The Absence of Myth

"Now you know the key of mythology, and are free to unlock all the gates of the unconscious psyche." But then something whispered within me, "Why open all gates?" And promptly the question arose of what, after all, I had accomplished. I had explained the myths of peoples of the past; I had written a book about the hero, the myth in which man has always lived. But in what myth does man live nowadays?  

In the Christian myth, the answer might be, "do you live in it?" I asked myself. To be honest, the answer was no. For me, it is not what I live by. "Then do we no longer have any myth?" "No, evidently we no longer have any myth." "But then what is your myth--the myth in which you do live?" At this point the dialogue with myself became uncomfortable, and I stopped thinking. 

I had reached a dead end. -Jung.

The absence of myth is also a myth: the coldest, the purest, the only true myth. - Bataille. 

What is your myth?

IoM is Myth Dead by James Curcio

Modern Mythology Podcast #3: Pornography of Cruelty

In this class we discuss many topics raised in The Immanence of Myth:
Pornography and the theatre of cruelty
Abu Ghraib and the subconscious of the United States
School shootings and the psychology of vicariousness

Direct download

This is just the second in a series of classroom recordings from SUNY Binghamton in conjunction with this digital humanities project.
Class with St Stephen and James Curcio.

Background recording by James Curcio, P. Emerson Williams, and Scott Landes. Interlude track is from Bradley the Buyer's Used Using People.

[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]

Virtual Classroom #1: Love sacrifice and the apocalypse

In this class we discuss many topics raised in The Immanence of Myth:

Sacrifice and the sacred, love, marriage and the apocalypse
Bataille's The absence of myth
Science and mythology
Cosmological models and myths of progress
World War II as a model for enlightenment reason
Suicide and creativity
The senselessness of the body and the unconscious...

Direct download 

This is just the first in a series of classroom recordings from SUNY Binghamton in conjunction with this digital humanities project.
Class with Rowan Tepper and James Curcio.
Background recording be William Clark, with some performances by Adrina Marie, William Clark and James Curcio.

[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]

Invasive Stories: Wombs, Brains & Survival

By Mr. VI

Allow me to tell you a story – and I say allow, because you will have to give consent. A story can't be told without the audience participating in some way, even if it's simple suspension of disbelief.

The written and spoken word require a little more effort, because that kind of story requires the audience to use their imaginations, and we've already spoken of how communication and storytelling actually require – and produce- a kind of bizarre neurological entanglement.

(If you've not been following this blog long enough to read it, or need your memory refreshing, it's here – Red Riding Hood: Narrative, Neurology & Storytelling. Go on, I'll wait, because it really is essential to what you're going to be reading next, and will help you see where we're going.)

One of the interesting things about stories is that they build on each other – they provide a referential framework. A story is not just one event, it is in fact an arrangement of events. Story, as a word comes from the same linguistic roots as history:

history

late 14c., "relation of incidents" (true or false), from O.Fr. estoire, estorie "chronicle, history, story" (12c., Mod.Fr. histoire), from L. historia "narrative of past events, account, tale, story," from Gk. historia "a learning or knowing by inquiry; an account of one's inquiries, history, record, narrative," from historein "inquire," from histor "wise man, judge," from PIE *wid-tor-, from root *weid- "to know," lit. "to see" (see vision). Related to Gk. idein "to see," and to eidenai "to know." In Middle English, not differentiated from story; sense of "record of past events" probably first attested late 15c. As a branch of knowledge, from 1842. Sense of "systematic account (without reference to time) of a set of natural phenomena" (1560s) is now obsolete except in natural history.

As you can see, it's quite literally a recounting of events – an order of experience conveyed to you.

That same earlier post you will have read was collected in a best-of Modern Mythology 2011 – a selection of our work last year. It's a peculiar thing, because it ends up giving you a snapshot of events which may lead you into looking back on 2011 with new eyes. Certainly, many of those posts were inspired by events in our lives and the wider world.

Those events spawned those pieces, which even now are spawning this piece, folding in current events, reacting and changing in accordance with circumstance and stimuli. No story, no myth, no recounting of events is immune to this.

Not even the Bible – or at the very least, the interpretation of it.

Apocalyptic Imaginary: 1st Edition Released!

