"Flamenco." Photography by Flavio Grynszpan, 2011. Used under Creative Commons license. It is easy to glamorize the gifts and benefits of artistic creativity, the unique sense of transcendence it brings to mind, a kind of panacea to cure all the ills of life. To be sure, there is magic in it, a grace we can’t control, which in one stroke seems to make us equal to God, allowing our shadows to fly in the infinite light of the spirit. Nevertheless, if you ever wanted to be an artist, you must be careful what you wish for. After all, gods are designed to be flayed and dismembered before they can be brought back to life — if they’re brought back at all. Campbell also understood the apparent paradox of creativity, the fact that it involves a degree of self destructiveness as much as a renewal of spirit. Creation and destruction are but two aspects of the same Force of creative-being itself. There is no real division between the light and dark side of the Force. Whenever opposites are undialectically torn apart, we are no longer dealing with the reality of true myth but with the alienation of an ideological fantasy. In The Ecstasy of Being , which contains fragments of Campbell’s aesthetic philosophy, he writes of the art of dance in such universal terms that it may apply to allthe arts: From earliest times, the dancer has been the human symbol of life- indestructible. The Dionysos-dance of annihilation is at the same time the dance of the fire of creation: the oxidizing fire of the interior of the living cell. Need it be pointed out that life is a process; process, change; change, painful: pain-and-death the other face of joy-and-birth? (Ecstasy, 5) Apparently, it does need to be pointed out: Art is not a function of wish-fulfillment alone, flowing along the channels of the pleasure principle. Under the spell of positivistic slogans and feel-good wisdom, the mysterious conjunction of opposites that brings pleasure and pain together will remain an incomprehensible riddle. The very notion of such unconscious prospects will not be a welcomed guest—let alone a permanent resident of our mental make-up and understanding. Nevertheless, such is the passion of the infinite that drives a being from the depths to the heights of artistic creation. Campbell also knew that the psychoanalytic con-fusion of eros and death-drive is, indeed, the secret of passion (from the Greek pathos or “suffering, enduring”) which is better comprehended as a category of death-drive ( todestrieb )—a notion which Freud never called “Thanatos” because what he had in mind was something that stands beyond gods and men. Neither a literal death-wish nor a mystical annihilation in Nirvana, todestrieb is more like a spiritual force which is made primarily manifest in “the compulsion to repeat”—the relentless character of the drive, which presses us to go on and on, again and again, as if to test the very limits of our mortal existence. For this reason, death-drive has been called by psychoanalytic thinkers “as the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis.” (Žižek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan , 62) Todestrieb is indeed the psychoanalytic category of transcendence—but of a material kind of transcendence which is tied to historical repetition—in contradistinction to the idealistic version of the transcendent that has come down to us in traditional wisdom. As every artist knows, matter is of the essence in the creative process. Art, like alchemy, is a kind of “dialectical materialism” which recognizes the inseparability of matter and spirit at every stage of the game. No one can be a creative spirit—or indeed a human being—without immersion into the material substance of their everyday life and artistic medium. The imagination of art is a material imagination which distinguishes itself from mere fantasizing “in one’s head.” Matter did matter—quite literally, not only symbolically—to the alchemist as it does to the artist and the work of art. We breathe and revel in matter as we do in our own bodies; the more literal the thing, the more symbolic it becomes, replete with the possibility of transcendence. In this sense, alchemy anticipates a modern material notion of transcendence, one in which the compulsion to repeat—and not the escape into ideology—underscores its fundamental character. Finally, with respect to the “pursuit of happiness,” we should say that people don’t become artists—and I mean great artists—in order to be “happy” or enjoy themselves. At one level, this is quite simply the general distinction between amateur and pro. Amateurs stick to a subject as long as it is a mode of “having fun,” that is, as long as they can remain within the limits of the pleasure principle. The minute the work begins to hurt a little, however, when serious discipline enters the picture and demands its pound of flesh, the throng of amateurs suddenly melts away and only a few are left to complete the task. Furthermore, if you go into the biographies of the greats you will also find that ordinary human happiness was by no means their goal or objective; it was rather a casualty in the wake of their ecstasy of being in art.

Mosaiculture at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. Photograph by Eric Sonstroem, 2013. Used under Creative Commons license. There is no doubt: we have entered unprecedented times as a global community, brought together by an ingenious virus which, biologically speaking, does not like to discriminate among race, class, or gender, although it has a marked preference for people suffering from respiratory problems and the elderly.  There is no doubt this is a vicious and malignant virus, an “invisible enemy,” bearing all the mythic contours of a crowned hero hot from the underworld. But what if we’re wrong to demonise the virus so? What if Mother Nature is not angry at us or raging against the system; what if She is simply expressing her love for her microbial son, a creature which she perhaps had long neglected? In an atheistic cosmology, where humanity holds no special position or ontological priority, there is no reason to believe that Mother Nature would care for us more than her viral baby—not to mention the biosphere as a whole, which is definitely benefitting from the cessation of human industry. Living and working in Los Angeles, I can safely report a dramatic improvement in air quality. Who could deny the virus’ salubrious effect upon our natural environment? Nevertheless, such ostensive “mythological” approaches to our present crisis fail to articulate the deep foundations of what is happening; they are nowhere near the latent archetypal background of the collective psyche as it manifests itself in our own times . Of course the “power of myth” is not dead, it’s just not where we expect to find it. For the true power of myth always speaks with the power of truth, and this is radically different from spinning subjective fancies “into the blue.” As a form of mytho-historic consciousness, true myth speaks with the power of the Real in our lives; it does not need to be “believed in” in order to function as such. You may call this power of the Real and its existential rub “God,” if you’d like, for it is a mythic expression of the truth that transforms our lives—for better or worse. Such is the ruthlessness of the living God as Job’s testimony shows in the Bible. But in contrast to the logic of “make-believe” and wishful thinking, Jungian thinkers like Wolfgang Giegerich have put the definition of myth in the categorical terms of a human actuality rather than a system of belief or subjective fancy: Real myth is the simple expression of truth, of the truth. The Greek word mythos = ‘word’ ( as opposed to other Greek words for ‘word,’ e.g., logos) means ‘the true word,’ the word that did not need to be proven inasmuch as it carried its truth within itself; it came as unquestionable truth.(W.F. Otto, with Kerényi concurring. Cf. Vico: “similarly, mythos came to be defined for us as vera narratio, or true speech…”) (The Soul’s Logical Life, 171) This is the real depth of myth as vera narratio where the fundamental “mystical” function, as Campbell understands it, aims to make “a connection between our waking consciousness and the whole mystery of the universe.” ( Thou Art That , 103) Nature is on the side of this mystery of the unknown, both in her real material concretion as in her resistance to being known by man. “That is its cosmological function,” Campbell continues, which “allows us to see ourselves in relationship to nature, as when we speak of Father Sky and Mother Earth.” (103) Given that knowing the world is this fundamental mode of human relationship, the latter cosmological function of myth coincides with our scientific picture of the world—a world of human cognition that is literally the realization of Campbell’s dream of “symbols without meaning.” Just as Jung often talked of the “just-so” nature of psychic facts, science is also part of our existential destiny as a species. Why is this the case? We don’t know; it is just so. Because the virus is a cosmic phenomenon on its own right, in order to understand the present pandemic in its true mytho-historic light we must begin with a thorough cognitive mapping of the situation, its microbiology and epidemiological ramifications, etc. But it would not be long before our inquiry would also run into the nature of our human institutions, their power structures and hierarchies, an awareness of their historic conditions and class structures, together with the deconstruction of ideological fantasies that sustain the status quo—even as it implodes before our very eyes and noses. In the face of such destruction, we should not be deceived by appearances to the contrary: a mythless empirical understanding of COVID-19 is the first step we must take along the road of true depth as vera narratio , that is, to the extent that we can embody the truth of the collective psyche in our lives. The healing power of truth by no means excludes understanding of fact and reason, but quite the contrary: it constitutes that Higher Power which encompassess both truth and fact in the synthesis of matter and spirit. For under certain conditions, there is nothing more divine than to stress the obvious facts. It is precisely such “divine intervention” of human reason which is now needed to counteract and eventually beat this virus in reality— not just in the celebrations of myth and symbol, artistic and philosophical representations which can only come afterwards as a series of fundamental reflections.  Over against campaigns of disinformation coming from the highest office as well as  from the lowest regions of the internet, true myth stands against the proliferation of conspiracy theories and their dangerous false mythologies and “fake news.” The true power of myth, on the other hand, threatens the dominion of death with a renewed sense of reality and truth as well as social justice.  Accordingly, our journey must begin with a firm grasp of the factual situation, on the one hand, and on the other, with a rehabilitation of the concept of truth and reality —both encompassing and going beyond the order of objective cognition. For it is only an actual —not just metaphorical—understanding of the current crisis that can save lives and heal millions. This is the magic of human science and its empirical attitude.  This is only the beginning, though. The truth is that we are all called upon an unprecedented hero’s journey, challenged to dig ever deeper into our inner resources, both as an individual as well as the exponents of the collective psyche—otherwise known as being citizens of a country.  Our epic journey through this pandemic is only beginning to unfold. But now that civil unrest unites with the deadly force of the virus, we do have a fuller picture of this first chapter of 2020 by COVID-19. In the crucible of myth and history, the intersection of race, class, and gender can no longer be ignored if we wish to arrive at an actual understanding of our present situation and how to respond to it. We must get hold of truth in the light of nature on the ground of factual information. Before succumbing to the temptations of Fate or the perspective of the Final Judgement, we must do all we can to prevent further catastrophes. But only time will tell the truth we are now too blind to hear even as it speaks in images before our very eyes.

"Mictlantecuhtli (left), god of death, the lord of the Underworld and Quetzalcoatl (right), god of wisdom, life, knowledge, morning star, patron of the winds and light, the lord of the West. Together they symbolize life and death." Codex Borgia (p. 56) via Wikipedia. Public Domain. The search for origins has always figured among the greatest adventures of humankind in its epic journey on earth. “Who are we?” “Where do we come from?” “Where are we going?” These fundamental questions never fail to inspire philosophical wonder; they help to open up the epic dimensions of mytho-history as humanity’s philosophical journey through the meaning of being and time.  In The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology , Joseph Campbell joins the search for origins by taking up mythographic materials from around the world dating back to the earliest of times. Drawing from the treasure troves of world mythology, Campbell does not romanticize this quest; he understood that if we want to grasp the deepest foundations of the human psyche, we cannot shy away from the brutal beginnings of our race. Looking for the primeval origins of the light of humanity, we should not be surprised to find a much darker vein.  The climax of the Aztec festival dedicated to the young goddess of the corn, Chicomecohuatl , is among the examples Campbell draws from James Frazer’s immortal classic The Golden Bough , wherein “a young slave girl of twelve or thirteen years, the prettiest they could find” (222) was chosen to play the role of the divine being and share its archetypal destiny. The harvest festival lasted for several days as the young girl was celebrated in the likeness of the goddess, forced to dance and cheer people all day long, and finally made to go from house to house in order to announce the bounty of the harvest. Taking up the account of Fray Bernardino Sahagún, a direct witness to the local festivities of the times, the climax of this Aztec festival cannot but appear to us as a literal horror show (please be warned, the following account contains graphic depictions of ritual violence):   The multitude being assembled, the priests solemnly incensed the girl who personated the goddess; then they threw her on her back on the heap of corn and seeds, cut off her head, caught the gushing blood in a tub, and sprinkled the blood on the wooden image of the goddess, and the walls of the chamber, and the offerings of corn, peppers, pumpkins, seeds, and vegetables which cumbered the floor. After that they flayed the headless trunk, and one of the priests made shift to squeeze himself into the bloody skin. Having done so they clad him in all the robes which the girl had worn; they put the mitre on his head, the necklace of golden maize-cobs about his neck, the maize-cobs of feathers and gold in his hands; and thus arrayed they led him forth in public, all of them dancing to the tuck of drum, while he acted as fugleman, skipping and posturing at the head of the procession as briskly as he could be expected to do, incommoded as he was by the tight and clammy skin of the girl and by her clothes, which must have been much too small for a grown man. (qtd. Primitive Mythology 223-224)  In view of such a gruesome spectacle, we cannot but feel the revulsion that overcomes Campbell in his immediate reaction: No wonder, we may say, if the Spanish padres thought they recognized in the liturgies of the New World a devil’s parody of their own high myth and holy mass of the sacrifice and resurrection! (Primitive Mythology, 224) The kind of collective horror that Campbell alludes to in view of such bloody “satanic” deeds points to another more recent leap or watershed in the history of the human soul. For there is a fundamental psychological difference that separates the stage of human culture in which human sacrifice was not only acceptable but the very source of the sacred, and the stages in which it is not (with notable exceptions!). Our pious as well as secular festivals have learned to do with symbolic substitutes rather than literal bloodshed — especially human blood! This has been a veritable “transcendental” or mytho-historic change that ultimately helps to shield us from the murderous violence of the sacred.  