A Mythology of the New Aeon

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Winter Solstice, 2006 e.v.

The themes and symbols by which humanity understands and explains its own straits to itself, whether they be religions or mythologies, Hollywood films or Hallmark cards, are falling victim all around us to the slowly growing malaise of a postmodern, existential, crisis of meaning. The news media which we are in constant exposure to bring us images and realities which appear ever more detrimental and chaotic- civil wars, unprovoked armed invasions, environmental destruction, CEO's with record-breaking quarter earnings and laborers with stagnating minimum wages, corrupt governments and crumbling familial and social structures. Believers the globe over clamor to churches and synagogues, temples and mosques, in the vain hope that their god will deliver their people from the approaching cataclysm, while the wealthy elite
bow before their neon gods, their technological saviors, their financial assets, in the vain hope that their mortgage will secure the safety of their future.

The general public lolls in front of perpetually-changing scientific findings regarding pharmaceutical products and food additives, while ninth grade teachers in the midwest battle over whether biology or the book of Genesis is a more astute authority on processes of biological development. Entire cultures are wiped out in the quest of the most powerful western countries to own the most important economic assets in the world, while entire memories are wiped clean nightly by the idiot box, taking its place as the new bard, the new poet, the new jester.

Life itself becomes bleak and empty, unaided, in this world of thieves, hucksters, rapists, killers, and diseased egos, of hysterically ubiquitous national flags and flash-in-the-pan popular trends, of java jackets with airline advertisements, of liposuction and transplanted hair, of genetically modified foods and water "treated" with flouride? Who can ignore that the way things are currently held to work is deeply flawed and perhaps poisonous, that somehow along the line, we went from industrial progress and the social contract to sinking ice caps and democratically approved torture? Who can fail to see that, although we have received so many teachers and "saviors," their message, their death, and their resurrection have changed so very little on a macrocosmic scale? Who can exist within our modern paradigm, at this so very late stage in its
existence, and not sense the serial wanting of moral definition, of a clearly understood system of absolutes, of a humane means of dealing amongst humans? When loudest and most powerful mouthpiece of christianity in the world today, the American president, has been found to be responsible for the pointless death of over 300,000 innocents in only three years, when the catholic priesthood has been found guilty of over 100,000 molestation cases in a decade, it appears that an evolution of morality is in order.

The issues with which our generation is dealing with are not of an unheard-of nature, however we have not had to deal with them for a very long time. At the time of Christ, the prevailing orthodoxy which Caiaphas represented was in a state of decadence and emaciation, and was blasted completely apart by Christ's revelations, which presented the people of his time with an alternative to the goat-sacrificing, dogmatically asphyxiated norm. His message was one of freedom from archaic law, which broke into pieces the prevailing, stale, orthodox form of the cultural-religious system he came from. A break had to occur between the finally busted-off barnacles of the morals of the past aeonic cycle, which represented the bloodthirstiness of Yahweh, and the eye for an eye mentality, whose tenure of validity had passed. The karmic
weight of that aeon, or spiritual epoch, had outlived its efficacy or meaning, and needed to be succeeded by that which was greater, that whose time had come, that city on the hill.
We find ourselves at a similar crux. All of the, priorities, systems, and ideas which we have inherited from previous generations are crumbling and falling apart, unless their appeal still proves to be profitable or fetishistic, such as home ownership or marriage. It indeed is a small world, after all, however its layers of complexity have manifested exponentially with the passage of the past hundred years. We teeter at the precipice of global fascism and infinite, cosmic freedom. The crowned achievement of the hardest science humankind has developed, quantum physics, is that the fundamental 'stuff' which constitutes all of material reality is the result of energetic wave patterns at a particular rate of vibration, which manifest, at subatomic speeds,
across all of the space/time continuum, as particular occurrences or happenings. We have indeed moved past the mechanistic view of the manifest universe which beheld mainstream science during the age of Newton, a universe which operated, through and through, according to established, calculable formulae, composed of solid structures with immutable presence.
Our philosophy has long become 'existential,' our social sciences 'post-modern,' our spirituality 'New-Age;' it is apparent that our focus is eschatological, that we are obsessed with time and our unwitting welcome of a new dimension of its passage- a new means of quantizing reality, a new means of mythologizing life's labyrinthine coils.

Regarding this same shift in consciousness, less than a decade after the Treaty of Versailles, Aleister Crowley wrote: "democracy dodders . . . ferocious fascism, cackling communism, equally frauds, cavort crazily all over the globe. They are hemming us in."1 Since the second world war, it has been obvious to all of humanity that we can be quite despicable creatures to one another, that we have not progressed or been 'civilized' enough to refrain from coldly slaughtering, en masse, our brothers and sisters. Crowley, echoing an almost conservative, libertarian voice,
further stated that "above us today hangs a danger never paralleled in history. We suppress the individual in more and more ways. We think in terms of the herd. War no longer kills soldiers; it kills all indiscriminately. Every new measure of the most democratic and autocratic governments is Communistic in essence. It is always restriction. We are all treated as imbecile children . . . they won't trust us to cross the roads at will."2

Well then, if we can note, with such perspicacity, that a new era is upon us, then can we do the same with where we have come from? It appears that, from roughly 2,000 B.C. to 500 B.C., a prevailing, general cosmology was held by most known cultures that was matriarchial in family structure, regarded the earth and its processes to be our means of comprehending the Divine, and worshipped the goddess, be she Innana, Astarte, Diana, Hecate, or Isis. It is from this time that we witness the paganistic or pantheistic cosmologies which represented, on the whole,
matriarchial government. Following this, about the time of Plato, Confucius, Buddha, and finally Jesus, the whole of creation had come to be conceived of as a divine tragedy, whereby an innocent must be sacrificed and mutilated in order for the sun to continue on its course. Order, adherence to dogma, and perpetual sacrifice define this particular aeon. And, although the lessons inherent within the frequency of consciousness to which we had evolved at that time had to be learned, we have demonstrably evolved to a novel frequency, wherein our hand-me-down traditions, benevolent as they may be, fracture and fall away in the face of our newfound
obstacles.

