The Way of the Celestial Lights

[excerpt from a lecture given at the Mythic Journeys Conference 2005]

REBECCA: The subject that I want to share with you today is one that is very dear to my heart. It's something that I've been working on extensively for the past three years - an intensive, four-day workshop called The Four Epochs of World Mythology. I decided on the third of the four epochs because it has such relevance for us — it's like a tipping point. But let me begin with poetry.

"The Song of the Chorus"
excerpt from the stageplay, The Rock
T.S. Eliot

Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Brings us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

What life have you, if you have not life together?
There is not life that is not in community,
And no community not lived in praise of GOD.
And now you live dispersed on ribbon roads,
And no man knows or cares who is his neighbor
Unless his neighbor makes too much disturbance,
But all dash to and fro in motor cars,
Familiar with the roads and settled nowhere.

Can you keep the City that the Lord keeps not with you?
A thousand policemen directing the traffic
Cannot tell you why you come or where you go.
Shall we lift up our feet among perpetual ruins?
I have loved the beauty of Thy House, the peace of Thy sanctuary,
I have swept the floors and garnished the altars.
Where there is no temple there shall be no homes.
Though you have shelters and institutions,

And the wind shall say: “Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.”

When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city ?
Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”
What will you answer? “We all dwell together
To make money from each other”? or “This is a community”?

Oh my soul, be prepared for the coming of the Stranger.
Be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions.

I was dazzled to find this poem, because T.S. Eliot, as one of our profound, prophetic seers, has grasped some very important ideas about the nature of our coming together in cities. We're going to return to this, but the pivotal idea here are the questions that the stranger calls: Why have you gathered together in cities? And what will we say?

The Way of the Celestial Lights is the way of the hieratic city-state. Joseph Campbell had some pithy things to say about the coming of this epoch of world mythology. He covers this brilliantly in The Masks of God collection/Primitive Mythology:

"Then with stunning abruptness, there appears the whole cultural syndrome, which has since constituted the germinal unit of all high civilization in the world, namely the city. Now conceived as an imitation on Earth of the cosmic order, conceived as a reflection of the universe, but actually a reflection of something from deep within the human, pulled from the heart as were the cave paintings of the great hunters, evoked now by the void of the universe itself. The labyrinths of the night and its threading adventurers, the planets on their mysterious journeys."

Isn't that gorgeous prose? Luscious. This is the centering, symbolic image of this entire cultural mythos dubbed by Campbell as The Way of the Celestial Lights. It is the reconstruction through the human psyche of the cosmological order of which we are a part. To give you a sense of where we have come, we are going to back up to the Neolithic period, to The Way of the Animal Powers; the way of the cave, the way of the great hunt. And in this time period, which lasts for tens of thousands of years, the animals are not just our kin, they are the gods. They are the powers of danger, of life, of death, of wisdom, to which we turn. All of the symbolic artifacts, the great cave paintings, the great rituals, are about finding that connectivity with the souls and the spirits of the animal powers.

Campbell calls the next epoch that we move into The Way of the Seeded Earth. This is 10,000 BC, the great agricultural revolution, where suddenly the centering metaphor shifts. The animals are still with us but we now have a new food source which dominates our imaginations. We have more control. We have a steady supply of food. Suddenly, the life cycle of the plants takes on a curious fascination because the stomach plays the guide into the realms of deep mythology. (Never underestimate the role of the stomach in mythology!)

What's really exciting about this marvelous plant mythology which springs up on  multiple continents as agriculture is introduced and everywhere along the same modalities, along the same lines - is that the plants have a similar life cycle and structure all over the world, and the myths follow suit.  Annual cycles follow the rhythms of the plants. We imagine ourselves not just as animals; now we imagine ourselves as if we were plants and our metaphoric language begins to reflect this: we have redeeming saviors who are a world tree; we have the grain; we have the vine. All of these images come into the sacred lexicon. We imagine ourselves, our own soul-life, as taking on these organic frameworks.

