Mythopoetics In Culture mythopoetry.com

HEADS UP!

2021-07-22T14:33:00.002-07:00

No new blogs for quite a while but maybe a brand new blog in the works for 2022. Think January!

IN THY SPIRIT KEEPING POETRY SERIES FOR DECEMBER, 2017: A POETRY TRILOGY

2017-12-16T03:34:00.001-08:00

I.
EVERGREEN & PINE

evergreen & pine
darken the snow
lit with dusk

II.
THE NORTH WIND BLEW

evergreen & pine
darkened snow
lit with dusk

an image
stuck underneath my lid right where
evergreen & pine once drew a smile of birds

there I withdrew into night antlers
and slumber and then, the North Wind
blew

and the image
in my keeping
mounted heaven

©2017 In Thy Spirit Keeping Poetry Trilogy: II. The North Wind Blew stephanie pope mythopoetry.com

III.
A REINDEER NAMED EVERGREEN

Red as a
reindeer oddly named, cold dusk
weaves throughout the ragged smile line

antlered evergreen & pine vine where birds
flew home in trust—reborn at dusk; the sun
reddens under cover of winter already
three times dark and climbs into bed.
Evergreen & pine reign here. A

deep promise in the smile not a poet—a poem
fleshed not flesh brings another kind of reign near
an ars poetica pulls through inner night antlers
poignant pabulum rooted in old stories & ancient stars
in ghosts & Christmas presence & the soul of worn Carol
seamless seemers clinging to a Yule King’s robe

©2017 In Thy Spirit Keeping Poetry Trilogy: III. A Reindeer Named Evergreen stephanie pope mythopoetry.com
********************************
notes

1. The major mythologem inspiring the poetry trilogy, "In Thy Spirit Keeping is the image of the Spirit of Christmas Present taken from Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol" re-imagined in the 1999 version and portrayed on screen by Patrick Stewart. Christmas occurs at a time of year when the sun is imagined weakest and life is most vulnerable. Our mythic imagination narrates how the light of the world is about to embark on a solar journey into night and the underworld this twelfth month and the world lay three times darkened. It is the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter. It is the end of the day and moving toward night. It is very near the end of the year. The spirit of Christmas appears in the form of a Yule King jolly and giant and adorned in a holly wreath and green fur-trimmed robe. He carries a cornucopia and an empty scabbard, the empty scabbard symbolizing good will and peace on earth. In the excerpt you are about to revisit, the Yule King's dark hair is graying. This is how one knows the presence is a reference to how things are in the soul of the man's world now and not some other year, era, or eon. Also, when Mr Scrooge notices something hanging down by the hem of the Yule King's robe, he thinks it is something not human, as if like an animal's claw, i.e. as if bird-like and he thinks it is not part of the Yule King but that it belongs to him. The Yule King says no. The claw exists as a result of man's doing. He lifts his robe to show two human-like children, ignorance, a boy and want, a girl. And, I remember my Jung. Psyche is at bottom nature. Thusly, the nature of my own psyche is reminded of its own return seasonally to nature's psyche for renewal forgetful of the world of men, which is culture and in this way I may tend to what pathos ails me ailing in the world of men.

2. I am reminded of the inner robe and the inner work which can be likened to an ars poetica. Both images, that of the inwardness of presence addressing my own soul likend to that of Christmas present in the literary imagination of the tale and the treatise or literary essays by Horace on the artistic nature of poetry 18-19 BCE, turned again by Archebald Macleish somehow matter to the way these poems come to be. I am reminded too of another way to envision "psyche is at bottom nature." Psyche or "soul" is not in the body. The body is in it. So now the Yule King seems to be an embodiment of the suffering soul ailing in the man and this is why Mr Scrooge doesn't recognize his offspring when he sees them. And when he does, it seems a nightmare.

3. Two twitter poetry prompts precede working with this literary mythologem and these occur simultaneously within the days leading up to the Doug Jones/ Roy Moore vote in Alabama. One prompt appeared as a trending twitter hashtag #OddReindeerNames. The second prompt was #348 and included the words, before, shadowed, and filament. One was not allowed to use the words in the actual poetry but use active imagination to see where they took one in the ars poetica.

4. Another thought that stayed with me while I was letting the poetic experience envelope me was remembering that the Greeks believed a god visits one in dream. This awareness was at the heart of the healing temples of Asclepius. Jung has written that when a man's soul first appears to him in dream and active imagiantion it shows up with the divine presence. Soul is not with man it is with god and god takes its form to speak intially to man Jung thought. Something like this psychological imagination is of what the scene Patrick Stewart portrays most reminds me. Mr. Scrooge cannot run away. The time has come for him to wrestle his soul from the Yule King so that he may carry its spirit with him throughout all his days.

TIS A SEASON FOR POETRY

2017-11-19T07:34:00.000-08:00

WHEN WHO POETS IN THE IMAGINAL DIMENSION
LIVES ON THE SIDEWALK OF YOUR CHILDHOOD...

WHO LOVES POETRY

Do you?
Let me introduce you to the new book trailer for
my August, 2017 release of Monsters & Bugs.

Enjoy!

Monsters & Bugs on Amazon

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cultural mythologer, poet-essayist, stephanie
publishes Mythopoetry Scholar Ezine
at https://www.mythopoetry.com

and Mythopoetry Blog (Mythopoetics In Culture)
at https://mythopoetry.blogspot.com

STEPHANIE ON TWITTER

twitter handle: @mythopoetry

or visit https://twitter.com/mythopoetry

WEBSITE

https://www.mythopoetry.com

NOVEMBER GUEST BLOG: RETHINKING MYTHIC THINKING by Bradley Olson #depthpsychology #myth #soul #mythopo

2017-11-12T05:00:00.001-08:00

A MEDITATION ON THE GRAMMAR OF MYTH
"Each mythology has its own grammar." ~ Bradley Olson

I thought for that at least a portion of this blog post, I might respond a bit to Dave Alber’s really fine September posts, which reflect nicely the essence of his recent book, The Heart of Myth:Wisdom Stories From Endangered People. I particularly like his phrase “the grammar of myth,” because it is an unusual and surprising pairing of the words myth and grammar but soon, upon closer examination, one discovers the reasons for why the pairing of myth and grammar is apropos. Grammar is comprised of an internalized set of rules for the use of a given language, and for most native speakers those rules are not learned—internalized—by study and instruction. Grammar is learned by watching and listening to other speakers, and the grammatical nuances of a language learned very early in childhood are intuitively relied upon in writing and conversation, and even in thinking. Grammar may also be a word used to describe an orthodoxy that prescribes and governs punctuation, spelling, and usage. In other words, grammar is the foundation of self-expression.

You see where I’m going with this; each mythology has its own grammar as well: rules that govern denotation, expression, orthodox understanding, thinking, and form. And these grammatical rules, sometimes called mythemes, tenets, or articles of faith, are also learned in very early childhood and often inexorably remain, over the course of even a very long life, the intuitive framework for understanding oneself and one’s world. Those of us cohabiting with a particular mythology rely on its grammar to communicate comprehensibly with one another, to support, instruct, encourage, and all too familiarly, rebuke. Perhaps even more important is that grammar insists on storytelling and making narrative possible, in fact, grammar may frankly necessitate story. I suppose one cannot truly imagine what trying to communicate with another person might have been like before, shall we call it, the invention or the organization of grammar, but I suspect that a lot of grunting, pointing, the use of contorted, exaggerated facial expressions, stick and dirt drawings, and an exasperated, repetitive emphasis on a few key sounds would have been the norm. An unwieldy enterprise, to say the least, and coupled with its longueur, it would certainly seem to incline one to fewer verbal interactions. Grammar allows one to participate in relationship by virtue of the narrativizing of life, not only one’s own life, but the lives (and deaths) of others, of the community, of animals, of forests, grasslands, deserts, seas, as well as the heavens. Grammar makes myth possible, grammar may even insist upon myth.

Rethinking Myth Through Joseph Campbell’s “Four Functions”

In David’s September 4th guest blog on this site, “What is Myth For You?”, he referenced an essay I had written: “Bradley Olson recently posted an essay on the importance of rethinking myth and personal definitions of myth, and similarly, he referenced it back to the mystical function of myth.” I was surprised to read this, because as I was writing it, I was thinking of it in terms of the psychological function of myth. But Dave was not wrong in associating what I had written with the mystical function of myth, of which is to awaken a sense of “awe” in the encounter with the, as Jung put it, mysterium tremendum. Joseph Campbell’s four functions of mythology, as I think about them now with Dave’s grammaticus influencing me, are also attempts at grammar, and it would be as wrong to relegate them to discrete domains as it would be to insist upon always speaking the King’s English; more elegant and clear, perhaps, but not nearly as interesting, nor as alive. Each of these four functions—metaphysical, cosmological, sociological, and psychological—are in dynamic relationships with one another, sometimes opposing, sometimes syncretic, and sometimes paradoxical. The student, less innately fluent than, say, the initiate, will struggle with the intellectual imperative of properly consigning this experience or that phenomenon to its proper function. For instance, is this particular narrative supporting a sociological function or is it advancing my own psychological needs? At any given time, the answer may be yes, no, or both. How does one decisively separate cosmology and awe (the metaphysical function) for instance? Here again, these categories function as grammar, and as such, one must first learn how to use and apply them correctly and reliably in order to effectively and creatively transgress the rules at some future point when the goal is to creatively open up and revitalize the mythic narratives. In mythology, as in the lives of cultures, perhaps this task falls to those best suited for the work: the heretics, the visionaries, the poets, the artists, those singular individuals living within a particular narrative who see, perhaps for the first time, something entirely new in the old forms, plasticity in the rigid structures, and beauty in the unavoidable, and often unforgiving, realities of life.

Dave writes that “Myths are transmissions of knowledge from the enlightened state, from cultures that rightly identify spiritual work with the routine moment-to-moment development of their awareness state.” As David soon points out, “[the definition] is imperfect and limited,” and he believes the imperfection is intentional in order to, I presume, give myth the room and imprecision it requires to make it flexibly expansive enough to contain and transmit extraordinary esoteric, metaphysical knowledge. I am aware from our personal conversations and correspondence that Dave values, as I do, the timeless, mercurial, eternal, archetypal qualities of myth, the fleeting “Protean slipperiness” of it (as he once put it to me), and the ability of myth to evoke “profound states of awareness.” Dave’s September essays are deeply thought, innovative, and pleasurable to read, and I have no criticism for him in this regard. But since the point of my essay this month is to contribute something of my own thoughts about myth, my response is, it seems, yes and…. The and… is my problem with the focus on the transcendent and spiritual aspects of myth, a focus I acknowledge as a venerable interpretation and use of myth, but one I am exhausted by and, frankly, one I think the world can ill afford any longer. At its best, it denies the reality of human effort and inter-relatedness and creates comforting illusions; at worst it creates an excess of greed, stupidity, and shallow, trivial gestures performed within an atmosphere of mercilessness.

Myth’s Grammar, Thought, And Imaginal Life

I prefer to consider myth as a mode of thought or a condition of imagining rather than a narrative containing a body of knowledge. Perhaps, referencing my above discussion of Dave’s notion of grammar, I can call myth the grammar of thought, or the grammar of imagination (as I recall, Hegel mentioned something along the lines of grammar being the work of thought). Myth was “taken up” or rediscovered during the Enlightenment because, as a mode of thinking, it was believed to be a key to comprehending history, philosophy, religion, art, linguistics, and creativity itself. Considering myth to be a mode of thinking returns ownership of myth to human beings and, from that point of view, a mythic imagination is an uncritical, non-causal, wholesale search for meaning and significance in a human life lived in a fundamentally mysterious world. Myth is no longer the province of gods or the expression in the world of supernatural intervention but instead, it rightfully reclaims for human beings an apprehension of the sublime nested within human passions, changes of fortune, joys, and depressions, elation and pathos.

A Fifth Function Of Myth?

There is at least one other exquisitely human function of myth that I would add to Campbell’s well known four, and that is the function of delight. Delight as a function certainly isn’t my discovery. John Dryden specifically, and all manner of poets, writers, painters, classically educated people in all walks of life, have noted this function at work one way or another in the mythopoetic genre. The mythographer is, as the word poesis suggests, a maker and a creator, she aims at making something beautiful, something that stirs us, not by representing things exactly as they are but by heightening their intensity, deepening their depths, qualities Dryden called “lively” and “just” (Essay of Dramatic Poesy). Poesis, and by extension mythopoesis, is a uniquely human endeavor and delighting in it allows one to, if not exactly remake the world, remake our own reality here and now, for there is no fear in delight, and no pain, delight is play, not pressure. Poesis and drama also instruct, says Dryden, but the function of instruction is secondary in his mind, and what always assumes a place of primacy in his thinking is the function of delight. Delight is created by the contemplation of beauty, and it is the job of the creative person to create or highlight a beauty that contributes to the pleasures of the soul. The condition of delight taken in every aspect of life, even the difficult, allows one to accept one’s human, all too human, existence without the vulgar, slavish, and undignified need for transcendence.

Meditations On Existential Dread,
Salvation, And Transcendence

There is a story I love about D.T. Suzuki, the great popularizer of Zen in the West and who was, as he was dying, visited by a friend and they had a wide-ranging conversation about Zen, poetry, and, of course, the meaning of life. Suzuki excused himself from the room for a bit, and once he was out of earshot his wife leaned over to the visitor and said something like, “You know why he doesn’t believe in Satori, do you not?” The visitor shook his head and said, “No.” Mrs. S. began chuckling and then exclaimed, “He’s never experienced it, himself!” I suppose I like this story because it reflects my own understanding; I’ve never been, in my exposures to Christianity, Zen, Sufism—all of which I took rather seriously at one time or another in my life, able to experience what “they” said I should, namely, some sort of transcendence. Some sacred wisdom, or some spiritual practice, was supposed to enter me, heal me, or expand my consciousness or something, and I would be fundamentally changed as a result. But stories, narratives, even sacred ones, don’t change anyone. Human beings don’t change. We are not transformed. We do not become different, altered (although we may well become altared, tied to doctrine, rituals, and forms) beings.

One might wonder that with an attitude like that, what is the point of being a psychotherapist? Well, there is quite an important point it, and while I don’t believe that people can change, I do believe they can relieve their suffering. Suffering is created by the apparently insurmountable gap between who people believe themselves to be and who they believe they should be. Because they can’t change themselves in any way to which they are not already predisposed, that gap appears to be unspannable and they begin to long for transcendence, a transcendence that in its most frank, naked intention, is to somehow escape their human condition, the condition of limited agency and vision, competency and comprehension, beset by frailty and existential dread. It makes sense, I suppose, to wish that some divine hand of a supernatural agent, some compassionate, just and virtuous suspension of the universal order would simply erase my misery and install me in a life of happiness and ease.It may be that the wish for salvation and transcendence is built into myth as well as human nature. Chekov once remarked that if you see a prominently displayed gun in the first act, you can be sure it will be fired in the third. Likewise, in mythology, the first act emphasis is religious, it is focused on supernatural, divine beings, divine, supernatural realms, and the religious thinking that encapsulates them. So naturally now, in the third act, people often turn to myth the way they used to turn to religion, except that we tell ourselves we’re not being religious, we’re too sophisticated to fall for that. Instead, we think of ourselves as being scholarly, or psychological, or merely “spiritual.” Practices arise such as personal mythology, culturally esoteric and exotic spiritual practices, and what they have in common, deep down in their religious DNA, is the desire for transcendence and salvation in some fashion. Please, the practitioner begs, let me be something I presently am not, and seem incapable of becoming. And I suppose, to some degree, that’s what those of us who privilege the metaphysical or psychological function of myth may have wrought. We’ve focused on the transformational, cathartic properties that an immersion in mythology is expected to offer. And it is, after all, a reasonable first step in the study of myth to try to understand exactly what is the impact myth is having on my life, on my personal situation.

