroe writes, "to look at her in 'the other night', as the still-unattained object of his desire".

Orpheus: The Song of Life, by Ann Wroe
Ann Wroe showcases a new kind of writing in this playful and passionate paean to Orpheus.
John Banville

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jul/29/orpheus-ann-wroe-john-banville-review

A guide who leads us only to ourselves

"A pantheistic force animating the world; a schizophrenic deity both plebeian and patrician; a guide who leads us only to ourselves: Eros, clearly, is no simple god. He is, Socrates contends, no god at all. Draw­ing together the strands of these various reflections, Socrates main­tains that Eros is, rather, a 'great spirit' who is 'midway between what is divine and what is human,' his ambiguous nature owing to the strange circumstances of his conception.

Sired at the birthday party of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty and love, Eros is the child of Pov­erty, who came to the festivities uninvited as a beggar, and the god Plenty, a welcome guest who passed out there drunk. He produces a son who is neither 'mor­tal nor immortal.' Now fully grown, Eros takes after his mother. Con­stantly in need, he is 'hard, unkempt, barefoot, homeless.' But, like his father, he is 'brave, enterprising, and determined.' Having inher­ited 'an eye for beauty and the good,' Eros continually searches for these two qualities through love, as befits one conceived in the pres­ence of Aphrodite.   

"Straddling the human and the divine, Eros is an emissary, con­ducting 'all association and communication, waking or sleeping,' between the gods and men. His twofold nature explains his defin­ing characteristic - desire itself. For what is desire but the human acknowledgment that one is in need, that one is lacking? As Socrates explains, 'the man who desires something desires what is not avail­able to him, and what he doesn't already have in his possession.' "

Author: Darrin M. McMahon  
Title: Happiness: A History 

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press

Date: Copyright 2006 by Darrin M. McMahon

Pages: 32-34

Ritual

As the night settles in the train, he climbs up to the top berth, and performs namaz, his prayers. Simple gestures, a pattern to follow five times a day, known, familiar. A ritual, a repetition, a returning to the centre, a remembering.

Nothing prepares you for the sudden stab of envy you feel. 

The amazement of it. Where is this bend in the road you have reached, what do you see now?

And then this morning, while waiting for a friend, you come upon this passage in the Joseph Campbell book you have been reading, and you again feel the same catch in your throat.

“For it is the rite, the ritual and its imagery, that counts in religion, and where that is missing the words are mere carriers of concepts that may or may not make contemporary sense. A ritual is an organization of mythological symbols; and by participating in the drama of the rite one is brought directly in touch with these, not as verbal reports of historic events, either past, present, or to be, but as revelations, here and now, of what is always and forever.

Where the synagogues and churches go wrong is by telling what their symbols “mean”.  The value of an effective rite is that it leaves everyone to his own thoughts, which dogma and definitions only confuse. Dogma and definitions rationally insisted upon are inevitably hindrances, not aids, to religious meditation, since no one’s sense of the presence of God can be anything more than a function of his own spiritual capacity.

Having your image of God – the most intimate, hidden mystery of your life – defined for you in terms contrived by some council of bishops back, say, in the fifth century or so: what good is that? But a contemplation of the crucifix works; the odor of incense works; so do, also, hieratic attires, the tones of well-sung Gregorian chants, intoned and mumbled Introits, Kyries, heard and unheard consecrations.

What has the “affect value” of wonders of this kind to do with the definitions of councils, or whether we quite catch the precise meaning of such words as Oramus te, Domine, per merita Sanctorum tuorum? If we are curious for meanings, they are there, translated in the other column of the prayerbook. But if the magic of the rite is gone….

Page 97, ‘Myths to Live By’, Joseph Campbell

Photo: Jamia Masjid, Bijapur

Myths, and the Powers of the Psyche

"An altogether different approach is represented by Carl G. Jung, in whose view the imageries of mythology and religion serves positive, life-furthering ends. According to his way of thinking, all the organs of our bodies - not only those of sex and aggression - have their purposes and motives, some being subject to conscious control, others, however, not.

Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with these inwards forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch. They are telling us in picture language of powers of  the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent that wisdom of the species by which man has weathered the millenniums.

Thus they have not been, and can never be, displaced by the findings of science, which relate rather to the outside world than to the depths that we enter in sleep. Through a dialogue conducted with these inward forces through our dreams and through a study of myths, we can learn to know and come to terms with the greater horizon of our own deeper and wiser, inward self. And analogously, the society that cherishes and keeps its myths alive will be nourished from the soundest, richest strata of the human spirit.