Then, as Campbell notes: 3,200 BC — BOOM! Within several hundred years there is this enormous explosion of a brand new idea all over Europe and the Middle East: the rise of the city-states and The Way of the Celestial Lights. Of course, this is an idea that has been working along for at least a millennium before it becomes manifest. The reason that it does so is interesting and I think it will please the deep matriarchy whose energy is already in this room by virtue of the dreams we've been having. Campbell attributes this insight to the feminine consciousness – that there is a correlation between the cyclic movement of the heavenly spheres and the human cycles. That insight is the key, the cornerstone to the new cosmic order!

In support of this assertion Campbell loved to show a particular image of an artifact discovered in the Dordogne region of France early in the 20th century. Named “The Venus of Laussel” it shows a woman holding a crescent-shaped horn with 13 notches in one hand, while the other hand rests directly over her womb. It was dated to 20,000 BCE. When Campbell showed this picture he would say, “Now, let’s just contemplate this for a moment and ask ourselves 'What could this mean?' This is clearly a counting device. We have thirteen notches. What do we know about the number thirteen? It's a complete lunar cycle. What do women know about lunar cycles and thirteen moons? Aha! Menstruating women would be the first to make this cognitive, dramatic leap in recognizing that there is something in the human being that corresponds to a cosmic cycle of vast proportions, and to make an image of it — to celebrate that profound, powerful link between the little 'I' and the great, starry cosmos."

Now if you have this insight, what do you begin to do? You look for other links. Obviously, this is exciting. We are related! There is something happening out there and I can predict it. We begin to look at all of the other counting devices that have been used in agricultural lands. Now that you're stationary rather than migrating continually to follow the wild herds you can actually begin to have observatories of these cyclical patterns of the planets and stars. Because you're in one place long enough to chart them, record them — you can pass this wisdom to the generations that follow you.

A digression: Outside of Vilna, Lithuania is a fabulous museum. It's the brain child of one astronomer, Jonas Vaiškūno, who managed to get the private funds to put up this beautiful little museum of archeo-astronomy. It has an old, wooden observatory tower that he got from the University of Denver when they changed over to one with fancy-schmancy, all-metal buzzers and wheels and things. He got this gorgeous old wooden observatory and he recreated it in Lithuania. The museum is built on seven levels, and each level shows a different period of northern European history of astrological observation. On the most ancient level is a big, flat stone on which are chinked little fissures, little holes in the rock. It might look just like a rock with holes in it unless you knew something about star patterns. Then you would look at it and recognize that it's a star map reflecting the way the heavens looked to the ancient northern European Celtic eyes 10,000 years ago. There follows successive measurement tools. The earliest ones after these stones are primitive farming implements that would have notches to mark the cyclical calendar showing when to plant. 

Now we have all of these systems for keeping track of things. If you do this long enough you see the pattern. Once you see the pattern, you can predict. If you can predict, you can control — at least you control the imagination of the other humans who cannot predict. This is the key. Plenty of scholars have seen this. Campbell is the only one that I've read who immediately gets the psychological importance of what's going on. This is how he describes it in Primitive Mythology:

"The new inspiration for civilized life was based first on the discovery through long and meticulous observation that there were, besides the sun and moon, five other visible heavenly spheres which moved in established course according to established laws along the ways followed by the sun and moon. But then, second, on the almost insane, playful, yet potentially terrible notion that the laws governing the movements of the seven heavenly spheres should in some way be the same as those governing the life and thought of humans on Earth."

Insane? Playful? Yet potentially terrible insight? Those are some pretty powerful adjectives, aren't they? What would be terrible about this knowledge? If there are stable, predictable laws of the universe, it means that there is something in charge. There is something governing us. It suggests a necessary obedience which, if not attended to— if violated — could destroy the fabric of life.

This is the potentially terrifying insight: "Oh-my-God! Now I know too much. I can never go back to this kind of carefree, irruptive, joyful, spontaneous, child-like existence on the planet. No, there are laws. They are knowable. Therefore, we must follow them."

Human beings begin to organize themselves into hierarchies. Campbell points out that, along with the establishment of the city-states, a new archetype comes into being which has never been on the planet before — the mediating archetype of all this new power: the priestly class. This is an entire group who are paid for nothing else other than being the mediating force between the great cosmic laws and how everybody else should be living their lives.