Is That All There Is To Myth?

But if that’s all it is, if myth is only beneficial to individuals because it makes their personal lives seem easier or better, we might as well give up on the way we (in the manner of Freud, Jung, Campbell, etc.) study myth right now. If myth has become merely another more exotic, and because of its unfamiliarity potentially more likely, shot at salvation, the genre has been exhausted in the way that a lode of gold or silver has been worked out; the mining of myth can no longer yield usable amounts of its natural matter. Secondly, we cannot continue to believe that our human condition is somehow inferior, fallen, or inadequate to the task of living. Life in the contemporary world has given way to other circumstances which must be met with other ways and forms of mythological imagining. And even if my second point isn’t correct, and the circumstances of human life haven’t changed fundamentally in ten thousand years, we either lack the imaginative power to approach the form novelly, or we no longer find the answers that novelty supplies to be of value. Finally, and we see this played out on every world stage multiple times every day, misunderstanding myth (intentionally or not) serves as some advantage to someone, and when mythic narratives are an advantage to someone or some group, one is helpless to be understood or to lay in course corrections.

Freud once remarked of his own theories that they appealed to him because they tended to, like the theories of Copernicus or Darwin, diminish man’s pride. Perhaps it isn’t asking too much to imagine that pride is at work in the sacred fantasies of transcendence, salvation, the project of leaving one’s human condition behind. Pride has at its core a loathing of the human condition and its forms, and pride refuses to see that simple human life and living has a profoundly aesthetic quality. The myths we cling to tend to summarize our cultural life, which may be why we so badly want to impress them into the service of escape. To my way of thinking, myths investigate and celebrate human will and if that avenue of their contemplation is dying, then perhaps it’s because the will of our society is dying, and if it is, it is likely dying of its own excess. But contemporary culture seems intent on transcending human nature, too, and self-interested, selfish excess is the chosen option for the program: multiply, augment, display, annex, coopt, volatize, transmogrify, transmute…and, like the directions on a shampoo bottle, repeat over and over until we are, finally, no longer human. As Oscar Wilde aptly put it, “nothing succeeds like excess.”

An Ethical Ideal

The answers to the problems of living are not found in self-transformation or through “realizing one’s divine nature,” but rather, becoming more and more and more human; more and more and more oneself. This is precisely what Nietzsche (no mean mythographer, himself) would prescribe. A self isn’t, according to Nietzsche, something you just naturally are. A self must be achieved, continually, over and over again. As Duncan Large notes in his forward to Ecce Homo, Nietzsche insisted that “the process of self-becoming [is] an ethical ideal.” In Nietzsche’s own words:

Becoming what you are presupposes that you have not the slightest inkling what you are. From this point of view even life’s mistakes have their own sense and value, the temporary byways and detours, the delays, the ‘modesties,’ the seriousness wasted on tasks which lie beyond the task. […] You need to keep the whole surface of consciousness—consciousness is a surface—untainted by any of the great imperatives. Beware even every great phrase, every great pose! With all of them the instincts risk understanding them too soon. Meanwhile in the depths, the organizing ‘idea’ with a calling to be master grows and grows—it begins to command, it slowly leads you back out of byways and detours, it prepares individual qualities and skills which will one day prove indispensable as means to the whole—it trains one by one all the ancillary capacities before it breathes a word about the dominant task, about goal, purpose, sense (Ecce Homo).

This is exactly, I think, what Campbell means by following your bliss; one realizes that living a human life is often accompanied by inescapable constraints of one kind or another, but there need be no authority but the inner deep, Nietzsche’s “organizing idea,” that continually unfolds proportionally to how intensely we approach our own self-becoming. That was a rather long quote, but one often reads about Nietzsche rather than actually reading Nietzsche, and we should be reading him…deeply. Those we turn to in our study of myth were powerfully influenced by him; Campbell certainly read him, Jung read him and worried that perhaps his philosophy made him mad, Freud almost certainly read him and lied, saying he had not.

Self-becoming, not change, is what happens in psychotherapy, although I suppose from an outside perspective it appears that, through this process, the individual has changed. But that would be wrong; in fact, she has simply become more of whom she has already always been. When a rose seed becomes a beautiful, blooming rose, it might appear to have changed from a seed to a rose, but the mature rose was always there, inside the seed, and she became the fullest expression of herself. The true value of myth is found not in esoteric teachings about transcendence, nor in, as seductive as it may be, an occulted promise to escape one’s human legacy. Rather, the value of myth is found in its way of consoling us, beings who are subject to wild swings of fortune, impossible moral dilemmas, horrifying exposures to the cannibalizing tendency of life itself to devour life, to triumph, love, joy, sorrow, and all the rest of the exquisitely human experience—as Zorba lovingly called it, “…the whole catastrophe.” To be more fully human should be the goal, to enter one’s humanity more and more deeply, to become as fully and completely human as one can possibly be, and those indispensable qualities and skills which benefit, not just oneself, but the entire collective, are found there. What myths teach is what I have called, in other venues, radical acceptance; Nietzsche called it Amor Fati, Jung called it individuation, and Campbell called it bliss. Keats, in Sleep and Poetry, says it this way:

…Though no great minist’ring reason sorts

Out the dark mysteries of human souls

To clear conceiving: yet there ever rolls

A vast idea before me, and I glean

Therefrom my liberty…

Myth has the power of absorbing and disturbing us in secret ways, just as our own self-reflection is likely to absorb and disturb us, in ways remaining frustratingly secret. Myth is one of the few ways complex civilizations keep in mind the uncivilized and untutored selves we desperately want to have outgrown. To keep us in mind, too, the existentially puzzling phenomena we’d rather not give too much thought to, things like death, birth, and the constant struggle between free will and fate, issues that remain stubbornly resistant to the intellect. Myth allows one to see the full force and effect of a complex world on a limited human being, and if one begins to think and imagine mythically, one wakes up and is less constrained by the complexity and limitation of living a human life, and opens the doors of perception to lives of joy and significance. Imagined and thought this way, myth serves the purpose of a closer and truer relationship with life. Myth doesn’t transform or solve the problems of living, but it does illuminate the subject, and that, itself, is something important and worth having.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bradley Olson, PhD is a psychotherapist in private practice with an office at Mountain Waves Healing Arts. Dr. Olson has a particular interest in Jungian Analytical Psychology and Mythological Studies, and his work with clients is heavily influenced by these two traditions. Dr. Olson works mainly with adults on issues of spirituality, identity, and transitions into mid-life.

For more regarding Dr. Olson's work visit
Mountain Waves Healing Arts.

BE ALWAYS DRUNKEN #blog #MondayMotivation #WorldFoodDay

2017-10-16T10:56:00.000-07:00

see @FlynnGrayWriter blog

ABOUT THAT NEW BOOK

“It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.”– Charles Baudelaire

I must admit I have been having a bit of trouble pulling a press kit together to launch the marketing campaign for my new poetry book, Monsters & Bugs. My new book published August 27, 2017 just ahead of my 65^th birthday on the 31^st.

I am not quite three weeks and four pages into shaping the press kit when I have a quite sinister car accident which totals my 2004 Mazada Miata convertible. The wreck of my world bangs me about a bit. Some part of me feels like it has become part of the crushing wreckage, now a burden of time. It is not in this moment but in another, the one in the gap between then and now the ghost of Baudelaire finds me. “Become drunken,” whispers his shade. It is between moments when death flashes underneath the green light at the intersection where the accident occurs, and I now, marveling that the severest of my several injuries is a soft tissue, contusion of the wrist the doctor advises will heal in six weeks, that I think of Baudelaire who suggests how to become drunken in one’s inner nature and why.

All this while ice has been my friend, I have become aware of existence and the burden of time. Rest and compression using a Spica thumb brace, then elevation of the injury are constant companions. Being a mythologist, I examined “Spica” in Greek mythology by pressing the image back into its archetypal, historical pattern. Spica is the grain of the goddess. In this September-October moment Spica reflects the Ceres sacrifice, the horrible burden crushing one into Earth, dust to dust. And one does not die, one lives.

The doctor assures me I will still be able to type but I find the constant throbbing between thumb and wrist hampers entering into necessary levels of depth that allow one of Baudelaire’s other maxims to operate. Baudelaire’s second insight suggests when one is writing one continually strive waxing poetic even in one’s prose. Thusly I recall the miracle in my transitoriness: blood becomes ink and water becomes wine and who is the poet whispers nearby, “be always drunken.”

Over the weekend I’ve begun car hunting for a new Mazda Miata convertible and this morning I have reopened the press kit to revise what I’ve written plus add some poetic touches to those lively monsters of my fancy you will encounter in Monsters & Bugs.

notes

1. Inspiration for this blog as well as finishing my press kit came to me while checking into Baudelaire’s turning of beauty. One of the inspirations for insects as soul guides was noticing how not often insects are included in images of beauty. Yet their very strangeness suggests to me they must be included. I was checking into Baudelaire’s quote on including the strange and bizarre in our Beauty Way when I found @FlynnGrayWriter blog, a very fine, fingertip source for getting at the writings of Baudelaire on line.

2. Pope, Stephanie. Monsters & Bugs: Selected Poems. ©2017, Mandorla Books.

ON AMAZON
Monsters & Bugs

DAVE ALBER GUEST POST #blog 6 of 6 The Myths Of The Crow (Apsaalooke) People #NorthAmerica #native #mythology

2017-09-29T11:38:00.001-07:00

Heart Of Myth Kindle Edition Amazon

THE MYTHS OF THE CROW (APSAALOOKE) PEOPLE

Hello Blogosphere!

I’m Dave Alber, the guest blogger for September on Stephanie Pope’s mythopoetry.com blog.

In previous blogs… I introduced the core grammar of myth, described the alchemical nature of myth, as well as the ecological vision of polytheistic myth. We took a look at some of the characteristics of the mythology of Native North America.

In The Heart of Myth: Wisdom Stories from Endangered People, we explore the myths of six geographic regions (North America, Arctic, Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceana.) Beginning with North America, lets take a look at one specific community of people in North America and their myth of world creation.

[What follows is from The Heart of Myth.]

Chapter 1—Crow (Apsaalooke): The Earth Diver

The Crow people call themselves the Apsaalooke, meaning “people of the large beaked bird,” after a mythological trickster in their oral tradition.[1] Many modern Apsaalooke tell their history in mythological terms. “We know where we came from, we know where we’ve been, and we know whom we are,” states the Crow Nation website:

We came through three transitions to become who we are. We were (Awaakiiwilaxpaake) People of the Earth, we were all one mankind, we became (Biiluke) on Our Side, we became (Awashe) Earthen Lodges, and we became Apsaalooke some 2000 years ago.[2]

The ancestors of the Crow had varied life ways including hunting, gathering, and farming, stories of which survive today in cultural memory. In the 1400s, under the leadership of the legendary ancestor, No-vitals, the Crow people migrated to the Great Plains culture area.[3] The Native Americans of the Great Plains lived primarily through large game hunting, particularly the buffalo, which people trapped in box canyons or stampeded off cliffs. Small family tribes lived in portable tepees covered with buffalo skins, each tepee being a symbol of the people’s relationship with the land. “The tepee is a spiritual habitat that symbolically embraces her occupants as a mother.”[4] With the decline of the buffalo in the nineteenth century, the Crow people worked with the United States to integrate into the European American culture.[5] Loss of traditional lands has been a major threat to the Crow community. Today most Crow people live on their reservation in south central Montana.[6] Many see their children’s education as key to their cultural survival. For example, the Crow or Apsaalooke language is vigorously maintained and taught in Crow schools. This Siouan language is one of the most widely spoken Native American languages.[7] Another vital concern is the preservation of sacred lands. Oil drilling in Montana’s Valley of the Chiefs, for example, endangers a religious site containing the largest Native American collection of rock art.[8]

Myth: The Earth Diver

In the beginning, there was just That Old Man Who Did Everything wandering around. And it seemed to him that there was only his awareness . . . his attention . . . his presence. He noticed the water below him, stretching out for as far as he could see. But soon there were voices and circular ripples on the surface of the water. He listened.

[1] Grim, John A. and Magdalene Mocassin Top. “The Crow/ Apsaalooke in Montana.” Endangered Peoples of North America. Ed. Tom Greaves. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002. p. 23.

[2] From the Official Site of the Crow Tribe: Apsaalooke Nation. http://www.crowtribe.com/history.htm. Retrieved 12-30-08.

[3] Medicine Crow, Joseph. The Crow Indians’ Own Stories. Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P., 2000. p. 23.

[4] Grim, p. 23-4, 29. George Bird Grinnell relates a Blackfoot myth of the buffalo maiden in his Blackfoot Lodge Tales. Joseph Campbell retells the myth in his Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Vol. 1, Part 2, and again in “The Message of the Myth” segment of The Power of Myth series.

[5] Grim. p. 24.

[6] Ibid. p. 23.

[7] 4,280 speakers in 1990 U.S. census. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=cro. Retrieved 12-30-08.

[8] Endangered Peoples of the World. Sierra Club: Montana Chapter website. http://montana.sierraclub.org/weatherman.html. Retrieved 12-30-08.

“Yeah, there is no one else here.”

That Old Man Who Did Everything followed the voices and the ripples in the water to their center, where he saw four ducks. Two were blue-eyed ducks and two were smaller red-eyed ducks. The small red-eyed ducks had just finished talking. On seeing someone other than themselves they appeared shocked and even a bit embarrassed for just having said that there was no one else about.

“Ha,” laughed That Old Man Who Did Everything. “Did you really believe that you were alone? I am here, too.”

The big blue-eyed ducks said, “Our hearts told us that there were others and we believed.”

“Yes,” smiled That Old Man Who Did Everything. “Tell me what your hearts say to you.”

“Our hearts say that there is something below the water.”

“Yes,” said That Old Man Who Did Everything. “You can dive and swim through the water. Why don’t you dive down, down, down and see what is there?”

So, the first blue-eyed duck dove down, down, down into the water. The others waited on the surface. Their friend had been gone a long time. “Maybe he is drowning,” said the second big duck.

“No,” said one of the two smaller ducks. “He’s a good swimmer. He’ll be fine.”

At last, with a gasp, the big duck broke the surface of the water. The other ducks waited for him to catch his breath.

“Well?” asked That Old Man Who Did Everything. “What did you find?”

“Just water, liquid currents pushing me to and fro, water above, water below.”

“Hmmm,” said That Old Man Who Did Everything. He pondered the duck’s words.

The second big duck flapped his wings on the water’s surface. “I’m sure I can make it. I’m going to find out what’s below all this water.” And so, he dove down, down, down into the deep water and was gone a long, long, long time. That Old Man Who Did Everything waited with the ducks and they waited together for a long, long time.

“I don’t know if he is still alive,” said the first big blue-eyed duck.

“What does your heart tell you?” asked That Old Man Who Did Everything.

“He’s alive,” said the first small duck. “Look!”

He pointed where the surface of the water broke with feathers, a winged body, frantic splashing, and panting. The others waited for their friend to catch his breath.

