A Group of One's Own: Full Circle

Much of this comes from rough drafts that inspired a piece in The Immanence of Myth. This is an important post re: the intent and future of this site so please read on...

Art is a medium of personal and cultural revolution. 

How do myths of progress and individuality effect our perspective of art and creativity? Though we regarded it from a macro- level in PrettySuicide Machine, I would like to turn our attention back to the micro- level: specifically the myths that we have of artistic progress, which we can then fold back into some of the larger issues of progress within Western, which is to say, industrialized and capitalist, culture. It is impossible that the myths that structure the place of art within the world should not similarly structure our views of value and commodity, or perhaps it could be flipped around and remain the same.

    Let's consider: it is a common conception that breakthroughs in science, philosophy and the arts have all come about through critical analysis of an established corpus of previous works, and that the process is a gradual one. This is a myth cemented in the natural methodology of teaching art history, or history in general: we assume a gradual progress from one point to the next through time, carrying up to the present day. Perhaps the rate of progress accelerates or slows down, whether through the convergence or divergence of trade routes, the friction and choke points of information of culture in the formation of cities, or the growth of an arts culture in a certain location, (not unlike a bacterial culture) and so on. But we imagine that we can safely assume that this Hegelian myth of gradual synthesis is a sound one. “In all ways we have Progressed, and this progression is towards some end,” so says the teleological myth. Let's proceed with it, but also consider the possibility that, like all myths, it is also misleading.

    It also follows that wherever we have a prevailing myth of “the artist,” rather than a tradition of artisans and skilled tradesman that attempt to do nothing beyond furthering and perfecting traditional methods, the real breakthroughs occur in the hands of rare individuals who change the playing field in varying degrees. Through figures such as Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Thelonius Monk, or Ornette Coleman, blues and jazz were transformed into bebop and free jazz. They all had varying experience in the traditions that came before, but all of their contributions are measured in the uniqueness of their own voice, and how the addition of that voice forever changed the tune afterward. An artist is often somewhere between a medium and a curator, picking which elements in the screaming cacophony around us to focus on, to enlarge or elaborate upon, or to rail against. What was Hunter Thompson's mode? What's yours? The emphasis on the role of artist in this process, which really involves everyone engaged within a particular social domain, is clearly something valued in Western culture, even if it is also feared by the conservative elements of that culture. (If a conservative perspective is one that seeks to be backwards facing, emphasizing and idealizing the importance of tradition rather than revolution.)

    We simply don't find the same emphasis on an artist as a unique individual, at least as the rule, in traditional tribal cultures of South America, or in many Asian cultures before Western values began to take hold. (Through it does crop up in various forms of guru worship, which is probably a variation on a similar theme.)

What's your Superhero Origin Story?

Let’s get one thing straight. I hate the word Superhero, but I don’t hate superheroes. I think that’s because like many things, the overuse of hero has dis-empowered the word. A hero, in its original sense, meant more than mortal. A person worshipped, honoured and elevated above others. Some of them were demigods, others made it to godhood and had shrines raised to them which lasted beyond their deaths.

Superman is an alien raised by kindly adoptive parents, one of the last scions of a destroyed world. Batman is a man who is forged in tragedy, becoming a symbol which casts long shadows. Captains' America and Britain are elevated by science and magic respectively, to become symbolic as defenders of the world. The X-Men are mutants, set-apart by genetic quirk and the merciless pressure of evolutionary selection.

And all of them, all of them, have an origin story. They’re not just their powers - they’ve been shaped by their experience, those events which change them, make them different.

They do not stand in isolation - whether it be genetics, radiation, magic, or being child of a god, a hero is nothing without their origin. So, where does that leave us poor ordinary mortals who have our everyday lives? It’s highly unlikely we’re going to get nuked in a particle accelerator and come out with godlike powers. And yet, if you look, it is once again the apparently ordinary which they strive to protect.

Whether its the fireman, the paramedic, the doctor, the librarian, the alien ubermensch, the Dark Knight or the trench-coat wearing magus who chain-smokes his way through apocalypses, laughing all the while. Whether it’s the barbarian or the wizard, the soldier or the king, they all come from somewhere. They don’t just pop into existence - they emerge somehow. Without the ordinary, they have no fuel, no way to claw their way into existence, to drive their stories.

So, let me ask you - where is it that you come from? What’s made you who you are? Just think about it.