This is a really critical insight. Campbell connected the anthropological and archeological data with their psychological importance. He shows us sociologically how we've arrived at where we are. If you buy into this then you permit yourself to become part of the great mandala of the organized society. In your soul of souls you believe that this vision of the world is true; not just a theory but “true”: there are laws and we must work together in accord with them. Now we have the coordinated mandala societies that Campbell talks about. This is the foundational myth of this entire epoch. Very significantly, this is the epoch in which we are – mostly – still living.

Think about it. What vast percentage of the population lives in cities with organized political hierarchies? Ever more so, every year the population continues to move into cities. We have a profound belief in astrology. Whether or not we say we really believe it, there is an astrological column in every newspaper in the civilized world. We pay people to tell us what the planets are doing. So we are very much in this way of the celestial lights — this is our epoch.

Campbell calls this unifying idea, this unifying principle, a monad. There are some marvelous things about this monad. If you are participating in it, it means that you are not thinking outside of it. You are part of the monad. You have a sense of belonging. Of course, it has given rise to the kind of cultural pleasures, beauties, delights that we all celebrate. When you have this possibility for the division of labor within a hierarchical culture, many kinds of specialties grow out of that. This developing monad creates civilization as we know it. Later on we're going to talk about some of the shadow side of this monad of civilization.

One of the things that I found enjoyable to do in discussing the four epochs of world mythology was to look all through Campbell's material and other mythological collections to find the specific myths that show the transitional myths between epochs. It's really fun because you can find them; they are there. One of the transitional mythologies that will probably be familiar to all of you, which you've probably not thought of as transitional, comes out of Greek mythology. Ancient Greece in the Helladic Period, which is the Bronze age in the Greek islands and which gives rise to the Mycenaean culture is going to extend back through this period, 3,200 BC. The myths that come down to us from the early phases of this great mythological epoch remind us of this transitional phase.

Edith Hamilton and Bullfinch tell this well-known tale of Daphne and Apollo. What many people do not remember was that Daphne was a granddaughter of Gaia. Grandmother Gaia, one of the Titans,  is the great goddess of the Earth itself. Daphne is one of the speakers, one who brings the deep, prophetic wisdom of the Earth, and gives it forth as an Oracle. She is a temple daughter, and one of the great oracular speakers of her time. As a temple goddess she is virginal. So when Apollo is attracted to the beauty of Daphne and begins to pursue her she recognizes it as an "either/or" choice. If she submits to the advances of this young, upstart god (for remember, Apollo is third generation), she will lose her capacity as the great oracle. We don't want to simply interpret her flight as distaste for sexual exploration. In fact, Apollo is said to be quite charming. Imagine what loss there would be in giving up your position as spokesperson for the wisdom of Gaia.

So Daphne flees and Apollo pursues. As Daphne feels the hand of Apollo upon her, she calls out to Gaia for preservation and protection that she may not lose this great connectivity to her source. Gaia sends her energy up through the feet of Daphne, pulling her at once into a deep-rootedness through her limbs. And Daphne sprouts, becomes the laurel tree. When Apollo wraps his arms around his beloved and recognizes only the bark and twigs and leaves he is angry. But he is still impassioned and in love, and says, "If I cannot have her as a woman, I shall have her as her energy. I shall still have her soul.” Apollo takes the beautiful arms of Daphne and wraps them around his forehead. With the crown of laurel leaves, he becomes the new oracle, the Apollo oracle.

Do you see the connection now? The laurel leaves of Apollo are directly through the feminine Gaia. Apollo, as you remember, is the god of intellect, of the cosmos — the stars, mathematics, music — all of which have their origins in the epoch of the Celestial Lights. The music, as we have inherited it from the Greeks, is all based on the celestial mythologies. The harmonics, the diatonic scales, are all parts of the celestial mythology. Here in this one image is the movement from the Earth, the seeded earth mythology epoch, into the celestial lights. Swooosh! There you have it.