I'm happy to announce that the 1st print edition of Apocalyptic Imaginary is now available. You can order it direct or on Amazon. ($18) It is also available on Kindle. ($2.99)

Check out the free sample on Scribd. 

I just got my copies of this, and it looks nice. There are a few very minor aesthetic tweaks that I intend to make for the 2nd edition, but none of them are things that would probably even be noticed by most readers. (Plus, I'm sure, the stray typo or two that slipped by me and the freelance editor.)

More about this book:

"This book captures and expands upon the unique commentary and analysis that has helped define the Modern Mythology project in 2011. Through the voices of many contributors, we collectively take a hard look at the blurred lines between narrative and truth, philosophy and literature, personal history and cultural memory. All of this is done with an eye towards the imagined apocalypse that is always just around the corner."

Authored by James Curcio, Edited by James Curcio, Edited by Michael Tesney, Authored with Peter Emerson Williams, Rowan Tepper, Mr VI, Rusty Shackleford, David Metcalfe, Wes Unruh, Gunther Sonenfeld, Doctor Adventure, and Brian George.

Seriously, check this one out. Whether you're a writer, artist, musician, or just curious about how your ideas play into the world you live in, this book should give food for thought for years to come.

This book will be featured in the upcoming class at SUNY Binghamton, "The Apocalypse of Love." Also, if these subjects herein interest you and you'd like a deeper look, check out The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized this past September.

[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]

Why Myth? An Open Curriculum

Over the course of this project, and in the publication of The Immanence of Myth (Weaponized) and the upcoming Apocalyptic Imaginary, we have been developing a sort of curriculum which has indeed even spread to Prof Rowan's classroom at SUNY Binghamton and hopefully beyond. But what is the intention of this curriculum? What benefit can it serve?

The Immanence of Myth begins a curriculum of self-discovery and questioning that reaches far outside the scope of academic inquiry. This is a challenge to you, to question your beliefs and dig into your own personal history to better understand your own story, and your place in the modern myths unfolding around us every day. The myth of your life is already underway, but this is an opportunity to engage with it in a new way: first philosophically, and then personally. It proposes no final answers, and is simply the opening line in an ongoing discussion.

This curriculum isn't a route to to learning new facts. It's the first step on a path to transformational unlearning. Become who you are and live your myth.
The benefits of this sort of challenge will vary from person to person. Many will become infuriated at first, as they feel their beliefs challenged, and certainly many will react with a kneejerk dismissal before they can ever get far enough in to realize what the potential benefit can be. This is not something that will get you rich quick, in fact the honest truth is that a deep rooted tendency to doubt and question everything will likely not make you very popular in the boardroom. However, that only further highlight how absolutely essential it is.

I have been told by many that this work has changed their lives. I hope that continues. If so, I feel I've certainly done my job.

Want to know where to start? Pick up your copy of The Immanence of Myth. Read with an open mind. And continue ahead to The Apocalyptic Imaginary.

I hope to begin an audio series that continues this but that depends in part on how the fundraiser does in its final days. So by the time you finish with those, there will be more material for you.

[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]

Carts and Horses: The Deification of the Brain

(Image by petercallesen.com.)

By James Curcio

In “Is Myth Dead?” in The Immanence of Myth, I talked about some of the misconceptions that exist between what falls under the purview of science, and what belongs instead to myth, or as it is more commonly known, narrative. And it is a direct result of misconceptions discussed there that we see a constant glut of so-called science articles investigating claims such as “neuro scientists say that evil no longer exists,” (Slate article) or “neuroscience versus philosophy, taking aim at free well.” (Nature.com article). Let me use these two articles as an example of what needs immediate and complete overhaul.

Vivisecting Verses - DARPA Investigates the Neurobiology of Narratives

By David Metcalfe

“If I were a betting man or woman, I would say that certain types of stories might be addictive and, neurobiologically speaking, not that different from taking a tiny hit of cocaine,”
- William Casebeer of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Virginia

Despite the fact that it’s readily apparent Mr. Casebeer has never tried cocaine, DARPA’s current interest in narratives is an interesting development at an agency known for unique scientific inquiries. On April 25 and 26th DARPA held a conference called Narrative Networks (N2): The Neurobiology of Narratives. The purpose of this conference was to follow up a Feburary 26th event which sought to outline a quantitative methodology for measuring the effect of storytelling on human action.