Under the rubric of the “Love-Death” mythologem, therefore, Campbell comes across a fundamental image of transformation and psychic humanization. Rather than a heavenly cradle or a lost paradise, however, what we find at the root of the soul’s emergence is the festival of humanity’s primordial self-slaughter.  Putting an end to the endless night of pre-history and its meaningless cycles of death and reproduction, a sacrificial killing of an innocent human victim — not unlike the figure of Christ — lies at the cradle of humanity’s spiritual emergence. Evidently, the literal act was needed for the space of the symbolic to truly open up. In this way we may say with Wolfgang Giegerich that the human soul “ killed itself into being ,” as he emphatically writes, considering “sacrificial killings as the primordial [act of] soul-making.” ( Soul-Violence 205) In the breakthrough of the kill, the human animal is symbolically “castrated” of its biological determinateness; for only then can the slain creature resurrect as a being of spirit, language, and culture. The human animal ( homo ) is thus transformed into a being of myth and conscious self-awareness ( sapiens ). As Giegerich finally explains the internal psycho-logic of sacrificial killings:  In the sacrificial blow, the soul knocked its natural instincts out of itself and ipso facto knocked them into itself as (no longer natural, but human-cultural) images of gods or as archetypes. The blow is the reversal. It is the origin of the images. (Soul-Violence, 212)

Tzompantli at Templo Mayor, Mexico City. Photo by Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata. Creative Commons, via WikiMedia. All roots are dark, and the deeper they go the darker they get until they touch the light of the primal fire of the human soul. In Masks of God, Volume 1: Primitive Mythology , Joseph Campbell turns our gaze to the aboriginal origins of humankind, a truly mythic eon of human cultural evolution, where we should not be surprised to find the bloodiest rituals ever concocted by the brain of man: the sacrificial killing of young girls served up for cannibalistic frenzy.  Although there is evidence to suggest that the sacrificial human victims of the archaic “dark ages” were just as often males, one also finds a preponderance of myths where the sacrificial creature is principally a young woman. As Campbell highlights in Primitive Mythology , citing another horrific account of anthropophagic rituals (please be warned that the following account contains psychic images of sexual violence): The particular moment of importance to our story occurs at the conclusion of one of the boys' puberty rites, which terminates in a sexual orgy of several days and nights, during which everyone in the village except the initiates makes free with everybody else, amid the tumult of the mythological chants, drums, and the bull-roarers—until the final night, when a fine young girl, painted, oiled, and ceremonially costumed, is led into the dancing ground and made to lie beneath a platform of very heavy logs. With her, in open view of the festival, the initiates cohabit, one after another; and while the youth chosen to be last is embracing her the supports of the logs above are jerked away and the platform drops, to a prodigious boom of drums. A hideous howl goes up and the dead girl and boy are dragged from the logs, cut up, roasted, and eaten. (p. 170-171) Such is the blissful eon of the mythological age at the twilight of the gods. We thus catch a glimpse of a primeval time and place in which human victims were totally absorbed into the archetypal drama of self-renewal to the point of extinction, obliterated by a literal outburst of murderous mythic violence. And yet, within the archaic context, such sacrificial killings were evidently the only way to keep in touch with the blood of transcendence as a concrete manifestation of the collective psyche. Setting aside our spontaneous anachronistic horror at such gruesome spectacles, we would have to recognize that, at some basic level, these collective rituals worked . That is, they performed the vital existential function they were meant to perform. But what was that function? In what sense was it necessary for such festivals to be instituted in the primordial organization of human society?  At the time Campbell wrote Primitive Mythology, there was no solid answer to this question. Campbell even seems content with the old 19th-century hypothesis of Leo Frobenius which essentially says that the existence of these rites “are but the renditions in act of a mythology inspired by the model of death and life in the plant world” (171). At the same time, he is constantly noticing the link between sacrificial rites and the real feeling of communitas that binds the existence of a people or tribe. There is little doubt that a fundamental root of our sense of transcendence lies in the archetypal experience of the “living spirit” in communitarian union. As Campbell highlights this collective moment of transcendence in the puberty rites cited above: The ceremonies continue for many nights, many days, uniting the villagers in a fused being that is not biological, essentially, but a living spirit—with numerous heads, many eyes, many voices, numerous feet pounding the earth—lifted even out of temporality and translated into the no-place, no-time, no-when, no-where of the mythological age, which is here and now. (p. 170) Absorbing its actors into the archetypal drama of self-renewal, the sacred space of the eternal no-where and no-when becomes a “necessary illusion” for setting the stage of collective rape and murder. It takes the “power of myth” to sanctify the hordes of primal violence in their institutional containment. On this score, there is no need to disagree with Steven Weinberg: “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion.” ( A Designer Universe ) One may recall in this critical connection the mythic intervention of Krishna into the heart of Arjuna, the legendary Pandava General, as he stood upon the Kurukshetra battlefield described in the Gita . Krishna must help Arjuna clear his troubled conscience which is burdened with the prospect of having to slaughter members of his own family. Krishna’s advice, considered a summit of mythic wisdom, in effect performs an archetypal “dehumanizing” move, a “cosmic perspective in which the soul participates” to cite James Hillman ( Re-Visioning Psychology 168), managing to strip the victim of her basic humanity: The humble sage, by virtue of true knowledge, sees with equal vision a learned and gentle brahmana, a cow, an elephant, a dog and a dog-eater [the “untouchable” outcaste]. (Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 5, Verse 18) Myth is always the gateway to a “sacred space”—setting apart a no-where and no-when in a particular place and time—which is needed to prepare the spiritual ground for the orgiastic festivals of bloodshed and human sacrifice. Just like today, the mythic force of nationalisms of every sort are mobilized into “the hearts and minds of the people” in order to win their support for the horrors of modern warfare and the hegemonic struggle for global dominion. There is no mass murder without the transcendence of a poetic vision.   Never expecting to find it in the holy of holies, we may feel far removed from such “primitive” notions of human sacrifice and sacred anthropophagy. But they are not as foreign as they seem. On the contrary, these specific notions feel oddly familiar. Is not the bloody image of Christ on the Cross, served-up on the “communion table” of the eucharist—where his flesh is to be eaten and blood drank—the sacrificial image of the primal murder and its sacred anthropophagic rite?