After a time, he spoke,

“I don’t know what there is down there. It seems to be all water.”
The first of the smaller red-eyed duck said,

“These ducks are too big to reach the bottom. I’ll dive down this time. I know I’ll make it!”
That Old Man Who Did Everything contemplated those words.

“You are small,” he said. “So be careful not to go beyond the capacities of your body. Bring awareness with you as you dive, maintain that awareness in the depths, lest you should black out and drown. Remember to be aware in the depths. I should be very happy to see you safely return to the surface.”

The small red-eyed duck took a deep breath and dove down, down, down into the depths of the water. Down, down, down he dove. On the surface, his friends waited. They looked around at each other and waited, waited, waited.

Finally, the small duck broke the surface of the water. He panted, but was quick to catch his breath.

“Aha,” cried That Old Man Who Did Everything. “Tell me what did you find?”

The small red-eyed duck said, “I swam down, down, down into the depths. Down, down, and down. And then my head struck something. And so, I placed that thing in my bill and carried it up to the surface.

He handed That Old Man Who Did Everything a small plant.

That Old Man Who Did Everything turned the plant over in his hands as he eyed it intently.

“Well, what your heart directly knew you have found through experience to be true,” he said, then turned to the second small red-eyed bird. “Now, you dive down, little brother, your friends are too tired. Beneath the water you will find something hard . . . and maybe beneath that there will be something soft. Take that soft something and place it in your bill. Bring it up to the surface.”

The fourth duck dove down, down, down into the water. He dove deeper, deeper, and deeper. Eventually, he struck something hard. He pressed his feet into it and broke that surface below. Deeper and deeper he went. His feet were now in something sticky and soft. He filled his beak with this soft something. Blowing air out of the nose holes in his beak, he rose to the surface. Up, up, up he rose and splashed on the surface.

“Aha,” That Old Man Who Did Everything said, “Our friend.”

The fourth duck was exhausted. He took the soft earth out of his beak and placed it in That Old Man Who Did Everything’s hands.

That Old Man Who Did Everything felt the earth in his hands. He looked at it, tasted it, and smelled it.

“This is earth,” he said. “Creation can now begin.”

So, That Old Man Who Did Everything, with the aid of the ducks, divided the earth into four quarters . . . and directed the course of water on the land . . . and placed trees and living plants about . . . and arranged the sky above it all . . . and above the above they placed the sun, moon, and stars. That Old Man Who Did Everything addressed the ducks, “You have wings to fly in the air, feet to walk on land, and sleek bodies capable of swimming in the water. You embody this story of creation and transmit its knowledge in your flying, diving, and even in your most easygoing gestures. In the beginning, I brought my awareness to you. When men bring their awareness to you they will remember your story and progressively (or maybe all at once) attain knowledge of creation.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dave Alber is the author of To the Dawn, Myth & Medium, and Alien Sex in Silicon Valley. His book The Heart of Myth is a global anthology of living myth that unpacks the grammar of world mythology. His website is DaveAlber.com and his English learning products are at EasyAmericanAccent.com.

DAVE ALBER SEPTEMBER GUEST BLOGS

Blog1
What Is Myth For You?

Blog 2
What Is The Core Grammar of Mythology?

Blog 3
What Is The Alchemy Of Myth?

Blog 4
What Is The Ecological Vision Of Myth

Blog 5
The Myths Of Native North America

Blog 6
The Myths Of The Crow (Apsaalooke) People

DAVE ALBER GUEST POST The Myths Of Native North America #mythology #September #blog Heart Of Myth Kindle Edition Amazon

2017-09-27T06:29:00.000-07:00

Heart Of Myth Kindle Edition Amazon

The Myths of Native North America

Hello Blogosphere!

I’m Dave Alber, the guest blogger for September on Stephanie Pope’s mythopoetry.com blog.

In previous blogs… I introduced the core grammar of myth, described the alchemical nature of myth, as well as the ecological vision of polytheistic myth. Now lets take a look at one geographical region and see how these attributes of myth apply.

In The Heart of Myth: Wisdom Stories from Endangered People, we explore the myths of six geographic regions (North America, Arctic, Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceana.) Let’s begin with North America.

[The following is from The Heart Of Myth]

Section 1: North America

Hear me, four quarters of the world—a relative I am! Give me the strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is! Give me the eyes to see and the strength to understand, that I may be like you. With your power only can I face the winds.[1]

We start our journey in the spiritual landscape of North America, where every Native American ceremony gives evidence to the spiritual recognition of balance—for each Native American ceremony begins with a salutation to the four directions. No less than the Ancient Greeks’ centering themselves within cardinal virtues, the Native American salutation is a totalizing invocation of harmony. Hartley Burr Alexander writes of Native American mandalas, artistic representations of visualization practices that express the cosmos invoked in their salutary prayers:

As the colours, so the elements are related to the Quarters: to the North belongs the air, element of wind and breath, from it come the strong winter winds; the West is characterized by water, for in the Pueblo land rains sweep in from the Pacific; fire is of the South; while the earth and the seeds of life which fructify the earth are of the East.[2]

The polytheistic worldview of Native Americans harmoniously integrates the paradoxes of simultaneous material and spiritual realities as well as an Ultimate Reality (referred to as Wakan-Tanka, Awoawilonas, Tirawa, May Wah-Kon-Tah, Tatanga Mani, Usen, a’nehimu, the Great Spirit, Grandfather, or the Creator)[3] that expresses itself through diverse manifestations. Indeed, Native Americans are exemplary as a devotional people who accept life’s universal paradoxes by rising above all apparent conflicts of duality. Sympathetic awareness, the recognition of the heart is, for Native Americans, the guide to this devotional worldview. For example, “Zuni prayers to the directions begin and end with reverence given to the ‘Middle Place’ which is also related to the ‘heart or navel of the world.’”[4] The elaborate mandalas of the Zuni and Hopi that develop their social planning must be understood as projections through this “Middle Place” of the Eternal powers of the mythological dimension.[5] Humanities role, therefore, is seen as that of a mediator of these raw universal energies into the world. Likewise, a sacred circle of the Sioux is divided into the elemental powers of Earth, Water, Fire, and Air, and an Omaha creation story similarly relates, “Suddenly from the midst of the water uprose a great rock. It burst into flames and the waters floated into the air in clouds.”[6] From a materialistic observation, the elemental myth merely describes cosmological phenomena, yet, like any elemental myth in the Native American tradition, it presents a map for alchemical transformations of consciousness.

As a mediator of universal energies, every human being is a transforming agent. The impacts on our environment tell us as much. However, the act of transformation begins with the spiritual practitioner’s own consciousness. Native American spirituality is rich with the alchemical recognition of the mutability of consciousness. As the Zuni myth The Beginning of Newness relates:

Now like all the surpassing beings the Earth-mother and the Sky-father were changeable, even as smoke in the wind; transmutable at thought, manifesting themselves in any form at will, like as dancers may by mask-making.

In the Omaha ceremonial myth of the sacred pole, during a time of community conflict, a glowing tree is discovered in the forest. “The Thunder birds come and go upon this tree, making a trail of fire that leaves four paths on the burnt grass that stretch toward the four Winds.”[7] Furthermore, in the myth, the Omaha called the tree “a human being, and fastened a scalp lock to it for hair.”[8] The alchemical potential of human beings (whether individually or culturally realized and expressed) only makes itself known when the center is recognized—when balance is achieved. In the Native American mythological worldview this is achieved through maintaining awareness of one’s physical, emotional, and mental experiences in relation to the windy drag of the four cardinal powers.

Thus, the spiritual worldview of Native Americans has its feet planted firmly on the ground. And what is the ground of existence but something that is vigorously alive? Many of North America’s indigenous peoples still call the land Turtle Island. The myth The Woman Who Fell From the Sky tells why this is so. The myth also relates the creation of the landscape and its animals from the efforts of two brothers of differing temperament. Mudjikiwis is another story of brothers, one of which encounters four spiritual guides on his journey to the home of his lost wife—a being of transformative power—a Thunder bird.

The diversity of Energy’s manifestation in Native American mythology is consistently recognized as something to be celebrated. And what opens the heart and unites all people in the recognition of our ultimate sameness—our one heart—more so than laughter? Horned Toad Meets the Giants invites us to participate in the mythological world, not from the forced habit of the solemn misperception of separateness, but rather from the joyous commonality of recognition and celebration in life’s hilarious absurdity.

notes

[1] Neihardt, John G. and Nicolas Black Elk. Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux. Lincoln: U. of Nebraska P., 2000. p. 4.

[2] Alexander, Hartley Burr, Ph.D.. The Mythology of All Races: North America. New York: Cooper Square Pub., 1964. p. 186.

[3] Smith, Huston. A Seat at the Table: Huston Smith In Conversation With Native Americans on Religious Freedom. Ed. Phil Cousineau. Berkeley: U. of California P., 2006. p. xix.

[4] Alexander. p. 187.

[5] Ibid. pp. 185–7.

[6] Ibid. p. 98.

[7] Ibid. p. 100.

[8] Ibid. p. 100.

COMING THIS FRIDAY BLOG 6 of 6

In the next blog… we examine one group of polytheistic people from the Native American tradition — the Crow (Apsaalooke) people — exploring their culture and living myths.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAVE ALBER SEPTEMBER GUEST BLOGS

Blog1
What Is Myth For You?

Blog 2
What Is The Core Grammar of Mythology?

Blog 3
What Is The Alchemy Of Myth?

Blog 4
What Is The Ecological Vision Of Myth?

Blog 5
The Myths Of Native North America

Blog 6
The Myths Of The Crow (Apsaalooke) People

DAVE ALBER GUEST POST: What is the Ecological Vision of Myth? #September #blog #mythology #ecology #SundayMorning

2017-09-24T13:22:00.000-07:00

Heart Of Myth Kindle Edition Amazon

What is the Ecological Vision of Myth?

Production, development, growth, and consumption are all on the rise. We hate to imagine the economy behaving otherwise. And we pretend that this stage in the economic cycle is the norm. Why do we pretend? -Dave Alber, "The Sustainable Vision of Endangered Societies"

Hello Blogosphere!

I’m Dave Alber, the guest blogger for September on Stephanie Pope’s mythopoetry.com blog.

In previous blogs… I introduced the core grammar of myth and described the alchemical nature of myth… now lets consider the moral and philosophical implications of participating in a unified world recognized within the awareness-heart, empathy as a synthetic process of awareness connecting us all together.

How can we treat apparent “others” within a worldview that recognizes

1.) everything as divine and
2.) everything as an expression of a unified field of being.

It’s a quandary pondered in the essay “Guest Rituals”.

In The Heart of Myth: Wisdom Stories from Endangered People, we see that across the globe, the polytheistic world has resolved the problem presented by the mystical revelation along ecological lines, because there are sustainable vision underlying the myths of indigenous people across many continents.

The 2nd day of Tihar festival is Kukur Tihar, a day when
dogs are celebrated as a manifestation of the divine.

[What follows is from The Heart of Myth.]

The Sustainable Vision
of Endangered Societies

No economist, industrialist, or politician would ever suggest that the earth’s resources might be consumed indefinitely at their present rate. Yet, looking at the media, the compulsion to consume appears paramount, while the Classical virtue of temperance is nowhere to be seen. Production, development, growth, and consumption are all on the rise. We hate to imagine the economy behaving otherwise. And we pretend that this stage in the economic cycle is the norm. Why do we pretend? Perhaps at some deep level, Western Culture does not believe in limits. Perhaps that is its key virtue, inspiring discoverers and adventurers to push the envelope in all directions. That is the song we like to hear, is it not? It is the theme of the DVD we rent. All limits are surpassed; all conventions are broken; the young lovers escape the traditional values that confine them. Yet, limits are also what define and give context to every freedom.

Nevertheless, on realizing the dangers of the global civilization’s unsustainable economic vision, many people have looked to other models—other visions offering a more workable human future. Surprisingly, sustainable visions of human culture are in abundance. In seeking them, we find ourselves immediately upon the “red road” of plentitude. Many small societies have maintained sustainable modes of living for thousands of years. Historically, their vision has been the norm—ours the exception. As Jerry Mander states in Paradigm Wars: Indigenous People’s Resistance to Globalization:

. . . it is no small irony that the very reason that native peoples have become such prime targets for global corporations and their intrinsic drives is exactly because most indigenous peoples have been so very successful over millennia at maintaining cultures, economies, worldviews and practices that are not built upon some ideal of economic growth or short-term profit-seeking.[1]

Therefore, there is not only a moral imperative to protect the cultures threatened by economic shortsightedness, but also an imperative of ultimate practicality. “In more ways than one, indigenous issues are the frontier issues of our time.” Mander explains:

They deal with geographic frontier struggles where the larger, destructive globalization process attempts to suck up the last living domains on the planet—its life forms, its basic resources, its peoples—in the empty cause of short-term wealth accumulation. And it is also a frontier struggle in conceptual terms: What are the values that can sustain us for the future? What are the worldviews that can keep the earth alive? How are we to live on behalf of coming generations of human beings and the larger community of beings and creatures?[2]

For global civilization to “progress” on its present course, people must be exploited like “resources.” By contrast, the core mode of perception of polytheistic communities—the knowing of the heart—is a vigorous safeguard against such a systemic cultural imbalance. The knowing of the heart is congruent with the great traditions of Western Humanism and is the safest way for individuals within the system-driven civilization to sustain the fragile candle of their
fullest humanity.

[1] Mander, Jerry and Victoria Tauli-Corpuz. Paradigm Wars: Indigenous Peoples’ Resistance to Globalization. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2006. p. 4.

[2] Ibid. p. 10.

The Organization of The Heart of Myth

Following some of the logic of Greenwood Press’s The Endangered Peoples of the World Series, the polytheistic cultures in The Heart of Myth are organized into six sections which align with a geographic region: North America, the Arctic, Central and South America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. The Heart of Myth describes several communities from within each region and relates their mythological narratives.

Choosing the Cultures in The Heart of Myth

In choosing the cultures of this book, diversity was of key interest. To use Africa as an example, oftentimes when discussing African mythology, the Yoruba mythology that made its way west to the American continents and Caribbean islands due to the slave trade is discussed as representing the varied mythologies of this vast continent. However, African culture and mythology is much more diverse. Speaking collectively of African mythology makes about as much sense as speaking collectively of Asian mythology: as though the mythologies of India’s Vedas, Puranas, epics, regional and folk traditions; Tibet’s Bonpo and Buddhism; Nepal’s syncretic spirituality; China’s Taoism; Japan’s Shinto; and South East Asia’s diverse mixture of indigenous traditions and most of the traditions mentioned above would so conveniently fit into a single category. The importance of highlighting this diversity is precisely because those communities that are the least recognized are those most endangered by their apparent invisibility.

In doing the research for this book, one of the delights of choosing this approach was in discovering, again and again, that the seeming invisibility of a culture in no way demonstrates a reduction of the beauty or sophistication of its mythology, life ways, or spiritual beliefs. The Karanga mythology of Zimbabwe, for example, reveals a biological sophistication comparable to Indian Ayurveda or China’s Taoist medicine. It is due precisely to its sophistication that Zimbabwe’s traditional healers are fighting against a Swiss University and a U.S. corporation, both of whom want to patent Zimbabwe’s snake bean tree.

The three types of diversity emphasized in the selection of narratives are geographic diversity, cultural diversity, and diversity of endangerment.

· Geographic Diversity. All geographic regions in this book are represented by different geographic terrain and the cultures that have developed out of them.