We owe much of the early development of the internet to DARPA, along with remote viewing, remote controlled moths, invisibility cloaks and other wonders of the contemporary age. Now they’ve got their sites set on stories, and we can be assured that, in the near future, there will be some fatly funded scientific justification for what we already know. I mean, come on, Modern Mythology and Weaponized just published The Immanence of Myth exploring this very topic, and I assure you there’s more in there than a tiny hit to get you inspired.

And that’s the unfortunate thing about these scientific inquiries, they’re always years (usually centuries) behind the times. I seem to recall an author who spent his entire career developing this theory, and effectively influencing television, film and music with his ideas. Who was that? Something about word viruses? Oh, yes, William S. Burroughs. Who in turn got much of his inspiration from other thinkers like Brion Gysin, Alfred Korzybski, and really beyond all this name dropping, what true poet or writer doesn’t understand the fact that their writing takes on an effective reality?

The Apocalyptic Imaginary

Toward a Psycho-Philosophy of History

Prof Rowan is teaching a course at Binghamton College by this name which includes The Immanence of Myth in its curriculum. The whole reading list looks interesting.

I will be joining him up there in October to co-teach 2 classes, 10/11 and 10/13, unless we re-schedule. I plan to record those conversations and podcast them here.

I also hope that more professors choose to incorporate this book, the work we are doing here on the Modern Mythology site, and forthcoming books such as the forthcoming Best of Modern Mythology 2011 anthology in future classes. We plan on bringing a new interdisciplinary approach to the study of these overlapping issues.

More on the basis of that thinking here.


The Immanence of Myth is in final layout now and will be available on Amazon very soon.

Teleology and Circularity, a footnote

Working on re-writing a footnote for IoM that, it's been pointed out to me, was not as clear as I'd like it to be. The re-write:

In life we are confronted by problems that we render as binaries. This framing may be culturally or biologically established. Such barriers are for instance the inner and outer, mental and matter, order and chaos, and so on. Superimposed atop that we present ideas of teleology, linear movement towards an end, contrasting ideas of circularity. For instance, the Big Bang either presents a teleological or circular myth, depending on if we believe it is followed by a Big Crunch or not. These are all points of mythic necessity, existential dilemmas that we must directly confront in our lives— and the myths we spin as a result of those crisis points defines our way of being in that world. “We are segmented from all around and in every direction. The human being is a segmentary animal. Segmentarity is inherent to all the strata composing us. Dwelling, getting around, working playing: life is spatially and socially segmented.” For more on this, and many other ideas of segmentation, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. [9]

Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized. (Or sign up to be notified of its release on Amazon.com)

Names Banished Beneath the Sea - On Revenant Returns, and Fears of Adversarial Immortality

By David Metcalfe

“A human being is experienced as a power, and power reveals itself to the human being. We have seen how in certain respects a dead person as compared to a living person experienced an increase in power. The dead person possessed knowledge of the future, which the living (using dead magic) could gain access to and utilize. The living corpse, the revenant in particular, has command of monstrous physical forces. A revenant could shift its physical location in a way that a living person could not, and it also had the ability to transform its shape.”

- from Barbarian Rites, by Hanz-Peter HasenFrantz (trans. by Michael Moynihan)

The internet is an immortality machine without the need for Kurzweil’s Singularity. All you need is a name on which to hang a thin frame of philosophy, a single photograph of emotional resonance, and you can affect a return. A physical site of personal importance is even more potent, a grave on which the living can focus their intentions, gifts, talismans and memories. Dead heroes return in the lives of their attentive lovers, and when a society wishes to forget, to forgo such revenant returns, it seeks ways to blot out the names, the memories, and most importantly the body of the deceased so no return can be made.

The body of Rudolph Hess, a close companion of Hitler, was recently exhumed from its resting place in a Bavarian cemetery, cremated, and scattered in an effort to take power away from his enduring image as a hero of nascent Neo-Nazis. According to the New York Daily News, Roland Schoeffel, deputy mayor of Wunsiedel where Hess was buried, said “Now, hopefully we can put it all behind us, we hope the phantom has left.” His tombstone, where someone had scratched “I Dared” was also removed.

