Detail from Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss. Antonio Canova, 1787-93. If anyone doubted that the essence of the individual is thoroughly interwoven with the collective fibers of society, our continued state of social distancing and isolation is further proof of the case. Robbed of our participation in the collective, we feel robbed of part of ourselves. Our sense of individuality and uniqueness rests on a social matrix of institutional forces and collective energies well beyond our egocentric control. Perhaps this is the reason Aristotle came to the conclusion long ago that a human being is by nature a “political animal” ( zōon politikon ) (Politics 1.1253a3). And this is not dissimilar to the way feminism came to formulate its rallying cry at the end of the 1960s: “the personal is political.” Now, with the advent of social media, it has become startlingly clear that one’s “personal” life experience — once caught in the dynamic of our virtual networks and the order of the symbolic — gets entangled in the spider web of our collective psyche. Nevertheless, there’s more to the story. The surface show of our collective consciousness does not exhaust the resources of the collective unconscious proper at its deepest foundation. In their native soil of possibility and pure potentiality, the archetypes of the collective unconscious are the nocturnal creatures of nightmarish fantasy, hidden deep in the dark primeval forests of cosmic matter and its universal unconsciousness. This is why archetypes, when properly understood, do not become fixed objects of empirical cognition. They are accessible only to a peculiar “dark mode” of consciousness — an existential hermeneutic of myth which takes place near the threshold of being and nonbeing in the "noumenality" of time. Speaking in this “dark mode” of mythic consciousness, Joseph Campbell writes about the deepest substratum of the archetypal psyche, this pre-symbolic realm of pure psychic energy hinting at the strange state of non-being before the positivity of the world of objects. This is an unheard of space before the act of creation, where rather than heroes or monsters or any other definite mythic typos, Campbell comes upon a nebulous set of “primal energies and urges of the common human species: bioenergies that are of the essence of life itself, and which, when unbridled, become terrific, horrifying, and destructive.” ( Inner Reaches , xv) Campbell wants to highlight four distinct channels of primordial influence (nutrition, sexuality, the “will to plunder” and compassion), making a distinction with the latter two as being impulses “launched from the eyes” (xviii), which is to say that they are more ideological in nature. This is especially true of compassion, as it was “late to appear in the evolution of species, yet evident already in the play and care of their young of the higher mammals.” (xviii) Upon closer inspection, however, each of these primordial impulses appears as a slight modification of a singular self-generative life-force or libido and its uroboric logic. Subverting the world of appearances, libido stands for the paradoxical and irrepressible sexual energy of Love, the self-generating and self-consuming power of life, bubbling up to human consciousness in the metaphysical boiler of the death drive ( todestrieb ). As Campbell begins to elucidate each of these primal impulses, we can see how “the innocent voraciousness of life,” as he writes, is already “linked almost in identity with […] the sexual, generative urge.” ( Inner Reaches , xv) And the same is true of “the will to plunder” which is ultimately explained by the “the ‘Law of the Fish’ ( matsya-nyåya ), which is, simply: ‘The big ones eat the little ones and the little ones have to be numerous and fast’ (xviii) — an analogy that once again brings us back to a secret “ identity with […] the sexual, generative urge.” (xv) This is an illustration of Freud’s point against the Jungian stratification of the psyche and its brutal reduction of sexuality to some blind biological urge. The irony of this debate is that only Jungians reduce sexuality to biology whereas Freud saw very clearly what all religious ideologies, including Jung’s, seek very much to repress the knowledge of: the fact that sexuality (Eros) is a rival metaphysical force beyond Meaning and the need for religious ideology. Although in its inception psychoanalysis postulated Eros and todestrieb as the primordial pair of opposites, it was Jacques Lacan who settled the theoretical ground of the Freudian vision by clarifying the ultimate identity between Love and the death drive. They are two sides of the same metaphysical coin as the singular force embodying a mortal sense of transcendence. The common essence that binds sexuality and todestrieb is present in the deadly excesses of life itself, the way it presses against itself in order to maintain and create itself through endless cycles of death and reproduction. As Jung himself put it, “The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive.” (CW12:¶93) Hence the tendency shared by each of these primordial impulses to “become terrific, horrifying, and destructive,” as Campbell observed in Inner Reaches (xv). But this is the stillpoint of archetypal psychoanalysis, the mortally transcendent concept of libido, which embodies the tremendous essence of life itself at the bounds of knowability. Aptly pictured in sci-fi horror movies by the voracious alien creature, the concept of libido has “infinite plasticity” and “can morph itself into a multitude of shapes,” as Slavoj Žižek writes in How to Read Lacan , adding that in this alien image “pure evil animality overlaps with machinic blind insistence. The ‘alien’ is effectively libido as pure life, indestructible and immortal.” (63) Denying us the comfort of a parental archetypal image, the representation of libido becomes The Thing in John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi horror classic — a masterpiece of psychoanalytic fiction which effectively deploys the image of the alien as an “image to cancel all images, the image that endeavors to stretch the imagination to the very border of the irrepresentable.” (64) “This blind indestructible insistence of the libido is what Freud called ‘death drive,’ and one should bear in mind that ‘death drive’ is, paradoxically, the Freudian name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis.” (62) With this apt description of the passion of the infinite, we come to rest here, in the grip of our creative daimon, where a state of ceaseless productivity provides the ground for a transcendent vision. Driven by its relentless desire to reproduce itself, possessed by the “compulsion-to-repeat” again and again the act of creation, the soul finds her proper rest here, in the stillness of Love’s madness, beyond the cycles of life and death.