That hero was nothing without that difference. Your neighbourhood, your childhood, your family, your beliefs, your food, your drink, your culture - all of these shaped you. You are one of billions on this planet; one of those staggering numbers which boggle the mind, force it to take shortcuts, to create categories like race, sex, gender, politics. All that to make sense of things.

Because gods forbid you look at yourself in the mirror and see the Mystery that you are. Gods forbid you conceive of the sheer wonder of life - not that it may have meaning, or otherwise - merely that it exists at all!

Look over your shoulder and imagine the countless choices that brought you here. Imagine the memories and nuances you have, which no-one else does.

Now:

Imagine all those things that made you what you were, and then look back at the screens and the newspapers and wonder - “Why the hell are they trying to get us to buy these things? Why the hell do they want me to conform to this body-image, dream this particular dream?”

You are the proverbial miracle, hiding in the common-place. The diamond in the rough - the commonest carbon compressed by a billion pounds of heat and pressure into a multifaceted gem. You may not have a nuclear explosion or genetic code that warps notions of humanity. You may not have billionaire status, or be a member of an alien aristocracy, but you have the fuel, the experience that you can arrange, the difference that makes the difference.

And maybe, just maybe, it’s time to give up on the secret identity, claim your birthright and assume the mask of the hero.

*** 
Craig 'VI' Slee is a Consultant & Theorist dealing with Mythology, Folklore, Storytelling & Culture.

Currently, he serves as Writer and Content Developer for FoolishPeople, an internationally acclaimed immersive theatre company who create ritual experiences, books and films. Their latest work is STRANGE FACTORIES, which will be released to worldwide distribution late 2013.

[Where is the fucking counterculture? Mythos Media.]

The Myth of Masculinity: A Bloodied Nose Is Not Just Horseplay

By James Curcio

Your son may come home crying every day with a bloody nose, and with bruises, he may be trying to hide bursting into tears at the dinner table, or maybe he wet himself in terror after having rocks thrown at his head and his life threatened for the third day in a row. But boys will be boys, right? Certainly the worst thing a mother can do is jump in and help brand the poor child as a "Mommy's boy."

The fact is that yes, it is how they are. But no, it isn't OK. However, the underlying issue is not about a few rotten eggs or even bad parenting. It isn't about rough and tumble. Certainly boys and girls both will do plenty of that, and sometimes a bloody nose is just a bloody nose. It can be hard to tell, from the perspective of the parent.

The underlying issue is not the bruises. It is what they sometimes represent. It is about the society that we live in, top to bottom.

Alright, so this is a first attempt at an issue that is incredibly important not only to me but in fact to all men, across the world. It is highly underreported, and owing to its importance, I kind of fear that anything I write in a blog post will be horribly insufficient. I still have to start somewhere, so please bear with me. I am going to begin with what I know best, in other words, my personal experience, and talk about some pretty raw issues for me. I am speaking from my experience, and from my heart.

I have read a great deal of research about this issue, which I may share in a later post. But this post is about anecdotal evidence. It is about my life. 

Before I get into this... Some of you have noticed that I have some affiliation with an ongoing project of the Beacon Initiative, pertaining both to bullying and hate-speech. This is not a censorship tool. It is something very different. This post isn't about that, but this will explain my non-business reasons for being passionate about the issue of bullying, "drama," and hate-speech. We have some things in motion to bring this initiative to thousands if not tens of thousands of students in the near future, but I can't speak about that now, and, like I said. This post isn't about that.

The fact of the matter is, for all of the writing that gets done about the raw deal women can get in our society, and the gender policing that women are subject to, as well as the narratives provided for gay men, cross-dressers, transexuals, and so on, there is a huge piece of this puzzle that is left unspoken. It is quite noticeably absent to such an extent that I wondered for years if my personal experience was some huge aberration, and that added to the shame that I was trying to mask or play off.

I'll paint it fine: men, all men, are subject to extreme gender policing which can lead to bullying, mental and physical abuse of heinous levels, even rape and sexual abuse, if they don't fall in line with the gender identity narrative provided by the status quo.

Dionysus, Tequila, and Kung Fu don't mix.

I don't want to give the impression that the only modern expression of Dionysian energy is to be found in drum circles. Far from it. Nor, as we've said, is ecstasy the only human experience that brings us in touch with it.

I've had many experiences which I think fall into this other category. However, one comes immediately to mind. It has the added benefit of being comical at my expense.

When I was in my early twenties I become very interested in Kung Fu, both Shaolin and Bagua. I never got incredibly good at it, but I was certainly more expert at it than the average person. This is always a dangerous amount of knowledge.

I was at a party over the summer. It was a picnic kind of event, with alcohol and live bands. I decided to dress up in one of my Shaolin outfits, and was already pretty punchy by midday. A friend was bartending, and lit a shot of what looked like Windex and 151 on fire. Quickly blowing it out, I grabbed it and prepared to down the thing. However, an invisible flame was still burning off the fumes, and the glass was scorching hot. I twitched, and the alcohol poured across my hand, re-igniting in the process. I stared for a moment at my hand, as the skin bubbled. My friend grabbed a bucket of ice, and very much like a cartoon, I shoved my hand into it, expelling a little huff of steam.

I wrapped the hand up, and then proceeded to wander around with the obligatory bottle of Patron, as I was want to do in those days. Afterwards, I started doing my daily stretching exercises and forms - a little bit of alcohol and a burned hand wasn't about to stop me. I'd also worked up quite a bit of the mad kind of enthusiasm that can come from an energetic practice like Kung Fu, especially when mixed with alcohol.

Some people noticed me, and somehow a short demonstration of some exercises turned into a full out sparring match. Ten or twenty of us were fighting in the back yard- some with shinai, others (such as myself) bare-handed. A couple minutes in, two people approached me to attack simultaneously with their shinai. Without thinking I took two sprinting steps and lept into the air, connecting with each of them with my feet. What I hadn't counted on was connecting slightly below their center of gravity, and I also had no particular plan for how I was going to land after landing this attack. So they fell on me, and there was a loud crunch.

When I got to my feet, I was greeted by a flock of people staring at me in disgust. I still remember the look on one girl's face- it was a look of horror that you might expect, say, if a giant centipede had just burst out of my chest. I couldn't imagine what was causing this reaction. I felt a dull kind of pain, but it didn't match what I saw when I looked down. My arm was bent at a near ninety degree angle, about six inches below my wrist. Both bones in my forearm were clearly snapped, though thankfully they hadn't punched through the skin.

Wax: Or The Discovery Of Television Amongst The Bees

In a recent post on Dionysus I made some reference to the mythologies that might spring from bees, and alluded to Wax. Well, here's a clip of it. Enjoy.


Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees [10:00/85:00] from David Blair on Vimeo.

You can also watch the whole thing on Waxweb.

Personal Mythology: Dionysus, A Night Of Drumming (cont)

(For the other posts in the personal myth series, click.)

I was at a festival in the middle-of-nowhere, which we generally refer to as Pennsyltucky. It was a festival held on grounds tended by a Pagan commune, and we were several days into it. As is often the case at events like this, there was a fire circle, surrounded by sand, and an area where drummers often congregate. This particular night was young. There was a slight chill in the air for summer, but faint. Also the kind of pregnancy you can feel before an enormous storm hits. The leaves were turning up. The fire was low, there were a few people huddled about the fire in conversation, and one or two people idly tapping on their drums. I sat down behind an assortment of goat skin drums, lashed together by ropes. I began playing with mallets, hesitantly at first.
    Now, I don't want to cut the flow of the narrative, but I feel the need to interject that I don't feel that anything that happened after this was the result of some incredible talent on my part - rhythm comes pretty naturally to me, and I've played bass for over a decade, but I'm no exceptional drummer by any stretch of the imagination.
    Things started to coalesce every so slightly. More people joined the circle. Those who had been sitting stood up and began swaying around the fire. There was the distant rumbling of thunder, echoing off the hills that surrounded us.

Personal Mythology: Dionysus, Maenads, continued

Here are some more thoughts I jotted down about Dionysus today, which concludes the first drafts of my personal myth series.

 The common association with Dionysus is with wine. This is usually what most people think when you say "Dionysus" to them. "Ah, the God of wine," they often say, as if this explains anything at all. There is some validity to this association; certainly a state of "divine intoxication" that exists outside of all social boundaries is the entrance-point to his realm. However, though wine was his sacrament in some Grecian traditions, this association is hammered home more firmly in the form of the Roman Bacchus. Dionysus, especially the "proto-Dionysus" forms of Zagreuss, Bromeus, and many other similar outsider divinities originating in the Mediterranean and Asia Minor, all shared sacramental drinks of fermented honey and other grains. This may seem incidental but it isn't. The individual symbols that make up a complex, a God, a Symbol, are all multifaceted, and they are all entrance points into the entire network. Let's look at just a few before making some generalizations about the symbol itself, and turning to personal experience.