I think that it is very important to recognize what it is that we are gaining. Let's imagine for a moment that Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphogenetic resonance is true. Jungians get a lot of mileage out of this idea that there is a collective unconscious — there is a field of knowledge which belongs to us because we are all part of the same species, and it is not a linear field. This is what Sheldrake is exploring from the physical science side of things. When we enter this field we “tune in the frequency” in the way that a radio tunes into a certain wave length. When we are in that field, we can access everything that has been entered into this vast database which means that we can pull from our ancestors' wisdom. When we move into this database we have access to the way of the animal powers, the way of the seeded earth, and the way of the celestial lights. With that, which comes very often through our own dreams, we can access these tremendous powers that have been given to us imaginally through these eons-long engagements with fabulous powers of our manifest world.

I would like each of you to take a moment to think of some way in which your own life has been empowered, blessed, transformed, gifted by the mythology of the constellations: the images of the sun, the moon, the planets moving in their spheres-the very idea that we are part of a celestial dance that progresses in this serene, dignified fashion eon after eon with great predictability-every planet moving through its great elliptical phases. All of these energies impacting our little planet and we, as little, human receptors of these vast energies. And just ask yourself, how have I benefited? What are some of the gifts of these mythologies: the planets, the cosmos, the cosmic dance, the harmony of the spheres?

One of the things which is distinctly different, for instance, between this epoch and the epoch of the animal powers is that in the time of animal powers, you would never have a concept of scientific inquiry. It would just never occur to you. It's all about magic. It's all about intuition. Because while the animals may have some kind of pattern - around this time of the year they come to graze because then they have their mating season - it's not precise enough that you can predict it. You have to tune in to the animals' wave length, their morphogenetic field—move spontaneously, intuitively. There has to be cunning and quick decisions. It's a very different mental construct of belonging.

Once you have this kind of highly predictable regularity in the way of the celestial lights the mind can suddenly begin to construct a perceptive vehicle that allows for scientific inquiry. It never could exist in that way before because we were not living, we were not belonging to the cosmos in such a way that we recognized those patterns, or even the possibilities of that kind of precision of pattern.

Our primitive ancestors would eat the brains of the intelligent animals with great ceremony in some magical belief that they would then incorporate the power of the animal. At that level, this belief is perfectly logical. Whereas, we now go in with our delicate little, seismic, digital instruments and define the levels of the brain; it's a very different construct. Our science mirrors the mythic imagination of our cosmos and the images we use to describe that cosmos are reflected in our art and our mathematics.

For example, Carl Jung attaches the geometric image of the spiral to the second epoch, to the way of the seeded Earth. He based this upon his own observation of his clients and their dream images and drawings. There's a fascinating set of books based on a three-year seminar cycle that Jung gave to his analysts—his training group in Zurich—based on the paintings of one of his American clients, a very exciting, creative woman named Christiana Morgan. Over this three-year period he showed several hundred of her paintings that she had done during therapy. When I saw them laid out in this two-volume set, I said, "Oh-my-God! She has recapitulated the four epochs of world mythology." Jung did not express it that way, but one of the things he certainly noted was the shift between animal symbolism and plant symbolism. He said when a client moves from dreams and symbolic paintings of animals into plants, he knew that they had reached the beginning of their spiritual or their soul evolution. That's the shift. It moves from circles and meander lines to spirals because the plant energy is a spiral. Not animal; animal movement does not spiral. Plant energy always spirals like this, so he made that attribution to that second epoch.

Now Campbell put the mandala as the symbolic, centering image for the way of the celestial lights of the hieratic city-states: not a circle, not a spiral, but a mandala. If we think about that for just moment, this is very important because the mandala in one sense is static: it's not moving this way or this way or this way. 'Mandala' is the Sanskrit word for circle, but it always has the implication of a center that radiates out to the circumference.

When Jung's clients entered the healing phase of their treatment, they would always begin to draw mandalas-untutored. It's not that he suggested they do that, no, the soul does that spontaneously. It begins to create mandalas because the mandala represents the gravitational energy in your psychic life.