Life is hard; it wears us out. We are worn down by the tooth of time as well as luckless circumstances that are well beyond our personal control. We are worn down by people, especially those closest to us, as well as by medical conditions. The world overwhelms us and makes us feel small; we are afraid, and in the grip of an anxiety that will not let us rest, even in sleep. And yet, despite our sleeplessness and weariness, life presses on. Through death and destruction, this life force, which is identical with Spirit, continues to beat on, seeking its birth and renewal through new forms of creation. The élan vital which the French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote so eloquently about in his book Creative Evolution (1907) is an archetypal idea that has been around from time immemorial—going back to the esoteric teachings of the ancients all the way down to the Star Wars saga. Every culture and people have had a mythic concept for a kind of universal life force or generative power that pervades all things, including so-called inanimate matter. Indistinguishable from Heraclitus’ “everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures” ( The Presocratic Philosophers . Ed. Kirk and Raven, p. 199 fr. 220), this life-force is both mortal and immortal, creative and destructive, at the same time. What the ancient Maya called itz , embodied in the image of Kukulkan (Feathered Serpent), and what the Hindus called Shakti , embodied in the image of Kuṇḍalinī  (Coiled Serpent), is a philosophic notion of all-encompassing “cosmic” psychic energy. This is the archetypal dragon of the libido, which was also known to the Hermetic tradition as the uroboros. Such a revolving snake principle expresses a certain revolutionary movement of the deep psyche and its self-transcending creative energy.  The snake that gives birth to itself also incestuously makes love to itself, putting its own tail in its mouth; it is the seminal member and womb of creation in one. It represents the source and origin of all life and the place where it comes to renew itself in time. The uroboros is both alpha and omega, an image of death drive and sexuality intertwined; both self-fertilization and rebirth come to be as one. The notion of this life force or “cosmic” sexual energy is always found at the heart of mythology. It is perhaps for this reason that Campbell’s enthusiasm was most palpable just here, when speaking of this life force. As Bradley Olson writes quoting Campbell in his latest MythBlast, this is “the animating principle, a principle [Campbell] called ‘the deathless soul.’” ( Myths of Light , 44) It is here that Campbell’s passion for myth truly lights up. Like Jung before him, he was endlessly fascinated by the mythology of India (given the fact both men were schooled on the subject by the same master, Heinrich Zimmer). Yet these great minds, deeply appreciative of Indian lore, were quick to recognize how yoga in the West can become distorted and hollowed out as a commodified form of exercise and relaxation which in no way interferes with the ruling order of the status quo. A staple of the wellness industry, this sort of “Western yoga” seems far removed from the complete inward turning the ancient yogis had in mind. As Campbell writes:  The irony is that most of the yoga that is taught to people in the West is this sort of yogic calisthenics. You have probably seen the books on how to practice yoga at home—something like doing athletic warm-ups—it’s teaching a setting-up exercise. But here we think of haṭha as the thing itself rather than a form of preparation. (38) This ha ṭ ha yoga is a preparatory “Yoga of the Body” which here takes the place of the ultimate in the popular consciousness of the West. As Jung also recognized, this purely physical yoga may “delude the physiologically minded European into the false hope that the spirit can be obtained by just sitting and breathing.” (CW11 §907) Involved as we are in the West in the pursuit of “obtaining spirit” as a commodified experience, Yoga simply feeds the already deepened channels of capitalistic ideology. For this reason kuṇḍalinī yoga in the West became a form of “experience seeking” little different than a drug trip or psychedelic experience. Rather than the profound transformation of the psyche as a whole, both conscious and unconscious, the practice of yoga becomes another ephemeral hedonistic pleasure. Rather than a revolution of consciousness in a new dawn of creation, yoga becomes another psychotropic technique for the smooth functioning of the status quo and its hierarchies of power.  Every guru acknowledges the fact that this supreme form of yoga—and the kuṇḍalinī serpent itself—is indeed the most dangerous and profound. It has the potential to wreck your life or to regenerate it—or perhaps both at once! For the awakening of primordial creative energy requires the strongest container or vessel to integrate it within a frame of culture. In kuṇḍalinī yoga the journey begins with the awakening of the serpent energy that lies “coiled” or dormant at the base of the spine. As Campbell explains: “The goal of this yoga is to bring this serpent power up the spine to the head so that our whole being will be animated by the serpent power, so that our psyche is drawn up to full flowering” ( Myths of Light 27). Already inclined to view things from psychoanalytic angles, Campbell was fascinated by the parallels that can be drawn between yoga and certain psychotic and schizophrenic states. It fascinated me long, long ago to realize how close yoga experiences were to those described by Freud, Adler, and Jung in their discussions of the deeper regions of the psyche into which people fall. (28) Placed in the same phenomenological order, kuṇḍalinī yoga becomes a powerful visualization of the individuation process as a profound transformation of our whole being in time. This is what makes yoga relevant to the West. Rather than pertaining solely to a subjective experience, kuṇḍalinī can become an authentic mythic perspective into the objective archetypal processes and structures of the encompassing psyche, the so-called collective unconscious, into which every individual consciousness is embedded. The road to enlightenment as the ascent of the kuṇḍalinī serpent through the chakras of the human spine works as the activation of the “transcendent function,” which is the beginning of the individuation process, as a process of rebirth and regeneration in time. Culminating in a certain state of [un]consciousness—indeed, the highest mystical experience!—we become as One with the Divine. This famous unio mystica is a theme that Campbell returns to again and again throughout his work and life: follow your blissful state of identity with the One.

Fresco around the niches of the Columbarium depicting scenes from everyday life. C. 50 AD. London, British Museum. Creative Commons. The journey into the mythic imagination which opens the abyss of the collective unconscious is not some fixed track devoid of reason. It is not a dead end for the creative intellect; it provides stores of food for speculative thinking and metaphysical imagination. The way in which Campbell constantly engages in the philosophical dimension of myth is a testimony to the way the logos of mytho- logy is obviously not an externality to myth, let alone an enemy of the “poetic.” Reason belongs to myth’s inner ring, expressing as it does the fundamental archetypal role Mind plays in the mythopoetic imagination.  In this regard, Campbell uses the philosophies of India to make a personal confession. When he learned that “the great division between the religious and social patterns of India and West derives from the period of a.d. 1400‒1550” ( Asian Journals 165-166), Campbell reflected on his own spiritual journey for  […] that is the period in Europe of the Italian Renaissance, with its breakthrough into psychological adulthood from the religious formulae of the Middle Ages, India at that time, overwhelmed by Islam, stressed the folk-religion of bhakti. This was the period of Rāmānanda, Kabīr, Nānak—the founders of modern Hinduism: anti-Sanskrit, anti-brahmin, in a sense. There was a stress on the childlike attitude of refuge in a personal God (kitten-monkey differentiation; yet both remain childlike). Contrast to this the attitude of the vīra [“hero”], rendered in the medieval temples. The stress now is on the Mother and Father images, as found in the approach to Catholicism in its paśu [“herd animal”] formulae. Whereas in the period of the dynasties India’s religion was heroic and that of Europe largely childlike, after A.D. 1400 ‒1550 the contrast was reversed. / This explains to me why all the patterns of Indian life and religion now seem to me to be precisely what I left behind when I broke with the Church, whereas the philosophies of India suggested a bold adulthood even surpassing that of the European-American ideal.