    Honey comes up in several places in reference to Dionysus. The pine-cone tipped wands that the bacchante (women of Dionysus) carry drip honey. It can be fermented into a drink, and it is also a curiously effective emulsion for making elixirs with hallucinogenic properties. (There is much argument about to what extent hallucinogens factored into the various historic examples of generally Dionysian rituals.) Honey itself was often considered to originate from a form of fermentation out of death,

"According to Virgil, Aristaois sacrificed four bulls and four cows. He let their bodies lie for nine days; then bees swarmed from their entrails which had become liquid. Here the number four certainly has cosmic significance. It corresponds to the four cardinal points. ... The animal is transformed into a sack containing its own liquids. After four weeks and ten days- roughly forty days, as in the traditional brewing of mead- grapelike clusters of bees fill the hut. ... The natural phenomenon ushering in the great festival for the early rising of Sirius ... an awakening of bees from a dead animal." (Kerenyi, Pg. 41, Dionysus: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life.) 

    Mythologically, honey is the sweetness of life, a nourishing source, which is derived as a result of death and rebirth. It may be facile to point out that alcoholic libations are also called "spirits," especially without an analysis of the etymology of the term, but on its surface it nevertheless seems appropriate. (That it is essentially regurgitated nectar, bee vomit, is also somewhat amusing but seems less mythologically significant. Just like the fact that much can be said about the mythological significance of the moon,but the moon is essentially a large, cold hunk of rock. These two things may or may not have bearing on each other, depending on whether the physical reality has an immediate bearing on the psychological reality of a thing.)
    I also developed a mythological fascination with bees; those familiar with my works will recognize this readily. When I was working on the first draft of Join My Cult!, I randomly happened upon Wax: Or How I Learned Television From The Bees. This is a very bizarre pseudo-documentary that mythologizes bees and beekeeping through a rather schizophrenic lens. I had already been taken in by the image of the hive, many agents acting independently yet, secretly, operating in tandem, but this movie only further pushed me into the realms of absurd lunacy as I continued through that literary experiment. The hive, the honey, and the directional sense of these curious creatures all seemed magical to me, and like the other disparate symbols of Dionysus, have appeared and re-appeared throughout my lives as what seem like separate metaphors until I realize, again and again, that they are all tied together through this central or mono-mythical figure, Dionysus.  

Looking at the impact of symbols: Contact With the Subconscious

(This is the most recent post in a personal myth series.) 

    The story does not end here, however. (It never ends, not really.) Our subconscious can never be truly boxed away; and the ability to deal with the experienced that are shored up from that "world" conferred by psychedelics or even a practice like yoga can never fully prepare us for the strength of a confrontation with its full strength, though they certainly can help. You can spend years on solid ground and then, as I recently experienced, you can take a single small step and fall back into the water. Luckily, swimming is a skill one doesn't need to entirely relearn, even if it's been a long time.
    To conclude this section I'd like to give an example of this. Nothing theoretical or conjectural, but rather an experience taken directly from my life, not more than a day or two ago.

(Click on post title for more.) 

Looking At The Impact Of Symbols 3: Lilith, Babalon, Kali

(Read more Personal myth posts)

By way of another example of how symbols can enter and effect our lives, I wanted to touch on another fairly volatile image: Lilith, and the similar Thelemic Babalon, based in part on Crowley's drug-induced imaginings of the Whore of Babylon. (For those interested in exploring the psychological & historical history of the image, I suggest the book you'll find through that link.)

There are many interpretations of this symbol. As with all mythological symbols, she is a mirror; and it isn't my point in this post to follow its myriad permutations through time. Most to the point, her origins are not as a Goddess but as an air or desert demon. The distinction between Demon and God is somewhat in the eye of the beholder; it isn't so much a matter of power as of function. To quote a little from the Fallen Nation screenplay I've been working from, told by the present incarnation of Lilith in that script:

Women told tales of me...I would steal the men away from them. I would devour their children. I was an abomination. I lived inside mirrors to seduce the vanity of nubile girls. Can you imagine?