It's when you have no center - when the center cannot hold - that you lose your psychic grip. You become disturbed or crazed. When you go into healing you must have a container. A mandala is the psychic container. It always implies a center, which is the Self with the large S, and all of the revolving energies which eventually find their way into harmonious balance with each other. It's fascinating to look as Christiana Morgan's series of paintings move into a mandalic phase about three-quarters of the way through her treatment. The mandalas move from just wild, abstract, circular things to polarities, to three-serpent, to quadrant... This is just so delicious.  [see ________ for examples of her images]

So the city-state, and this is very important for any of you who have studied architecture or urban planning particularly in these ancient cities, they are mandalas. The temple, which is now also usually the house of the emperor, the reigning king, the monarch, is the center of the city. And things radiate off of that, or there is...well, even like this rug that I’m standing on...this is a perfect example. You have this larger circle, and then you have the temple here. The great public square here, and the king's house here, and then you have the gates to the city here and here, so it's all laid out in these very discernable patterns.

Lightning, by the way, is also a child of the epoch of celestial lights: mathematics, science, engineering, almost everything that we think of being the hallmark of civilization comes about through this epoch. Every kind of specialization. The hierarchy gives rise to the pathways of the human imagination to go off on these tangents and explore these new realms.

The holy book of the monotheisms of the Middle East begins in the seeded earth mythology with the sacred tree in the garden and ends in the celestial cosmology of the New Jerusalem, the heavenly city.  And that was the first thing that I thought about when I threw the T.S. Elliott question out, you know: Why do we gather together in cities?  Think of how important that single idea has been in the last 2,000 years. I mean, just think for a minute about the concept of a heavenly city. Wow, this is huge. We can attribute all sorts of cultural advantages to this apparently benign image, but upon closer examination it is not necessarily so benign, because when you have an idea of what heaven is supposed to look like, you can easily see when it doesn't look like that. And if it doesn't look like that it must be wrong. And if it's wrong, it's bad. And if it’s bad then it must be reformed or destroyed. And that attitude pretty much describes where we are right now in the world!

"He carried me away in the spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the whole city Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. And it shone with the glory of God. And its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel clear as crystal and it had a great, high wall with twelve gates and twelve angels at every gate."

There you are. There is one of the great mythologies of the hieratic city-states. This has given rise to how many generations of warfare in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world? This is one of the shadows of mythology, the mental construct of what is “right” against which all experience is measured and judged. I don't know about you folks but I was raised Roman Catholic and that childhood training has had a huge impact on me. According to my childhood indoctrination, the whole point of being created was to bring the kingdom of heaven to Earth. That is a cosmic 'You Should.' That's a big finger pointing down from heaven: ‘We've got the game plan laid out for you. This is what it looks like.’

But this is not just Christianity. The kingdoms of China are laid out in these same cosmic fashions. I have a friend who has made life study of royal tombs in China because it was very important that when you buried someone that they had to be oriented exactly right to pick up the energy of their ruling planet and stars. The head and the feet would be lined up...and the paintings around the interior of the tomb...to harness the energies of the planets and the stars to make the passage to the next world, the upper realms, easy and predictable for the departing soul. Egyptian mythology has much the same thing; an extraordinary reliance upon the astronomical as guide to the earthly rounds and hierarchies.

So there we have part of that incredibly important mythos which impacts us all. We're all impacted by the Way of the Celestial Lights mythology, even if you're not actively aware of its contours you’re unconsciously participating in the cosmology. We live immersed in a society in which these ideas constitute the ground of being. The idea of heaven is a construct, a mental construct, of this epoch. The implication of being able to envision the heavenly city, and bring it down to Earth, has enormous psychological implications for how we organize ourselves in our domestic and political relations.

If you've seen the movie Troy, think of how important it was to be part of the city. Think of those walls. The protection within the city, the walled city, for what, three or four thousand years? Up through the Middle Ages, the walled city is where you have to be, otherwise there is no safety, there is no security and you are at the mercy of every wandering bandit. But if you can be a city dweller, ah, then you have access to food, to safety, to a spouse, to health, and to the next world as your people will say the right prayers to send you to your heavenly reward. The city becomes the cultural matrix for everything in your life.  The city, in a psychological sense, becomes the substitute for the great goddess.