Once Upon a Midnight Dreary. Illustration to The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe. Édouard Manet, 1875. Public Domain. Edgar Allan Poe once wrote a little piece called “The Imp of the Perverse,” and I do believe that there must be in the fashioners of piously held beliefs, all over the world, an exceptionally strong strain of the faculty and impulse that he there describes; for it cannot be that they do not know what they are doing. Neither can it be that they regard themselves as deceivers. Nevertheless, they are seldom satisfied merely to brew for the moral nourishment of mankind an amusing little beer of what they know to be their own apocryphal fantasy, but they must needs present their intoxicant with deliberately pompous mien as the ambrosia of some well of truth to which they, in their state of soul, have been given access. It is exactly as my author, Poe, has said. “All metaphysicianism,” as he terms such work, “has been concocted a priori. The intellectual or logical man, rather than the understanding or observant man, set himself to imagine designs —to dictate purposes to God. Having thus fathomed, to his satisfaction, the intentions of Jehovah, out of these intentions he built his innumerable systems of mind.” And with a curious strain of the same perversion by which the sages teach their designs, both vulgar and the learned everywhere have been forever loath to see any such facts brought to light as might tend to inform them of the true nature of the brews by which they live, dream, and regulate our lives. (The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology 518-519) Although we tend to think of the Campbellian enterprise of Mythological Studies as providing honey-sweet “positive” content for our lives, passages like the ones above tell a slightly different story, more critical of the positivity of mythic ideology. As a consequence of this double task, both affirmative and critical, any piece of mythological studies issues a call to confront the traumatic truths of our mythic past, the composition of the brew of our national ideology, forcing us to come face to face with the imp of the perversity of mythic consciousness.   In "The Imp of the Perverse," Poe anticipates such notions of depth psychology, later developed by Freud and Jung, as the Id (The Thing) and the Shadow. With this level of psychoanalytic insight, Campbell can easily explain to himself the “curious strain of the same perversion by which the sages teach their designs,” and the great resistance of “both vulgar and the learned everywhere” to “forever loathe […] any such facts brought to light as might tend to inform them of the true nature of the brews by which they live, dream, and regulate our lives” – Namely, the true nature of what we adopt as our “personal mythology": the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves which are mostly lies.  For it is generally acknowledged that if we want to get to know someone, we cannot base our judgement solely on what this individual thinks about herself; Instead, we must turn to the content of this person’s actions in order to know their true character. Sometimes these self-serving fantasies are crushingly belittling, sometimes narcissistically self-aggrandizing, but any sympathetic observer and listener would recognize at once the perversity of such “personal mythology.” What is true of the individual is also true of entire nations and their mythic pasts. We all have to deal with the imp of perversion at the heart of our founding narratives. For without this shadow work, without this making conscious of the unconscious lie, the true blooming of mythology cannot come to pass. As with the psychotherapy of the individual so it is with entire nations; the problem is not so much the "creation of a new myth" but the elimination of repressive elements that block the spontaneous outpouring of mytho-historic truth. This is the reason that a well-trained psychotherapist will refrain from providing “answers'' or assigning “meaning” to an individual’s life, no matter how much they may beg for it. A significant part of working through the transference, the spontaneous co-dependence of the patient to the analyst, is to free the individual from this delusion. For it is taken for granted that delusions are never good for the life of the soul.  “Truth is the ultimate repressed,” as Wolfgang Giegerich states in The Soul’s Logical Life (217). What is ultimately repressed in the depths of the psyche is not some mysterious “self“ waiting in the wings, nor is it the intensity of sexuality, but a painful truth that speaks at the place where the psyche must enter the flesh. For there is the existential rub, the irrepressible edge of the symptom, where the unconscious mind forces itself upon the conscious ego and breaks down all its defense mechanisms.  So when we advocate for the “non-binary” logic of myth as the logic of both/and over against either/or , we should not forget the full implication of this proposition: that the logic of both/and must include either/or as its internal complementary opposition. Otherwise we remain caught in the literal split of external opposites. True myth thus operates through the logic of both/and and either/or , following the paradoxical logos of the soul, as an upsurge of the mythic imagination into the material light of history. Hence, we would do myth a disservice were we to relegate it to the purely metaphoric or personal realm of make-believe and wish-fulfillment—where we can have everything both ways and speak out of both corners of our mouths. No, that is not the true nature of myth but the work of the imp Campbell and Poe warned us about. If we believe that myth truly matters, on the other hand, we must turn to the material truth of its existential mystery. It is when myth is allowed to bloom in truth that it becomes living history.