Lilith, the first Eve, has a positive element as a defier; she is another anti-patriarchal symbol. But to compare her to Dionysus, one might compare the Lust to Art or the Devil cards in Tarot. (Refer to the Book of Thoth.) In the terms of those symbols, her craft is most likely to lead to the Blasted Tower than any kind of immediate synthesis. Not even Lucifer has such a defiant nature. This is one of the things that distinguish Lilith from a "dark mother" symbol like Kali. Kali represents a synthesis. In Qabbalistic terms, you could say the entire tree is contained within her. In other terms, it is enough to simply consider the linkage of the womb and the tomb, of sex and death, of time and eternity. Kali may appear frightful from within the field of time, but she is a synthesizer. Alchemically, psychologically, synthesis is a process of union. Lilith is precisely the opposite: she divides, even seemingly without point. This too serves an important psychological / alchemical purpose, but it is often a destructive one. Perhaps synthesis is the result, but that is up to the individual. She certainly isn't going to do it for you-- she'll be on to the next mark. 

Enough with abstractions. My most obvious first contact with Lilith came through my relationship with my ex-wife. This was quickly became an intentional endeavor: our first music project together was called Lady Babylon. We changed the name to simply Babalon with a new lineup. Most of our music dealt with our relationship, and our relationship dealt in great part with our art, our dreams, and our magick workings. They bubbled one into the other. At a point I don't have any idea what meaning those songs had for anyone else, because they were so internally motivated; but there is no doubt, what we were invoking was potent, and it had teeth.

I mentioned in my first post in this series that symbols of these kind can actually obscure our genuine relationship with the person that evoked them. This was quite true with us, I think. I have the benefit of hindsight now. At the time, I couldn't make the distinction. In the process of bringing up such a potent, and destructive archetype, our relation ran constantly between explosive fire and torpor. I can only imagine that, whatever our conscious motivations in bringing such a symbol into our lives, we were truly yearning from a release from prior "karma." This is where her role and Kali remain somewhat the same. When the fire has burned everything to the ground, you are finally at a point where you can truly leave the past behind and begin anew- supposing that you survive the process with something intact.

That is very much what happened. The band and our marriage went up in flames. While I clung to the personal element, I was stuck in a downward spiral. All your attachments will be burned away, one by one, until you learn to truly let go, or there is simply nothing left. I eventually did let go, and, though many new trials have followed, I have become who I am today as a result. I very much believe that without having performed the working that we did - difficult as it was - I would in some way still be stuck where I was psychologically, still a child. In that way it was my initiation. And I think many Americans never get that, and are stuck in a kind of perpetual psychological limbo: not quite a child, not quite an adult. They yearn for an initiation, brought about by this symbol or another, but often don't even know what they're yearning for.

Dionysus may be a patron of sorts, but Lilith was my initiator. I bear her little love, but plenty of respect.

At this point - and I mean this quite genuinely - I am thankful for everything that happened. Nothing subtle could have helped me grow. It is only when nothing short of personal apocalypse can shake up the status quo that a sane individual would call upon a symbol like Lilith, certainly not with such regularity.

Looking at the impact of symbols (part 2, Dionysus)

 read part one

My initial contact with Dionysus was probably not especially atypical. I was part of an "enrichment" program at my HS that included an English class that mixed in a great deal of mythology. In a way I feel pretty thankful for that; though we were mostly working with Bulfinch's, our teacher was especially passionate about the subject and repeatedly tried to get it into our heads that these were psychological metaphors. At the time I was mainlining Mountain Dew and fixated on most of the things adolescents fixate on, but it must've gotten in. Dionysus was portrayed as something of a sideline divinity in most of those texts; his real role in the pantheon or in my life wasn't at all clear.

Not long after, I became obsessed with Nietzsche- there's something about his writing that seems particularly attractive to young, intellectually-oriented outsiders. Especially, though not exclusively, males. (The same could be said of Crowley.) His framing of the Apollonian / Dionysian dichotomy in art was really compelling to me, but still, the symbol remained fairly intellectual. It did lead me to a class in college on Dionysus, which framed the Dionysian in the context of creativity, rather than the more mundane Roman rendering of the image as Bacchus. (Not the same image at all, but the distinction is often lost.) We read artists like Artaud. I remember a number of classes with particular amusement, like when the professor came in, clearly with a stiff back, and offhandedly commented that he'd injured himself during Tantric sex with his wife.