Many of Christ's teachings, although revealed two millennia ago, have yet to manifest in any consistent, widespread fashion of which he would seem to approve. Although there have been sporadic movements towards civil equality and world peace, they have been routinely stomped out by power interests the globe over. We have enmeshed ourselves in the deepest shadow-problems of the just-passed aeon, and are painfully dealing with the horrific vibrations of its death rattle. The kicker is that we are undergoing the activation of an even deeper circuit of our consciousness, what some might even call 'the new Christ-consciousness.'

Since the advent of the so-called aeon of Osiris, or that of the specifically dying and resurrected god, the theme of religious experience across much of the world, from the crucifixion of Christ and Krishna, to that of the dismembered Osiris, the submission (islam) to Allah, has been primarily to expedite the collective calibration of one group, tribe, nation, or mesocosm to some such supposedly exclusively correct Divine reality. We can see that currently another set of ideals are afoot; that perhaps it might be that the redemption of all humanity is a necessary precursor to the hopeful evolution of the species. Not only is this shift of focus simultaneously from the nation to the individual, from the family to the globe, but the raw material of the type of
redemption it affords has been removed from the summits of Sinai and Olympus and placed within the raw reality of the individual faced with its own individuality. This has been the staggering stage upon which we draft our life's meaning only recently, in literary form perhaps best described by James Joyce in Ulysses, or in the works of Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. It is the undertone which fueled the anarchistic and socialistic movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the occult revival in western Europe at the same time, that of existential philosophy, the quantum, the cultural reunion of east and west, the drug culture, the countercultural movements of the beats, the hippies, the back-to-the-landers, the punks, the postmodern yuppies, and the uber-uber 'yutzies' (young urban trustfunded psychopaths).

Even though most of us have been allowed, by circumstances, to more or less watch life from the sidelines, it seems that we will not be able to so much any more. We will not be able to merely clap our hands to the song and mutter some of the words under our breath, to simply nod our heads at the sermon- the song must be of our hand, and the sermon of our lips. We do not have to save our tribe, nation, culture, or even globe- we have to save ourselves, from our own hubris, our own avarice, and our own weakness, ignorance and incompleteness.

The fundamental mythological structure which followed Christianity in the west, after it had a millennia to mature and implement itself sufficiently, is the grail myth, or the stories surrounding the existence of an holy grail, which caught the blood of Christ as he hung dying on the cross, and which was brought by Joseph of Arimathea, supposedly, all the way to Great Britain. Even though the grail legends are of knights, dragons, maidens and ailing kings, their importance to Christianity, perhaps more specifically to esoteric Christianity, are widely known. The grail is a symbol of the feminine, receptive, yin polarity of the universe, "that which receives, contains, and supports, of the maternal in particular."3 In her masterpiece on the subject, The Grail Legend, Emma Jung wrote that the grail "is so frequently considered to be life-giving or life-maintaining . . . when we realize how extremely important it must have been for earliest man to possess a receptacle in which, for instance, water, the stuff of life par excellence, could be transported or stored. According to Jung's definition, the archetypes represent innate predispositions to human behavior in certain life situations and the ability to grasp their meaning. The image of the vessel could therefore correspond to such a 'pattern,' to a possibility
inherent in the psyche of finding or producing a vessel and of discovering its uses."4

The mission of these mythic Christian knights which occupied the imagination of the west for centuries was to rescue and reclaim this sacred vessel, and become the new 'grail king,' or keeper of it, to ensure its safety and its ability to perform, ostensibly, its autonomously world-redeeming task. Perhaps the most well known of the grail legends is that of Parzival, the knight who went from being a complete fool to being keeper of the grail, through his manifold journeys and battles with riddles and adversaries. Parzival learns, by degrees, that there is a whole world out there of
knights and men at-arms, a reality which his mother kept him steadfastly hidden from as long as she could, as Parzival's father and uncles all died from battle as knights. He also learns that there is a whole world out there of women- women who are most definitely not like his mother. When he first sets out upon his quest, unknowingly, fatherless, to find himself- he greets everyone exactly the way his mother told him to, and sees each new phenomenon through this safe, innocent, and painfully naive vestige.

Without going into the entire story of Parzival and his triumphs and tragedies, I wish to place it in a particular place, then step back and look at how we may have advanced past the stage where mythologies such as Parzival have anything of detrimental value for us anymore. With the advent of the Christian church, the status of women, in Jewish, Roman, and western European locales, did not change in the least. Whereas the Jews required marriage for their rabbis and incorporated the feminine into their theology through such concepts and terms as the shekinah and the Elohim, and the pagan Romans accounted fully for the feminine in their cosmology by
the worship of Hera, Juno, Aphrodite and Ceres, among many other Goddesses, the Christian church which flourished from out of these cultures did not account at all for the feminine in the universe- except only vaguely by the presence of the holy spirit. This ignoring of the fundamental, life-giving energy and sanctity of the divine feminine resulted in one of the most patriarchial cultures the world has seen, and even if women's voices were stifled from birth for many centuries, while the mainstream culture only now begins to squeamishly realize this, the deep loss, pain, and separation that the Christian west has suffered from this is quite evident. The grail and the allimportant quest to find and defend it is symbolic of finding the divine feminine within each of us, and integrating it into our characters.