· Cultural Diversity. Africa, for example, is home to hunting and gathering, farming, fishing, and herding cultures as well as cultures whose life ways represent borrowed elements from overseas and mixtures of all of the above, often in increasingly modern urban areas. An emphasis is placed on the more unrepresented at-risk communities.

· Diversity of endangerment. The world’s indigenous cultures are defending themselves from many corporations, universities, and political groups. The problems they face are many and varied. It is the intention of this book to present a clear picture of the diverse range of difficulties facing these traditional people.

Service To Endangered Polytheistic Peoples

Like the transformational alchemy described within so many of these myths, it is generally understood in the Orient that to know is to be transformed. According to this philosophy, to know something means to behave fundamentally different from before the acquisition of the new knowledge. Truly then, we have learned nothing at all about the often overlooked abuses of global civilization and the communities who are threatened by it, unless we, as individuals and as a greater community:

· Alter our relationship to the corporations, nations, and institutions that are endangering or exterminating the living polytheistic communities, and

· Extend our relationships outward—in the sympathetic recognition of the heart—to these endangered communities in action, financial support, or humanitarian service, and

· Pressure the current administrators of the system of economic globalization to support a sustainable vision of the human future that does not depend on the exploitation or systematic extermination of others.

The Heart of Myth ends with a list of resources that offer service to endangered societies. In this collection of myths, all stories—as projections of the sympathetic heart—express a devotional worldview. Let this devotional vision of the absolute divinity of the “other” inspire us to new knowledge expressed in our individual and collective imagination, compassion, and action. May our hearts be awakened sympathetically within all our relationships, and may our behavior be consistent to the eternal values of myth.

In The Next Blog

We explore how the grammar of the mystical function of myth and the ecological vision of myth relate to the myths of North America.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAVE ALBER September Guest Blogs

Blog1
What Is Myth For You?

Blog 2
What Is The Core Grammar of Mythology?

Blog 3
What Is The Alchemy Of Myth?

Blog 4
What Is The Ecological Vision Of Myth?

Blog 5
The Myths Of Native North America

Blog 6
The Myths Of The Crow (Apsaalooke) People

DAVE ALBER GUEST POST: What Is The Alchemy Of Myth #FirstDayOfFall #FridayReads #September #blog

2017-09-22T12:37:00.000-07:00

Kindle Edition Amazon

WHAT IS THE ALCHEMY OF MYTH

From the perspective of the mystical function of myth, myth is a metaphorical system founded in primary states of awareness that the language of myth refers back to.
-Dave Alber

INTRODUCTION

Hello Blogosphere!

I’m Dave Alber, the guest blogger for September on Stephanie Pope’s Mythopoetry.com blog.

I introduced the core grammar of myth in the last blog titled: “What Is The Core Grammar Of Mythology?”

In that last blog, I wrote about the grammar of myth from the perspective of the mystical function of myth. Myth is a metaphorical system founded in primary states of awareness that the language of myth refers back to. From the perspective of this mystical function, myth is a way to communicate an experience that is also the essence of Taoism:

The Tao that can be told is not the Eternal Tao.

The name that can be named is not the Eternal Name.

Nothingness is the Origin of Heaven and Earth.

Beingness is the Mother of the Ten Thousand Things.[1]

In plain language, thought and ideation — giving things names and living in a worldview of things with names — is understood as a secondary process of the mind, whereas simply experiencing life directly uninfluenced by that secondary process — simply being aware without naming what comes into awareness — is a return to the primary level of experience. In this context, the lines above from the Tao te Ching are meditation instructions… as are myths functioning from the grammar of the mystical function of myth!

Myths often refer to the heart as an organ of awareness that opens one up to the primary experience of life. As stated in the previous blog: Sympathetic awareness, empathetic consciousness, or knowing experience directly through the heart of compassion is highly valued and cultivated as a primary truth. It is the truth not to be forgotten lying behind all arguments or apparent differences within the interconnected continuum of all beings. This fullness of difference (what in India is called maya or “that which can be measured”) is indeed more deeply recognized as a stream of pulsating energy within which we participate in harmony (as manifestations of maya-shakti) if we make the upward moving recognition of this unified field of simultaneous energy and consciousness. We will perceive this same experience as disharmony if we are fixated in the downward moving recognition of difference, distinction, and separateness. For in polytheistic cultures the contextual appreciation of reality is alchemical.

The word alchemical is used in the sense of being psychologically transformational, of being mobile among states of awareness, and especially of being mobile in the world of forms while remaining grounded in an experience of life’s unfiltered primacy.

The alchemical/transformational nature of the mythological worldview is used — all over the world — as a communication medium for humanity’s shared eternal values. This is important because it is genuinely not that difficult to experience moments of enlightenment or eternal values on the meditation cushion, however it requires a deft stabilization of awareness in daily life to remain grounded in enlightenment and eternal values while moving through a world defined by socially communal constructs and names.

The Himalayan bhava chakra depicts a wheel sliced
like a pie into six sections. Each section represents
a different habitual trance state that people fall into.
Thinking and ideation define one of these habitual
trance states. This fresco is from the Potala Palace in Tibet.

We take the world of names and forms for granted, but when we access the primary level of our awareness and then look upon the world of things, we realize that the habitual — un-mystical — worldview of things and forms is a secondary trance state. (It’s one of the six trance states described in the Himalayan Buddhist bhava chakra.)

notes

[1] This is the first line of the Tao te Ching. Tao te Ching Daily. http://taotechingdaily.com/1-the-eternal-tao/. Accessed 08-31-2017.

The Inherent Alchemy of the Mythological Worldview
Excerpt taken from "The Heart Of Myth"

An alchemical recognition saturates the polytheistic mythological worldview. This recognition is of two movements: one upward toward unity and wholeness; its contrary force moving downward toward diversity, difference, and disintegration. These forces are represented in religious imagery in the Chinese Taijitu symbol of the yin and the yang and the Indian Shivite Hindu symbol of Shiva and Shakti represented as the upward and downward pointing triangles within the six-pointed star.

In polytheistic cultures, the alchemical model of these two simultaneous processes provides an accurate view of the transformations of life, wherewith one may experience the ephemera of one’s experience (whether animals, food, loved ones, and even oneself) transform from one process to another. It is also a model for recognizing and cultivating states of awareness while in this play of life.

In the alchemical model, states of awareness are appreciated as a regular, if not continuous, spiritual practice. The polytheistic community member “checks in” to recognize the state of his awareness in the moment. Is awareness and attention focused on selfish motivations that separate the community member from others (the downward movement)? Or is awareness and attention held in meditation on what would benefit the community (the upward movement)? In the later experience, the “community” can be as large as one’s worldview. Indeed, as large as imagination can make it.

The Eternal Values of Myth

In pan-Indian aesthetics food consists of rasas or “flavors”. A
traditional meal is a mandala which contains all of the flavors of
life. It is a symbol of perfected “flavors” within the sphere of unity.

The eternal values (or virtues) of love, joy, truth, peace, freedom, heroism, loyalty, and compassion transcend culture styles. For example, in India an understanding of the rasas, or “flavors” of life, is used as a spiritual compass. It is understood that the flavors of love, joy, and peace, if fully embodied, manifest as expressions of a transcendent recognition of reality.

The eternal values are, in a way, mediating forces between human experience and the mysterium tremendum et fascinans[2], but as with the virtues in Dante’s Purgatorio, they lead to the Absolute in the Paradiso. Medieval Catholic Europe held that the seven virtues (chastity, abstinence, liberality, diligence, patience, kindness, and humility) represent unchanging values that give confidence to the spiritual aspirant seeking fixed truths. The fixed truths are not that this or that historical event occurred with such and such results. But rather, that kindness exists—that it exists as an eternal value and that the eternal value can be drawn from and embodied. The virtue is a transcendent form with recognizable temporal manifestations. An aspirant can halfheartedly seek to embody a virtue and in doing so he symbolizes ambivalence more than the virtue he seeks. For again, from the perspective of these worldviews with more time and experience than our own—everything symbolizes!

These Medieval virtues were Catholic elaborations on the cardinal virtues (temperance, prudence, courage, and justice) of the polytheistic Greek worldview. Plato and Aristotle both wrote that to practice any one virtue to perfection would be to have mastered them all, and Socrates himself contemplated the virtues in many of his dialogues. Furthermore, the word virtue itself comes from the Greek ethike arete, which means “habitual excellence” and, as such, “is something practiced at all times.”[3] The virtues were a second attention practice in the language of the Buddhists. A second attention practice keeps the practitioner awake and aware of his or her state of consciousness by keeping secondary awareness on a visualization, meditation, mantra, place in the body, or breath. It is a type of mindfulness meditation. For the Ancient Greeks then, the practice of habitual excellence allowed people to act from a continually maintained core experience of eternal values.

Some spiritual practices in Chinese Taoism are comparable. In Chuang Tzu’s story The Sign of Virtue Complete, the reader is asked to consider the element water as a spiritual example for balancing virtues within one’s life. “What do you mean when you say his virtue takes no form?” a seeker asks a sage. The sage replies: The sage replies:

“Among level things, water at rest is the most perfect, and therefore it can serve as a standard. It guards what is inside and shows no movement outside. Virtue is the establishment of perfect harmony. Though virtue takes no form, things cannot break away from it.”[4]

This Lakshmi mandala is placed in front of Nepalese houses on the 3^rd day of Tihar (Gai Tihar). Lakshmi (Laxmi) is the goddess of abundance. The tiny footprints are meant to lead abundance into the house. The holiday is a celebration of the abundance of life.

In polytheistic cultures, the meditation on eternal values, understood as a continual awareness practice, creates balance. The maintenance of personal harmony is the base experience of most people in these communities.

The deities of polytheistic cultures refer, express, and manifest these eternal values. They are vitalizing energies and expressions of consciousness that, for the balanced individual or community, model appropriate responses to the rhythms of life, whether reflected in seasonal festivals or the transformations of the body in age.

These eternal values are also what Plato called “forms” and the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called “archetypes.” Jung states:

The concept of the archetype, which is an indispensable correlate to the idea of the collective unconscious, indicates the existence of definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere. Mythological research calls them “motifs”; in the psychology of primitives they correspond to Levy-Bruhl’s concept of “representations collectives,” and in the field of comparative religion they have been defined by Hubert and Mauss as “categories of the imagination.” Adolf Bastian long ago called them “elementary” or “primordial thoughts.” From these references, it should be clear enough that my idea of the archetype—literally a pre-existent form—does not stand alone, but is something that is recognized and named in other fields of knowledge.[5]

Eternal values are inherent to all humanity. Without the guidance of such values, people become ambivalent, attaching their values to petty fads, opinions, and comforts. For certainly, as well as maintaining eternal values, the concerns of an individual or an entire civilization may very well be petty or middling. A people may say they stand for freedom, but if their idea of “freeing” the people of the hour means conditioning that population to be subservient to an externally imposed economic system and/or the acquisition of their resources, then their actual understanding of freedom is suspect. If people fool themselves on this point then they will suffer quietly, or at least unintelligibly, because they will have lost touch with the eternal values and forever mistake false values, perhaps misshapen and monstrous values, for the virtues themselves. With the loss of eternal values, they will act out merely as beasts mimicking the actions of men. Their greatest triumphs will be the winning of wars, the economic domination of others, and the acquisition of profit, power, or comfort.

The global civilization, at times, denigrates the values or worldviews of “primitive” polytheistic people. People in the global civilization after all, have an impressive worldview that encompasses not only the economically quantifiable material world, but also, more subtle and often surprisingly beautiful aspects of the entire universe as explored through myriad sciences. Yet, this civilization’s mass marketing of triviality has shattered its people’s self-recognition with the eternal values of myth.

Re-experiencing these values with an open sympathetic heart reconnects us not only to the people who transmitted their wisdom through their stories, but to our own depth, height, and breadth. We are returned to our most fully human context and we are able to recognize our lives in relation to profound life-affirming values. Communion with these values allows us to be effective, not as automatons serving a system’s agenda, but as vigorous human beings serving the fuller profundity of a responsive life.

***********************************************

In the 4th and next guest blog in this series by cultural mythologer, Dave Alber he will explore the ecological and sustainable vision of living myth. Look for it this coming Sunday!

notes

[2] “Life’s awesome and fascinating mystery.” The Latin phrase was coined by Rudolf Otto in his book The Idea of the Holy. London: Oxford U.P., 1958. p. 12.

[3] Adler, Mortimer, J. and Charles Van Doren. Great Treasury of Western Thought: A Compendium of Important Statements on Man and His Institutions by the Great Thinkers in Western History. New York: R.R. Bowker Co., 1977. pp. 630, 634.

[4] Chuang Tzu. Basic Writings. Trans. Burton Watson. New York: Columbia U. P., 1964. p. 70.

notes

[5] Jung, Carl. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. New York: Princeton U.P., 1990. pp. 42-3.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAVE ALBER September Guest Blogs

Blog1
What Is Myth For You?

Blog 2
What Is The Core Grammar of Mythology?

Blog 3
What Is The Alchemy Of Myth?

Blog 4
What Is The Ecological Vision Of Myth?

Blog 5
The Myths Of Native North America

Blog 6
The Myths Of The Crow (Apsaalooke) People

DAVE ALBER GUEST POST: What Is The Core Grammar of Mythology? #mythology #TuesdayThoughts #September #blog

2017-09-19T15:10:00.000-07:00

The Heart of Myth: Wisdom Stories from Endangered People

WHAT IS THE CORE GRAMMAR OF MYTHOLOGY?

Hello Blogosphere!

I’m Dave Alber, the guest blogger for September on Stephanie Pope’s Mythopoetics In Culture Blog.
I gave a short bio in the last blog: “What is myth?”

In that last blog, I wrote about awareness states being primary to the grammar of myth. If myth, for example, is a sphere, then an awareness state is at the gravitational core of that sphere. This is the premise of my book The Heart of Myth: Wisdom Stories from Endangered People, which is an anthology of living myth (meaning the myths of living polytheistic communities.) Unpacked section at a time… The Heart of Myth is an attempt to share with a wider audience the grammar of myth as a system for the transmission of profound states of awareness.

If Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces was Campbell’s attempt to teach people how to read a myth, then The Heart of Myth is my attempt to unpack the grammar of the mystical function of myth.

To this end, in this blog… we will take our first steps in our discovery — inward, ever inward — toward that foundational state of awareness from which myth emerges.

What follows is from my book pictured above, The Heart Of Myth.

Introduction

Global Civilization and the Wisdom of Polytheistic Peoples

Since I was a boy, I spent many hours with my nose in a book while my imagination flew to other continents entirely. I was often entertained, and am still daily entertained, by the most direct manifestations of wonder I know—mythological tales from around the world! To me, myths always present an enigmatic, semi-recognizable, yet palpable beauty that defies logical explanation. Like riddles, Zen koans, poems, or pieces of music that bring unexpected tears or elation, myths communicate experiences that challenge the rational processes of the mind. Whether the story is a Crow myth of world creation or an Inuit tale of shamanic flight; a Maori story of the origin of knowledge or an Ainu tale of supernatural realms, the mythologies of the world present one vast and interconnected tapestry of timeless beauty and timely wisdom. Simultaneously, these stories refresh us with their eternal human values and shock us awake to our responsibility in both our living continuity and the present historical moment.