It started to gel at this point that there was something about the image of Dionysus that kept pulling me back. There are many approaches to creativity and the arts; Dionysian creativity in many ways is about getting out of the way of yourself. This is is one of the reason that drug use is so tied in with this current, for better and worse. Certain substances lessen the pull of the conscious self, letting what lies underneath to rise to the surface. The creative is a medium, the body is the point at which the upward and downward triangle of aspiration and the force of gravity meet, out of which alchemical transfiguration can occur. That sounds pretty high-minded and abstract, but it directly influenced my earliest approaches to writing, visual art, and music- diving in, often in chemically charged, manic binges. The result was characteristically intense and unfocused. There's no evaluation in that place. This is the creativity of the fugue, or channeling. Art has to be wed to this process through restraint, that comes with practice. The danger of the Dionysian approach is the complete lack of valuation; you will produce gems, but they'll be mixed in with the shit. You simply can't distinguish between the two, and later, in editorial, you may discover that they are very hard to separate from one another, as if the insights are connected to the dross through some invisible organ system. Kill the body and the head will die.

There was a more personal side to this connection, too. From my earliest memories on, women have always served a central role in my life. This is unsurprising, given that my parents were always women- my Mother, and her girlfriends. I didn't have a real male friend until I was thirteen, most of my early socialization was with girls- more out of preference than anything else, as well as the fact that the boys always seemed to sense something "other" in me and have a strong desire to attempt to squash it, like a bug. The most common insult from their quarter was always to call me "a girl." Even at the time I remember finding this curious. The insults stopped when I began meeting every slight related to this supposed insult with violence, but it always confused me: why was being a "girl" such an insult, when it seemed to clear to me that, before society had its awful way with them, women were closer to nature? Perhaps I didn't consciously think this last part just yet, but the feeling was there. I still remember it clearly. And even when the insults stopped, I still remained somewhat other, at least until the social dynamics of HS took me in for a while.

For those that are familiar with the Dionysus myth, this should be very familiar. For those that aren't, by the time he has attained the status of a deity, the first sign of his appearance is in the form of the bacchante, the wild women of Dionysus; in his earlier life, he was alternately hidden by his mother Semele from the wrath of Hera- he was raised by nymphs in seclusion- or he was hidden by Zeus "in his thigh." This is not to say that I was raised by nymphs, but the psychological significance of this element of the symbol is there. These symbols always must be read psychologically. In some ways I have grown further from him as my life has gone an, even as I've learned more about him and become mentally closer; I can only imagine that this is because of the effects of living in the society that I do. But the current is there, even when not clearly apparent. Still waters run deep.

Dionysus himself is considered effeminate, though I'm not aware of any direct reference to homosexuality that isn't juxtaposed there. We simply assume he is effeminate, bivalent, surrounded by wild female energy- there must be an element of homosexuality in the image. Perhaps there is, but it always struck me as something else. Certainly the consciousness represented by his symbol is beyond pairs of opposites in the social sphere, so there is a strong current of pansexuality throughout the symbol, but not strictly homosexual. And, as I said, this rarely enters into the traditional portrayals of the symbol.

I have an explanation for this. Dionysus is the mythological necessity of a feminine current that seeks to return a society divorced from nature back into accord with her, even if it is the nature that Lord Tennyson refers to, "bloody in tooth and claw." In Western mythological terms the male, solar energy is necessary to give the lunar, female energy light; you can read this as the sexist statement of an aeon of male dominated mythology, but there is a sense to it if we consider the meaning of the symbols themselves outside the context of human society. To whit, it is the lurking sense that the "passive" is "weaker" than the "active" that is the coloration of a male dominated mythology, rather than the meaning of the symbol. Is the negative pole or a magnet "weaker" than the positive? Perhaps the Chinese Yang and Yin are preferable; they mean "sunny" and "shady" side of the hill, which is to say two states of the same thing, the active and receptive. When you consider that Dionysus is a bull God, this inversion of roles gets even more complicated, but I'll save that for a later post as it wanders back into the historical rather than personal interpretation of symbol.