Page 4, The Impact of Science on Myth, in 'Myths to Live By', Jospeh Campbell

Rapture

"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."

Page 1, 'The Power of Myth', Joseph Campbell

Sacred Time

From Mircea Eliade's 'The Sacred and the Profane, The Nature of Religion':

Profane Duration and Sacred Time

For religious man, time too, like space, is neither homogeneous nor continuous. On the one hand, there are the intervals of a sacred time, the time of the festivals (by far the greater part of which are periodical); on the other there is profane time, ordinary temporal duration, in which acts without religious meaning have their setting. Between these two kinds of time there is, of course, solution of continuity; but by means of rites religious man can pass without danger from ordinary temporal duration to sacred time.

One essential difference between these two qualities of time strikes us immediately: by its very nature sacred time is reversible in the sense that, properly speaking, it is a primordial mythical time made present. Every religious festival, any liturgical time, represents the reactualization of a sacred event that took place in a mythical past, "in the beginning". Religious participation in a festival implies emerging from ordinary temporal duration and reintegration of the mythical time reactualized by the festival itself.

The Way

"...The Buddha's enlightenment is the most important single moment in Oriental mythology, a counterpart of the Crucifixion of the West. The Buddha beneath the Tree of Enlightenment (the Bo Tree) and Christ on Holy Rood (the Tree of Redemption) are analogous figures, incorporating an archetypal World Savior, World Tree motif, which is of immemorial antiquity.

...The point is that Buddhahood, Enlightenment, cannot be communicated, but only the way to Englightenment. This doctrine of the incommunicability of the Truth which is beyond names and forms is basic to the great Oriental, as well as to the Platonic, traditions.

Whereas the truths of science are communicable, being demonstrable hypotheses rationally founded on observable facts - ritual, mythology, and metaphysics are but guides to the brink of a transcendent illumination, the final step to which must be taken by each in his own silent experience.

Hence one of the Sanskrit terms for sage is muni, "the silent one." Sakyamuni (one of the titles of Gautama Buddha) means "the silent one or sage (muni) of the Sakya clan." Though he is the founder of a widely taught religion, the ultimate core of his doctrine remains concealed, necessarily, in silence."

Page 25, 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces' the seminal work of comparative mythology by Joseph Campbell

Enkidu

Long ago, attended a fabulous cello conert by a Swedish musician, Svante Henryson. His album Enkidu speaks of an intriguing Mesopotamian myth, represented in the Epic of Gilgamesh, perhaps the oldest written story.

When Gilgamesh, who is two-thirds god and one-third man, becomes so powerful and arrogant that his own subjects cannot bear him, the goddess Aruru whom they go to for help, creates a double for him, called Enkidu. Enkidu is a hairy man-beast, his more natural, elementary, unpolished side, which balances Gilgamesh's arrogance and acquaints him with his humanness, the side that is weak and vulnerable, but also therefore capable of kindness and tolerance.

"We meet Enkidu first in the Epic of Gilgamesh, and learn that he was created to be Gilgamesh's equal and Soul Brother, so that the young, selfish, brutish and proud king of Uruk could know the meaning of friendship, trust, courage and loyalty to become a wholer being. Enkidu's coming into Gilgamesh's life is announced by the dreams of Ninsun, Gilgamesh´s mother, who states that Enkidu will be "a strong companion, the one who helps a friend in need".

from the site: http://www.gatewaystobabylon.com/gods/lords/lordenkidu.html

Found this story beautifully used as illustration in this book: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him" by Sheldon B.Kopp.

"Every man has his Enkidu, his other half, his hidden self. The more he is out of touch with his double the more a man's life is an empty and unsatisfying burlesque. For one strong man who lives like a brute, there is the double of his own soft helplessness to be met. Without his weak and passive double, his capacity for tenderness and gentle touch is also lost.

For another sort of half-man who meets the world as Mr.Nice Guy, there is the danger of living a life of self-degrading appeasement. In order to become free to assert himself when he needs to, he must first be introduced to the ruthlessly dangerous double of his undiscovered rage."