The holy masculine is exemplified by the figure of Christ, however there is no corresponding feminine figure or symbol to complement him. Christians regard as heretical modest claims that the man might have been married and sexually active, which would have been expected of a rabbi of Christ's time, leaving us the figure of Christ's mother, a virgin, as the only obvious feminine influence in the entire religion. Well, nature abhors a vacuum, and an unbalanced cultural system eventually finds the crutch which it intrinsically demands to stay equilibrated enough to survive, in one form or another. My conviction is that this vacuum of femininity within the Christian tradition found its life-support system through the grail mysteries, in that they supplanted the religion with a symbol of the divine feminine, without an exoteric manifestation of which the entire tradition might have dried up. The embrace of the feminine allows woman
and man to come to terms with this pole of their Self or Individuality. As Emma Jung wrote

In all of these movements a preoccupation with the problem
of evil of nature, of the feminine and of the divine in the individual,
was manifested in a form which sought to supplement
those elements that until then had been lacking in Christianity.
The natural symbols of psychic wholeness, or the Self, do not
fully coincide empirically with the traditional figure of Christ,
since the shadow is missing in the latter or else appears split
off into the contrasting figure of the Antichrist.5

As well as bringing into waking consciousness the sacred feminine, although esoterically, the grail legends also employed many alchemical or hermetic truths which, although deeply connected to the Christian tradition, had been rejected long before, by an ecclesiastical tradition which jailed its thinkers and burned its seers. The grail legends can be seen as having the office of supplanting the Christian tradition with the additives it demanded and almost starved without after a thousand years of formal, Roman, papal authority. This was the development of the Christian age after half of its time had passed- the mid point before it came back around on itself at the end of the Piscean era, the shambles of which we are currently trying, as a culture, to uncover and make sense of our lives from so long underneath. The mechanism which Christianity (not Christ himself, but the religion which named itself after him) gave its varied cultures was a type of safety net against the horrors of the shadowsoul, or 'original sin,' a type of flotation device with which to keep from drowning in the rapids of the darkness we all fear, which we now know to have inside of us as well as without, in the world at large. For, despite the admonitions of Christ that we turn the other cheek and love our enemies, we still find our own 'Christian' culture to be rife with licentiousness and blood thirst, with vengeance, rape, and murder, on a scale now
hitherto undreamt of by previous technological eras. It is obvious now that we need a new charge, a new model, a new schema by which to judiciously, compassionately, and wisely navigate our lives through their sometimes desperate and horrifying, sometimes euphoric and illumined, twists.

An element of our current global situation is that the paradoxes which follow our daily lives, from Porsches parked beside medians lined with the homeless, lawless invasions and wars fought to 'protect' and 'secure' the invaded population, to unexplainable, 'paranormal' occurrences such as crop circles and all the range of known 'psychic' phenomena, are an increasingly obvious and unsettling force in our evolution as a species. It is at this time, this aptly titled "age of information" that we cannot anymore escape the absurdities, ironies, and horrors of the 'postmodern' world, where borders for money are nonexistent and borders for people are adamantly enforced, where corporations have more freedom than humans, and government is
dripping with corruption and institutionally-supported avarice.

It is against this back drop that, between the first and second world wars, a small but persistent interest arose in the west in the psychoactive qualities of certain chemical compounds, natural or synthetic. In 1943, LSD was synthesized by the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman, and soon after was being heralded as the new miracle drug among some European psychotherapists, allegedly reducing a year's worth of therapy into several sessions. Psylocybin, the psychedelic substance found in the amanita muscaria mushroom, was 're-discovered' by a group of Harvard psychologists in 1953, and after two or three years was being used, in Massachusetts, to successfully reduce the recidivism rate of the state jail system by seventy percent in three years.
Mescaline, the psychedelic substance which comes from a species of cactus native to the American southwest and central/south America, was the inspiration for Aldous Huxley's groundbreaking Doors of Perception, published in 1954.

These substances, which if used responsibly can allow us to fully know our hidden aspects or shadow material and the universe in clearer ways, allowing for rapid inner development and enhanced awareness of the sacred interconnectedness of all things, emerged into the collective consciousness at the same time of the holocaust, the atomic bomb, and the general upsetting of convention which the beat and hippie generations represented. Even though the first and most thorough researching institution into the uses and abuses of these substances was the United States Central Intelligence Agency, they became synonomous, by the "summer of love," with wild abandon, irresponsibility, carelessness, and eventually, permanent psychological damage. These substances do have a powerful affect on our nervous systems- and like any object or piece of technology, can be used wisely or unwisely. Their affect can easily be to strip away all of
our false pretenses and layers, the masks we hide behind, the boastful, selfish front which we all possess, and lay bare what is underneath. This can be, depending on the person, a highly unenviable experience. If you exist in a hall of mirrors, where your truest desires are repressed and hidden, and your greatest fears, underneath your constant smile of acceptance, are lurking around every corner, then taking away the mask can be a horrific trip. LSD is a technology which amplifies our consciences, and forces us to attend, either harshly or lovingly, to all of our faults and secrets. Of course, it needn't be about anything of more psycho-spiritual importance than several hour's worth of giggling and squirming around on the floor, exploding with laughter at the idea of low-fat salad dressings and whether or not the fundamental substance composing
the universe really is tension of infinitely varying colors. As in any situation, there are a wide range of variables which can affect the outcome and development of an LSD trip.

Beyond these pretenses, however, psychedelic substances have been the tool of many religious and initiatory orders at all times and places, such as the record that ergot, a fungus which is the chief ingredient of LSD, was used for visionary and oracular purposes at the mystery schools of Eulysis in ancient Greece, and the use of peyote and psylocybin by mesoamerican shamans since time immemorial, to name just two examples. They are re-emerging at the time that we are developing our new models, our novel cultural symbol systems, our new mythologies.

We find ourselves now to be at the helm of a new kind of ship, taking a direct role in the existence of good and evil, of order and chaos, versus the age when we believed it was quite alright to fold our hands and let the gods take care of things. We realize that every action we make is of vital importance- we can either be a good, noble, honest, life affirming person, or we can be otherwise; but there is no after party where one gets to finally do one's karmic laundry- the playing field is life- life, through all of its mind-splitting ecstasies and pounding agonies, its mundanities and its crises, where our work must be done, here on this earth, within these bodies. Anyone who acts decently to his fellow humans merely for the reward of heaven is a scoundrel and a con. The kingdom of heaven has been found within us, as well as the deepest pits of hell. We are the ones who mercilessly slaughter ourselves, not Satan or "the devil," or some other force 'out there.' And it is time for us to carry that weight and begin to bring some light into these
lives; this is what a new mythology is about: how to find meaning in the paradoxical absurdities of our time, and how to unite the dark and light we are coming to find the source of which to be ourselves, a task taking perhaps many lifetimes.

Psychedelic technologies and many other sundry subjects such as crop circles, the Mayan calendar, shamanism, depth psychology, and current political events people the book 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, written earlier this year by journalist and author Daniel Pinchbeck. In the book, Pinchbeck probes into the phenomenon of UFO abduction cases, and our culture's continued obsession with futuristic, technological advancement, coupled with its apocalyptic undertones. Referring to the supposed 'aliens' as "visitors," he writes

In the saga of the visitors, we are witnessing a return of the
repressed, the mythic world, surging into the postmodern
consciousness in a form that strangely fits our fixation on technology,
our space fantasies and genetic obsessions and dingy
beurocracies, and our terror of the unknown. The Grays exist
on the boundary of the sensible, seeking entry into our realm.6

In Pinchbeck's book, a shift of consciousness is described, occurring in the here-and now, in which we are absorbing our own cultural products, re-integrating them, and regurgitating them back out onto ourselves in the form of modern fantasies such as E.T. and the X-Files. Pinchbeck also focuses on the deep psychic imprint left on our lives by the 9/11 attacks, and places them into the context of living, mythic imagery, whereby the most powerful symbols of wealth and security in the modern world were toppled in less than half an hour.

The point made in 2012 which is the most pertinent to our purposes here is that we are embracing a new reality, which has found its way to us through the imagery of aliens and crop circles, through hallucinogenic revelations and shamanic adventures, whereby the soul is beheld in all of its infinitude, and a light is beheld within it which transcends the concepts of "on" or "off." Although the work is primarily in the form of a memoir, documenting certain events in authors life here and there throughout, there are particularly revelatory passages which were received by Pinchbeck during certain episodes described therein, which accompanied his shamanic, psychedelic journey, one addressing itself as Quetzalcoatl, the Mayan bird/serpent redeemer god who is to return by the closing of the present 'great cycle:'

I do not let anything interrupt me in my quest for truth neither
fear nor indifference, poverty nor cynicism. In the
realm of thought, I practice warrior discipline. As gravity
draws matter to it, I have pulled myself back into manifestation
in this realm, from the depths of cosmic space, piece
by piece and bit by bit, reassembling the component parts,
the sparks of thought, that make up my being- which is,
primarily, a form or vibrational level of consciousness.
Soon there will be a great change to your world.7

This passage, received by Pinchbeck during an ayahuasca-inspired, shamanic sabbatical in the Amazon, describes the detrimental truth it is the object of this paper to present to the reader: that we are arriving at a novel understanding in space/time, and that we are becoming increasingly aware of our own level of interconnectedness and interdependence with the rest of the spectrum of reality. The mythological structures which are emerging today are pointing us towards a mythology of more efficient technologies for accessing other realms of reality- a mythology which must address the soul in its torment, and its satiety, and teach it that neither of these states are 'true' or 'eternal.' The new mythology is one of the individual seeking salvation
through its own actions and thoughts, and on account and because of itself, and not to attempt the 'saving' of anyone else, such as one's family, nation, culture, or globe. No one can save us from our sins but ourselves. Some might view this as an egocentric or nihilistic perspective, but it is none of either. It is the acknowledgement of the fact that our personal redemption from our evil nature, which animates the evil 'without.' is necessary first if any of the larger, transpersonal issues are to be dealt with. The blind cannot lead the blind. You are responsible for your own actions; for your own sadness, and your own happiness. Vicarious atonement, a misunderstood idea from the start, can not exist as a viable option for us anymore, even in theory (which is as far as it can go anyways).

In 1904, in Cairo, the famed mountaineer, poet, and occultist Aleister Crowley received a message, channeled through his wife Rose, during the course of three one hour sessions over three days, which was called The Book of the Law by the transmitting intelligence, a praeter-human entity who called itself Aiwass. Believed by a small number of people the globe over to be the prophecy of our current aeon, supplanting that of the previous aeon's prophecies and teachings, clearing the way for new developments which they could not address, namely our growing sense of individuality and awareness as a species, and a newly and quickly globalized cultural mosaic, where old and new, orient and occident, were pushed face to face in a completely novel way. Sometimes cryptic, sometimes voluptuous, and sometimes vicious, the Book of the Law heralds a new age, an age that was seeing its initial saplings at the time of its reception, and occurred because of the fact that we were entering into a new aeon, and not the other way around. It teaches a somewhat novel moral system, a new ethic which applies to individual, inter-personal, national and even global concerns. This moral system can be summed up in the eleven words "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law," which grants that each man, woman and child has an eternal True Will, and must not only discover but follow and execute that Will, which is not of our conscious, temporal choosing, but was formulated before we were
born and which will exist after physical expiration; earthly life being just one stage among many in the career of that Will, or soul-identity.

The Book of the Law also states that "every man and every woman is a star," a unique being with his or her own particular trajectory and velocity, or orbit.8 This implies that we all have our own path, which is the wandering of the soul, and that, if we were to see its career played backwards from the final point of its dissolution back into the undifferentiated Almighty, we would be able to plainly see how the events of these and those lives affected the sequence which were the 'random' events of that one life, that nothing in the universe can be sanely conceived of as random, ever, though we have 'free will.' The will which we possess is the unique set of experiences we must be presented with and experience so that we might be purified of our own dross, and rise to the feet of the Almighty, in this lifetime or in an infinitude of them. Our ignorance of our True Will is what binds us in darkness. We may have a fleeting will to obtain a new car or a will to walk up to and charm that woman across the bar- but this could be called the 'conscious will,' which has to open up to and understand the higher True Will, or 'soul-purpose.' Crowley writes that

a man may think it is his duty to act in a certain way,
through having made a fancy picture of himself, instead
of investigating his actual nature. For example, a
woman may make herself miserable for life by thinking
that she prefers love to social consideration, or vice versa.
One woman may stay with an unsympathetic husband
when she would really be happy in an attic with a lover,
while another may fool herself into a romantic elopement
when her only true pleasures are those of presiding at
fashionable functions. Again, a boy's instinct may tell him
to go to sea, while his parents insist on his becoming a
doctor. In such a case, he will be both unsuccessful
and unhappy in medicine.9

If human beings, as unique individuals and as spiritual beings who are naturally, under healthy circumstances, well-meaning and communal in tendency, cannot be allowed to safely express or articulate their true, unique and incomparable character in whatever form they so desire, then entire cultures can become generally will-less. A perusal of the mythological portrayals of the world's heroes availed to me the knowledge that heroes can act by two agencies, in their influence upon individual and social development of cultures; they can distract and abstract, or they can clarify and inspire. In our culture, flash-in-the-pan pseudo-heroes are created, puffed up, sold off, and forgotten about quicker than I usually change my socks, and we have the blissful
alternative of attending to the comings and goings of these heroes, these celebrated personalities. These identifications have the demonstrable affect of distracting the conscious will of the individual so much so that even passing whims of the existence of one's own unique passage in life are kept locked in the dungeons of our dark, foggy, scabby shadows. Individual, here-and-now experiences of the one sacred moment that IS, through some shiveringly gorgeous, langourous and leaping union with the beloved, or by spirit-shattering terror, insidious cold-blooded evil, and grief of desert proportions, are stymied by our obsession with the 'over theres' and the 'back thens,' the beeping lights and the sexy girls.

Blaise Pascal said that all of humankind's problems came from our refusal to sit in the dark by ourselves every day. To discover our True Will, we must examine ourselves and seek to unearth and better understand what our particular mission is in this life. This takes time, effort, energy- and love. The idea that we are all one substance, from one source, and of one mind, one body, one spirit- one love- is pleasant and beautiful, however, once one begins to instill this habitually or 'think the world' through this lens, a bleak picture emerges, which can be terrifying if carried to its extremes. These ideas can no longer serve as pleasant distractions from the rusty brass tacks of modern everyday life- of car accidents and interest rates, rotten vegetables and intra-personal fascism. They must be taken, humbly and with quivering hand, like the tough medicine that they are. It is that time. It is that time in our development, as a probably very peculiar species in and amongst the manifested universes, where we are reaching an ecological, philosophical, spiritual boiling point and yet from birth most of us heard that common maxim "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" repeatedly, and we just can't quite get it together to be consciously aware of the predictable outcome of our actions, with care for all sentient beings around, and act accordingly. Our actions have infinite ramifications, and if they
are to mean anything of cosmic importance, within our own journey, if we are to accept the lessons which it is our lot in this humble life to learn, and delve deep within, to the rich, black, silt at the core of our being, infinite in and of itself, then we must live that life in humble prostration before the seeming triumphs and tragedies across all shades of reality, seeking out the mechanism and reasoning by which the universe seems to manifest itself, and extending our minds out always to its furthest reaches.

This review of several perspectives, from that of current 'paranormal' or apocalyptically-tilted phenomenon of the human psyche, resulting in what we call psychism, UFOs, crop circles, and the effects of psychedelic substances, to that of Thelema and the proposition of a True Will of each human being, inalienable and necessary, I have propped up as a response to our history of archetype and hero worship in myth and depth psychology.

We stand at a particular time in recorded history where all of our fundamental models and paradigms of the nature of the manifest universe and our place in it are being incrementally ripped from the surface of our sensorium like a scab from a wound, revealing a long-emerging, novel means of relating to psychic and mental, as well as material and physical realities. Our True Wills, or orbits, are free yet fixed; they are free in choice of word and deed- but fulfill a presence, process, and series of lessons which appear to be necessary and deterministic. If we can accept the reality of an inalienable, individualized, True Will for each human, existing in tandem, throughout, and beyond the conscious will, then if we can see that, perhaps, we each must actualize a necessary function in the universe- but we cannot know what it is if we refuse to seek and develop it. There are several systems suggested by the sages which seem to supply the practitioner which increasingly deeper understandings of hirself, namely yoga or meditation. Although this these types of practices are highly important and efficient ways of stilling and directing the mind towards the inner, True Will, and should be given honest investigation, one's spiritual path must include all of the observable phenomena which occurs to one's consciousness. Spiritual practice must include everything- from one's means of livelihood and self-fulfillment, down to the way in which you treat, on the most minutest of scales, the most foul and repulsive person.

The point is as simple as this: there is the potential at every moment wherein we can heroically grow creatively together, as unique expressions of the Almighty, as drops in the cosmic ocean, as thoughts in the Infinite Living Mind. Or, we can batter each other down for dollars and cents, or for words and ideas, until we become a tiny and obsolete presence on the face of the earth. We can create new weapons and a new war, new barbed-wire and new internment camps, or a new future and a new clarity- a one love and a one mind, of many bodies, and many thoughts- infinitely and with infinite forms transposing itself back onto and to itself, rushing towards the
quickening of days rapidly approaching.

Sources Used

Jung, Emma. von Franz, Marie-Louise. The Grail Legend. (Princeton UP, 1998).
Pinchbeck, Daniel. 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, (New York, Penguin: 2006).
Crowley, Aleister. The Book of the Law, (York Beach, Maine, Weiser/OTO: 2004).
1 Crowley, Aleister. The Book of the Law. (York Beach, ME, Weiser: 2004) p. 19
2 Ibid. p. 20
3 Jung, Emma. von Franz, Marie-Louise. The Grail Legend. (Princeton UP, 2004) p. 111
4 Ibid. p. 114
5 Ibid. p. 102
6 Pinchbeck, Daniel. 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, (New York, Penguin: 2006) p. 141
7 Ibid. p. 367
8 Crowley, Aleister. The Book of the Law. (York Beach, ME, Weiser: 2004) p. 25
9 Ibid. p. XV

a poem for ahmad

in that ancient silence of the desert fathers,
you and i argued in aramaic once, a long and long time ago
i remember your accent
or is that just my shitty memory?
still, i miss your stories
we used to speak of epics and empires,
and you shared my love of life, slamming
orange juice while I liquored myself
at bars full of empty people, as I saw for the first time
that i was an empty people
and still our conversations became the stuff of forest fires
our mutual understanding grew into families we
celebrated all manner of holidays with,
over just a sip of tea, or a flip through the papers.
our world's are full trouble and chaos.
crying babies and grandmas and hollowed-out mosques.
i will always remember your tears when you lost your friend.
i would kill the man who killed him.
i know deep down that somehow my country took his life.
i burn with vitriolic revenge for your best brother who fell.
so do you.
you come from a torn place.
i become a bitter person. i hate all things and people and
you don't really understand.
you wear scars like french cufflinks- we keep speaking to the minutes.
we are the same age- how much we have in common!
i dreamed my whole childhood of meeting a friend like you!
i tell you about how new york is not america, and you tell me
how baalbek is "just stones..."
we clumsily try to connect with and present 'our people,' yet I know
that it's all a sham. we are our people. that's how it is.
i cry sometimes when i think of how separate we are.
you are always my brother.

The Ranchos de Taos Mystery Painting

I went out to the Saint Francis de Asisi Church in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico (about four miles south of where I sit now). They have this old painting there, completed in 1896 by Henri Ault, a French-Canadian, called "The Shadow of the Cross;" a lifesize portrait of Jesus standing on the banks of the sea of Galilee. It's seven feet tall.
There is a mystery surrounding "The Shadow of the Cross." It glows when the lights around it are extinguished. Ault, the creator of the piece, noticed its glowing character when he chanced upon it one night in his studio.
The first time that I went to view and study the "mystery painting," I had stationed myself in a more or less bouyant dynamic, and two or three gin and tonics later, felt as if I were in a position to truly behold the enigmajesty of the "mystery painting." I traveled there, armed in the custody of my critical thinking cap (an old Northwest Airlines cap I stole from an asshole I used to work for), and my "research jacket" (a fairly nice gray blazer I had just mined from the free-box), and proceeded to commence the reconnaisance mission, the fact-finding voyage, the getting of the scoop, etc., etc.
We pull into the parking lot, extinguish the beers, and figure out the kind of cash we have. Throwing open the doors, and grinning, we saunter on into the exhibit. A tariff of three dollars is expected. Aquiescing, I attempt light-hearted, relatively perverse talk with the nuns working the window. "You can go right in," the most biologically-evolved one commanded, and we shuffled along respectively.
Once inside, we found ourselves in a room filled, wall to wall, with various sterling and apparently gold liturgical artifacts. We shuffled along in front of the display cases bemusedly before being herded into seats to watch an educational film on the building of the church. At the very tail end of the agonizingly-boring documentary, they finally mentioned the mystery painting, and something of its history. It still glowed in the dark in strange ways, such as in an outline of Jesus' torso, head and shoulders, and somehow showed the "shadow" of what looked like a cross held above his left shoulder. The cross did not appear in the actual painting when the lights were on. It was made before Madam Curie discovered radium, before we even had any knowledge of so-called glow in the dark paints.
I shuddered briefly in front of the image but have seen phenomena far more disturbing and bizarre. We were allowed to stand right in front of the painting, and turn the lights on and off at will. The two tourists we were in there with didn't like being in the pitch black with strangers and anomalies, evidently, because they scurried out of there as fast as they could. Of course because of this the nuns waiting outside the door decided that all of us were done examining it and promptly shuffled us out in lieu of the newly-paid patrons.
For a town of 4,500 residents, this odd, religious painting is about as paranormal as things get. Life is simple here. There are no alarms, no surprises, no bum gauntlets to walk through, no dark alleyways, no smog, no Satanists, no muggings, no beeping cars. Just the blue sky, and the mountain. And I honestly find the blue sky and the mountain boring. They don't talk, they don't discern between the general and the particular, they don't enforce or advertise any moral law, and they certainly don't party. Who needs mountains? They're just piles of dirt. I fail to see their importance. They got grandfathered in.
What matters to me? The library. Row after row of human-generated information and ideas. For free. Its always warm there, you'd be an idiot to not score a sack when you want one, and people are generally very gentle, polite, and austere there. What else matters? I don't know. Maybe just writing in this goddamn machine, trying to put together a beautiful sentence or two. And of course all of the beautiful things about life. Like waking up to the charming, cheerful, wittiness, and supple, relaxed flesh of your true love, on an open morning of sunlight and fresh-squeezed grapefruit juice, fresh pot of coffee brewing and a day at the museum. "Paris in the spring", and all that. But the demons never seem to quit squawking and hooting like a band of depraved, slobbering, hyena-like speed freaks, cackling at each new slip-up in mine and the lives of those around me.

Joseph Campbell's Creative Mythology in Light of Info-Psychology, Chaos Magic, and Hologram Theory

Arbor
Fall 2006

The notion that a somehow final point of all-knowingness about the nature of the universe, about the inner nature of energetic relationships can be attained simply and by stint of allegiance to a particular belief system or scientific theory, is patent nonsense. And, as hunger ensures and prepares for satiety, the truth seeker plunges forward into life’s absurdities and statements and tears at it flanks so that sHe might be better able to understand the cosmos by the light of wisdom. It should be especially apparent to the student of culture, philosophy, comparative mythology or religion that a deeper strain than we are led to suspect exists between inner reality and outer reality. It is that whose “center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” that we wish to experience, to be held by, to better understand. We have been purged by now of the archaic delusion that we will find a message of love, charity, justice or transcendent meaning by the talking heads of government, business, academia, and organized religion. These are
institutions long bereft of any sense of the intrinsic worth, freedom, and individuality of every human being, and the imperturbable need of every child, woman, and man to better seek and understand the order and nature of their true will. Government would hope for the horizon of human potential to appear as a monolithic statement of approval of their hell-contrived machinations. It would assume that you knew not what was order for your household, and that you would gladly supply it with the funds to arm police squads for every street corner. Politicians, at this stage of history, choose their profession either from a desire for petty, state approved power, or from naïve ignorance of the true nature of social and political change. The heads of business would prefer that you remained haply unaware of your own unique nature and path, because one cannot sell beauty products to one who already deeply feels herself, by all possible eyes, as beautiful. Business interests would rather you constantly conceived of yourself as pathetic, impotent, ugly, uninteresting, and lacking, for how else do you convince adults to continue buying toys? Academia works, curiously, so that the most exciting work and that most mind-expanding theorems are not only ignored but in most cases deliberately repressed in order to maintain the status quo. The most dangerous things in a western educational paradigm, from kindergarten to professorship, is an independent, analytical, unafraid mind which chooses to evaluate the world based on its own morals and experience, and not on those of the establishment. How many of us were beaten down and called stupid for our ability to creatively think and see differently than the sheep we were surrounded by at a young age in those dungeon-like classrooms, while the most passive, uninterested, goosesteppers made the highest marks? And finally, religious institutions, while in theory gaining closer to the answers to our problems, have more often than not, in the west especially, maintained a firm hold over the plight of the spiritual centers of their adherents, for ultimately, organized religion is born from the unfortunate idea that if you do not accept exactly the terms of the given belief system, however archaic and ridiculous, then your soul will burn in hell. In all four categories; government, business, academia, and organized religion, alternatives to the established norm are stymied, ignored and ridiculed, until they gain enough steam amongst the rabble, and are then
changed into the new orthodoxy. In all four categories we see institutions who purport to provide our lives with sustenance and meaning, with order and with higher understanding, and we have seen how they paradoxically do nothing but squelch these values.

Indeed, at the apex of modern achievement, with our technological wizardry gathered all around us, and skyscrapers which beg of Babel, means of force which dwarf even that most jealous and bloodthirsty Old Testament deity, and amounts of horded money which would make of King Solomon a pauper, we remain empty handed when it comes to that nagging question: why am I here? Why am “I” at all? What is “I?” From within these very modern parameters to which we find ourselves bound, we seek a higher order, a Divine hand by which not only are the oceans and mesas drawn, but are the tales and directive themes of the universe, the keys unlocking the doors of a higher perception are to be found. A most potentially pure place to which to cast our gaze for meaning, inner and outer, is myth. Far from being merely a form of folk entertainment, myths point our eyes to where we find ancient wisdom unfettered by the petty authority of a pope or a king. Myths are steeped in our own unique brand of humanly wisdom which has always
and at every point existed in order to push us further in our quest for meaning. And as we have seen in the previous three chapters, the world’s mythologies, like the world’s religious and philosophical systems, contain within each of them the same golden thread which connects them all like pearls on a necklace, and it is this element of uniformity between them which charges their authority with timelessness and universality. For whether we speak of the Sun, Krishna, Osiris, Adonis or Jesus, the themes of the mysteries of birth, the tragedy of earthly life (with its four dimensions) and its mysterious death, and finally the triumph of re-birth or resurrection, are all apparent and avail to us a glimpse of the reason or purpose behind these processes. Humanity has been telling the same mythic stories for millenia, with very little fundamental thematic modification, because the lessons were, evidently, slow to be learned. The pedagogical process of mythological revelation has always, as far as we can tell, been of a descending nature; the meaning which we seek and find in myth comes from ’out there,’ from the Gods and Goddesses, from the one God, or from the great void beyond. Their authority and value are based upon where they are believed to come from. The story of humanity’s slow march through the ages is one of the competition between these loci of power and their attendant followers, unknowingly and at all times bellowing the same general themes against one another, threatening the wrath of their God upon whosoever does not believeth in him. In short, throughout nearly all of our recorded history, from the deluge to the theory of relativity, we have sought meaning in the ‘out there,’ the higher, the beyond, the super-human. This relationship between center of transcendent power and eventual envelope of its wisdom runs from high to low, fine to gross, God to human, priest to congregant, teacher to student.

However, it appears that a shift of tectonic proportion has been underway and exponentially gaining momentum, outwardly here and esoterically there, by which we come to find the mythic meaning of our existence, and that is the basic premise of Joseph Campbell’s work Creative Mythology. Creative Mythology is the fourth and final book in a series called The Masks of God, wherein Campbell reviewed primitive, Oriental, and Occidental mythologies, culminating in the work under scrutiny here, which proposes that around the time of the European middle ages, mankind began to project its own values into myth in novel ways, infusing, almost knowingly, itself into its gods and goddesses, thereby evolving the pedagogical relationship described above into a spherical, transpersonal system of meaning, in essence leaving behind the ‘trickle down’ structure of the previous ten millennia. As Campbell himself described the thesis of the book:

"In the context of traditional mythology, the symbols are presented in socially maintained rites, through which the individual is required to experience, or will pretend to have experienced, certain insights, sentiments, and commitments. In what I am calling "creative" mythology, on the other hand, this order is reversed: the individual has had an experience of his own - of order, horror, beauty, or even mere exhilaration - which he seeks to communicate through signs; and if his realization has been of a certain depth and import, his communication will have the value and force of living myth..."

Instead of one receiving lessons and values from the higher, one creates one’s own lessons and values out of the very stuff of one’s life. This novel premise places the individual in the axis mundi, the frontispiece, the center of hir own affairs, cosmic or molecular, and demands of hir that sHe find meaning in the chaos surrounding hir, and not merely to prostrate hirself before another’s altar.

In the book, Campbell takes the reader on a journey through the major mythological themes from the middle ages to the renaissance, to the age of enlightenment and finally to twentieth century thought, and reaffirms his doctrine that myth has four primal functions: the first being to “reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendous et fascinans of this universe,” the second to provide a taxonomic, systematic cosmological schema of this universe, the third “is the enforcement of a moral order,” and the fourth to align the individual to “himself (the microcosm), his culture (the mesocosm), the universe (the macrocosm), and [finally] that awesome ultimate mystery which is both beyond and within himself and all things (Campbell, p. 4-6).” The final function is that which concerns what he calls creative mythology, in that it places
emphasis on the individual first, ascending upwards to the highest. It “corrects the authority holding to the shells of forms produced and left behind by lives once lived. Renewing the act of experience itself, it restores to existence the quality of adventure, at once shattering and reintegrating the fixed, already known, in the sacrificial creative fire of the becoming thing that is no thing at all but life, not as it will be or as it should be, as it was or as it never will be, but as it is, in depth, in process, here and now, inside and out (Campbell p. 7-8).”

