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Initiation on Bald Mountain
- Teddy Hamstra, PhD
- 9 minutes ago
- 5 min read
It’s no small miracle that the VHS copy of Disney’s Fantasia (1940) survived all of the times I rewound it to the Night on Bald Mountain sequence when I was three to four years old. The imagery of the grand demon Chernabog summoning skeletal wraiths from their graves and initiating a frenzied Walpurgisnacht upon an near-volcanic Bald Mountain utterly entranced my childhood psyche. Like many modern children, Fantasia was my first conscious encounter with classical music and what made it so hypnotically strange was its use of Modest Mussorgsky’s tone poem as the melodic dialogue for one of the film's vignettes (Mussorgsky himself called it “a musical picture” in 1867). In the absence of dialogue to advance a narrative, Fantasia insisted upon the power of music to help render raw mythic imagery. These interplays of color, light, and shadow became the primal cave paintings on the Lascaux walls of my developing cerebrum.
Fire on the mythic mountain
As a composition, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain is richly mythic, inspired in part by Goethe’s Faust but also drawing on the Slavic demon figure Chernabog and variations on the witches’ sabbath rite (Goethe’s Faust, of course, also is an encyclopedia of Germanic folklore and mythology, too). The composer claimed that he wrote it entirely in a fever on the evening of June 23rd, 1867, the very night of its setting during a witches’ sabbath on St. John’s Eve. For pre-Disney listeners, Night on Bald Mountain evoked interior images, whereas for me, it’s impossible to separate those thunderous chords and crashing swells of harmony from the grandeur of Chernabog and the fiery dancers puppeteered along Bald Mountain’s ridges rendered in Disney animation.
When Joseph Campbell was asked about his personal journey to some of the great Paleolithic cave sites in the French Pyrenees in The Hero’s Journey, he spoke vividly of these spaces:
They are sheerly cold, dangerous, and dark. I remember when we were in the caves of Pêche-Merle, France, the concierge who was showing us through shut out the electric light, and you’ve never been in a darker place in your life. You didn’t know what direction you were facing in. Your whole consciousness was wiped out. (The Hero’s Journey, 103)
The painted creatures on the cave walls were meant to instantiate, in Campbell’s view, a form of animal magic to the adolescents undergoing rites of initiation within those caverns. The wraiths in Fantasia’s Night on Bald Mountain were a parallel form of cave painting to my young mind: creatures of the beyond whose writhing, gesticulating choreography initiated me into the seductive power of reality’s nocturnal dimensions—courtesy of Mussorgsky’s mythic music. Mussorgsky wrote to fellow composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (who “edited” many of these works posthumously) that “its tone is hot and chaotic,” which is how I imagine those Paleolithic cave rites must have been, too. This notion of a consciousness-wipe-out that Campbell describes is precisely what I gravitated toward in the summoning symphony of Night on Bald Mountain.
The shadow rites & the inner light
Fantasia’s multimedia unfurling of a modern mythology through symphonic animation profoundly exemplifies what Campbell meant when he related how “mythology opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech, beyond words, in short, to what we call transcendence (Hero' s Journey, 74).” Achieving this Charon-like voyage across the arts, Fantasia’s Night on Bald Mountain initiated me into mythology itself. Why this sequence of Fantasia was my favorite, and why the villains in other Disney films tended to attract me more than the heroes and heroines, has long vexed me. I’ve never been violent or intentionally cruel, so why have the “baddies” allured me so much? The great insight from Jungian depth psychology’s extensive spelunking into the “shadow” realm of the unconscious is to wrestle, like Jacob, with the dark angels of our psyche and to recognize them not as forces of evil but as temple guardians of our innermost light.
The mythic rites of initiation—whether of the young witches in Mussorgsky’s musical imagination, the young boys in shamanic ceremonies in the prehistoric Pêche-Merle caves, or my childhood encounter with the sound of Chernabog’s mythic image in Fantasia—are an education in light via the contours of shadow. There can be terrors in knowing, it is true, yet it is equally valid that much fear coagulates simply from standing outside the ring of initiation, afraid of what lies beyond. Listening to the shadows of our own soul, we may find that Chernabog is merely a monumental projection of that ultimate demon within us all whose true name is Ego. The dance of one’s night upon the Bald Mountain of their interiority initiates us for that ultimate acoustic ascent to the mythic peaks of our being, from which bliss radiates like a blue moon.
The dance of one’s night upon the Bald Mountain of their interiority initiates us for that ultimate acoustic ascent to the mythic peaks of our being
MythBlast authored by:
Teddy Hamstra, Ph.D., is an author and educator based in Austin, Texas. Teaching English Literature as well as Mythology classes at an alternative K-12 school by day, Teddy also teaches courses on Mary Magdalene, the Eranos Conferences, and assorted mystic topics by night with organizations like Morbid Anatomy, Jung Archademy, and more. Teddy holds a Ph.D. in English Literature & Visual Studies from the University of Southern California, where his dissertation was entitled "Enchantment as a Form of Care: Joseph Campbell & the Power of Mysticism." He is the Joseph Campbell Foundation's Digital Intellectual Property Coordinator, and author of numerous prior MythBlasts.
This MythBlast was inspired by the Initiation stage of the hero's journey and The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on his Life and Work.
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This Week's Highlights
"The idea of a temple as distinguished from a chapel or shrine––namely, of an enclosed area in which all the forms beheld are of vision––was conceived and first realized in the great painted caves of southwestern France and northern Spain. . . . As in Chartres Cathedral the mystery of the universe is revealed through the imagery of an anthropomorphic pantheon, so here, in these temple caves, the same mystery is made known through animal forms that are at once in movement and at rest."
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Historical Atlas of World Mythology
Volume I: The Way of the Animal Powers
Part 1: "Mythologies of the Primitive Hunters and Gatherers," 60