Remember that in these cosmologies there was not just God; God always had someone to oppose Him. There were demons just outside the gate, and you definitely needed those angels with very big swords at the twelve gates to the city. Not only is it a powerful and beautiful sense of belonging, but it also implies an enormous amount of sociological control over the behavior of every individual who believes themselves to be part of this matrix of the city.

When I do this as a five-hour workshop, I usually do an exercise with a ball of twine, and maybe you've done this with a therapist because I learned this from a therapist, where we actually create a matrix where we're all holding part of the web. And then one at a time you let go and the others who are left try to adjust to try to keep the appropriate tension in the web and as you get fewer and fewer people you realize what an enormous burden it is if you don't have everybody holding their end of the web. Because basically you just have a tangled mess if there are too few people. This is a very visceral example of the matrix at work. Everybody needs to hold their piece of it to maintain the structural integrity.

And yet there is a sense of if I can't let go of this, I'm in custody to this mythos, if I can't let go without losing my own place in the order of things, or terribly inconveniencing my neighbors if I'm not here to hold up my end of things. So again, viscerally this is an important piece of the puzzle of this mythos that we are in. Because what we have all been taught is, you are necessary piece of this social construct. There is a role for you. If you find it, you will be rewarded. Stay with it. Hang on 'til the very end. Hang on! Don't let go! Okay, now that idea of 'don't let go' is the stick. There are plenty of carrots, but the 'don't let go' is a very big stick.

And the final epoch, the epoch which was announced by the troubadours, according to Joseph Campbell, in the middle ages and nurtured in the renaissance, which is still trying to come to birth, is the epoch called The Way of the Human where the individual recognizes that so long as I am not free to let go, I am simply part of a mandala matrix and I may never truly know who I am as an entity unto myself. The tension between the individual and the society looms larger and larger and larger as we go through the last five hundred years of human history. Society says: “This is your role. This is the model. This is what it looks like.” But some small voice inside keeps whispering: “What else?”

Oh, there is definitely, you know, dark and light, positive and negative in each of these, but just to place ourselves on this huge map of epochal movements or shifts of mythology, it’s important to recognize that the kind of ideas we can follow after the troubadours is different that can even be entertained in the mind prior to that. These are paradigm shifts – to use Thomas Kuhn's important word - and Campbell has, I think, accurately identified when this began to shift for us. He says this comes about during the shaking of the societal structures of the Crusades when so many of the ruling males abandoned their homes to seek glory in the Holy Land and left their well-endowed wives, sisters and daughters to mind the manor! Campbell has stated that myths are born from the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with one another and here comes the libido energy with room to move, at last! At the moment when the first troubadour or the first royal woman begins to muse on the possibilities of personal desire, all hell (or is it heaven?!) breaks loose!  Because what if I actually want to love somebody? What if outside the required mate that I have to take because of family needs...what if I felt like falling in love with somebody? I mean this idea cannot exist before this moment in time. This is the new mythological epoch. And Campbell says it comes from the troubadours who decide that a personal love is possible; to fall in love with this individual and no other because of some mysterious configuration of personality traits and physical charm – a desire not only possible, but sacred. It's through this dangerous love that one attains “God” – which Jung suggests is another way of saying “Self” – that is a personhood apart from the societal matrix.

There are a lot of theories. I think part of Joe's theory is that the movement of the knights outside of their habituated domains into the crusades freed them from much of the immature fantasy of what they had projected onto the priesthood and the Christian myth., I mean they saw the holy city of Jerusalem and suddenly it was just a city and they sacked it and killed the people and tore the buildings down and God didn't rain fire on them. The enemy did. So they encountered glimpses like that. But in a very human, realistic way, they also encountered a culture, a very highly advanced Islamic culture that blew their minds. The advances in medicine, in art, in textiles, in warfare, in life...it was unbelievable to them. And suddenly the world became much bigger. And there were different possibilities and suddenly you weren't under one lord and master in terms of either pope or king. You came back as a world-weary knight and you had money, you had riches, you had experience. You had authority of your own experience. Your own bravery. And so the hierarchy was breaking down. You had more and more people who had proved themselves during the crusades, and came back to establish their own kind of way of existence. And it was exactly during those hundred-and-fifty years that the troubadours and all of the extraordinary poetry of the women like Queen Eleanor - who herself went on a crusade - she went on the second crusade with King Louis – comes out to challenge the status quo and ignite this new ideal of courtly love which morphs into romance and a re-enchantment of the “sinful” world. But this whole rise of the courtly love and idealization of the individual comes out of that very tumultuous period.