Yes, it’s the 21st century, and we no longer hang apotropaic charms on our doorway, or conduct ritual mutilation, to keep the dead down (at least most don’t admit to doing so.) Fears of their return, however, are no less prevalent, and precautions are taken despite our wish to evolve away from our shadowy unconscious. We know that whether or not the dead themselves come back, their memories festering in the minds of admirers can bring them back as an impetus for actions that carry on the goals they had in life.

Calling On Reviewers!

Got your attention?
Good. 

In the next three weeks, we are putting two books on the market: The Immanence of Myth published by Weaponized, and Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End.

Here's the deal: If you agree to read and review one of these books, I will give you a free eBook version of it. It's an honor system.

We make no stipulations on what that review contains, though I suggest you keep "I love it," "I hate it" out of it. A good review tells people whether they, in particular, will enjoy it or get something useful out of it. If you write a solid review of a book that you hate, it could just as easily tell someone else that they'd love it as hate it. There's no accounting for taste.

Post your review on the relevant Amazon page, Smashwords page (for Fallen Nation), on Goodreads. Any and all of these, and your own site if you have one. By the time you're finished reading it, these sites should all be updated, and the right product should be easy to find with a quick search.

Interested? Email me!

NOTE: The Immanence of Myth will be ready for review in 2-3 weeks. Fallen Nation: Party At The World's End is ready for review now.

Lord Shiva, King of Ghosts

by David Metcalfe

"This particular time is most inauspicious; at this time the horrible ghosts and constant companions of the lord of the ghosts are visible. Lord Shiva, king of ghosts, sitting on the back of his bull carrier, travels, accompanied by ghosts who follow him for their welfare."

- Bhagavata Purana

The media is calling them 'flash mobs', but from what I've read of recent incidents there's no real connection to the internet, just a roaming group of 20 or so teens willing to beat and rob whatever mark they set up.

This weekend 4 people were assaulted and robbed near Northwestern University, an upscale neighborhood in downtown Chicago, where violence isn't the norm. One of the victims was a 68 year old man. According to Crane's Chicago Business this is a new development in a series of group related crimes in the area. The end of 2010 saw nearby Michigan avenue, a popular shopping area in the city, hit with a rash of shop lifting carried out by teens in organized groups.

Cranes states that, "in January, 11 teens, reportedly coordinating their actions via text message, stole some $5,000 worth of merchandise from North Face, Filene's Basement and AX Armani Exchange stores. According to a Chicago Sun-Times report, one of the teens yelled “Snatch!” to initiate the shoplifting. Another shouted, “Meet you on the Red Line!”

The Alchemy Of Emotion

By James Curcio

I've been doing an incredible amount of introspective work over the past few months. I only seem to catch myself doing it out of the corner of my eye, but I think that in truth it has been my primary preoccupation lately.

Much of this has to do with working on being of better service to my lovers and friends, of learning more about how humans tick, and of course, how I do. I've been trying to heal myself to heal the world because it is the only way. And there is such a long way for all of us to go, and so many social forces at work against being able to even discuss this topic without the practiced cynics dismissing the line of thought with a chuckle and a shrug. I've been working against habit rather than along with it, more time than not, and as a result it probably looks like I'm not doing a whole lot in this regard at all to those around me. Allowing yourself to experience your emotions differently is not something anyone but those closest to us can see at first. But I'm starting to see the results, even if the opportunity for backsliding is constant.

"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." -- Wendell Phillips

I've been thinking about emotions as an expression of various kinds of energy, running through us. These currents and cross patterns may encounter a variety of dams, canals, rapids, or furious crackheads ranting about reptilians munching on human pineal glands.

Consider the sublimation and redistribution of this energy when you feel yourself feeling something. Look to be more aware of what you're feeling, seeing it and looking it in the eye before you react. It's like trying to force a blade of grass between two bricks but there's simply no other way.