Prometheus

Prometheus, the creator of humans, feels sorry for them as they shiver through cold winter nights. He steals fire from the gods and gives it to mankind. And so he incurs the terrible wrath of Zeus, who punishes him to be tied to a rock on the top of Mount Caucasus, where an eagle comes to eat his liver every night. The next morning the liver grows back again, so that his torment is eternal.

In the repeated returnings of our suffering, we repay our debt to Prometheus, by reliving in small ways what he suffered for 30 long years...

Aretê, a higher idea of efficiency

‘...What moves the Greek warrior to deeds of heroism’, Kitto comments, 'is not a sense of duty as we understand it-duty towards others: it is rather duty towards oneself. He strives after that which we translate "virtue", but is in Greek aretê, "excellence". It runs through Greek life.

Phaedrus is fascinated by the description of the motive of 'duty toward self' which is an almost exact translation of the Sanskrit word dharma, sometimes described as the 'one' of the Hindus. Can the dharma of the Hindus and the 'virtue' of the ancient Greeks be identical?

'When we meet aretê, in Plato,' he said, 'we translate it "virtue", and consequently miss all the flavour of it. "Virtue" at least in modern English, is almost entirely a moral word; aretê, on the other hand, is used indifferently in all the categories, and simply means excellence.

Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Phaeacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing aretê.

Aretê implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency - or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself.'

'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance' Robert M Pirsig

The way back to Eden

"....The myth of the "happy savage" is based on the observation that when free of external threats, preliterate people often display a serenity that seems enviable to the visitor from more differentiated cultures. But the myth tells only half the story: when hungry or hurting, the "savage" is no more happy than we would be; and he may be in that condition more often than we are.

The inner harmony of technologically less advanced people is the positive side of their limited choices and of their stable repertory of skills, just as the confusion in our soul is the necessary consequence of unlimited opportunities and constant perfectibility. Goethe represented the dilemma in the bargain Doctor Faustus, the archetype of the modern man, made with Mephistopheles: the good doctor gained knowledge and power, but at the price of introducing disharmony in his soul. ...........

Few would argue that a simpler consciousness, no matter how harmonious, is preferable to a more complex one. While we might admire the serenity of the lion in repose, the tribesman's untroubled acceptance of his fate, or the child's wholehearted involvement in the present, they cannot offer a model for resolving our predicament.

The order based on innocence is now beyond our grasp. Once the fruit is plucked from the tree of knowledge, the way back to Eden is barred forever."

Page 228. 'Flow – The Psychology of Optimal Experience'Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Never look back

"The descent to the Underworld of Orpheus is paralleled in other versions of a worldwide theme: the Japanese myth of Izanagi and Izanami, the Akkadian/Sumerian myth of Inanna's Descent to the Underworld, and Mayan myth of Ix Chel and Itzamna.

The Nez Perce tell a story about the trickster figure, Coyote, that shares many similarities with the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. The mytheme of not looking back, an essential precaution in Jason's raising of chthonic Brimo Hekate under Medea's guidance, is reflected in the Biblical story of Lot's wife when escaping from Sodom.

The warning of not looking back is also found in the Grimms' folk tale "Hansel and Gretel." More directly, the story of Orpheus is similar to the ancient Greek tales of Persephone captured by Hades and similar stories of Adonis captive in the underworld. However, the developed form of the Orpheus myth was entwined with the Orphic mystery cults and, later in Rome, with the development of Mithraism and the cult of Sol Invictus."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpheus

Transition

".......There is, however, another kind of symbolism, belonging to the earliest-known sacred traditions, that is also connected with the periods of transition in a person's life. They point to man's need for liberation from any state of being that is too immature, too fixed or final. In other words, they concern man's release from - or transcendence of - any confining pattern of existence, as he moves towards a superior or more mature stage in his development. ........
It is similar to cases reported among the simple food-gathering tribes, which are the least family-conscious groups we know. In these societies the young initiate must take a lonely journey to a sacred place (in Indian cultures of the North Pacific coast, it may actually be a crater lake) where, in a visionary trance-like state, he encounters his "guardian spirit" in the form of an animal, a bird, or natural object. He closely identifies himself with this "bush soul" and thereby becomes a man. Without such an experience he is regarded, as an Achumaui medicine man put it, as "an ordinary Indian, nobody."
Symbols of Transcendence
Part 2: Ancient Myths and Modern Man - Joseph L.Henderson

from the book 'Man and his Symbols'
Edited, with an introduction, by Carl Gustav Jung