Campbell suggests that in order to follow your own desires you have to have a new reward system,  because to go against the society, the church, the social norms - to go against the current mythology - is so huge a current that you would never be able to do it otherwise. You would not have the psychological strength unless the ante was so high that it is worth death, disfiguration, dismemberment, exile, whatever, in order to go towards that new idea. The idea of being a person capable of such individualized passion, a personal love of this one, not another one, this one, is absolutely radical and revolutionary and heralds the coming of the new mythological epoch, which we are currently in, in which the role of the individual suddenly becomes an important and entertainable idea. Prior to that you've got your web, you've got your end of the net, and everybody is modeling their role, the better for you to live into your role. Campbell’s prime example of this state of mind comes from the Indian practice of “suttee” – the immolation of the widow on the funeral pyre of her husband. You know what the word suttee means? "She who has become something." The Indian widow who lies down to be burned with her dead husband is ‘she who has become something - she who has lived into the ultimate possible role for a wife.’ So that's a very important distinction to make. The word says a lot. It has nothing to do about death. It has to do about becoming. In the mandala matrix society you become your role and that is the ultimate becoming. For the warrior to die in battle is the ultimate becoming. As Campbell explains: “In the archaic Orient, every act well performed is an act of suttee – a burning out, purging out, of ego.” (Wild Gander, p. 163) Separate selfhood apart from one’s role is not in the stars!

This new idea that I might be something outside of the matrix of this mandala mythology, this is very radical. Suddenly the rewards are high enough that the social risk is worth taking - for some. Campbell clearly champions the goal of this last epoch of the Way of the Human.  For him there was something so glorious in this idea, not yet fully realized: the idea of the individual; not as a member of his tribe but as something unique in himself, herself - such a one as has never been before. Just that. Just to have arrived at a place of your own – to live into authenticity. And to what end? Well, this is where you go back to Jung to glimpse what is going on in the idea of “the human” yearning its way through each one of us individually into becoming something. Jung felt that the God concept had been rendered spiritually dead as far back as the Book of Job, when Job discovers that as a mortal he is capable of greater compassion and justice than God. The great, benign God as father-ruler as it came about with this hieratic city-state where you had God, and then you had the king, and then you had the king's counselors, the elite, the warriors, and the peasants at the bottom, is dismembered. It cannot hold. That center does not hold anymore – much as we try to keep propping it up.

But the new god will emerge and where it's showing up is in the center of the individual human consciousness. It appears as an apotheosis, not an atonement, Jesus was an atonement: I and the Father are one. The new god is an apotheosis: I am the Creator. I...am...God. That's where the great psychological challenge lies.

Suddenly we are not just individual cogs in a great matrix. Instead, each one of us must begin to grapple with the god-like properties of the human imagination in a unique ,individual constellation. But, says Joseph Campbell, there was something very powerful in the old epoch with the shaman, the individual hunter, who went out into the dark forest to find the beast or wrestle with the demons alone. There is something in that capability of experience which is not ever going to be found in the mandala-like consciousness of the city-state human. In other words, the soul has not grown into a courageous portion sufficient enough to allow us to really inhabit this new epoch. And he says that is the great challenge of the times we are in. The last five thousand years have 'unfit us' - that's his term - have basically unfit us for any kind of understanding of sacred risk. We cannot really fathom it. We don't have the inner architecture to contain the god-like energies of direct creation and that's exactly what's required. And we've got all these people unfit for the kind of heroism that the times are demanding – not the warrior or the king but the engaged creator of new worlds.