Corn Husk Mask (Iroquois) Exhibit in the Château Ramezay - Montreal, Quebec, Canada. There is nothing more mythic than the ceremonies and stories that have gathered around the winter solstice. They are powerful metaphors that are present across cultures, irrespective of time and places, with the vastness of the skies as their native home. It is no accident that the solstice continues to reflect the highest value for the human soul. The transcendental significance of the season persists even when this astronomical aspect seems lost in the decked halls of consumerism and electronic mass media. Both inside and outside the United States, people continue to relate to the land in its primordial agricultural aspect. To them, this astronomical event is not only a decorative item but a matter of vital significance. If we take a broader view of our side of the hemisphere, going south of the border across Mexico to the Guatemalan Highlands, the end of December is a time of year-end festivities for the Maya peoples who, like all Mesoamericans, celebrate their ancient religion beneath the mythic garments of Christian rites and symbols. Beneath the conventional religion, something deeper stirs in the native soul; a subterranean stream of archetypal ideas and images continues to flow in, through and around Roman Catholicism. So the winter solstice is not simply a celebration of the birth of Christ, but also of El Niño Dios, (the Child God), who appears together with the Feathered-Serpent Goddess of Maize. As a child growing up in Nicaragua, I still remember being struck by the processional “Christmas” parades which featured El Niño Dios accompanied by all manner of saints and virgins. It was a crowded street filled with the spectacle of sacred figurines and mythic people riding on elaborate floats. Beside the float bearing a life-sized figure of El Niño Dios, a second chariot bore a half-naked woman standing erect with arms outstretched and tied to a cross. She was carrying signs of the Feathered Serpent—a combination of feathers, make up, and lizard skins, surrounded by offerings of corn and other signs of agricultural abundance. Even before I was nine years old, I knew that all these mythic figures somehow belonged together, although no explanation was given to me in official Catholic doctrine. I had a distinct feeling that these figures belonged together: the Child God, the Virgin, the Cross, and the naked Goddess of the Corn. Their coexistence inspired a strange sense of awe and fear, mixed with erotic excitement, which I could hardly explain to myself as a young child. What I knew, and knew with deep conviction, however, was the love of my family and friends, together with the pride of belonging to these “People of the Corn.” So it was in my childish imagination, then and to this very day, that the odd constellation of mythic figures, the Child God along with the naked Goddess of the Corn, were engraved in my soul as the “true” meaning of Christmas. And even then, I had a sneaking suspicion that the mystery of sexuality was also mixed up in it—just like everything in the adult world! Indeed the celebration of the winter solstice has everything to do with an upsurge of productive and reproductive energies, the celebration of the fertility and bounty of the land, the public enjoyment of rivers of milk and honey. There is no doubt that in such gratifications of the collective spirit, the power of the mythic image is truly alive. As Joseph Campbell never tires of saying: "The life of a mythology derives from the vitality of its symbols as metaphors delivering, not simply the idea, but a sense of actual participation in such a realization of transcendence, infinity and abundance.…” (Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space , xx). The winter solstice is indeed such a realization of transcendence in the world, a materialization of its abundance and infinite grace. It is a kind of spiritual-material reward that was originally reaped by our parents and ancestors on the ground of organized human life. It commemorates a communal enterprise animated by a fundamental sense of solidarity and neighborly love which extends to all living things. Far from being a celebration of private wealth and power, which at best can only simulate a spurious form of transcendence, living myth is the reaping of the collective “blessings” that come from being a member of a productive society working for the benefit of all.

Moon Rising Over Craftsbury, by Bernard Lebleu. Craftsbbury, Vermont.2015. Used under Creative Commons license. "Get up!" Through his sleep, Freddy Bliss vaguely heard the agitated voice, but he was unwilling to open his eyes. “Up! Up! Up! Up!” (Mythic Imagination, 3) For readers of Joseph Campbell, the name “Freddy Bliss,” the young man who stars in his short story Moonlight in Vermont , immediately conjures up the central theme of the hero’s journey with the promise of bliss buried with the “treasure hard to attain.” The Call to Adventure thus begins with a rude awakening for the youngster, who, as “a jitterbug from Brooklyn,” had no experience with the tribulations of farm life. Indeed, he was so green and out of touch with farm life that Freddy Bliss had scarcely “seen hair nor hide of a cow before two weeks ago.”(6) Now in the midst of a cow pandemonium, Freddy’s instincts would be put to the test. Chaos had broken loose on the sleepy farm; a large herd of “immense Guernseys,” a fine breed of milk cows, was accidentally let out in the middle of the night. The Young Hero, which in many ways resembles Campbell himself as a young man, is thrown into the bovine mayhem only to lose his way in the darkness of the night. So was Freddy Bliss set up to embark on his own idyllic brand of “night-sea journey” under the brilliant moonlight of the New England countryside. Now, I don’t wish to spoil the story for anyone, but from what follows in the narrative it becomes increasingly clear that at the heart of Freddy’s journey, as that of Campbell’s own, is the curious question: “What is poetry?” As the implicit notion of transcendence, the development of the concept of poiesis itself seems to be the centerpiece of the mythic quest; it marks a crucial development of the heroic mind, an alteration of everyday consciousness into the consciousness of the One as it reveals itself in the visual language of story. It should come as no surprise that the theme of poetry comes out the mouth of an erotic fantasy or “anima figure,” a lovely maiden ready to initiate our Campbellian hero into the charms of the countryside. She was, of course, a farmer’s daughter, an archetypal figure and source of inspiration which prompts Freddy to ask: “Will you teach me about poetry?” In Campbell’s story, his explicit question concerning the nature of poetry re-inscribes the theme of the re-awakening in the consciousness of Art, now imbued by the pale light of the moon: T he unbelievable beauty gently shook his shoulder. “Wake up, young man,” she insisted softly. In the light of its internal dynamics, Moonlight in Vermont attempts to illustrate the magnitude of the question of being in art, the “unbelievable beauty” or impossible reality lying at the heart of the mythic imagination itself. The ability to even raise the question implies an archetypal encounter with one’s inner muse, an event igniting a spiritual journey—the deployment of the Concept in Art—in the soul’s mythological life. So the young Campbell writes: Freddy caught her hand, and she let him experience the texture of her skin while employing the moment to assist him to his feet. “The night is beautiful,” she whispered. They were clutching each other’s hands. “Come,” she urged quietly, “let us wander again under the moon.” (Mythic Imagination, 13) The warm immersion of the scene in the sensuality of love should not mislead us into believing that we are dealing with a non-intellectual or anti-intellectual “thoughtless” experience. Quite the contrary. As the young man clutches hands with the muse of poetry, the archetypal logos in Art has already unleashed its creative activity and transfigured the sensuous experience of the world. The question of being in Art, however, transcends the bounds of the aesthetic consciousness as such. Unable to nurture itself by itself, mythic consciousness requires the energy of all the fundamental spheres of human existence—such as politics, science and religion—in order to fulfill the promise of its Great Opus. Jung also recognized the severe limitation that vitiates the purely aesthetic approach to the fundamental problem of the human soul. Tracing this problem historically through various authors leading up to Nietzsche and his own work, Jung evaluated Friedrich Schiller’s brave response to the “problem of opposites”—or what others might simply call the evil at work in mankind—as simply inadequate: In Schiller it was a sort of aesthetic solution, very weak, as if he had not realized the length and depth of the problem. To try to solve it by a vision of beauty is like trying to put out a great fire with a bottle of lemonade. (Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934 – 1939, Vol. 1, p. 120) Despite its historical obsolescence, Schiller’s thesis may still be persuasive to some people. Nevertheless, Jung had his eye on something more than meets the sight of beauty and her lovely semblance of truth. Far from a repudiation of the power of myth, however, the critical move beyond aesthetics itself, which has become a hallmark of modern art and philosophy, renews the path for the self-transcending mytho-historic nature of Art: to point beyond itself to the profound reality of our own lives.

"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.