Hello MOQers: I hope to answer some remarks from Bo, Rod and Marco
AND it might be of interest to those seeking the light in the
"science/society independence" thread too. In fact, everyone is required to
read the whole bloody mess and submit a five-page report by Monday morning -
or else.
> All Quotes are from the 4th volume of Joseph Campbell's THE MASKS OF GOD:
> Creative Mythology. More or less, it reflects the present period and the
> recent past. Its about the end of an Age, the death of the West's
> mythology and the need for a new living myth. Pirsig hadn't yet read the
> four-volume set, but apparently knew something about THE MASKS OF GOD when
> he recommended the series. (In the last chapter of Lila.) I suppose, then,
> that the affinity between Pirsig and Campbell should come as no big
> surprize. But I'd go even further. When it comes to the conflict between
> social and intellectual values and when it comes to mysticism, Campbell
> describes exactly the same thing that Pirsig describes. They're both
> getting at the same historical moment, except Campbell is doing it with
> alot more detail and with a different set of terms. Pirsig is broad and
> Campbell is deep. And together, well,... you add it up.
>
Let's start way back with neolithic man. This quote tries to take us
back to a mythologically-charged world.
> JC quotes Ananda K. Coomaraswamy: "Those who think of their house only as
> a machine for living should judge their point of view by that of Neolithic
> man, who also lived in a house, but a house that embodied a cosmology. We
> are provided with heating systems, but let us not forget that he
> indentified the column of smoke that rose from his hearth to disappear
> from view through a hole in the roof with the Axis of the Universe, saw in
> this luffer an image of the Heavenly Door, and in his hearth the Navel of
> the Earth, formulae that we at the present day are hardly capable of
> understanging; we, for whom such knowledge as is not empirical is
> meaningless. Most of the things that Plato called 'ideas' are only
> 'superstitions' to us." P613
>
Damn. Its almost as if I remember those days myself. And Campbell
adds to that depiction in his own style.
> The meaning of the word 'superstition' , from the Latin 'to stand over',
> is simply 'belief in something 'standing over' as a vestige from the past.
> The image of this earth, for example, as a flat revolving plate, covered
> by a dome through which a golden gate, the sun door, leads to eternity,
> was not a 'superstition' in the eighth millennium B.C., but an image
> derived empirically from contemporary naked-eye observation. Its spiritual
> value did not inhere in anything intrinsic to the image, but derived from
> its power to suggest and support a sense in man of accord with the
> universe. However, such a cosmic image, taken literally and insisted upon
> today, would suggest not accord but disaccord, not only whith the known
> facts of the universe, but also with the science and civilization dacing
> those facts - as the trial of Galileo has well shown." P614
>
I won't bore you with the details, but he also spells out the
process of disenchantment with, among other things, a list of scientific
revolutions and their impact theology. Its a blow by blow account of the
death of God, so to speak. He says
> Columbus, Copernicus, Newton, Kant, Hutton and Darwin all helped to
> destroy the cosmological myths and replaced them with a Faustian
> technology. P620
>
Naturally, there is no direct link between the magical world of
neolithic humanity and the death of god. As Marco and Rod there have been
lots of changes and migrations in our history. ( I recently learned of
genetic bottleneck or population bottleneck. 75,000 years ago there was a
global disaster that reduced the world-wide human population to about 10,000
people. Everyone on earth is related to those survivors.) But bringing
things into a range that requires less guess-work, here is Campbell
describing how two different kinds of patriarchal warrior horse cultures
overtook the older goddess cultures.
> "Traditionally, as our survey of the myths of the world has disclosed, the
> idea of an absolute ontological distinction between God and man - or
> between gods and men, divinity and nature - first became an important
> social and psychological force in the Near East in the period of the first
> Semitic kings. (2,500 B.C.) Then and there it was the older, neolithic and
> Bronze Age mythologies of the Goddess Mother of the universe, in whom all
> things have their being, gods and men, plants, animals and inanimate
> objects alike, and whose cosmic body itself is the enclosing sphere of
> space-time within which all experience, all knowledge, is enclosed, were
> suppressed and set aside in favor of those male oriented, patriarchal
> mythologies of the thunder-hurling warrior gods that by the time a
> thousand years had passed (1,500 B.C.) had become the dominant divinities
> of the Near East. The Aryan warrior herdsmen, driving downward into
> Anatolia, Greece and the Aegean isles, were also patriarchal in custom,
> worshipping gods of thunder and war. In contrast, however, they never
> ranked ancestral tribal gods above the gods of nature, or separated
> divinity from nature." P626
>
Notice the "absolute ontological distinctions" of the Near East
resemble absolute ontological distinctions of SOM? The two streams of
culture give our Greco/Roman-Judeo/Christian culture its shape. There is an
underground current in the Judeo/Christian stream too, but Campbell
describes the pagan branch here...
> "No less in philosophy and science than in literature and art, the
> authority of the Greco-Roman heritage was such that Dr. Curtius could
> write of a single Classical European tradition extending from Homer to
> Goethe. It was carried by two interacting streams. One, above ground, was
> of the poets and philosophers, grammarians, scientists, and historians,
> openly read and taught in the schools. The other, more secret, beneath
> ground, was of the mystery cults which in the late Roman centuries had
> flourished throughout the classical world, from India and the Upper Nile
> to the Celtic British Isles." P95
>
In this I think we can see something like a static tradition above
ground and a more dynamic and mystical current underground. Pirsig pays
plenty of respect to the above ground guys, but unlike most other
philosophers he taps into the underground current too. Builds the MOQ upon
it, in fact. That's where the contrarians are likely to be, underground.
> "In fact, if one may judge from the record, the shared secret of all the
> really great creative artists of the West has been that of letting
> themselves be wakened by - and then reciprocally reawakening - the
> inexhaustibly suggestive mythological symbols of our richly compound
> European heritage of intermixed traditions." P94
>
I think this is what Pirsig has done. He's dipped deep into the
culture and gathered enough material to weave a whole new metaphysics that
includes all these streams and currents. I think he's one of those really
great creative artists. Speaking of which, let's now move to the end of the
patriarchal warrior thing. Now were getting to the present crisis, the roots
of the confliict between social and intellectual level values and such. Here
Campbell is looking at art from the beginning and end of the Horse age. And
how the neolithic (Moon Bull) godess culture fits in there too.
> MOON BULL AND SUN STEED
> Bronze solar horse and car; Denmark, 1,000 B.C., "The composition of a
> Gallo-Roman coin, in which a human-headed horse leaps over a bull as the
> sun leaps over the earth suggests the relationship of the two orders of
> the conquerors and conquered in that early Celtic heroic age; and when
> these figures are compared with those of Pablo Picasso's "Guernica", where
> a horse and its rider lie shattered and a bull stands mighty and whole,
> the beginning and end are seen illustrated in a remarkably consistent way,
> of the long majestic day in Europe of the conquering cavalier and his
> mount." p209
>
> "The shattered steed, the once conquering vehicle of the day of history
> now ending, appears to have been pierced by the lance of its own rider, as
> well as gored by the bull. (picasso's painting) is a reference, obviously,
> to the Spanish Civil War, during the course of which, in April 1937, the
> Basque town of Guernica was bombed. But the Basque race and language are
> pre-Aryan. They represent a period of history antecedent to the day and
> people of the horse. They typify and represent even to this present hour
> the patient spirit of those long, toiling millenniums of the entry into
> Europe and establishment there of its basic peasant population; when the
> myths and rites of the sacrificial bull - symbolic of the ever-dying,
> self-resurrecting lord of the tides of life, whose celestial sign is the
> moon - were the life-supporting forms of faith and prayer." P211
>
He quotes Gasset and Spengler on the death of horses....
> CERVANTES' DON QUIXOTE is a sad parody. Ortega y Gasset says "Don Quixote
> stands at the intersection where two worlds meet, forming a beveled
> edge,"The two worlds of poetic apiration and spiritual adventure and, on
> the other hand, empirical reality, "the anti-poetic per se". P213
>
> Oswald Spengler's YEARS OF THE DECISION (1933) "...we are witnessing at
> this very hour in the displacement of the horse by the "horse power" of
> our Faustian technology. As late as through the (First) world war there
> hung about the famous old West European cabalry regiments an atmosphere of
> knightly pride, daring adventure and heroism, which greatly surpassed that
> of any other military arm. P211
Remember Pirsig's remark about the Victorians and their horses?
Something like an attitude of firm resolve helps when dealing with horses,
but it doesn't help much when the car breaks down. Or how they thought of
science and the intellect as tools and servants of society. Here's Cambell
quoting one of those guys that did well in the "new deal for intellectuals"
, as Pirsig describes it.
> JC quotes John Dewey (1859-1952): "Victorian thought conceived of new
> conditions as if they merely put in our hands effective instruments for
> realizing old ideals. The shock and uncertainty so characteristic of the
> present maks the discovery that the older ideals themselves are
> undermined. Instead of science and technology giving us better means for
> bringing them to pass, they are shaking our confidence in all large and
> comprehensive beliefs and purposes. Such a phenomenon is, however,
> transitory. The impact of the new forces is for the time being negative.
> ... It is psychologically natural that the outcome should be a collapse of
> faith in all fundamental organizing and directive ideas. ... A philosophy
> of experience will accept at its full value the fact that social and moral
> existences are, like physical existences, in a state of continuous if
> obscure change. It will not try to cover up the fact of inevitable
> modification, and will make no attempt to set fixed limits to the extent
> of changes that are to occur." P621-2
>
OK. So the whole long project finally ends. The horse culture was
motorized and de-mythologized at the same time. This is the death of god.
This is where we find ourselves. You could say the hurricane of the 20th
century was caused by a vacuum left where the living myths used to be. I
think it explains. This is the historic moment that both Campbell and Pirsig
describe.
DMB
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