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Miss Jane Ellis Harrison has the following to say on the theme of Western Heroic Mythology, contrasting it to underlying older mythological forms, which centre around the serpent and powerful cosmic forces:
“A worship of the power of fertility whch includes all plant and animal life is broad enough to be sound and healthy, but as mans attention centres more and more on his own humanity, such a worship is one divine source of danger and disease.”(Harrison, Themis, Cambridge, CUP,1927, Page 459.
Mythology, we have argued earlier, gave birth to a form of reflection and argumentation that abandons or sublimates the narrative plots of the deeds of warriors like Achilles, or prophets like Moses, in favour of the words of men who use their reason to understand and pass judgement on matters of universal importance for humanity. The introverted form of the narratives relating to Achilles and his forerunners and descendants do not, for Aristotle, connect with that part of the mind of human psuché he called noos, the part of the mind that he thought was intimately related to the divine. Physical courage as displayed by Achilles is, of course, important in particular environments involving war, but it is important to note that insofar as Achilles uses rationality at all (in his willingness to die for a perspectival cause), this use is instrumenta,l and locked onto aggressive self serving ends that the Greek oracles warned lead humanity down spiralling paths of ruin and destruction.
Ancient Greek Philosophy, but especially Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, provided us with some of the text to what Campbell refers to as “the deeper song” of ancient mythology sung by human psuché: a song that engages with the eternal silence of outer space and time in a spirit of worship. The song of the Philosophers, on the other hand, was neither a lamentation nor a joyous celebration of the human which, in their eyes, left a lot to be desired.
Classical Art, inspired by Philosophy, changes form from the Art that was inspired by Mythology, and contributed to singing this deeper song, especially during the period of the Renaissance where we saw a Greek holistic humanistic spirit and transcendence, revived in relation to the human psuche and linked in turn to the metaphysical realm of the sacred.
Campbell misses the philosophical deeper song and compares the song of ancient mythology with what he regards as the more superfical song of Western Mythology, which he claims is :
“something forced, and finally unconvincing about all the manly moral attitudes of the shining righteous deedsmen, whether of the Biblical or of the Greco-Roman schools.” (Page 25)
The deeper song of ancient non-Western mythology may be better represented by Kuli of India who is both life and death, womb and tomb of the world, and for whom the opposites of right and wrong, male and female were not absolute, where each opposite annihilates the other. Certainly the Greek Pantheon (inspiration for Western “balance of mind”), at least insofar as the earlier deities were concerned, did not seek ahhihilation of opposites, but rather engaged in the more balanced synthesising behaviour of, for example, having gods and goddesses marry each other , thus preserving the power of the mother earth representatives, rather than expelling them from the Pantheon. They were not cursed but regarded as ends-in-themselves, worthy of similar status and embraced in friendship. When they were the focus of sacrifices there was no dark intent lurking, namely, the hope that the transcendental divinity will depart and become deus absconditis.
The challenge that Campbells mythological reflections presents us with, is the challenge to synthesize the deeper song of mythology with the deeper song of Philosophy: this latter song is, of course, still in the process of composition, but one can clearly see in the initial movements of the composition, a kind of worship of the Truth and The Good. This is a very different proposition to that of worshipping individual heros, however powerful they may be.
Campbell discusses the Minoan Culture which we know, contained many goddesses and female cult leaders and it has therefore been classified as matriarchal in type. There were no walls around the cities and little evidence of weapons. The “atmosphere” of the culture is gentle with a commodious life-style in which social interaction extends broadly across class boundaries. The Minoan cults surrounding the goddesses could be both benign(involving cattle) and terrible (involving lions,) and central to these, was a tree of life and death, often associated with a Bull and the ritualistic practice of regicide. We referred earlier to Zeus and the primacy of the heavens over the sea (Poseidon), and the earth(Hades), which is also indexed in the developmental stages of the monument Stonehenge in England. The first Stonehenge monument consisted of sacrificial pits and an earth goddess cult, an evolutionary process ending with erect stones paying homage to the sky and solar divinities. Campbell claims that :
“The British dates match the Cretan perfectly.” (Page 67)
Contacts between Britain and the Mediterranean, the evidence suggests, occurred much earlier than previously thought. This was during the period when architects and poets were “wandering souls”, wandering from city to city, region to region and across various land-masses. Late Stonehenge may well have been created by a Mycenean architect. The Greek Pantheon, we know, began with Zeus, Poseidon and Hades dividing up the Universe between them: no female presences were involved directly in this process, and in spite of the Greek compromises with previous female divinities, earthly divinites gradually became occluded, as did their central symbol, the Tree of Life. As a consequence we see in the Garden of Eden Myth, that another tree, the tree of knowledge of good and evil begins to occupy the centre of concern for the deities. Knowledge, we know, also became a central concern for Philosophy: both knowledge of the external world and knowledge of the self.
Otto Rank, the psychoanalyst, was concerned with the psychology involved in the myth of the hero which, it is argued, resembles the structure of a neurotic naracisstic day dream:
“where the individual dissociates himself from his true parents by imagining for himself: 1. a noble or divine higher birth, 2. infant exile or exposure, 3. adoption by a family much more lowly than himself(namely, that of his actual parents), and 4. a prospect, ultimately, of return to his “true” estate with a wonderful humbling of those responsible for the exile, and a general sense of great achievement all around.” (Page 74)
The dissociation of oneself from the categorical relation we all have to our parents, and the categorical relation we also have to the world of sky-life, sea-life, and the life of the earth, uses the defence mechanisms of denial and splitting to alleviate a weak ego from anxiety and depression. Freud reports a case of psychotic dissociation, a case of paranoia in which the patient “(Shreber) feels that his own physical body is being dissolved into the infinite matter of the universe. Spinoza is in no doubt that we humans are an individual form of infinite substance intimately related to the substantial attributes of thought and extension. We strive to maintain ourselves in existence like all forms of substance, but inadequate ideas of our self, other selves and the universe hinder us from striving to fulfill our rational potential. Inadequate ideas, Spinoza argues, produce passive emotional states of mind that are not conducive to the classical Ancient Greek ideal of living a good-spirited flourishing life, a life of eudaimonia. Freud’s case, Schreber, is a more serious case of disssociation, more akin to the psychotic breakdown of the mind, than the neurotic accommodations the mind makes to a reality it is still in tenuous contact with. Campbell elaborates upon this theme:
“Indeed, it might be asked whether the morbid state of mind is not a function of the legend rather than its cause;for, as it stands, the beyond represents the descent from the cosmological plane to individual reference. It therefore, produces an inferior meditation, namely, instead of an extinction of ego in the image of a god(mythic identification) precisely the opposite: an exaltation of ego in the posture of a god (mythic inflation); which has been a chronic disease of rulers since the masters of the art of manipulating men contrived to play the role of incarnate god and yet save their necks from the double ax.”(Page 74)
Campbell argues that this state of affairs contributed to the transformation of the state/polis from a religious entity to a political entity. The human attribute of being a tyrant can be seen early on in History in the case of Hammurabi who likened himself to the sun that illuminates all the land and is charged with the duty of providing both justice and piety for his people. The sun sublimates the moon in this changing of the guard of the gods and fundamental differences of psychic attitude follow from such mythic transformation:
Whereas the aim of the earlier mythology has been to support a state of indifference to the modalities of time and identification with the inhabiting non-dual mystery of all Being, that of the new was just the opposite: to force action in the field of time, where subject and object are indeed two separate and not the same–as A is not B, as death is not life, virtue is not vice, and the slayer is not the slain.” (Page 78)
Thus, the womb of the narrative is about he who must overcome his opposite, the villain, or alternatively overcome a hostile world with strange and various life-forms in order to find peace of mind. The narrative is, then structured in accordance with a dialectical logic of thesis and antithesis, which in the best of all worlds, produces the synthesis, and names it as a kind of victory, instead of the more psychoanalytically tempered synthesis of a balanced rational adaptation to the hostile forces encountered. In its extreme form, when the image becomes more powerful than the word, images of a man walking on the surface of the moon is far more interesting than our mundane earthly journeys. This image of modern man is an image of an ego that must master the external world , the id, and the superego, whose Kantian task is to treat every other ego as an end-in-itself.
In the dramatic world of the hero there is no Greek synthesis of the opposites which is clearly not heroic enough for our Western Kings or Gods whose egos demand mastery, conquest, and victory for the drama to be complete. We can wonder whether such egos are also related to the Age of Adam and Eve who exercised their wills so positvely and dramatically in the sacred Garden. Such egos clearly no longer belong in the post Socratic world which is built on a categorical framework of epistemé, diké, arché, and areté (all forms of rationality). In this world, forms and principles constitute and regulate mans relation to his fellow man and the external world. For both Plato and Aristotle, the political sphere was not immune and it too, was constituted and regulated by the “Form of the Good”— a form that was both good-in-itself, and good-in-its-consequences: situated in a space that allowed the harmonious coexistence of the categorical universal ideas of justice, and the realm of the sacred.
The BiblicalCreation Myth relating to Yahweh was a late-stage patriarchal myth where the heros were “prophets and saviours”. The evolutionary development of the forms of creation-myth stretched, according to Campbell over 4 stages:
“1. The world born of a goddess without consort; 2. The world born of a goddess fecundated by a consort; 3. The world fashioned from the body of a goddess by a male-warrior god; and 4. The world created by the unaided power of a male God alone.” (Page 86)
The Bible is, of course, to the extent that it is a pre-historical, mythological document, but it is also an attempt to structure the time of this later phase of myth historically. Imaginative narrative is thus sublimated by historical narrative, charting the chronology of Kings and Prophets, as the figure of God successively recedes into the background to become Deus absconditis. The narrative of the life and teachings of the son of God, Jesus, becomes, then, an important focus and precedes the Age of the Holy Ghost to come, in which, on some accounts, the Church no longer needs to take the respnsibility for communicating the holy message that the Kingdom of Heaven is now, here on earth, and inside of everyone who will search for it.
This historical narrative record in its turn gives rise to the emergence of Ancient Greek Philosophy as well as the replacement of Myth and Religion by an overarching form of rational universal argumentation which could still find a role for the Holy or the realm of the sacred in the philosophical mansion of The Forms of the Good. Spinoza and Kant eleborated upon the Forms of Plato and the Hylomorphic Philosophy of Aristotle with firstly, a monistic ontological account of infinite substance, and secondly, a metaphysical dualism, namely, the Metaphysics of Nature, and the Metaphysicsof Morals. This latter domain involved the controversial practical idea of a being whose freedom consisted in an ability to cause itself to independently act and take responsibility for this action. 20th Century followers of Aristotle and Kant, such as Freud and Wittgenstein and their followers presented us with further elebaorations that can be added to the Canon of previous Philosophical works which, to some extent can be interpreted mythologically.
The question these two competing forms of account raise is whether both can be categorised as “the deeper song”: a song sung using the Philosophical faculties of sensibility(imagination), understanding, and reason.
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