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permits Joseph Campbell: "The life of a mythology springs from and depends on the metaphoric vigor of its symbols. These deliver more than just an intellectual concept, for such is their inner character that they provide a sense of actual participation in a realization of transcendence. The symbol, energized by metaphor, conveys, not just an idea of the infinite but some realization of the infinite... Mythology may, in a sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as a popular misunderstanding of mythology. Mythology is a system of images that endows the mind and the sentiments with a sense of participation in a field of meaning... A system of mythological symbols only works if it operates in the field of a community of people who have essentially analogous experiences, or to put it another way, if they share the same realm of life experience..." [6-8] THOU ART THAT "The Promised Land is any environment that has been metaphorically spiritualized... not a place to be conquered by armies and solidified by displacing other people... a corner in the heart, or it is any environment that has been mythologically spiritualized... Each of us has a track to find and follow. So whatever your life commitment is as of now, it involves certain daemonic relationships - that is, the one you forge with the deity residing in you... The sacraments are an evocation, not an indoctrination... Marsilio Ficino had translated for Cosimo de' Medici a considerable portion of the Corpus hermeticum, a work that at the time was thought to be a product of the same period as the Law of Moses, and that, in any case, employed many symbolic images already known to the Christian faith. It employed them, however, with a difference: whereas, in Christian thinking, following the Mosaic, the deity is regarded as transcendent of the world, in the 'hermetic' tradition, which was a development rather of a Greek line of thought, divinity inhabits and is the very essence of the substance of the universe. The same images, consequently, that in the Semitic line of argument are rendered in terms of a system of game rules requiring that the deity be regarded as 'out there' turn up in the Corpus hermeticum following the game rules requiring that the divine be present within as well as without. Every theological tradition sets up its own game rules, and no matter what experiences of a mystical or visionary order one may have, it will be necessary when translating them into speech to bring them into accord, so to say, with the game rules of the particular theology currently in play. Indeed, one of the really great problems encountered by Christian mystics through the centuries has been the conflict of these two contrary traditions of speech, the Hermetic and the Mosaic... Mythic images -- from the Christian tradition, or from any other for that matter since they are all actually related -- speak to the very deep centers of the psyche. They came forth from the psyche originally and speak back to it. If you take in some traditional image proposed to you by your own religious tradition your own society's religious lore proposing it to yourself for active meditation without any strict game rules defining the sort of thoughts you must bear in mind in relation to it ... letting your own psyche enjoy and develop it, you may find yourself running into imageries, experiences, and amplifications that do not fit exactly into the patterns of the tradition in which you have been trained..." [36-39] THOU ART THAT "The first part of the book of Genesis is sheer mythology, and it is largely that of the Mesopotamian people. Here we have the Garden of Eden, for this is the mythological age in which we enter a mythological garden. The story of not eating the apple of the forbidden tree is an old folklore motif, that is called 'the one forbidden thing.' Do not open this door, do not look over here, do not eat this food. If you want to understand why God would have done a thing like that, all you need do is tell somebody, Don't do this. Human nature will do the rest. God's idea, in this story, was to get Adam and Eve out of that Garden. What was it about the Garden? It was a place of oneness, of unity, of no divisions in the nature of people or things. When you eat the Fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, however, you know about pairs of opposites, which include not only good and evil, light and dark, right and wrong, but male and female, and God and Man as well. Man has eaten the fruit of knowledge of good and evil. Lest he eat the fruit of the second tree, which is that of immortal life, God throws Man out of the Garden and places two cherubim, with a flaming sword between them, to guard the gate. Adam and Eve are seperated from God and they are aware of this break in their sense of oneness. They seek to cover their nakedness. The question becomes, how do they get back into the Garden? To understand this mystery, we must forget all about judging and ethics and forget good and evil as well. Jesus says, Judge not, that you may not be judged. That is the way back into the Garden. You must live on two levels: One out of recognition of life as it is without judging it, and the other by living in terms of the ethical values of one's culture or one's particular personal religion. These are not easy tasks. I said that God exiled Adam and eve from the Garden, but actually they exiled themselves. This story yields its meaning only to a psychological interpretation... The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites - man and woman, good and evil - are as holy as that of a god. Let us look around this Garden now that we stand imaginatively within it. What is the tree of immortal life? Even after examining in depth the rabbinical discussions of the two trees in the Garden, it remains something of an enigma. Look closely and you may see, as I do, that they are the same tree. You are in the Garden and the tree is the way out. The way out is through learning of good and evil, a process that is symbolically expressed by eating the fruit of that tree. It is as if you are walking from a room where all is one into a room where, as you pass the threshold, all is suddenly two. Look back at the gate... you are out, in exile from ... where all was one..." [49-51] THOU ART THAT "Let me now ... just say one more word about the functions normally served by a properly operating mythology. They are, in my judgment, four. The first is what I have called the mystical function: to waken and maintain in the individual a sense of awe and gratitude in relation to the mystery dimension of the universe... The second function of a living mythology is to offer an image of the universe that will be in accord with the knowledge of the time, the sciences and the fields of action of the folk to whom the mythology is addressed... The third function of a living mythology is to validate, support, and imprint the norms of a given, specific moral order, that, namely, of the society in which the individual is to live. And the fourth is to guide him, stage by stage, in health, strength, and harmony of spirit, through the whole foreseeable course of a useful life... | In sum, then: The inward journeys of the mythological hero, the shaman, the mystic, and the schizophrenic are in principle the same; and when the return or remission occurs, it is experienced as a rebirth: the birth, that is to say, of a 'twice-born' ego... One is now no longer afraid of nature; nor of nature's child, society... The new ego is in accord with all this, in harmony, at peace; and, as those who have returned from the journey tell, life is then richer, stronger, and more joyous. The whole problem, it would seem, is somehow to go through it, even time and again, without shipwreck... one should have been taught something already of the scenery to be entered and powers likely to be met, given a formula of some kind by which to recognize, subdue them, and incorporate their energies..." [122|131] MYTHS TO LIVE BY "The hero ... is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms. Such a one's visions, ideas, inspirations come pristine from the primary springs of human life and thought. Hence they are eloquent, not of the present, disintegrating society and psyche, but of the unquenched source through which society is reborn. The hero has died as a modern man; but as eternal man -- perfected unspecific universal man -- he has been reborn. His second solemn task and deed therefore ... is to return then to us, transfigured, and teach the lesson he has learned of life renewed... | The cosmogonic cycle is presented with astonishing consistency in the sacred writings of all the continents, and it gives to the adventure of the hero a new and interesting turn; for now it appears that the perilous journey was a labor not of attainment but of re-attainment, not discovery but rediscovery. The godly powers sought and dangerously won are revealed to have been within the heart of the hero all the time. He is the king's son who has come to know who he is and therewith has entered into the exercise of his proper power -- God's son who has learned how much that title means. From this point of view the hero is symbolical of that divine creative and redemptive image which is hidden within us all, only waiting to be known and rendered into life... The two -- the hero and his ultimate god, the seeker and the found -- are thus understood as the outside and inside of a single, self-mirrored mystery, which is identical with the mystery of the manifest world. The great deed of the supreme hero is to come to the knowledge of this unity in multiplicity and then to make it known." [14-15|30-31] THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES |