ERIN said: I heard Campbell say in an
interview that the archetypes of this century were the artist archetype and
the scientist archetype. So why do you say "the hurriacan of the 20th
century
was caused by a vacumm where the living myths used to be." I still see
myths
they are just dressed up as artists and scientists this century.
When it is talked about the death of god I think of another thing Campbell
talked about in the interview. It was about the "trickster god" . He was
painted up (like a clown) so that you could not use his image as a god
because
you knew something was underneath that mask.
I think the artist mask and the scientist mask both seem to be in line of
the
trickster god who doesn't allow the image to be presented as a god.
DMB says
Good question. I think you'll like the answer. You're quite right. The
archetypes remain active and have a profound effect on us even after a
mythological system collapses. In other words, we still have the myths, but
its like a corpse. It no longer functions as a living myth when it fails us
1)Spirtiually 2)Cosmologically 3)Socially and 4)Psychologically. Presently
we are so far away from having a living myth that its difficult to express
what its supposed to do. Its hard to know what we're missing. Cambell quotes
Ortega y Gasset on this matter. "We believe in something with a live faith
when that belief is sufficient for us to live by, and we believe in
something with a dead, a sluggish faith when, without having abandoned it,
being still grounded in it, we no longer experience it efficaciously in our
lives".
I'm not sure exactly what Campbell may have said in the interview, but he
strikes similar cords in his books. He points to artists and scientists as
the new heros. It isn't the sages and warriors anymore because they are
defenders, but what we need now are the creative types. Remember not too
long ago someone posted a Pirsig quote from his SOVD paper? He said that
Bohr and Heisenberg were passionate artists in the throes of creation. Same
idea. Campbell quotes those scientist too, as well as Schrodinger and
others. He's also very fond of literary giants like James Joyce and Thomas
Mann for the same reasons. And in yesterday's post I included his
descriptions of Picasso's work, which is creative and filled with mythic
images even while it depicts the death of the old mythological system. He
likes Nietzsche for the same reason; there was a creative impulse in all his
destructiveness. Artists and scietists are the new heros because we need
them to help put a new living mythology in place.
"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." from the MASKS OF GOD
DMB
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:01:56 BST