Perhaps because my enjoyment of mythology has too often been both bookish and escapist, it occurred to me with some shock that economic and political forces now endanger most of the world’s living polytheistic communities. Despite the importance of mythology for artists, psychologists, historians, anthropologists, folklorists, and other professionals in the modern world (not to mention those people to whom the stories are still fluid emanations from spiritual realms), the contemporary inheritors of these primary stories find themselves threatened by voracious economic and social forces that know no bounds and, at present, no human restraint. As Barbara Rose Johnston states in the forward to the Endangered Peoples of the World series:

Human action and a history of social inequity leave some people more vulnerable than others. This vulnerability results in ethnocide (loss of a way of life), ecocide (destruction of the environment), and genocide (death of an entire group of people).[1]

The polytheistic communities visited in these pages are so imperiled. In popular usage, the word myth denotes an untruth—a lie. And although there is some truth to that, the truth of the lie exists in our own forgetfulness to myth as one of the foundational expressions of both human culture and spirituality. In Homeric Greece, the term mythos was understood as the mode of speech of the muses and poetic bards. However, it was also appreciated as “an unvarnished truth . . . a blunt and aggressive act of candor, uttered by powerful males in the heat of battle or agonistic assembly.”[2] In Ancient Greece, then, mythos was a mode of expression that was both radically complex and profoundly straightforward. Mythos was understood as expressing a direct form of knowledge. This direct form of knowledge is recognized in every corner of the globe as the heart’s way of knowing. “What does your heart tell you?” we still ask our friends and loved ones, when facing important decisions. We trust the heart implicitly with the understanding that it is incapable of lying. What the heart knows, it knows through a direct sympathetic relationship that defies the logic of the materialistic worldview.

The Heart’s Way of Knowing

Sympathetic knowledge is to know another’s experience directly by becoming the “other.” It is the source of empathy. It is knowledge of the heart. This knowledge of the heart is the principle way of knowing in polytheistic culture. To know an “other” is to become the other—to loose the false perception of separateness with the other—and to feel through the other’s world directly. In polytheistic cultures when people know the gods, they know them directly—sympathetically—through their hearts. It is the nature of the heart to know directly.

In The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, Joseph Campbell considers our historical moment in the late 20th century—the global crisis of the world’s people being unified by a technological economy. He ponders the question, “What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being?”
He writes:

One cannot predict the next mythology any more than one can predict tonight’s dream; for a mythology is not an ideology. It is not something projected from the brain, but something experienced from the heart, from recognitions of identities behind or within the appearances of nature, perceiving with love a “thou” where there would have been otherwise only an “it.”[3]

The Unity of Life

Click on the image to enlarge it so you can read the captions

In polytheistic cultures, difference is not experienced with fixed certainty, as within both Aristotelian logic and the materialistic worldview. Rather, difference is recognized as an expression of the natural diversity and fullness of life. The Plains Indians speak of walking on the red road, which is the road of plenty. This is an image of the lush, ever resplendent fullness of life. It is a recognition that is always present in the foreground of awareness—“Life in all of its diversity is good and to be enjoyed.” In India, the color red is associated with shakti—energy—and is appreciated as the Great Mother, Ma Shakti.

The “E” of Einstein’s E=MC² is Her body. And we are all conscious streams within that body, despite, at times, holding too fixedly to traits we identify with ourselves (and concurrently, whatever traits we reject in order to reify our supposed separateness.) The forms within this streaming energy are appreciated as projections of maya-shakti, the energy of apparent phenomena. People and events appear and disappear with the fluidity of a semiconscious dream wherein the dreamers are all manifestations of an energy capable of veiling its Eternal Nature, projecting the phantasmagoria of phenomena upon the veil, and yes, lifting the veil too.

In the North American Crow myth How Men Were Made, there is an almost musical refrain of phrases describing the direct knowledge of the heart, such as, “There is no doubt, my younger brothers, that what you felt in your hearts was true.” The heart is an organ of awareness. Sympathetic awareness, empathetic consciousness, or knowing experience directly through the heart of compassion is highly valued and cultivated as a primary truth. It is the truth not to be forgotten lying behind all arguments or apparent differences within the interconnected continuum of all beings. This fullness of difference (what in India is called maya or “that which can be measured”) is indeed more deeply recognized as a stream of pulsating energy within which we participate in harmony (as manifestations of maya-shakti) if we make the upward moving recognition of this unified field of simultaneous energy and consciousness. We will perceive this same experience as disharmony if we are fixated in the downward moving recognition of difference, distinction, and separateness. For in polytheistic cultures the contextual appreciation of reality is alchemical.

I use the word alchemical in the sense of “transformational”. It is the terrain of old Proteus, whom we discussed in the last blog. In the next blog… we will see how the alchemical/transformational nature of the mythological worldview is used — all over the world — as a communication medium for humanity’s shared eternal values. Eternity meets experience… in the next blog.

footnotes

[1] Johnston, Barbara Rose. Series Forward. Endangered Peoples of North America: Struggles to Survive and Thrive. Ed. Tom, Greaves. Westport: The Greenwood P., 2002. p. ix.

[2] Lincoln, Bruce. Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2000. p. 17.
[3] Campbell, Joseph. The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. New York: Harper & Row, 1986. p. 17.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAVE ALBER September Guest Blogs

The Myths Of The Crow (Apsaalooke)People

DAVE ALBER GUEST BLOG "What Is Myth For You?" #mythology #Monday #September #blog

2017-09-04T10:40:00.000-07:00

WHAT IS MYTH FOR YOU?

"Myth, I discovered from others… relates to poetry, trance states, shamanism, personal mythology, art, history and more. There was no containing this thing — Myth — for long."

"Myths are transmissions of knowledge from the enlightened state, from cultures that rightly identify spiritual work with the routine moment-to-moment development of their awareness state. Myths are not quaint fantasy literature."

~Dave Alber, cultural mythologer

Hello blogosphere!

I’m Dave Alber, the guest blogger for September on Stephanie Pope’s Mythopoetry.com blog.

About me:

I’m a friend of Stephanie, who, like her, is also alumni at Pacifica Graduate Institute. We shared the same class, learning about the value of myth to such diverse areas as psychology, literature, and filmmaking. At Pacifica, we quickly became friends and have enjoyed many long conversations about the poetics of myth in life. I enjoyed adding two essays to Stephanie’s Mythopoetry Scholar e-zine (Guest Rituals: The Aesthetics of Being With An “Other” and Myths and Moon Cakes: The Cosmological Symbolism of the Zhou Revolution) and earlier Stephanie web-hosted my poem To the Dawn with images and an environmental context.

I’ve also created a book about myth and art, Myth & Medium, and have written a novel about personal mythology and mythopoesis, Alien Sex in Silicon Valley. More recently, I’ve published an anthology of world myth that we’ll talk about shortly.

Despite being somewhat tech-savvy in some areas, I’m a complete newbie to blogging, so please forgive any errors in blogging etiquette. I am grateful to Stephanie for — as always — encouraging collaboration in mythic ventures.

I would like to begin this blogging adventure with a memory. It is a moment of surprise, fascination, and bewilderment.

I had traveled from Georgia to California, had begun work as a graphic designer in San Mateo, California, south of San Francisco, and was establishing a base of stability from which to begin graduate school at Pacifica. Before the first class, I drove down Highway 101 to Santa Barbara and camped on the beach. The next morning, I would begin classes studying mythology. I was excited — filled with anticipation — because I was an avid reader of myth as a child and a great fan of Joseph Campbell, whose work struck me as an expanding revelation. I had, like many people, discovered Campbell through his PBS series The Power of Myth. And feeling touched in my heart by the enlivening force of his words, I quickly devoured all of Campbell’s work that I could get my hands on: The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Transformation of Myths Through Time, and the series that completely transformed my perception of world history, The Masks of God. I assumed — on my way to Pacifica’s welcome lecture to new students — that most other students in Pacifica’s myth program would have had a similar experience, yet in meeting students on the shuttle bus and on Pacifica’s grounds, I quickly experienced confusion and befuddlement. In hearing the stories of others, I was surprised and fascinated to hear from everyone that I talked to that they had an experience that was very different from my own, and that their own understanding of myth was again world’s apart from mine. We were all fascinated by mythology, intent on the same object of study, like moths drawn to a great and fascinating light… yet we were each approaching the subject in the way of the Indian parable of the blind men and the elephant.

In India, it is said, that there were once five blind men who had never encountered an elephant before. Upon reaching the elephant, one blind man touched the elephant’s ear. “Indeed, an elephant is like a fan,” he said. While another blind man touched the elephant’s leg, “No, an elephant is like a tree,” he replied to the first. Another touched the elephant’s trunk. “It is like a snake.” Yet another touched its tail. “Almost. For I think it is more like a rope.” Finally, the last touched the elephant’s side. “How can you say that? For from my perception, an elephant is like a wall.”

Consequently, one of my first lessons at Pacifica was that myth was a totality wholly other than the expectations set by my own point of departure. In shared conversations with others, our shared perception of myth seemed to swell, grow, and change shape. We were not blind men after all… it seemed. We were — each of us — like Menelaus gripping Proteus on the beach of the island of Pharos.

For coming from Egypt to his homeland, Menelaus was detained on the island and needed to grip Proteus — and hold him fast — in order to progress. Yet when he gripped that old god of the sea, Proteus changed shape… to a lion… to running water… to a tree… and so on, transforming himself again and again within Menelaus’s grasp, until eventually, offering up truth.

In studying myth, we each had gripped Proteus, and gained truth and truths from the experience. And in traveling to Santa Barbara, each time, old Proteus would wash ashore and greet us as teachers, mentors, friends, and fellow students.

Myth, I discovered from others… relates to poetry, trance states, shamanism, personal mythology, art, history and more. There was no containing this thing — Myth — for long. Once your griped it in your hands and sat down for dinner with other students of mythology, you’d realize that it had wiggled free of your grasp and had become something else entirely.

Bradley Olson recently posted an essay on the importance of rethinking myth and personal definitions of myth, and similarly, he referenced it back to the mystical function of myth.

I had when writing Myth & Medium one definition of myth, in Alien Sex in Silicon Valley another, and most recently, in the anthology of world myth that I had mentioned earlier, The Heart of Myth, yet another definition of myth has emerged from the great Ocean of the Streams of Stories that is myth’s protean nature: Myths are transmissions of knowledge from the enlightened state, from cultures that rightly identify spiritual work with the routine moment-to-moment development of their awareness state. Myths are not quaint fantasy literature. Rather, they communicate in symbolic language the play of eternal values into the field of time. Myths are so designed as to break the “individual” open to a totalizing identification with eternity.

The Heart of Myth: Wisdom Stories
From Endangered Peoples, Dave Alber

This definition is, of course, limited. It is framed entirely within the context of Campbell’s mystical function of myth (within Campbell’s four functions of myth.) However, the definition was determined by the scope of the book, The Heart of Myth: Wisdom Stories from Endangered People, which is an anthology of world myth… so it is global in its scope. The definition is focused only on an esoteric reading of myth, dismissing exoteric meanings as the medium of transmission, yet, since Heart is an anthology of living myth, the myths of living polytheistic communities… it is relevant to both anthropological and phenomenological experiences among diverse communities all over the globe.

Already, the definition pulses within our grasp. It is imperfect and limited. It is intentionally imperfect and limited.

Why?

The Heart of Myth is an attempt — through context and examples of myth from around the world — to unpack myth… as a communicational medium grounded in profound states of awareness.

Arguments centering upon myth and ritual (after van Gennep) often ponder, “Which came first, the myth or the ritual?” My argument in The Heart of Myth is that state of awareness is primary. Like poetry, myth is a mode of communication with shifting sets of grammatical characteristics based, nevertheless, upon core principles of metaphor and figurative language. Unpacked section at a time… The Heart of Myth is an attempt to share with a wider audience the grammar of myth as a system for the transmission of profound states of awareness.

If Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces was Campbell’s attempt to teach people how to read a myth, then The Heart of Myth is my attempt to unpack the grammar of the mystical function of myth.

To this end, in the next blog… we will take our first steps in our discovery — inward, ever inward — toward that foundational state of awareness from which myth emerges.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAVE ALBER September Guest Blogs

Blog1
What Is Myth For You?

Blog 2
What Is The Core Grammar of Mythology?

Blog 3
What Is The Alchemy Of Myth?

Blog 4
What Is The Ecological Vision Of Myth?

Blog 5
The Myths Of Native North America

Blog 6
The Myths Of The Crow (Apsaalooke) People

STORYHOUR : A Sea Glass Serenade #Friyay #mythopoetry

2017-08-11T07:42:00.000-07:00

AND SO IT HAPPENED
True personality is always a vocation...vocation acts like a law of god from which there is no escape. -C.G. Jung

Archetypal Suffering "The Development of Personality"
CW17, p. 175

Tear catchers popular once

among our womankind

whose men are lost in battle

during the Civil War; many

ladies of such mind

say tears of wives and daughters

are sacred much like holy

water

It makes me think of glassy sea & blues

that in their whitely singing foam

mermaids also knew

and of this ancient turning solid

suspending sadness in those tears they

drew—caring too, they might undo

the shipwrecked fates of men in lore

And, as if by some enchanted magic

pulled they underneath

the grey-green ocean

floor

swept up in varied colors thrust

such teardrops onto shore

SARASVATI: The Flowing One Deanna McKinstry-Edwards #guestpost #July #MondayMotivation #Sarasvati #Saraswati #Saraswathi

2017-07-10T09:09:00.001-07:00

SARASVATI: The Flowing One
by Deanna McKinstry-Edwards

In the bright world, where the light of the world opens, In the bright world, at the furthest border of The Word, Sarasvati poured out her rivering voices. Down, down, deeply down, the syllables flowed from the something that shines at the center of the world.

She came to me when the waters of my life were frozen. I think I’d heard Her name many years ago, but nothing took hold, and perhaps I even heard Her call mine. Some voices sound like the wind. Some like rain. They rustle, they loosen, but its not yet their time to linger, so they pass through you, time and again, rustling, loosening your mind until you can hear and heed them in the language they speak.

I had some exposure in my early days to stories of Goddesses, but I had not heard there was a Goddess who moved the world by a word, a syllable, a voice. Fortunately, weather bristles in one’s psyche when the time is right for all manner of voices and words to be heard, to upend, to reconnect, to sing songs and retell stories long forgotten. These stories work like magnets tugging at the personal story of each person’s life, wresting it from impoverished moorings too isolated from the epic and collective human story, and too fixed with nailed down notions to support the beneficent chaos which initiates birth and creativity.

We were destined to meet, Sarasvati and I, since I have been, an actress, a singer, a writer, a devotee of breath churned into expression through melody and words. For this is Her realm, the domain of sound, singing, eloquent speech, and intuitive wisdom. Originally a river goddess in the ancient Vedic texts, Sarasvati is the archetypal figure who embodies wisdom through the flowing motion of sound and running water. Hers is the archetypal energy that compels us to break loose from inhibiting forces and stuck places, especially those rutted in our minds. She compels each of us to loosen our notions and animate dialogues with ourselves, others, and all life, continually moving our minds like leaves riding a river. It is not closure Sarasvati seeks, but open-ended conversation.