(Asian Journals 166) Campbell underlines a fundamental contrast or order of development between philosophy and institutional religion; a contrast, one could say, between the grown-up culture of the logos and the innocence of the “beautiful soul” in pure mythos . Campbell understands very well that as long as we are in myth, looking up to metaphysical parents, we remain spiritually infantile. Despite the freudening facts of adult life, we remain in the womb of myth forever young. The point of true myth, on the contrary, is to be born out of this sac of inherited ideology. To become a true self we must step into a spiritual adulthood, in the clearing of reason, that has put childish things behind. No longer a spiritual toy or aesthetic play thing, myth becomes instead an existential vehicle of truth—not only the “Truth” of a personal life but the truth of the life which is common to all. As Heraclitus put it with respect to the universality of the logos : “Therefore it is necessary to follow the common; but although the logos is common the many live as though they had a private understanding.” ( The Presocratic Philosophers . Ed. Kirk and Raven, 188 fr. 198). This “private understanding” is what we call ideology, the thing that keeps us from growing up in the spirit of truth. For ideology is, by definition, a generator of a false consciousness. Elsewhere, Campbell is quite explicit about the need to transcend mythic ideology in a movement of true spiritual growth and transformation: In India, the objective is to be born from the womb of myth, not to remain in it, and the one who has attained to this “second birth” is truly the “twice born,” freed from the pedagogical devices of society, the lures and threats of myth, the local mores, the usual hopes of benefits and rewards.(The Flight of the Wild Gander 38) Stillborn in the imaginal womb of myth, we remain “pagan,” so to speak, while caught in the spiritual childhood of the herd animal who still needs to “believe.” The fully rebirthed adulthood of the twice-born no longer needs myth as an object of belief; we see through its imaginal garbs and are no longer affected by its “lures and threats,” as Campbell put it. Growing up in the reflective mirror of philosophy we become reborn in the light of reason as the mytho-historic consciousness of the truth.  Famously, it was Aristotle long ago who pointed to the basic link between philosophy and myth in a mutual state of wonder at being itself: For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize […] whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of Wisdom [or a philosopher], for the myth is composed of wonders.(Aristotle, Metaphysics; The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon, p. 692) Elevated on the seat of philosophic wonder, the full concept of mytho-logy gives form and expression to an intertwining movement of thinking-being, a transcending motion of the conscious spirit that binds logos and mythos into a single chain of being. Far from a desperate retreat of one into the other, it is the mysterious conjunction of both that enthralls us, blowing our minds and lifting our hearts to the life of the infinite!  Primordial Images are indeed brilliant ciphers that speak in their own chords—provided our ears have been attuned to hear their silent tones—with the willingness to decipher their visual music in so many words.  To the psychoanalytic ear, the so-called “irrational” factors that appear in myth and manifest dream have long been demonstrated to have “latent” reasons of their own—reasons that are not without Reason in the capital metaphysical sense of the word. In a way, that is the whole point of psychoanalysis: to discover a hidden working order—or logos —in the chaos of the psyche. Its “crazy” psycho Logic. Rather than reducing human reason to some kind of ridiculous narrow-mindedness as if it were some ideological fantasy among others, depth mythologists like Campbell help us recognize the greater archetypal logos of the psyche in the inner workings of myth and dream. Reason is indeed a sign of the divine spark of the human soul in the unfathomable history of the cosmos, not some oppressive mechanizing procedure or rationalistic creed. In the order of true myth ( vera narratio ), Reason assumes its proper “equiprimordial” role and archetypal status; it becomes, like the Heraclitean fire of becoming, constitutive of the universal order of the world, the fiery spark of a cosmic consciousness of being and time: This world-order [cosmos] (the same of all) did none of gods or men make, but it always was and shall be: an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures.(The Presocratic Philosophers. Ed. Kirk and Raven, 199 fr. 220)

Empty Hands. Valerie Everett, 2011, via Flickr. CC BY-SA 2.0 However, one has to recognize a distinction between the ends and means of devotion and of science; and in relation to the latter there is no reason to fear a demonstration of the derivation of local [mythic figures] from more general [archetypal] forms [of myth]. It is simply a fact—deal with it how you will—that the mythology of the mother of the dead and resurrected god has been known for millenniums to the Neolithic and post-neolithic Levant. (Masks of God: Occidental Mythology , 56-57) Reading the third volume of Masks of God: Occidental Mythology is a formidable endeavor, especially as it touches the mythic roots of our own historic consciousness. It is for this reason that Campbell highlights the difference between a devotional attitude towards myth—the attitude of the believer—and a “scientific” or phenomenological approach. Drawing a line between being contained in myth and a genuine independent outlook, the project of a “ New Science ” of myth was always beating in the heart of Campbell’s writings. This is most evident in the encyclopedic scope and historic depth of The Masks of God series.  And Campbell is absolutely right in stating “there is no reason to fear a demonstration of the derivation of local [mythic figures] from more general [archetypal] forms.” (56-57) But given Campbell’s own emphasis on the stuff of personal experience, neither should we fear the predominance of historic content over an empty generic form. For it is our own history that matters to our soul, providing as it does the material ground of our ecstatic experience of being in the world.  In the same way, across the ages of our mythic history, the human experiment carries the hope of a possibility forward—through detours, regressions, side-steppings and meanderings—moving towards an unknown destination with the vehemence of mortal finality. Such is the journey through the eons, which has taken us to the precipice of this very moment in time, the present state of our mythic history. Convinced as Campbell was of “the unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but also in its spiritual history,” (8) let us then raise the question of where we have come thus far. What is the spiritual situation and interpretive horizon of our own times? Without giving way to harsh value judgments, we can say at least this much: the solution to all our present problems with the Judeo-Christian tradition must be worked out from within this tradition—that is, our tradition here in the West. On this point, I cannot help but agree with C. G. Jung when he writes in Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious : I am convinced that the growing impoverishment of symbols has a meaning. It is a development that has an inner consistency. Everything that we have not thought about, and that has therefore been deprived of a meaningful connection with our developing consciousness, has got lost. If we now try to cover our nakedness with the gorgeous trappings of the East, as the theosophists do, we would be playing our own history false. A man does not sink down to beggary only to pose afterwards as an Indian potentate. It seems to me that it would be far better stoutly to avow our spiritual poverty, our "symbollessness," instead of feigning a legacy to which we are not the legitimate heirs at all. We are, surely, the rightful heirs of Christian symbolism, but somehow we have squandered this heritage. We have let the house our fathers built fall into decay, and now we try to break into Oriental palaces that our fathers never knew. (CW9i ¶28) What Jung is trying to express here touches upon what is precisely unique and historic about our own spiritual situation and times. Any way you slice it, the point at which we have arrived is unthinkable without the transformations and reiterations of the Judeo-Christian tradition. For it is precisely this tradition that has paved the way for the spiritual poverty that Jung finds so horrible and unacceptable. But rather than wishing to sidestep or “go beyond” the Christian myth, Jung intimates the fact that our present “symbollessness” or spiritual poverty may be, on the contrary, the good news of the Gospels! If we follow the Christian myth to its logical end, we may rediscover a dying and resurrecting God unlike any other! For rather than adorning oneself with the riches of puffed spirit or material wealth, it bids us cast aside all pretense and “spiritual” ostentation, accepting our metaphysical nakedness in the face of the Divine. After all, we are all familiar with the well-known adage of Christ the Savior: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matthew 5:3)