I will not dwell on this point any longer. I think it must be clear by now that a certain relationship is indicated here between the courage of the Paleolithic Hunter in his individualism and his willingness to face unprotected the spiritual experiences available to our race. Personally – though I do not wish to make a point of this – I believe that there is a precise relationship between the format or stature of the psyche and the quantum of immediate experience that one is capable of sustaining and absorbing, and that the training and shaping of the mandala-conditioned psyche of the incomplete man of the agriculturally based societies has simply unfitted him for the reception of the full impact of any mysterium whatsoever. (Flight of the Wild Gander, p. 189)

But, if we go back into the way of the seeded Earth, back into the way of the animal powers, back through the epochs into the great, long body of the ancestors' memory and reacquaint ourselves with the kinds of courage that were required of us in these ancient times then, perhaps, we can pull them back and face in the right fashion the demands and challenges of our times.

This was Campbell's challenge: Follow Your Bliss. I don't know how many of you were aware of how much flack Campbell got for that little phrase. People who were very much engaged in the matrix of this civilization saw that as a clarion call for chaos, disruption, unbridled hedonism, selfishness of unparalleled proportions, and would decry him from the pulpit, radio station and newspaper editorial.  “Follow your bliss” they insisted, “is a bad thing. Don't do it. Stay where you belong – within the confines of your socially proscribed roles.” But remaining within those roles means that we are not taking up the challenge inherent in our times of The Way of the Human.

And to take that another step, why should there be so much fear right now? Because for the first time we recognize that I am, not just we. I am the Wild Gander. In order to attain god-like energies, the soul has to become so fierce and so self-attuned that it can soar into the realm of the godly powers without becoming lost in its own inflation, but simultaneously descend to the bowels of matter, of humus, of humility and recognize its own mortality - - and both will give rise to terror. And you will have to bear both. Terror is a sign that we are arriving at a point of extraordinary individuation.

There is the fear of risk and responsibility - the fear of making a mistake. Remember Campbell quoting James Joyce, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where we have that marvelous statement in which Stephen says he's not going to be a Roman Catholic anymore and his friend is horrified: "How can you say this? You're going to leave the church? You're going to leave your immortal soul?" Stephen replies,

“You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. And I am not afraid to make a mistake, even a great mistake, a lifelong mistake and perhaps as long as eternity too.”

Wow! Now there is 'I am that I am' confronting everything that has gone before, the willingness to lose everything. But where did we hear that line previously? In the myth of Tristan and Isolde. Five hundred years earlier, as Tristan drank the love potion and the nurse said, "You are drinking your death," he replied, "I drink it willingly...to love the one I want to love."

There you have it. There's the introduction of the new epoch. It is a tragedy, yes, but a great tragedy, the really good tragedy which lifts up the new possibilities. It lets us see the contour of the possible epoch. And that's all we need.

But the old society still cannot shift its way around to accepting this yearning of the individual to go into this element of chaos but it's there. It belongs to us, and we have to learn how to access it. But it is 12:30 and I don't want to keep you here past your lunch so I'm going to leave you with one of my very favorite Joseph Campbell quotes to go off into the world with, my friends, because Campbell saw all of this and if you want tools for how to live your life, they are there.

"Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us-the labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."  (The Hero with a Thousand Faces)

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Rebecca Armstrong was brought up in the legendary Armstrong folk family, where she learned the old stories, tunes and traditions from the fingers and voices of folks who kept them alive. Their home was a frequent resting place for the multitude of bards and balladeers who traveled through the Midwest, including Joseph Campbell, who became a close family friend. Following her interest in sacred stories and teaching to the spirit, Rebecca became an ordained Humanist Minister, receiving Masters degrees from the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Unitarian-Universalist seminary. She has worked with the Joseph Campbell Foundation since its inception in 1990, supporting the Mythological RoundTables around the world and writing the monthlyMyth Letter for the Web site. She is one of the co-leaders of the annual Campbell week at Esalen.

This lecture was given at the Mythic Journeys Conference  and transcribed by their staff. To see the original post and learn more about the Mythic Journeys organization, visit their site: http://www.mythicjourneys.org