To meet Sarasvati, The Hindu Goddess of Speech, Sound, Music and Wisdom, is to meet the holy rivers veined through the inner and outer landscapes of our lives. “Sarasvati is the Word, and the Word is the way of The Gods.” (Calasso 239) writes Roberto Calasso in his lush and erotic book, Ka; Stories of the Mind and Gods of India. “The Word, and these waters, are the one help we have. We shall follow the Word, so as to be able to leave it behind.” (Calasso 239) Beyond the Word, it was written in the Vedas, was the center of the world. A place known as “Only something that shines.” (Calasso 239)

It was not the fate of all Hindu goddesses to remain important in later Hinduism. But Sarasvati exemplified her own attributes of change and transcendence, by representing a wisdom which permeates all life, that being to remain open to and flowing with life’s ever-changing nature. Something primordial defines Sarasvati which extends beyond cultural associations to cosmic tendencies and attributes, and this feature of her archetypal zest is no doubt key to her continued survival and importance in Hindu culture even today.

David R. Kinsley, author of Hindu Goddesses, describes Sarasvati’s earliest appearance as a river. She is

“no ordinary river. Early Vedic references make it clear that the Sarasvati River originates in heaven and flows down to earth. Physical contact with her earthly manifestation, however, connects one with the awesome, heavenly, transcendent dimension of the goddess and of reality in general.” (Kinsley 57)

Even before Sarasvati The River and The Goddess flowed down from the celestial heavens, another Goddess, her ancestral progenitor, quickened and fertilized the visible and invisible aspects of the world through sound. Her name was Vac. The Goddess of voice. Of word. “Queen of a thousand syllables…” (Calasso 238), “Vac was a power at the world’s beginning.” (Calasso 238) Wherever life grew parched, and living things lost their luster, it was Vac who moistened and brighten them at their source. With sound. Sarasvati emerged from the mythical husks of Vac, and though initially and consistently identified with her, over time Sarasvati came to represent characteristics other than those originally ascribed to Vac.

Although the distinction of sound and speech as primordial factors in the creation of the universe is a post-Rg-vedic concept, nevertheless sound, and speech especially when ritualized, are regarded in the Rg-veda as an integral aspect of cosmic creation and order. Vac’s attributes exemplified the theory prevalent in many mythologies that the origin of the created universe occurred through sound. In Hinduism, Vac besides being a primordial creative force, is also honored as

“the presence that inspires the rsis. She is truth, and she inspires truth by sustaining Soma, the personification of the exhilarating drink of vision and immortality. She is the mysterious presence that enables one to hear, see, grasp, and then express in words the true nature of things.” (Kinsley 12)

Bear in mind, Vac was more than an abstract concept. Her essential nature was that of an omnipresent, nourishing goddess, forceful as a lioness, decked in golden raiment, capable of fostering both fiercely and tenderly, organic growth as a result of providing the blessings of language and vision. She is equated no less with the creation of Hinduism’s three Vedas, the earth (Rg-veda), the air, (Yajur-veda), and the sky (Sama-veda). She is a Goddess at the very source of life, and Hinduism’s holy writ. Gradually Vac’s vivid personification was assumed by and metamorphosed into Sarasvati. Centuries later, additional qualities became attributed to Sarasvati which took on a primacy in the shaping of Hindu culture.

To understand Sarasvati’s transitions from earlier associations with Vac into her own Goddessdom, and from her earliest identification with the cleansing purity and fertility of the Sarasvati River, and rivers in general, one needs to consider the historical and cultural transitions occurring when nomadic life in India metamorphosed into agricultural, village societies. Rivers were the life blood to these societies. Understanding the nature of rivers was mandatory to survival. Sarasvati’s river heritage affirmed a tendency in classical Hinduism to perceive the landscape itself as something sacred. Rivers were considered symbolic places for planting, for healing, where one could cleanse one’s body and spirit. Furthermore, not only were rivers places into which one could immerse one’s bodily self, metaphorically they assumed imagery indigenous to all three Indian religions, Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism—that being the fording of a body of water, be it river or stream for spiritual attainments. By crossing over to the other side of a river, one drowned the deadening beliefs of the old self to be born afresh, to be liberated from the past, towards a new, more enlightened way of being in the world.

It is not known exactly, how The Goddess Sarasvati became less connected with her original river goddess status, and more associated with another Goddess, Vagdevi, the Goddess of Speech. Kinsley speculates that,

“Perhaps the centrality of sacred speech in Vedic cult and the importance of Vedic rituals being performed on the banks of the Sarasvati River led to the identification of the two goddesses. In any case, Sarasvati increasingly becomes a goddess associated with speech, learning, culture, and wisdom; most post-Vedic references to her do not even hint that at one time she was identified with a river.” (Kinsley 57)

I would suggest also that the transition Sarasvati traveled from ancient river status into the goddess of speech expresses an archetypal connection between a river’s ability to carry earthly sediments, and the voice’s ability to carry emotive sentiments. Intrinsically linked, voices and rivers move and shape inner and outer topographies. Soul as soil, soil as soul.

Insofar as Sarasvati would eventually become a goddess equated with the refinements Hinduism attaches to culture and transcendence of the natural world, Sarasvati could be said to have come full circle. That is, as a Goddess of learning and wisdom, such as it is attained through language, She has, in a sense, returned to her celestial fount in the heavens, a domain above human travail. But even though Sarasvati in present times is often represented as transcendent, purified knowledge and wisdom, riding a heavenly swan above the toil and turbulence of the natural world, she can also be Sarasvati seated on a lotus, rooted in the muck of earthly bogs.

Although rooted in the mud (like man rooted in the physical world), the lotus perfects itself in a blossom that has transcended the mud. Sarasvati inspires people to live in such a way that they may transcend their physical limitations through the ongoing creation of culture. (Kinsley 62)

Sarasvati upholds a theme in Hinduism that affirms that human destiny is inextricably tied to notions of the refinement of nature. Nature without these cultural refinements is not considered suitable for the fullest unfolding of a human being in Hindu thought. These sentiments regarding the refinement of nature as essential to a human’s fullest potential possess a Western bias as well, and in so doing tend to emphasis and esteem certain human attributes at the expense of others. With the more recent emphasis on purity and transcendence of the physical world, India’s present day Sarasvati appears more disembodied than her earlier incarnations. But for all Her purified, sattvic nature, Sarasvati remains a Goddess of music as well as speech. Music is untethered speech. At her core, Sarasvati contains the fertile, rushing sap of Her beginnings; a juice squeezed from the Vedic philosophy of the primacy of syllables. Jonathan Levi, in his review of Literature and The Gods, by Roberto Calasso, in The Los Angeles Times, April 22, 2001, quoting from Calasso, writes, “One squeezes juice, from anything, but not from the syllable: Because the syllable is itself the juice of everything…And from the syllable all else flows.”

Sarasvati is a particularly juicy goddess for modern times, especially perhaps, for modern day women. She is not a goddess of motherhood, or the fertility of the fields, except metaphorically. What She gives birth to are creations other than human progeny. Hers is not a domestic presence in the traditional sense of keeping house, but of housekeeping by creating eloquence, art, wisdom through artistic discovery, poetry and music. With words She tills the fields of human longing and imagination. She is the running dialogue at the center of human affairs, spinning the stories within which we nourish our lives. “The world is made up of stories, not atoms”, wrote poet Muriel Rukeyser. The sounding harp of the Universe is plucked by Sarasvati, and key to understanding her wisdom, is hearing and releasing the sounds She makes, allowing them their ever flowing, ever-changing-ness.

In my own life, Sarasvati’s presence has been especially potent and integral these past few years. A story about Her swayed my decision as to where and how I should continue my education following a return to school to complete a bachelor’s degree begun over thirty years ago. Drawn to Pacifica Graduate Institute, torn between a degree in Psychology, which I perceived as possessing definite financial largesse somewhere up ahead, and The Mythological Program which seemed possessed with as sure-footed a financial future as the acting profession, I cast my net for a sign, an omen. I got a story.

Once upon a time in a faraway land, a man went into the forest to see his spiritual master. “I want to have unlimited wealth, and with that wealth, I want to help and heal the world. Will you tell me how to create this affluence?

The spiritual master replied. “There are two goddesses which reside in the heart of every human being. Everybody loves these two goddesses, but there’s a secret you need to know, and I will tell you what it is.”

Although you love both of these goddesses, you must pay more attention to one of them. She is the Goddess of Knowledge, of speech, music and sound, and her name is Sarasvati. Pursue her, love her and give her your attention. For when you pay more attention to Sarasvati, the other goddess, Lahksmi, the Goddess of Wealth, will become extremely jealous and pay more attention to you. The more you seek Sarasvati, the more the Goddess of Wealth will seek you. And she will follow you wherever you go, and never leave you.

In that mysterious way our Psyche senses even seizes what it really wants…and, in the gap between that psychic sensing and fearful admonitions of the ego, responses glimmer. Of course, I already knew which program it was I wanted. The Myth Program. The one with the knowledge that really called to me. It was just a question of how much faith and derring-do I still retained. It was just a question of letting a story reconnect me back to the source of something shining.

Certainly a most shining manifestation of Sarasvati in Buddhism was a woman who became the first Tibetan to attain complete enlightenment. Her name was Yeshe Tsogyal, and her life story is written about in a book, Lady of the Lotus Born. She is often referred to as The Great Bliss Queen.

For Padmasambhava, the guru who brought Buddha’s teaching from India to Tibet, to propagate his teaching of the Secret Mantra, he felt the time had come for an incarnation of Sarasvati to appear. Yeshe, whose birth reverberated a Sanskrit mantra through the air so powerfully that a nearby lake increased to almost twice its size, was the wife of Emperor King, Tri-song-dat-tsen of Tibet. It was Tri-song who invited Padmashambhava to Tibet to spread the new tradition of Buddhism. With his consent, Yeshe became Padmasambhava’s consort and foremost disciple. She was the embodiment of the Sarasvati he was looking for.

Yeshe and Padmasambhava through sexual union, mantras and chanting dissolved artificial boundaries between the mind and the body. Rather than forsaking and attempting to transcend the body, the Tantric wisdom that Padmasambhava advocated engaged both body and mind for enlightenment. Creating a bridge of sound between mind and body composed of sounds and sacred syllables facilitates an enlightening, informing dialogue between them. Keeping this river of sound flowing and being aware of its ever-changing, interdependent behavior is the heart of Buddhist wisdom. Buddhism’s most reknown Sarasvati, Yeshe Tsogyal, learned how to make her body sing, and became both the singer of her life’s song, and the song itself.

Sarasvati, such as She manifested in the bodhisattva archetype of Yeshe Tsogyal, presents an embodied Goddess who has married within herself the heavier, darker emotional sounds of soul as they move through the human body, and the flute-like soaring sounds of spirit, such as they leap from the human mind. This Sarasvati appeals to me immensely, for no parts of Her appear to be in exile.

Today, with so much talk about creating a sense of community in our lives and world, saturated as they are with feelings of alienation, I feel Sarasvati’s presence holds a promise. As the Goddess of speech and music, She carries the virtues of connection and communication. Robert Sardello writes in his book, Facing the World With Soul,. “When community does show forth among people it shows in the word, the living, creative, unexpected, heartfelt, spontaneous, thoughtful, reflective speaking through which the soul of the world finds voice.” (Sardello 181). This is Sarasvati’s Queendom, the shining place where words wait to be born in the mouths of living things. Voice is how the soul speaks

In speaking the breath connects us to each other. When we bank and shape this breath with the consonants and vowels of whatever language we speak, we become like the earth, banking the forces of a river so it can meander with some depth through the landscape moistening and moving it with life’s running waters. It is a sacred thing we do with breath and speech that Sarasvati oversees. It came to me so vividly just a few nights ago, as a small tree rat lay dying in the street by my driveway. I knew not what had happened to it. Poison, I assumed. But suddenly I was profoundly overcome. I could not leave him (her). Her tiny eyes seemed to take me in, as I took her into me. We were inhaling one another. We were a community of two, two souls speaking of the deepest things between us. I asked Sarasvati to hold her in Her breath as I lay her small furry body on soft ground under some vines, to expire. I knew She would say the right words. And that the little tree rat would hear her name in Her merciful voice, and be released into Her flowing music as she headed home to the bright world from whence She and she, and all of us came…together.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Deanna McKinstry-Edwards, PhD is a professional actress, singer, writer and Pushcart nominated poet. Returning to college in 1999, she earned a Master’s and Doctoral Degree in Mythology and Depth Psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute. Her doctoral dissertation, Singing; Soul’s Mythic Mirror, explores singing as the indigenous voice and language of human beings. Her lectures on singing and myth merge her performance talents with her academic background. She teaches a course on Ecopsychology, and is the author of Psyche, Eros and Me; A Mythic Memoir.

BOOK

PSYCHE, EROS AND ME: A MYTHIC MEMOIR

A BONE BROTH FOR SOUL-MAKING #NationalSelfieDay

2017-06-21T15:52:00.001-07:00

WILD HUNTS and The Secret Instinct

In the full light of a theology of sin, the false self appears as not just logically incoherent but morally dreadful…When the duplicitous subject turns away from god in his duplicity he mocks and parodies god’s own good activity. –Blaise Pascal

see
it’s not that it’s a witch hunt
it’s that it’s a wild hunt

a furious host
the white house
in something

morally
dreadful
disembodied dees

secrecy falsifies—
simulacra is
no photo

no video
press briefings
logically incoherent

the house
man
eye

white with duplicity, "his
imaginary" press briefings
try to make “good”

knot this start again
it’s not “make great again”
it’s make “good” good again

stay with the wor(l)d you face
as it tries to make something
good grow down in your bones

empty your will—not “empty vessel”
the face of her wild long river
is working into broth underneath you

D-meter vagina dentata eyes of blood
and wings of angels rage after the
white-housed man with the

falsifying eye
driving under
the influence

inside, the furious host
in the white housed
secrete dees

worms fall out
to make our
story come clean

deny
delay
deflect

deceive
the outside
furious hunt

seeking soiled linens
duplicitous parodies
gods borscht boys &

goodfellas; outsides pair and
dye dees showing in phainein form
the false nature of being creative

duplicitous gods
brown this June
with Demeter’s refusal

disembodied is our spirit
times, even the wild hunt is claim
to the disembodied in lives now loosed

upon the soul. But, the maiden underneath
makes “good” materialize
apart from the materializing of things

so give yourself to this other kenotic life
and let it shape the talisman, an
immediate access to profound wisdom

broth in our bones

©2017 Wild Hunts & The Secret Instinct stephanie pope mythopoetry.com

_____________
notes

see Blaise Pascal, On Duplicity, Sin and The Fall: The Secret Instinct, p. 120

A REPRESENTATIONAL SELF

2017-06-19T11:22:00.000-07:00

A MAD DESIRE FOR A JUST WORD

Click on this image. Watch
the cat disappear— all but his smile!

Cat up a tree
gone into canopy
smiling angel
creative emotion
insighting power
under the pen—me
ow me-oozing, smiles
throwing words into
their true order but

never trust a smiling cat[i]
grin hanging in a tree

©2017 A Mad Desire For A Just Word In A Representational Self
stephanie pope mythopoetry.com #GarfieldDay

___________

notes

additional quotes:

1. “But, I don’t want to go among mad people.” – Alice ("Alice in Wonderland”, Lewis Carroll)

2. “Soul, aware of the dreadful nature within situation’s reason and reasoning’s intelligences, understands there is no use trying to account for the grinning existences hiding in words.”

see Be(e)Speak! The Deformational Image by Stephanie Pope

[i] Famous Garfield quote

GUEST POST "song of the white dove" Beth Anne Boardman #mythopoetry #author #wednesdaywisdom

2017-05-31T12:08:00.000-07:00

song of the white dove

the white dove came again.

i love how she sits far back

in the black, tangled branches

of that wild oak tree –

she glows through the falling darkness,

a phantom of herself….

she used to frighten me,

appearing unannounced

at nightfall….

you’re not from around here, are you?

i thought at her,

that first night….

i’ve tried to make up all kinds of stories

about why she visits when she does….

a harbinger of death?

of change?

but every day changes and dies,

as do we….

her song differs from

those of the mourning doves

that have surrounded me

since birth –

(my father taught me their song)

softer than theirs,

her song floats featherlike,

unmournful….

it curls

wispy

tender

wraithlike

(holy….)

we have watched each other

for years now….

through black ash

and endless smoky grey –

we are dual-captured

by blue-white

myriad starfields --

(our secret)

and still,

her song stops me midstep

midbreath

midquestion --

like an incognito

gasp of surprise….

then i recall an elder’s words

and realize:

she sings

not as a warning of death,

but as an

encouragement

to keep dying….