Photo Credit: Unsplash/Michael Herren If we ever wanted to find a contemporary exemplar of living myth par excellence , we would need to look no further than the UFO phenomenon—especially with the recent video leaks and subsequent Pentagon disclosures on “Unidentified Aerial Phenomena” (UAPs). These phenomenal sightings share in the paradoxical nature of mythology proper: they are both real and unreal, immanent (to the universe) and transcendent of this earth; they are here and not-here, manifestly self-evident and suddenly disappeared. In this sense, they are a perfect embodiment of the peculiar ontological status of mythic beings as such, their spectral “otherworldly” plane of reality. In its very elusive aspect, UFOs represent the alternating logic of being and nothingness which structures the process of becoming, the processes of change and metamorphosis. As a modern symbol of transcendence, UFOs stand for the process of total transformation and self-creation in the noumenality of space-time.  Unfortunately, the UFO topic has received little attention from contemporary mythologists and historians, respectable academics who would rather operate at a wide girth from such “mass delusions.” Even a maverick like Joseph Campbell, by no means impeded by academic dogmas of respectability, also showed little interest in the topic. When Campbell explores contemporary examples of living myth as he does in Creative Mythology , the fourth volume of the monumental series the Masks of God , the UFO phenomenon finds no place either. Indeed, in the context of Dante, the Bhagavad-Gita, James Joyce, Immanuel Kant and the like, a discussion of UFOs would be grossly out of place.  Nevertheless, influenced as he was by Carl Jung, Campbell probably read and took for granted his monograph on UFOs, Flying Saucers: a Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies,  which is included in the 10th volume of Jung’s Collected Works entitled Civilization in Transition . In the “Preface to the First English Edition” Jung reflects back on the whole “moral of this story” with the realization that “news affirming the existence of Ufos is welcome, but that scepticism seems to be undesirable,”* which is to say that the belief in UFOs “suits the general opinion, whereas disbelief is to be discouraged.” ( CW 10 page 309) In other words,  it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the UFO myth stands in the place of an ideological fantasy used to maintain status-quo thinking and feeling.  Whether they are here or not here, the myth certainly can be used—and has been used—as a tool of state propaganda designed to distract our attention from actual technological developments and experimentation by our secret military. This is perhaps the greatest “revelation” of the recently released four-part docuseries UFO (2021) on Showtime, produced by J.J. Abrams: much of what is mistaken for an Alien presence is indeed our own tech! The fear of stepping into the shadow of our military industrial complex is a big reason we discourage critical thinking on this topic. And we are more than happy to deflect any meaningful criticism into the kennel of a “rationalistic” prejudice. But anyone who would suggest that we live in a much too “rationalistic age”—in the midst of “alternative facts,” “fake news,” viral lies, and campaigns of disinformation— must be distinctly out of touch with our social reality. Swimming in a sea of conspiracy theories and revisionist histories, by no stretch of the imagination can we say our age suffers from a burdensome excess of reason. Quite the contrary, the sorry state of the world every day tells us that we suffer from an egregious lack of it.  Nevertheless, I think Campbell would have followed Jung’s approach in reading the UFO phenomenon, both real and unreal, as a symptom of a deeper emotional tension in the collective psyche. From a Jungian perspective, UFOs stand for a certain archetypal content that finds no expression within our accepted frameworks of explanation and worldview. It is indeed a projection of a mythic reality that bears an unborn truth within. The shattering power of this truth is what threatens to “invade” our familiar fields of ideology and mythic fantasy, threatens to “abduct” our rootedness in the collective dream of our social hypnosis. As Jung elaborates further, the need to believe in UFOs, quite apart from the question of their objective presence, indicates a certain degree of collective psychic suffering . It is the “heavenly sign” of a “psychic dissociation” which points to the general “split between the conscious attitude and the unconscious contents opposed to it.”  ( CW 10: ¶591) Campbell himself called this psychic split a mythic dissociation , as we read with emphasis in Creative Mythology :  The Christian is taught that divinity is transcendent: not within himself and his world, but “out there.” I call this mythic dissociation. (528) […] Hence, there has now spread throughout the Christian world a desolating sense not only of no divinity within (mythic dissociation), but also of no participation in divinity without (social identification dissolved): and that, in short, is the mythological base of the Waste Land of the modern soul, or, as it is being called these days, our “alienation.” (529) The UFO phenomenon, both real and unreal, remains an excellent symbol of our own self-alienation, not only at the individual level but at the global level of the collective. Our sense of “divinity” cannot be divorced from a sense of justice and responsibility not only for ourselves individually but for the whole planet—including the entire universe.   * Spelling and stylization are preserved from Jung’s original text.

Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) explores the confines of his new home on Arakeen, capital of Arrakis. Courtesy of Warner Bros. The release of Denis Villeneuve’s remake of Frank Herbert’s influential sci-fi novel Dune has its entire fandom reflecting back on what made the novels great, thus bringing to mind the mythic dimension of the Dune universe.  When Dune appeared on the scene in 1965—two years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring —it was well received by its audience as a counter-cultural narrative that helped boost a modern environmentalist movement, while warning us against the dangers of digital technology and autocratic rule. The fact that Frank Herbert was himself deeply conservative, decidedly a Republican voter and operative, did not stop Dune’s own mythic universe from carrying certain progressive elements. At the same time, the intensely anti-government propaganda—especially on display in the last books of the saga —is a definite echo of Herbert’s own politico-ideological commitments.  Nevertheless, in spite of its spiritual ambiguity, Herbert famously said that he wrote the Dune Chronicles “because I had this idea that charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label, ‘may be dangerous to your health.’” Or more poignantly still, he wrote, “No more terrible disaster could befall your people than for them to fall into the hands of a Hero” ( Dune ), because Herbert himself believed that “superheroes are disastrous for humankind.”  Similarly, Joseph Campbell was aware of the danger that such heroic men of action represent with their mono-maniacal single-mindedness, for clearly they “are not the ways and guides to freedom, but the very nets, and the wielders of those nets, by which the seeker of freedom is snared, entrapped, and hauled back into the labyrinth.” ( Mythic Dimension 243) The net that Campbell is talking about here, the net that curtails our spiritual freedom, is none other than the mythic web of ideological phantasies. Appearing at first sight as the saving thread of Ariadne to help us navigate the labyrinthine darkness, positivistic ideology, like a crutch, is sometimes a necessary condition. But if we try to cling to fixed ideas, fetishizing them as final answers to life’s unanswerable questions, then we get caught in the web of an ideology. After all, Ariadne’s thread only helps us retrace our steps backwards, to run away from the danger zone, but does not teach us to fly away, upwards towards the Sun, despite new dangers. For that we need the artistry of Daedalus, what Campbell liked to call “the Wings of Art.” On a broad philosophical level, there is a striking similarity between the Dune saga and The Lord of the Rings trilogy: they both affect a kind of “transvaluation of all values,” a fundamental critique of the mythology of the One and its hyper-masculine heroic attitude . Where the masses are programmed to worship superheroes and bow before “the One,” both of the greatest epics of fantasy literature are there to warn us against the dangers of Its rise. So rather than dismantling the supremacy of the One from the outset, as Tolkien does in The Lord of the Rings —where he re-brands it as the greatest evil and pits it against it a Fellowship and not a singular hero— Dune fanatically asserts the singularity and genetic supremacy of the One. Affirming the messianic hope of the superior Kwisatz Haderach, Herbert wants to allow all the disastrous—indeed, genocidal consequences that follow from the One’s brutal imposition upon the collective.  The imperialism of the One is easily accommodated within Dune ’s feudal sociological vision, which is like Game of Thrones in space. This game of imperialism seems to be the critical target Herbert had in mind when he wrote Dune . Nevertheless, we can still ask if he ultimately succeeded. Did not Dune end up inadvertently strengthening and propping up the very thing it was supposed to take down: the naturalization of an imperialist ideology? It is true, there are at least two ways of undermining or subverting a given ideological edifice: one is by deconstructing it directly, in diametrical opposition to it, and the other is by agreeing with it all too strongly, believing in it all too literally, and proceeding to act accordingly. Where the former is a straight confrontation against the other, the latter brings out into the open its unspoken absurdity. Where Tolkien took the first path against the dominion of the One, Herbert chose the second option.  The question still remains, however: did he succeed in tearing down imperialist ideology or did he not end up glorifying it and justifying it in the end? I’d love to hear your thoughts and further comments on the mythic dimension of Dune —especially when we take Frank Herbert at his word and attempt to read this space saga as a cautionary tale against the emergence of heroes.

One of the murals at the Maya site of Bonampak, showing a procession of musicians. Created c. AD 580–800. Photo by Jacob Rus, 2004. CC 2.0. We now enter the festivals of the Winter Solstice and celebrate the birth of the savior archetype, which in the Catholicism of Latin America is presented with the image of the Niño Dios (God Child), putting a greater emphasis on the miracle of a newborn child as the ultimate Christmas gift. On such moments of reflection, we are called upon to an eternal return to the origins.  What is celebrated with the mythic image of the birth of Christ is the second birth: not the first birth of Adam, but the emergence of a new cultural force through which humanity as a whole may be renewed. If we turn to the Maya Bible, the Popol Vuh ( Book of the Community, Book of the Counsel ), we also find at the center of its cosmovision the same archetypal theme of collective self-renewal. In the event of the Winter Solstice, heralded by the image of the Sacred Dawn, the whole of humanity comes to be reborn. Within the Maya cosmovision, this is the momentous experience of the birth of the People of the Corn. It is at this point that A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake meets the Popol Vuh . In both texts, we are driven to the birthplace of humankind out of the mythic womb of history, where Campbell writes as though he was referencing the Popol Vuh : [Step by step the conditions of the dawn moment are being revealed. The Time aspect has been discussed: it is the moment of the first shaft of light. The Place aspect now comes up for consideration; together with the problem of the gist of it all. The place is this fishy river pool where so many things have happened. Here are the great tree and stone. Here a great life festival might flourish, or just as well, a hermit’s hut might stand.] (342) This is the place where the eternal return of the Feathered Serpent turns to that time ( illo tempore ), a time before time, a space outside space—like the shapeless, unimaginable universe before the Big Bang. In the light of the Maya cosmos this placeless place is the Void, the vast watery emptiness of the Womb-Sky. So the Popol Vuh describes the moments before the first act of creation: This is the account; here it is: Now it still ripples, now it still murmurs, ripples, it still sighs, still hums, and it is empty under the sky. (Tedlock) The first act of creation, before the One can be born, is thus to prepare the sacred unground of the collective soul . There is no act of creation before opening up the space of the Void. The One is thus the second step of the process of creation, not the first. The emergence of the One is already a Two, a Twoness of the Void and the One. In the Maya cosmovision, the One is already a Twinship that appears in the image of Tepeu and Gucumatz, the Sovereign Plumed Quetzal Serpent, as the creative logos of the Maya soul. This is an archetypal image that brings together the contrasting attributes of a bird and a snake—one as an air being and the other as a being on earth. At the same time, the One is also a Three making up the Heart of Heaven, Huracán , as we can see on key passages of the Popol Vuh :  Then came the word. Tepeu and Gucumatz [Sovereign Majesty and Quetzal Serpent] came together in the darkness, in the night, and Tepeu and Gucumatz talked together. They talked then, discussing and deliberating; they agreed, they united their words and their thoughts. Then while they meditated, it became clear to them that when dawn would break, man must appear. Then they planned the creation, and the growth of the trees and the thickets and the birth of life and the creation of man. Thus it was arranged in the darkness and in the night by the Heart of Heaven who is called Huracán .  The first is called [Giant Master Lightning] Caculhá Huracán . The second is [Lightning Splendor] Chipi-Caculhá . The third is Raxa-Caculhá [Trace of Lightning]. And these three are the Heart of Heaven. (trans. Goetz and Morley, Recinos) The pluralistic aspect of the Maya Logos, Its Root Ancient Word, comes together in both the Heart of Heaven Huracán and the Two Gods who form the Sovereign Plumed Quetzal Serpent, Tepew Gucumatz . The One as both Two and Three. We can see clearly the strange similarity and the difference between the trinitarian conception of the One in Christianity and that of the Popol Vuh . What other similarities and differences can you sense based on our brief excursion into the Popol Vuh ?