Let's be clear what exactly we're talking about when we say "energy." I essentially mean libido or manna. It was observed by Freud that libido - and let's not just restrict that to the sex impulse - drove the formation of civilization. Jung refined this idea, observing that

E=mv2/2 contains the factor m (mass) and v (velocity), and these would appear to be incommensurable with the nature of the empirical psyche. If psychology nevertheless insists on employing its own concept of energy for the purpose of expressing the activity of the psyche, it is not of course being used a mathematical formula, but only as its analogy. But note: the analogy is itself an older intuitive idea from which the concept of physical energy originally developed. The latter rests on earlier application of an activity not mathematically defined, which can be traced back to the primitive or archaic idea of the “extraordinarily potent.” ... The use of the term libido in the newer medical psychology has surprising affinities with the primitive mana. This archetypal idea is therefore far from being only primitive, but differs from the physicist’s conception of energy by the fact that it is essentially qualitative rather than quantitative. (See also this essay I wrote on this subject within the context of sexuality, Hillbilly Tantra.) 

For example, when we're furious about something we can't do anything about, we may redistribute, transmute that "energy" into push ups or a fist to someone's face. We may trap that energy in our body, often leading to chronic ailments (such as some of those that I now struggle with), or it can get on top of us, and our passions rule us wholly. Nietzsche, too, recognized this, perhaps first in the arena of Greek theater: the conflict of the Apollonian and Dionysian sensibilities is at the root of all human creativity.

Image by Vitali

However, Jung's greatest breakthrough was recognizing that all the alchemical systems of the world relate to psychology rather, or more usefully, than physics. (This is why I have symbols of the elements and zodiac permanently painted on my flesh. They are not divinitory maps, they are psychological ones - they are not divinatory, they are revelatory.)

The challenge is making these symbols tool rather than abstract concepts. If we throw ourselves into a sport or run or channel that initial emotion in one way or another, it turns into fuel. The same is potentially true with anxiety, joy, fear, and so on. Obviously, it is a difficult task to habitually hardwire that transferrence, or re-wire it in the case where our habits are not leading us to healthy results. Anxiety can make us smoke, it can make us lose our hair, it can give us a heart attack. ...Or it can be the hand of vigilance. What distinguishes one from the other?

Is Myth Dead?

IoM is Myth Dead

Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011. (Or sign up to be notified of its release on Amazon.com)

Unlearning Reality : Afragility, Twitter, and Embodying Myth as Incunabula

I personally don't suffer with the problem that Hunter S. Thompson did, the problem which he elucidated in the 1978 BBC documentary, and James recalled in his post on Living and Embracing Ego:

I'm never sure which one people expect me to be. Very often, they conflict — most often, as a matter of fact. ...I'm leading a normal life and right along side me there is this myth, and it is growing and mushrooming and getting more and more warped. When I get invited to, say, speak at universities, I'm not sure if they are inviting Duke or Thompson. I'm not sure who to be.

There is no conflict between the myth and reality for me. The Roman numerals which make up VI are as much a signifier of my self-hood as the name I was given at birth. Gonzo is the insertion of self into the narrative - the breaking of the notion of objectivity. The author goes native, becoming a native of the text or medium.

Native has its roots in natal, relating inextricably to birth and innateness. There is only a conflict if you were ever born somewhere else; the ontological and cultural tensions induce a kind of schizoid existence.

A double life, like Clark Kent and Superman or Bruce Wayne and Batman. We've all read enough comics or seen enough of the films and other media to realise that this tension is manufactured by the environment we're in.

Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne are masks. Batman and Superman are the faces behind those masks. Those faces are the real identities, and they are made of myth, born of it. In Immanence of Myth James and I talk a great deal about the body, the corpus of myth as living flesh.

Whether it be the twilight world of cannibalism, butchery, or simply eating fucking and dying, the reasons for such discussions are horrifically simple:

Our bodies, these flesh and blood machines; by their creaking, groaning, pounding and pulsing they are our method of experiencing the universe, and they are the only one we will ever have.

Going native, becoming part of the narrative; this requires that you become myth. It is in a sense, a second birth, a second Nativity - to become the 'rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem to be born'.

The body becomes the text, the medium. That is when you have become a native, when your very flesh has been juiced with myth, suffused with and marinaded in it.

It may sound insane, to aim to become a living being composed solely of myth; a thing of dream and nebuluous, quixotic creative potential. After all, if there is no dividing line between fiction and reality, one is insane, no?