©2017 song of the white dove by Beth Anne Boardman for mythopoetry.com
©2017 song of the white dove Beth Anne Boardman All Rights Retained

_____________
NOTES

The last two lines recall the wisdom of Chungliang al Huang, who appears in Finding Joe, a film by Patrick Takaya Solomon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Beth Anne Boardman, RN, MA, PhD lives in California and New Hampshire. She travels and lectures on the Mythology of Sport; Women and Myth; and the Alchemy of Adolescence (her dissertation topic), in addition to consulting as a writer to websites.

Recently, Beth has served on the board of the Pacifica Graduate Institute Alumni Association and as Regional Coordinator for local alumni. Her career spans work as a registered nurse, the study of world dance and music, and the profound joy of raising two children.

BLOG

For stories and essays on creative life and culture visit Dr. Beth Ann Boardman at MYTHMUSE

POETRY BLOG

POEMS FROM THE OTHERWORLD

GUEST POST "reconciling grey" by Beth Anne Boardman #amwriting #poetry #authorslife

2017-05-30T12:30:00.000-07:00

reconciling grey

sometimes the world’s beauty

seems to vanish

in one whoosh….

death bookends life,

fate turns on its dime,

and rugs shift

under our feet….

poems, words, colors, disappear

metaphor leaves….

shall we hope for no more happiness

if gifts come

on the sharp edge

of a knife?

•

this morning

i stood on my front steps

and this foreign wind

played in my hair,

ran all around my face

and made me dizzy

birds sang confusingly

of nests and mates

and territories….

the sun shone strangely

springlike

and i brought in the laundry….

© 2017 reconciling grey by Beth Anne Boardman on mythopoetry.com
© 2017 reconciling grey Beth Anne Boardman All Rights Retained

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BLOG

For stories and essays on creative life and culture visit Dr. Beth Ann Boardman at MYTHMUSE

POETRY BLOG

POEMS FROM THE OTHERWORLD

GUESTPOST "Oh Mother, Mother" by Beth Anne Boardman #amwriting #SundayMorning #poetry

2017-05-28T10:10:00.000-07:00

TROPHONIUS & THE BEES
photo courtesy Beth Anne Boardman

OH MOTHER, MOTHER...

in grief

sometimes

i cannot say more....

‘mother of gentleness’

‘mother of mercy’

‘mother of kindness’

visit me....

give me the vision

of the next few minutes –

remind me to breathe....

remind me of your presence....

remind me that these events

that shake me –

that topple my world

into pain –

remind me,

oh mother,

the sun will rise....

and oh mother, mother –

you will show me how to begin again....

____________

notes
In mythology Trophonius or Trophonios is the story of a man who is swallowed up by the earth and transformed into the oraculur demigod or daimon (spirit) of a cave near the town of Lebadeia or Boiotia.

Trophonius translates as "nourisher of the mind" from the Greek tropheô words and noos.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BLOG

For stories and essays on creative life and culture visit Dr. Beth Ann Boardman at MYTHMUSE

POETRY BLOG

POEMS FROM THE OTHERWORLD

GUEST POST "a mother glows" by BETH ANNE BOARDMAN #mOTHERSday #SundayMorning #ReasonToKeepGoing #mythopoetry

2017-05-14T08:51:00.002-07:00

PHOTO OVERLAYS mythopoetry.com

a mother glows

a mother gets sick

a mother swells

a mother dances about

a mother waddles

a mother wails

a mother dotes

how precious the hands!

how sweet the toes!

how frightening the wails,

how lovely the cradling….

a mother loves

a mother helps

a mother waits

a mother tries

to be redundant

to be unneeded

to be heartbroken

to be older

to be a mother

to be a lover

to be chosen

to be blessed

to love

to leave

to live

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BLOG

For stories and essays on creative life and culture visit Dr. Beth Ann Boardman at MYTHMUSE

POETRY BLOG

POEMS FROM THE OTHERWORLD

GUEST POST: "day and night/silent wings" by BETH ANNE BOARDMAN #wedwip #mythopoetry #poetry

2017-05-10T11:25:00.000-07:00

day and night/silent wings

day and night

my house is surrounded

by sacred wings….

two hawks call to each other across my roof

in the still dawn….

their screes grace the silence,

point to the silence….

they dance on the lifting currents of air

caused by the difference between night and day,

cold and warm,

dark and light….

often they come back just before noon,

when drafts of air surge up off the warming hillsides….

their calls ring like temple bells:

reminding me to be still for a moment,

to stop and touch the eternal in the day,

to take a breath and offer myself to the mystery….

•

another calls

as the sun turns orange

and falls slowly down

into the billowing cotton layer

that covers the western ocean,

drawn up over the day like a soft blanket….

this one summons the night-shift:

the ones who will soar over us as we

live on in the darkness,

as we sleep,

and dream,

and sometimes dance….

when the night is well-established,

their sounds, too, pierce the trying-to-be-silence:

shrill ghostly gliding white cries

of barn owls

and great horned owls

tracking their crawling prey….

•

if you’re outside walking in

that rare warm coastal air,

oohing and ahing over the surprising sharp blue glints

(priceless diamond stars making a

one-night-only appearance….)

if you’re out there,

you can sometimes catch a glimpse

of white wings glowing high above you in the night,

coming in fast,

and soon gone –

right over your head,

without a sound….

but a sheerly distant whistle drifts somewhere behind

those silent wings,

leaving a certain trace

of untouchable presence….

•

on the very darkest nights,

there is one who comes to the roof-corner

right outside my room….

and even though the window might be closed

against the damp night air,

he announces his landing

with an unmistakable, commanding scree….

I am here for the night.

I sleep and wake

under the jurisdiction

of sacred wings….

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BLOG

For stories and essays on creative life and culture visit Dr. Beth Ann Boardman at MYTHMUSE

POETRY BLOG

POEMS FROM THE OTHERWORLD

WHEN THE FIFTH IS WITH US #mythopoetry #slapdashsat #ThingsJesusNeverSaid #amwriting

2017-05-06T13:41:00.000-07:00

May The Fifth Be With You

WHEN THE FIFTH IS WITH US

"May The Fifth Be With You," my friends on facebook repeatedly exclaimed yesterday. Well last night the spirit of the fifth was with me!

Last night, Cinco De Mayo, May the 5^th was filled with a night of dreaming. I decided earlier in the day a “staycation” was in order, a staycation of another sort. My sweetie and I stayed home and created our own celebration which included a fifth of another sort as well—tequila instead of whiskey (naturally!)

I made beef chimichunga, pico de gallo, mango salsa, refried black beans all from scratch, got out the Mexican placemats, tabletop sombreros, Our Lady of Guadeloupe candle stick and a set of authentic maracas. Then my sweetie and I got the bright idea to share our fare with the BFF couple who live across the street. Gathering up a share of the feast and a pitcher of my sweetie’s marvelous margaritas we had one of those unplanned perfect evenings.

This morning I awakened from a dream. In it I was roller skating through Texas.

The dream me was tired and looking for her hotel among the many shops and restaurants about her. She stopped into a neat restaurant to ask directions. They didn’t turn her away but they did have a strict dress code and wanted to seat her in the fast food, casual dining area as opposed to the fine dining section. This is when she looked down towards her wheeled feet and noticed she was missing the right pant leg of her jeans. She also realized the folks at the restaurant misinterpreted why she walked through the door!

Here’s where I awakened feeling the mood of things.

I tried to work with this dream today without success until I got the bright idea to work not from my own image associations for the dream but hers. Let me call her Texas Roller Girl. This means she is now a personified notion.

Texas Roller Girl has a missing right pant leg. She could never keep her pant legs rolled, she can only keep the left pant leg rolled. She has a mortal side, her left side and an immortal side, her right side, the one already missing its fabric. Yet, Texas Roller Girl stays rolled or “rolling” by the nature of her soles, a polutropic dream pun, perhaps, for “soul” and maybe too, an image gerund-ing to presence “a wing-ing” movement in the dream figures that moves us, first, beyond our own perceptions of things to its perception of things and then through it again, moving (us) from object (the itness or psychic realness) to fabric or to fabricating (that gerund-ing notion again) what may be working the next room of the dream. The fabric is the image telling its own story we experience as a dream. What seems like a strange fabrication makes no sense at first until seen through the eyes of the pilgrim roller girl passing through it.

Now, let me turn to “the working in”, “the next room of the dream.”

Long before supper time yesterday I had just read about the ancient Greek sculptor Lysippus and his ideas regarding a certain figure in the Greek pantheon, Hercules Epitrapezius, Hercules of the Table. For Lysippus, he is the guest who may knock at your door anytime, that guest for whom you must always reserve a seat at the table.
The sculptor goes so far as to say, “to this guest goes the seat at the head of your table.”

This is a figure that begs hospitality. Moreover, this figure’s herculean effort over sees and rebalances the boundary between interiority’s and exteriority’s too rigid divide. The outsider and the outed sides are suddenly showing up as part of a dream figures context. Under this theme of guest, host and pilgrim, interior figures and exterior figures can speak their peace freely to each other, be welcomed and be listened to, exteriors and interiors performing together i.e. gerund-ing to presence like a pair of wings on a lyre, that is soles no longer soles are signaling a winged instrument at work, an ensoulment.

Ensouled with wings, the spirit of the fifth reminds me of one of the epithets for Hermes, homogenie. This is the idea in the word homogenized. Coming and going, Hermes Homogenie unites inside and outside and this is like a pair of wings on a lyre playing together. When the fifth is with us soul claps its hands and there is singing school.

©2017 When The Fifth Is With Us stephaniepope mythopoetry.com

GUEST POST BETH ANNE BOARDMAN, PH.D : THE SPIRIT OF ACTION #MayTheFourthBeWithYou

2017-05-04T06:38:00.000-07:00

THE SPIRIT OF ACTION

If one could bottle the elixir of motivation, one might make millions. What moves someone from stillness to action?

- Dr Beth Anne Boardman
cultural mythologist

THE SPIRIT OF ACTION

If one could bottle the elixir of motivation, one might make millions. What moves someone from stillness to action? How does one overcome complacency or emotional paralysis and take healthy, constructive, creative action?

Motivation fades and surges according to its own inconstant logic. How wonderful would it be, as one slumps at one’s desk, preparing to prepare one’s yearly taxes, to be able to chug down a quick shot of elixir-of-motivation, and get the job done? How fabulous to conquer stage-fright and let one’s passion fly with an effortless sleight of hand, or get that dissertation done by just opening the laptop. One hears the phrase liquid courage, but the spirit of action is more mercurial, more insubstantial than Jack Daniels.

Mercurial: difficult if not impossible to pin down, grasp, define. Uncontainable. Not always apparent. Unpredictable. Written in the wind. Words point in the direction of mercurial; images, though, evoke more complex meanings and help illustrate the enigmatic. Ancient cultures around the world drew or painted or carved the likenesses of winged humans, angels, gods, fairies, and mythic beings who moved between the worlds—between heaven, earth, and the underworld. Wings signify the unseen power of the air, the mysterious aspects of communication (prayer, intuition, meditation) between humans and what they perceive as invisible, divine energies outside of themselves.

In addition to angels, gods, goddesses, and other mythic beings, people also honor and pray to saints, prophets, stars, the spirits of the Ancestors, and/or the planet’s natural elements. Celtic tradition collectively names these unseen energies the Otherworld. Fantastical images and stories of otherworldly beings emphasize that Divine Power(s) exist outside of the human world and thus remain unpredictable and inscrutable to humanity. Jungian and Archetypal psychologies suggest that each individual’s mind and imagination can reflect these otherworldly energies, with the caveat that one may contain aspects of the divine but cannot possess all the power of the divine. In other words, we recognize Love in ourselves, but we do not command the power of Venus or Aphrodite. One may embody qualities of a Warrior or Defender, but one cannot bend the energies of Mars or Aries to one’s personal human will.

Diverse sacred traditions admonish humans not to gaze directly upon the gods. The gods/the angels/the spirits – all shy away from explicit contact, and their reticence must be honored. When the Biblical Moses encountered I Am that I Am on the mountainside, he saw only a burning bush, and through this interaction, understood that the human form cannot contain or withstand the actual power of God. In the Greek myth of Semele’s contact with Zeus, her pleas to see him directly resulted in the spontaneous immolation of her human form. These stories and others like them reinforce the reality of human frailty, our divinely ordained imperfection.

Early Greeks and Romans told of Hermes (Greek) or Mercury (Roman), gods who traversed between the worlds, passing messages between

gods and humans and accompanying beings that needed to travel to and fro between heaven, earth, and the underworld. Represented by wings on his cap or the heels of his boots (or both), Mercury’s essential responsibility and quality, therefore, is to come and go; and since he is a god, his movements are beyond feeble humanity’s ability to predict or command. Mercury gives a face to the unseen spirit of action, illustrates the ephemeral power of motivation. Alchemists, the philosopher-scientists of old, called this spirit Mercurius, the force they recognized as the power behind both worldly and spiritual transformation.

This is the mystery of motivation: human will-power can achieve much, but only inspiration, the visitation of the mercurial spirit of action, can lead us to accomplishments beyond our planning. Mercurius provides us moments of its otherworldly power to transform ideas into actions, dreams into realizations. Like any of the other gods, the Spirit of Action will not be summoned, only invited. And when invited, it may or may not coalesce. A humble stance honors that the great energies of the universe defy human containment. Creative, purposeful action requires a sensitive dance between power and receptivity on this spider’s web of life.

In paying attention to the quiet whisper of our inner guidance and gathering up our human willingness, we take the first step on a new journey. Along the way, we honor the otherworld and welcome the mercurial power of action to suffuse us with inspiration. Honor the gods, the old stories say, and remember to give thanks for those times when we find ourselves wonderfully mid-action, not knowing quite how we got there, and amazed at finding done what we thought we couldn’t do.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BLOG

For stories and essays on creative life and culture visit Dr. Beth Ann Boardman at MYTHMUSE

POETRY BLOG

POEMS FROM THE OTHERWORLD

POETS OF MYTHOPOETRY: BRADLEY OLSON : Four Poems #mythopoetry #guestpost #NationalPoetryMonth2017

2017-04-30T09:55:00.001-07:00

FOUR POEMS

PAUL VERLAINE'S AIM

You have me disadvantaged, dear Arthur.

You possess the sharp, quill tip of your pen

And your youth.

I have only this pistol…

If only my wounds were so easily mended.

I have not yet come to terms with written words

As you have--when you were yet a boy!--

And now you leave them,

And me,

Adrift in a drunken boat.

WINTER LEAVES

When I first heard it, I thought

It was really only rumor,

That this late in December's unforgiving draught

One golden leaf could still be in good humor.