Tête-à-tête. Edvard Munch, 1894. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1956. Public domain. Although Joseph Campbell is often pegged as a partisan of Carl Jung, he begins The Hero With a Thousand Faces with a fundamental piece of psychoanalytic wisdom. Leaning on Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams , Campbell evokes a kind of “hermeneutics of suspicion,” an interpretive attitude that regards appearances as deceptive, hiding and distorting as much as revealing a deeper level of truth.  Campbell begins his famous book by introducing the gap that separates the manifest contents of dream and myth from their underlying latent thoughts. Like the thousand faces of myth, the manifest contents of a dream are to be regarded, not as unvarnished truth, but as the childish disguise that distorts and hides a latent truth beating within. So Campbell explains: “It is the purpose of the present book to uncover some of the truths disguised for us under the figures of religion and mythology by bringing together a multitude of not-too-difficult examples and letting the ancient meaning become apparent of itself.” (xii)  We should be clear that the ancient meaning undergoes a fundamental transformation in the process of interpretation, becoming a phenomenon of the understanding of the present moment. What becomes “apparent of itself” in contemporary life is its distinctly modern significance, for the only way to recapture the ancient wisdom is to harvest it anew, not being afraid to dig it out of the dark mythic soil of our present historic moment. Therefore, if we want to embark on our own odyssey of ancient heroes, we must be prepared to discover a distinctly modern experience—as James Joyce does, for example, with Ulysses . To inhabit the hero’s world in a conscious manner, we must learn to speak the symbolic language of myth and dream anew, in the light of modern reason. That is why “we must learn the grammar of the symbols,” as Campbell writes, “and as a key to this mystery I know of no better modern [my emphasis] tool than psychoanalysis. Without regarding this as the last word on the subject, one can nevertheless permit it to serve as an approach.” (xii-xiii) And here you have the secret hero of The Hero With a Thousand Faces . What makes it a distinctive modern experience points to the historic breakthrough of psychoanalysis. In other words, the secret heroes of The Hero are Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Their interpretive approaches have become indispensable instruments for the understanding of myth in contemporary life. One of the things I love about Campbell is that rather than getting caught in partisan squabbles, he proceeds with an implicit reconciliation of Freud and Jung in his work. The conflict between psychoanalysis and analytical psychology, which is indeed a real ideological battle, seems to dissipate for Campbell in the transcendence of creative mythology. Working out of this zone of creativity, it is not so much a question of Jungian vs Freudian assumptions concerning the hero. In Campbell’s view, the point is not about a hero’s myth but about the experience of myth being the hero.  Soaring above the fundamentalism that creates Jungians vs Freudians, Campbell integrates both into a kind of twinship of archetypal proportions. He thus follows the lead of a new set of twin heroes, two of the greatest depth psychologists that ever lived, whose unique perspectives share a common goal in aiding the fundamental process of making conscious the unconscious psyche.  As an integrated process of self-understanding, Campbell seems to tell us, the psychoanalytic perspective is the modern hero and champion of the reality of myth. Through psychoanalytic reflection, it has become possible to recapture the fundamental sense of the Real in myth. Without it, myth remains in its mundane status of false illusion, like the “irrational” products of sleep. As the modern instrument of vision to illuminate the dark background of our lives, psychoanalysis re-opens the archetypal portals of myth and religion in the historic consciousness of the here and now.  This is the existential edge of creative mythology, the rub of its modern “materialistic” and “rationalistic” bias. For the modern soul is no longer interested in an idealistic form of “spiritual” transcendence, which is to lead us out of this world into some other place beyond reason. For that would be a form of transcendence reserved for a holier-than-thou select few. Instead, turning against such elitist impulses, the modern soul yearns for a more democratic experience of material transcendence , in principle available to all, through the ecstatic modes of being in the world.  For Being means being with and for one another, not a being in the atomized individuality of a self-centered consciousness. The latter is simply ego caught in self-righteous ideology, seduced into the narcissistic bubble of a false me-consciousness. Rather than a doctrine of the self or a belief system,, psychoanalysis is the very activity that would keep us free from the trappings of self and belief systems. So there you have it. Consider yourselves in the know concerning the esoteric core of The Hero With a Thousand Faces .

Mark Rylance as BASH CEO Peter Isherwell alongside Meryl Streep as President Orlean. Image courtesy of Netflix. Despite all rumors to the contrary, Don’t Look Up is not about climate change (spoilers ahead). An incoming comet, being a purely natural phenomenon independent of human influence, would in fact be a bad analogy for the problem of climate change. For the latter is a problem of the influence of human industry on the impending disaster, but human industry plays no role in determining the direction or speed of the comet.  To reduce the symbol of the comet to climate change pure and simple would be to miss the broader implications of its symbolic functioning within the film. A truly mythological reading of the comet would show its reflected meaning in the many mirrors it contains, drawing from the internal resources of its archetypal imagery. A symbolic reading thus stays away from a purely allegorical reduction of the comet, dispensing with the need to import external referents or additional hypotheses beyond those provided by the film. From this mythic or uroboric point of view, the meaning of the action of the comet is, of course, the reaction it creates in the human race and our systems of organization and first response, bringing into the open our failing sense of collective responsibility. The comet depicts a narcissistic culture of indifference, caught in a “post-truth” spiritual atmosphere whose catastrophic finality is finally pushed over the edge by the most obscene element of all: the existence of BASH CEO Peter Isherwell. Critics who took the film much too seriously and forgot that it was, after all, a comedy, also overlook the fact that Peter Isherwell is the true comic hero of Don’t Look Up. Where the scientists play the role of tragic heroes who ultimately fail but die honorably as decent human beings, Peter Isherwell actually succeeds, at the end of the film, in fulfilling his obscene dream of ushering in a New Golden Age of humanity—even if it was short-lived. Moreover, the critics miss a crucial insight of the plot, one which really surprised some first-time watchers who were not expecting the positive turn the film takes during the first half of the story, when a fresh wave of scandal forces President Orlean to do the right thing and embrace the mission to destroy the comet. At this point, the film’s mockery of people caught up in social media, disinformation culture, and mass entertainment, reaches its limit. By means of the very power of scandal, President Orlean finally does the right thing and steps up to the plate. Although corrupt and slow to act, the government does succeed in putting together a mission that could save the planet. Leading up to the very launch of the mission, the film is incredibly optimistic, suggesting that there is hope to work with the system as it is, fake news and all, and still avoid catastrophe. But of course, this was only an illusion; we cannot work with the system as it is and still avoid catastrophe. For it is the functioning of the system as it is—a system that produces the obscenity of billionaires—that is the real source of the catastrophe. For this reason, Don’t Look Up drops the hammer with BASH at the last minute, reintroducing Peter Isherwell when it was almost too late to derail the mission. His intervention causes the mission to abort in mid-flight, showing us that the meteor they were looking for had already struck the earth in the shape of BASH. As Peter Isherwell breaks into the situation room with a casual “Hey everyone, mind if I join?” Jennifer Lawrence’s character, Kate Dibiasky, is prompted to ask: “Is he allowed to be here?” to which Jason (Jonah Hill) responds: “Yeah, he's a Platinum Eagle level donor to the campaign. He has full clearance.” The billionaire intervention of BASH is the mirror image of the comet itself. The writers suggest as much by naming the tech company BASH, like the sound a meteor would make when smashing into the earth. The meteor is BASH and BASH means the meteor. The meteor is the obscene existence of Peter Isherwell, the true unsung hero of Don’t Look Up . Peter Isherwell is not only the personification of self-centered consumerism, he is also an embodiment of archetypal power as the mythic figure of the Old Wise Man. Like a Saint Peter standing at the gates of a golden age promised by Silicon Valley, Peter Isherwell is a kind of hybrid between Steve Jobs and Joe Biden. In his last name, Isherwell, we get the connotation of a wishing well—the fulfiller of wishes and the well-wisher of our final farewell.  The figure of Peter Isherwell can be said “to illustrate the libidinous association of the dangerous impish ogre with the principle of seduction,” as Campbell writes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces , naming “Dyedushka Vodyanoy, the Russian ‘Water Grandfather’,” a mythic being who was “an adroit shapeshifter and is said to drown people who swim at midnight or at noon. Drowned or disinherited girls he marries. He has a special talent for coaxing unhappy women into his tolls. He likes to dance on moonlit nights.” (66)