Except, there's things like this, where fictional characters tweet supportive messages to the people of Japan:

In the light of last week’s events in Japan, a twitter account has recently surfaced with encouraging comments from previous heroes on tokusatsu shows such as Ultraman, Super Sentai and Kamen Rider.

Tokusatsu means 'special filming'. Of the like seen in, y'know, Godzilla movies or Power Rangers for those of us not up on Japanese culture. Miraculous effects.

This isn't some mystical 'becoming-myth'. No, it's an attempt to help people parse the enormity of a catastrophe. This is an attempt to give people hope.

And it's happening right now, in a so-called 'rational' age. Seriously, am I the only one seeing the connections here? As I said in my last post, albeit obliquely - Godzilla and fellow mythic monsters serve a need that goes way beyond rationality.

A Talk With Clark About Tantra, India, Hinduism, and Cannibalism

Many months ago, when The Immanence of Myth was still begin written (now it is in copy editing), I recoded a series of conversations with my friend and roommate William Clark. 
Since then, of course, some of you may know we've shot the Gonzomentary series Clark with Daniel Warwick of Exodus Films, and some of his hand-drumming appear on HoodooEngine work, which was also mostly recorded in this apartment. 
We will be cutting Clark into a movie-length version sometime this summer or into the coming fall. I wanted to share this interview with you again, because the many conversations that William and I have had here in this apartment, at all hours of the day and night, have helped me gather some of the thoughts that you will find in the book (IoM), which will be released in July. William talked about writing a piece on Kali, and though I mention him in the book in a few places, he never did get around to writing that piece. However, like many of of my other friends, his influence still exists within the work, and certainly every project I've released has the fingerprints of friends and contributors all over it. 

At the end of May, Jazmin and I will be moving out of here - we're not sure exactly where to, yet - and William will shortly thereafter be returning to India. So, I guess you could say this is the end of an "era" and the beginning of a new one for all of us, though none of us know what the new one will be yet. 
It seemed a timely thing to share this conversation with you. I hope you enjoy it as much as I've enjoyed these conversations... of course, the bulk of which were between us and not recorded. But you can imagine that conversations like this have happened, between him and I and many other people, almost every day over the past crazy year or so that we've called this weird basement hideout our home. It has been at times chaotic - crazy parties, mood-swings amongst all of us moody artists, an incredibly difficult and exciting and tedious and mind-opening and altering time. I'm quite sure that in years to come I'll come to look back on it as a time of great gestation, hopefully for all of us. I hope you have some more incredible experiences while you're there, William. 
Download the mp3 directly or listen to the podcast on Alterati.com 
An addendum to this podcast: the release is through Weaponized, not Hukilau. Please pre-order below or sign up to be notified on Amazon, especially if you're in the states and don't want to pay for UK shipping! 
Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

Atlantean Hermeneutics - A Review of Jocelyn Godwin's Atlantis & the Cycles of Time

by David Metcalfe

“Yea, on all the divisions of the earth have there been great cities and nations, and men and women of great learning. And as oft as they are raised up in light, so are they again cast down in darkness, because of the great desire of the spirits of the dead to return back to the earth.”
- Oahspe, Kosmon Bible (1882)

When straight history doesn’t provide the right set and setting to explain archetypal interplays of force visionaries seek elsewhere to embody their ideals. Atlantis has been a rich receptical for such ruminations since Plato first penned the Timaeus. His enduring image of that fallen civilization “between the Pillars of Heracles” has become the perfect place for all our Golden Age dreams to foment. In Jocelyn Godwin’s latest book from Inner Traditions, Atlantis and the Cycles of Time, the eminent scholar of esotericism examines the continuing fascination of this myth and the surprising effect it has had on the Western world’s intellectual history.

Godwin gives us more than just an extensive survey of various theories of Atlantis. Through examining the numerous alternatives to the Atlantean question we find an in depth study of amateur archaeology, occult politics, trance channeling and the interstices of mythopoeia and culture. Notably absent are the more reasoned Atlantean musings of philosophers such as Francis Bacon in his political allegory New Atlantis. In Atlantis and the Cycles of Time we find a feast of error prone visionary fruit from the investigations of thinkers often radically separated from the mainline historical narrative.

Is Myth Dead?