Yet there it was, a palsied beggar,

At the mercy of winter's biting caprice.

How often have I (unwitting figure!),

Governed by an unattractive eye, failed to give notice.

I entered his world a puzzle, mostly skulking about

Then, by turning each leaf, I saw myself reflected.

His folios revealed me, so shockingly fleshed out,

That the sound, the fury, the Lear-ing suspicions no longer infected

A dislocated soul. A corroded spirit.

The littered psychic landscape unveiled by a warm spring sun

Is healed by the call away from winter if one can hear it

And grasp that, though logos contradict it, there is never, finally, a "done."

FLIGHT INFORMATION

I watched her from behind my newspaper

Trying to read a pulpy paperback

While the disembodied voice of flight information

(in both English and Spanish)

destroyed her concentration and sent her

eyes scouting the page for the word she last read.

When she left to board I wondered if she would ever finish

If the heroine would find love at long last

If the evils in her life would be overcome by good

If the someone waiting for her at some other airport gate

loved her Passionately, Deeply,

And Truly.

She looked like someone I usually wouldn't think about twice

Unless she were to trade the battered paperback for Hegel

Or someone else I couldn't understand.

I don't want what's familiar to me; I ran from the provincial long ago

I know instinctively by watching her

I ran away from everything like her; not towards anything.

She looked happy--comfortable in her own skin--it alarms me to think she actually was.

LIMINAL SPACE

I am puzzled of late

by my single and peculiar life.

I am not what I used to be:

An airy dreamer

with a too truant disposition,

nor any longer a dark, upheaved soul

alone and lonely,

but rather betwixt and between

suffering from a usurpation of the senses.

La belle dame sans merci

draws from her black sack

“beautiful untrue things,”

the necessary deceptions

symbolizing and signaling life;

those heralds most deeply felt and dreamt of,

yet remaining oddly unapprehended…

the soul’s fugitives

bringing substance to an insubstantial life

and imagination to a mundane world.

From this sack,

the very same one,

She brought forth Ilych’s death.

Grotesque to those who watched,

but did not see,

beautiful to him

whom it brought forbearance and joy.

Beautifully used and artfully worn was It.

Beautiful and holy.

So holy It seems

It can hold nothing at all

but air…

and light…

and time…

and space.

Giving room enough to live,

saving room enough to die,

proposing room enough to discover (to my surprise!)

where It is,

Death cannot be.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bradley Olson, Ph.D is a former police officer who returned to school to earn a Bachelor’s degree in psychology and literature, two Master’s degrees in psychology, and a Ph.D. in Cultural Mythology. Dr. Olson is currently a psychotherapist in private practice at Mountain Waves Healing Arts in Flagstaff, Arizona; his work with clients is heavily influenced by his interest in Jungian Analytical Psychology and Mythological Studies. Brad is also the author of the acclaimed Falstaff Was My Tutor blog, which has earned him a nomination for the 2012 PUSHCART PRIZE in nonfiction.

BRAD'S BLOG

FALSTAFF WAS MY TUTOR

BRAD ALSO BLOGS FOR JCF.ORG

MYTH BLAST

WEBSITE

MOUNTAIN WAVES HEALING ARTS

VISIT BRAD ON FACEBOOK AT

https://www.facebook.com/bradley.a.olson

POETS OF MYTHOPOETRY: BRIAN LANDIS Two Poems #guestpost #mythopoetry #NationalPoetryMonth 2017

2017-04-29T08:14:00.001-07:00

TWO POEMS

EL RANCHO GRANDE

Avocado trees planted in rows

walnuts and grapes

In the arroyo, pampas grass

as if trilled or plucked

A chord of pampas grass

singing down the breezy cañon

to the sparkling sea

Two dogs in the sideyard

barking

A lazy cat opens one golden eye

FAMOUS PEOPLE

Pablo Picasso

sits with Jean Cocteau

praising miracles

(not life, which is common).

They drink espresso

and eat Italian pastries.

"God," Jean philosophizes,

"judges us by our appearances

and is the ultimate idiot."

Pablo paints God's portrait

and is the ultimate idiot.

Idiocy is relative.

Albert Einstein, at the next table

scribbles in the margin

of his New York Times:

"Relativity is next to godliness"

He signs his name.

He leaves it on the table

for the waiter to see.

(If you don't promote your own work,

who will?)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brian Landis is a Buddhist/Jungian psychotherapist, because poetry is a very bad way to make a living, living and working in San Luis Obispo, California. As the years unfold, he looks more and more like his beloved arroyos and potreros, wild and unkempt. He likes it that way and is ecstatic to be going to seed after a lifetime of bloom.

BRIAN ON FACEBOOK

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BOOK

FEATHERED LADDER

Fisher King Press

Amazon

POETS OF MYTHOPOETRY: LINDA SUDDARTH : Three Poems #mythopoetry #guestpost #NationalPoetryMonth 2017

2017-04-28T08:39:00.000-07:00

THREE POEMS

CURIOUS AND RICH

When I walk past
the fragrant forest
after heavy rain,
which smells like
the freshest salad
you ever ate,
some vegetation
from Otherworld
that when eaten
makes you feel alive,

then I listen, listen
and there is
nothing, nothing but.

When it is almost dusk
and the horizon is tinged
with the most delicate
hint of lavender,
against it dark
silhouettes of tiny
fruit-tree branches,

I listen, listen
there is nothing, nothing but.

When I pass the small mountain
rising like a god
impressing the night
and the still liquid sky,

I listen, listen
and there is nothing, nothing.

But nothing is something
curious and rich,
and I have heard it.

©2017 Curious And Rich Linda Suddarth
mythopoetry.com

©2017 Curious And Rich
Linda Suddarth All Rights Retained

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

“Curious and Rich,” Featured poem for Parabola Online, Summer 2014

BORROWED FOREST, RENTED THICKET

My comfort falls on deaf ears.

Though you are only volunteers,

comical encroaching

forest with your odd smells:

sweet, tangy mid-spring,

hints of honeysuckle, cedar,

thyme, vinegar, rose, float,

don’t you know tomorrow

will be the back-hoe,

saws, bulldozers,

and your lovely thickets

will be undone?

Strange tiny flowers, like bells

and purple prehistoric shaped,

beside the poke berry

monster, decorated

with pieces of old fence.

You’re not sad?

Little birds, find other nests.

Yesterday when the crow

sat eating your young

on the telephone wire,

stolen from you,

and from the maple,

didn’t you see

that was a sign to scatter?

Yet you still sing,

sitting in the tree

that will be gone tomorrow.

The maple who has given

much shade and color

isn’t sad either. She

is giving me strength.

In my heart,

borrowed forest, rented thicket,

you are forever,

many and varied shades of green,

and ever joyous in your singing.

Someday I’ll put some money

down and buy some wild place:

HAPPY OTHER PLACE

With every rain the woods

grow another foot,

on the breeze

rose and honeysuckle

faintly permeate

the corners of the sky.

In the far-seeing

of distance is

the blue of mountain

through the tree tops:

the mountain that looks

down on all of us.

I’ve been there,

these are the apple groves

up on top of the blue.

One fall we sat

under an apple tree,

spread a blanket

and ate apple pie,

while the bees

resembled angels

singing all in harmony.

People strolled in a daze

with apple nets

in their hands,

collecting the harvest

in this happy

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First publication of the poem, HAPPY OTHER PLACE occurs April 15, 2017 on Linda's blog, LINDA WORD AND IMAGE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Linda Ann Suddarth sees the creative life as a vital expression of the psyche. Linda has been writing poetry and drawing/painting for more than thirty years. She has recently published poems in Parabola, Silver Birch Press, Anima, and Red River Review. Linda has a BFA in painting, an interdisciplinary MA in Aesthetic Studies, and a PhD in Mythological Studies with an emphasis in Depth Psychology. She teaches English, Art, and Humanities at the College level. Linda’s blog is www.lindawordandimage.blogspot.com, and she can be reached at linsudd (at) aol (dot) com.

VISIT LINDA ON FACEBOOK AT

LINDA SUDDARTH POETRY AND ART

LINDA'S BLOG

LINDA WORD AND IMAGE

Mythopoetics In Culture mythopoetry.com

HEADS UP!

IN THY SPIRIT KEEPING POETRY SERIES FOR DECEMBER, 2017: A POETRY TRILOGY

I.EVERGREEN & PINE

II.THE NORTH WIND BLEW

III.A REINDEER NAMED EVERGREEN

TIS A SEASON FOR POETRY

WHO LOVES POETRY

Monsters & Bugs on Amazon

STEPHANIE ON TWITTER

WEBSITE

NOVEMBER GUEST BLOG: RETHINKING MYTHIC THINKING by Bradley Olson #depthpsychology #myth #soul #mythopo

A MEDITATION ON THE GRAMMAR OF MYTH"Each mythology has its own grammar." ~ Bradley Olson

Rethinking Myth Through Joseph Campbell’s “Four Functions”

Myth’s Grammar, Thought, And Imaginal Life

A Fifth Function Of Myth?

Meditations On Existential Dread, Salvation, And Transcendence

Is That All There Is To Myth?

An Ethical Ideal

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bradley Olson Blog

More About Brad

More by Bradley Olson on Myth Blast

BE ALWAYS DRUNKEN #blog #MondayMotivation #WorldFoodDay

ABOUT THAT NEW BOOK“It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.”– Charles Baudelaire

ON AMAZONMonsters & Bugs

DAVE ALBER GUEST POST #blog 6 of 6 The Myths Of The Crow (Apsaalooke) People #NorthAmerica #native #mythology

THE MYTHS OF THE CROW (APSAALOOKE) PEOPLE

Chapter 1—Crow (Apsaalooke): The Earth Diver

Myth: The Earth Diver

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAVE ALBER SEPTEMBER GUEST BLOGS

DAVE ALBER GUEST POST The Myths Of Native North America #mythology #September #blog Heart Of Myth Kindle Edition Amazon

COMING THIS FRIDAY BLOG 6 of 6

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAVE ALBER SEPTEMBER GUEST BLOGS

DAVE ALBER GUEST POST: What is the Ecological Vision of Myth? #September #blog #mythology #ecology #SundayMorning

Production, development, growth, and consumption are all on the rise. We hate to imagine the economy behaving otherwise. And we pretend that this stage in the economic cycle is the norm. Why do we pretend? -Dave Alber, "The Sustainable Vision of Endangered Societies"

The Sustainable Vision of Endangered Societies

The Organization of The Heart of Myth

Choosing the Cultures in The Heart of Myth

Service To Endangered Polytheistic Peoples

In The Next Blog

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAVE ALBER September Guest Blogs

Blog1What Is Myth For You?Blog 2What Is The Core Grammar of Mythology?Blog 3What Is The Alchemy Of Myth?Blog 4What Is The Ecological Vision Of Myth?Blog 5The Myths Of Native North AmericaBlog 6The Myths Of The Crow (Apsaalooke) People

DAVE ALBER GUEST POST: What Is The Alchemy Of Myth #FirstDayOfFall #FridayReads #September #blog

WHAT IS THE ALCHEMY OF MYTHFrom the perspective of the mystical function of myth, myth is a metaphorical system founded in primary states of awareness that the language of myth refers back to. -Dave Alber

INTRODUCTION

The Inherent Alchemy of the Mythological WorldviewExcerpt taken from "The Heart Of Myth"

The Eternal Values of Myth

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAVE ALBER September Guest Blogs

DAVE ALBER GUEST POST: What Is The Core Grammar of Mythology? #mythology #TuesdayThoughts #September #blog

Introduction Global Civilization and the Wisdom of Polytheistic Peoples

The Heart’s Way of Knowing

The Unity of Life

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAVE ALBER September Guest Blogs

DAVE ALBER GUEST BLOG "What Is Myth For You?" #mythology #Monday #September #blog

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

DAVE ALBER September Guest Blogs

Blog1What Is Myth For You?Blog 2What Is The Core Grammar of Mythology?Blog 3What Is The Alchemy Of Myth?Blog 4What Is The Ecological Vision Of Myth?Blog 5The Myths Of Native North AmericaBlog 6The Myths Of The Crow (Apsaalooke) People

STORYHOUR : A Sea Glass Serenade #Friyay #mythopoetry

AND SO IT HAPPENEDTrue personality is always a vocation...vocation acts like a law of god from which there is no escape. -C.G. Jung Archetypal Suffering "The Development of Personality" CW17, p. 175

SARASVATI: The Flowing One Deanna McKinstry-Edwards #guestpost #July #MondayMotivation #Sarasvati #Saraswati #Saraswathi

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BOOK

A BONE BROTH FOR SOUL-MAKING #NationalSelfieDay

WILD HUNTS and The Secret InstinctIn the full light of a theology of sin, the false self appears as not just logically incoherent but morally dreadful…When the duplicitous subject turns away from god in his duplicity he mocks and parodies god’s own good activity. –Blaise Pascal

A REPRESENTATIONAL SELF

A MAD DESIRE FOR A JUST WORD

notes

GUEST POST "song of the white dove" Beth Anne Boardman #mythopoetry #author #wednesdaywisdom

song of the white dove

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BLOG

POETRY BLOG

GUEST POST "reconciling grey" by Beth Anne Boardman #amwriting #poetry #authorslife

reconciling grey

I.
EVERGREEN & PINE

II.
THE NORTH WIND BLEW

III.
A REINDEER NAMED EVERGREEN

A MEDITATION ON THE GRAMMAR OF MYTH
"Each mythology has its own grammar." ~ Bradley Olson

Meditations On Existential Dread,
Salvation, And Transcendence

ABOUT THAT NEW BOOK

“It is time to get drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of Time, get drunk; get drunk without stopping! On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.”– Charles Baudelaire

ON AMAZON
Monsters & Bugs

The Sustainable Vision
of Endangered Societies

Blog1
What Is Myth For You?

Blog 2
What Is The Core Grammar of Mythology?

Blog 3
What Is The Alchemy Of Myth?

Blog 4
What Is The Ecological Vision Of Myth?

Blog 5
The Myths Of Native North America

Blog 6
The Myths Of The Crow (Apsaalooke) People

WHAT IS THE ALCHEMY OF MYTH

From the perspective of the mystical function of myth, myth is a metaphorical system founded in primary states of awareness that the language of myth refers back to.
-Dave Alber

The Inherent Alchemy of the Mythological Worldview
Excerpt taken from "The Heart Of Myth"

Introduction

Global Civilization and the Wisdom of Polytheistic Peoples

Blog1
What Is Myth For You?

Blog 2
What Is The Core Grammar of Mythology?

Blog 3
What Is The Alchemy Of Myth?

Blog 4
What Is The Ecological Vision Of Myth?

Blog 5
The Myths Of Native North America

Blog 6
The Myths Of The Crow (Apsaalooke) People

AND SO IT HAPPENED
True personality is always a vocation...vocation acts like a law of god from which there is no escape. -C.G. Jung

Archetypal Suffering "The Development of Personality"
CW17, p. 175

WILD HUNTS and The Secret Instinct

In the full light of a theology of sin, the false self appears as not just logically incoherent but morally dreadful…When the duplicitous subject turns away from god in his duplicity he mocks and parodies god’s own good activity. –Blaise Pascal

WHEN THE FIFTH IS WITH US

"May The Fifth Be With You," my friends on facebook repeatedly exclaimed yesterday. Well last night the spirit of the fifth was with me!

If one could bottle the elixir of motivation, one might make millions. What moves someone from stillness to action?

- Dr Beth Anne Boardman
cultural mythologist