%20BB.png)
Lana Del Rey: Songs of Rapture and Return
Late autumn alpine afternoons in Boulder, Colorado, discerning a vocation to the Catholic priesthood in my twentieth year. Walking up to the church near CU’s campus, thumbing rosary beads, I tried untangling Hans Urs von Balthasar’s complex theology of beauty but was distracted by the belly rings of the Alpha Phi sisters reflecting into my irises. I suppose it also didn’t help that I was listening to Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence on endless loop. A sad boy in a Catholic church pew discerning a life of celibacy with Del Ray's sexually charged lyrics clanging covertly in my mind. Come winter, my Timberlands crackling upon the Colorado snow, and the rhythm of my walks to daily mass dictated by Del Rey’s vocals on “Shades of Cool.” When I heard the undulating choir soar to the peak of “Regina Caeli,” I wondered if the melody I hummed was about the Virgin Mary or Lana singing about her boyfriend in the band who plays guitar while she sings Lou Reed. A mess of contradictions, I yearned to find a lexicon for my encounters with the sacred, and I found it more in Lana Del Rey’s “Sad Girl” than Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica. From the Catholic priest I might have been, I found my way to becoming a scholar of Joseph Campbell, many spins of Del Rey records later.
Circe, Penelope, Lana
Campbell’s grand contribution to modern life and culture is, I believe, to remind us that, after the Charybdis whirlpools of psyche’s paradoxes and the Scylla-like entangled tentacles of ego, there is yet a return to rapture. The mystic’s heroic homecoming to bliss is what I have heard, year after year, in Lana Del Rey’s musical mythology. Equal parts Mazzy Star and Mary Magdalene, Del Rey is our contemporary chanteuse of the radiance brought back by the Hero Twins from Xibalba. Her ballads capture the elusive eros contained in Penelope’s nocturnal unweaving, vulnerable admissions of the mystic’s secret yearning to be eternal. Her contralto is perhaps as near to Circean enchantment as I will ever personally encounter; her siren’s song leads not to madness, however, but to an awakening to Joseph Campbell’s belief that “creative artists, on the other hand, are mankind’s wakeners to recollection: summoners of our outward mind to conscious contact with ourselves, not as participants in this or that morsel of history, but as spirit, in the consciousness of being” (Creative Mythology, 92). Like J. Alfred Prufrock, I have measured out my life with spoonfuls of the sacred…and the songs of Lana Del Rey.
Tropic of Hades: a sad girl cosmology
Calling herself “the gangsta Nancy Sinatra” at the start of her career in the early 2010s, Del Rey found, in the iconography of the American cultural imaginary, a wellspring for a mythos far beyond a postmodern pastiche. Del Rey’s peculiar American mythology is one where Joan Didion’s “John Wayne: A Love Song” is a Sunday scripture (see her 2013 music video suite “Tropico,” where Del Rey’s Eve frolics with Wayne in Eden) to be followed by a sizzurp-infused brunch with Harlem hip-hop stalwart A$AP Rocky (a frequent collaborator who once played the JFK to her Jackie O in a different music video). Chance and contradictions suffuse her jukebox-like approach to America’s myths, not dissimilar to the divinatory juxtapositions that Campbell built, I Ching-like, into his most dreamlike work, The Mythic Image. The core of her mythos, however, is ultimately a heroine’s journey through the Hades we know all too well in its alternate spelling as Heartache.
The core of her mythos, however, is ultimately a heroine’s journey through the Hades we know all too well in its alternate spelling as Heartache.
Teaching The Odyssey to my students this fall, the Hades sequence of Homer’s epic struck me as never before. I remembered, rightly, Odysseus’ encounters with the shades of his dead mother and fallen comrades, those noli me tangere moments of immense pathos. What I tend to forget, however, is Homer’s unusual inclusion of Odysseus then proceeding from the shades of his deceased familiars to beholding the wraiths of the Greek mythological canon itself, from Sisyphus to Hercules. This rather beguiling blend of a mythic cosmology with a frighteningly intimate rendering of one soul’s confrontation with unvarnished grief is, yes, also a key dimension of Lana Del Rey’s musical mythology. Her lyrics of loss may explicitly reference David Lynch films (Wild at Heart) or George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s marital woes (“Breaking Up Slowly”), but in truth they are modern mystical prayers of longing for an intangible beloved.
Isis Pharia of the Mariner’s Apartment Complex
In an undercited passage, Campbell recounts the dream analysis of...
…a distinguished operatic artist, and, like all who have elected to follow, not the safely marked general highways of the day, but the adventure of the special, dimly audible call that comes to those whose ears are open within as well as without, she has had to make her way alone, through difficulties not commonly encountered, “through slummy, muddy streets”; she has known the dark night of the soul, Dante’s “dark wood, midway in the journey of our life,” and the sorrows of the pits of hell. (The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 16)
He might as well be ventriloquizing the travails of Lana Del Rey’s lyrical personae.
And yet, for all that casts Del Rey as an Orphic bard of erotic melancholia (crowning herself the “24-7 Sylvia Plath”), her night-sea voyages have morphed her into a sonic Isis Pharia. Perhaps her crowning achievement as a lyricist, “Mariner’s Apartment Complex,” is the sound of a lighthouse whose radiance has been earned from so many journeys of return. “Let the Light In” is both the title of a recent masterwork by Del Rey and also the injunction at the conclusion of Campbell’s hero’s journey schema with its phase of the returning hero bestowing boons upon the world. Lana the Lighthouse is that mythic “radiance” which Campbell continually urged us to remember as we sail upon life’s dark ocean. As she sings (to me, to you, to our broken world) in “Mariner’s”: “You lose your way, just take my hand/You’re lost at sea, then I’ll command your boat to me again/Don’t look too far, right where you are, that’s where I am.”
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 Return stage of the hero's journey and The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Now Streaming on Spotify—Explore the MythBlast Playlist
Latest Podcast
In this episode of Pathways with Joseph Campbell, we hear Campbell’s lecture "Transformation of the Notion of Marriage", part of the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s Collected Audio. Campbell traces a profound shift in the Western understanding of love and marriage, beginning with the troubadours of 12th- and 13th-century Europe and the emergence of romantic love as a challenge to socially arranged marriage. Through the stories of Tristan and Isolde, the Arthurian romances, and the Grail legend, he explores the tension between love and duty, social convention and individual experience. At the heart of the lecture is an idea that runs throughout Campbell’s work: the importance of living authentically from what the medieval poets called the “gentle” or “noble” heart—a life guided not simply by inherited rules and expectations, but by the experience of being fully alive.
This Week's Highlights
"Creative artists . . . are mankind’s wakeners to recollection: summoners of our outward mind to conscious contact with ourselves, not as participants in this or that morsel of history, but as spirit, in the consciousness of being."
-- Joseph Campbell