To get back to the point, Dionysus is a necessary symbol, in mythological terms, to focus the counter-patriarchal, counter-order forces of nature, nature being closer in many ways to the female energy than the male. In the screenplay and novel for Fallen Nation I deal with this a lot, the character Dionysus says "I am an agent of chaos." This is what he means. Not the chaos of the anarchist but the chaos of natural order, of Tiamat, existing before the discriminatory force of reason slayed that dragon and made a sensible world from her corpse. This idea shows itself nicely in the Garden of Eden as well, when Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, what happened is they became self aware. They knew shame because they had become divorced from nature, from themselves, by reason. This is the cost. The benefits we know all too well-- as I sit here in a cafe, typing this out on a laptop, music paying from a digital disc in the background-- none of these things could come to be without having stepped outside of the Garden. But at what cost? The Dionysian current attempts to lead us back to that primal source. Maybe we can wed the last 2000 years of our development with what we lost in the process: that would certainly be a step towards Nietzsche's deleteriously conceived ubermensch. But there should be no mistake, this path is a dangerous one.

All of these ideas are central to understanding the significance of the Dionysus symbol, though hopefully I explore that more successfully in my fiction than I could here. Should the screenplay make it to screen, and or comic book, I certainly hope you come along for the ride.

Looking at the impact of symbols (part 1)

I want to start to explore a couple symbols that have been reoccuring themes in my life here on Modern Mythology. They are symbols I've dealt with on here many times before but I want to take a look at how they played into my life, hopefully to serve as a sort of example. By "symbols" I'm actually referring to entire constellations of symbols that most people refer to as Gods- like Dionysus- or demons, like Lilith. I like the word "symbol" better because it is more open ended, and passes no real judgement on the nature of what's being symbolized. I don't want to get into a discussion of what is "real" or not. Let that play out in the rendering. Our lives are real enough, or if not, then nothing is.

I'll be talking about past events, though I'll not be using people's full names. It's all done to serve as part of that example. I've finally reached a point in my life where my past no longer lures or haunts me, even if I still have something of an ongoing struggle with my expectations of the future. The story isn't about them, it's about me. Maybe this is probably the first point to make about symbols like this- they reflect us, and they can even obscure other people in their place. Jung noted this about the anima and animus. We can be so overtaken by the symbol evoked by an individual that our internal relationship becomes entirely with the symbol; our relationship with the person behind that symbol atrophies, if it was ever there at all. There's a lot I could say about that, but it'd lead me far off course. Hopefully I'll remember to return.

There's also an extent to which these themes reoccur because we pick them out of the lineup- there are countless mythological symbols out there, but only certain ones stick out to us, almost as if the others didn't exist. This speaks volumes about us, but little else. I think a lot of damage has been wreaked throughout history as a result of people being overwhelmed by the power of an image that appears to them, followed by the miopic assumption that the presence, significance, reality of that symbol was an imperative for everyone else as well.

Making myth a living practice

Another fragment from the long piece I'm working on about magical thinking and the power of symbols for the Immanence of Myth:

  This is how myth can serve an active function in our lives. Consider the Hindu goddess Kali. The quintessential image of Kali Ma shows her dancing on the slain body of her initiate (or Shiva, depending), wearing a belt of human skulls, and a long tongue known for licking the marrow out of bone.  She is the devouring side of the mother archetype, a symbol that appears in many forms but possibly nowhere so clearly as here. For example, the mythological image of Lilith bears resemblance to Kali in many ways: at least one side of Lilith and Lilith-related demons pertains to the “devouring mother,” the strangler, the devourer of children. These derive from a number of related yet distinct air and desert demon sources, from ancient Sumeria or even possibly earlier. 

  Yet, Lilith also has another side, that of the seductress, luring men away from their societal commitment to the “good mother,” a motif that developed most clearly when the Lilith symbol was adapted by the Jews. This is an element which Kali lacks. To some, this is just an odd image painted on canvas. But to others, those who wish to enter the psychological domain represented by the symbol, she is much more. Worshippers of Kali become that initiate, offer themselves up as a sacrifice in a mythological sense, so as to effect a psychological shift whereby they release attachment to the elements of life that might otherwise bar them from becoming truly human. This path of practice does not require the asceticism of monk-hood because the binding glue, you might say, of possession is undone. 

  All mythic characters can be analysed and experienced in this way: as elements of the complex that makes up the individual, the culture, the natural necessities of the universe. All gods, demons, heroes, and villains are constructed from symbols which can have real, psychological impact. But only if engaged with directly, rather than passively. This kind of engagement can be arrived at through mythic art, though the audience must meet the artist halfway, with this knowledge and a willingness to participate. This is a difficult task for the modern, mythic artist, because audiences almost have to be tricked into this kind of participation. Entertainment takes center stage.