Image by P. Emerson Williams

An excerpt from the upcoming Immanence of Myth anthology:

It may seem that the word “myth” has lost its meaning to us as a psychological or spiritual term. No, the situation is more drastic than that. Myth has become the opposite of fact, something that is generally accepted but untrue; “it is a myth that reading by flashlight ruins your eyesight.” The popular television show on the Discovery Channel, Myth Busters, uses this definition, attempting to disprove “myths” with something vaguely resembling science. The myths of antiquity are looked upon as quaint stories, despite the fact that they have shaped our cultural history. It is neatly overlooked that myths remain at the center of the bloody stage of modern religious, national, economic or ideological dynamics, not to mention our personal and everyday lives.
The fact that the word “myth” has become synonymous with untruth belies an underlying shift in the Western epistemological focus over the past several thousand years. This is clearly a sweeping generalization, and in these we are also inventing a myth, but bear with me. We have become, in this juncture of time and culture, a great deal more concerned with verifiable facts and less concerned with existential experiences which have little relation to fact. This progression ties into the Enlightenment focus on rationality and the scientific method, but perhaps more pervasively, we can see this following from the needs of industrialization.
This shift, though not concocted as some conspiratorial scheme, does serve a purpose. As we will see, fundamental business principles rely on actions that are easy to reproduce, and which produce similar (if not identical) results with each repetition. This cultural homogeneity promotes an economy of scale that is absolutely necessary for so-called big business. Similarly, the myths of a culture must ultimately serve the best interest of industry. The evolution of such co-related myths is often symbiotic, for instance, it is through the spread of industry as the backbone of a civilization that myths which better serve it spread. These in turn effect the further growth and spread of an industrialized infrastructure.

(Read full article on Weaponized)
Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.

The Karmic Fallacy Part 3

By James Curcio
Part 1 || Part 2

In part 1 and 2 of this series, I looked at many of the repurcussions of a belief in karma as an ethical dimension. However, this is not the only perspective on karma, and as some commenters on these posts recognized, I was doing a bit of baiting. Because there is a coherent psychological basis for the idea of karma, but it has little to do with reincarnation.

Instead we must look back to my post on the sacred in our profane holidays, and continue this exploration a step further.

If we are in doubt of the sacred origins of holidays, we might consider some of the ideas put forth in Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane:

“The New Year coincides with the first day of Creation. The year is the temporal dimension of the cosmos. ‘The world has passed!’ expresses that a year has run its course. At each New Year the cosmogony is reiterated, the world re-created, and to do this is also to create time- that is, to regenerate it by beginning it anew. This is why the cosmogony myth serves as paradigmatic model for every creation or construction; it is even used as a ritual means of healing.”

Thus, the role served by this entity which rewards and punishes, is to cut what we might call the karmic ties with the previous year. This seems an unusual attribution for the seemingly benevolent Santa Claus, but this is only because the holiday has become so desacralized that he has merely become a stand-in, a cardboard cutout, signifying nothing.

This connection between karma and the eternal return of the holiday cycle is not without precedent. Again we can turn to The Sacred and the Profane,

“...to Indian thought, this eternal return implied eternal return to existence by force of karma, the law of universal causality. Then, too, time was homologized to the cosmic illusion (maya), and the eternal return to existence signified indefinite prolongation of suffering and slavery.” 

These karmic ties don’t require an actual belief in karma within the Buddhist or Hindu framework of reincarnation. What it refers to is an element of our memory. Consider something that you own that has a great deal of “sentimental value.” Pick it up. Hold it in your hand. Think about the people you associate with it. Grab hold of those emotions, and travel back to the time that the object brings you to.

That’s your karmic tie. You are bound to those things. The same is true of the memories and emotions we hold onto of those we love, who are now gone, and of the life we lived which is also gone. Of course, outside a framework that espouses transcendence, these are neither positive nor negative in themselves, but they are attachments. From this, we can see that a mythic symbol serving some kind of ethical function would arise, when it comes to recapitulation and renewing. To renew, the soil must be tilled. Some attachments can be maintained but others must be severed.

Or, if they are not, they maintain a hold over us. Which is not to say, again, that this is good or bad. But there comes a time where all attachments will be stripped from us, if we give the Bardo any weight. Do you want to do it now, or then?



Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.