Within creative mythology, the burden of purpose and meaning, of triumph and tragedy is in the hands of the individual, and not a culture, a belief system, not a hero or a god. The template for inculcation is in the very processes of one’s life, and the curious patterns and tendencies, the absurdities and chaos which fill that life. It is not to be found in an ancient text, or on the lips of an authority figure, or even in the processes of nature as it is, but in the phantasmagoria of our inner labyrinth of longing and fear, and the beasts which fill the dark wooded path we have found ourselves, upon reaching maturity, to be slowly treading, never straight but always forward, whether we enjoy it or not. The efficacy of towering, thunderous, dogmatic edicts issued from the mouths of machine-like men no longer is sufficient, alone, to alleviate our straits we find ourselves to be in at this time. An unfathomable amount of universes like our own exist ‘out there,’ an ‘out there’ so incalculably distant that even terms designating the dimension of space itself, as we understand it, seem to beg of re-definition. The amount of planets which may or may not harbor what we call ‘life,’ namely consciousness or intelligence, could be permeating the
entire ALL of existing existences, beings perhaps made only of blue light, the coherence of whose nervous structures compared to ours could be as a diamond to a clump of dirt. These things we can safely assume, and they only scratch the surface of possible possibilities, expanding further and wider out until infinity itself is reached. The authority of mortals and our peculiar dogmas, models, and schemas can no longer provide the salvation we desire, deserve, and delay.

An important theme or leitmotiv within mythology and literature which Campbell addresses is what he calls the love-death. The love-death has become a central schema within the mythology of the west, and has influenced not only secular literature, from where much of our modern (past 900 years) mythology has derived from, but also our understanding of the mystery schools which flourished in Europe after Pythagoras, as well as Gnostic and Christian myth. In drawing Egyptian, Babylonian, greater near eastern, Greek, Roman, and Celtic mythic systems together, Campbell places the lovedeath theme in the center of western mythic novelty since the middle ages. Much of this is based on the court singers and poets, or minstrels, of the middle ages, wherefrom came some of the first European literature. The love-death is a novel force in literature, according to Campbell, which, once it found its way into mainstream poetry, became an exceedingly powerful one. This distinct genre of troubadour poetry sought to communicate “the celebration of a love the aim of which was neither marriage nor the dissolution of the world. Nor was it even carnal intercourse; nor, again . . . the enjoyment, by analogy, of the “wine” of a divine love and the quenching of the soul in God. The aim, rather, was life directly in the experience of love as a refining, sublimating, mystagogic force, of itself opening the pierced heart to the sad, sweet, bittersweet, poignant melody of being through love’s own anguish and love’s joy (Campbell p. 178).”

The power behind this theme is not an individual’s love for hir own family, tribe, culture, country, or god but for the love which sHe finds that obliterates the need for any of the above mentioned items. It is in this love which the individual finds hir salvation, hir hidden meaning, hir reason for living, and even more importantly, hir reason for dying. For in love, and in sexual union, we become one with our beloved and in a sense lose ourselves in our beloved, which is no more a metaphor for union with god, but a redemptive, soul-cleansing process in and of itself. For above the lowly material plane, the strict, biological differences between masculine and feminine disappear and the two lovers, while in rapturous union, represent the cosmic whereby “opposites,” previously thought to be of separate substance, come together and thereby create something new. The Greek god Pan and the European god Baphomet (commonly thought by the ignorant to be Satan), with its horns, hooved feet, phallus, female breasts, one arm pointing up and one down, with solve written on one arm and coagula on the other, represents this blending of opposites; Pan and Baphomet were worshipped as models of the blending of opposites which is a sometimes painful but purifying aspect of higher consciousness or closer union with god.

Linking the love-death theme historically, Campbell remarks that “there is evidence as well of a generic kinship of the classic mystery cults not only with the grandiose Egyptian mythic complex of that dying god Osiris and the Mesopotamian Tammuz, but also with those widely distributed primitive myths and rites of the sacrificed youth or maiden (or, more vividly, the young couple ritually killed embracing in a sacramental love-death), whose flesh, consumed in cannibal communion, typifies the mystery of that Being beyond duality that lives partitioned in us all (Campbell 203-204).”

Another theme within western European literature since the middle ages, which stands as more of a function of the mythology therein, is what he calls anamorphosis, "to form anew," whereby the scattered pieces of our lives, the different episodes and fragments of memories and events which make us what we are and are to be, can be brought together and unified through myth or mythic processes. "Chance experiences, scattered throughout a lifetime, when viewed reflected in a mythic form, come together and show an order in depth that is the order of man everlasting," the process by which enfolded becomingness unfolds and becomes, and then again folds back up into itself its scattered segments (Campbell, 325). This is perhaps the most important function of myth in the modern world- to show us that hidden reality which is more real than this one, whereby the "causal, chance, fragmentary events of an apparently undistinguished life disclose the form and dimension of a classic epic of destiny when the conic mirror is applied, and our own scattered lives today, as well, are then seen, also, as anamorphoses. Like Shakespeare's mirror held up to nature, the symbols bring forward into view that informing Form of forms which, through apparent discontinuity, is 'manifest,' as the
Upanishads declare, 'yet hidden: called Moving-in-secret.' Primitive and Oriental thought is full of presentiments of this kind: on the crudest level, in the sentiment of magic and its force; more subtly, in the recognition of the force of dream and vision in the shaping of a life (Campbell, 195)."

We have described two of the most important issues which the book addresses, and which, I believe, display Campbell's thesis best. To reiterate that thesis, it is simply that, in contrast to what we can tell from primitive and ancient mythological systems and the cultures they affected, since around the time of the middle ages, it seems that we have been placed in a position of directly influencing our own mythology, and affecting it through the events of our own individual lives, and the new mythology, which Campbell calls 'creative,' is a product of this novel development. It appears that the source from which we derive our mythic themes has availed itself more so to our involvement, and this is the point; the bounce-back factor from deep-seated wish to collective unconscious to waking consciousness is occurring faster that it did, say, 2,000 years ago.

I wish to here depart from Campbell temporarily, in order to better place his thesis in a broader forum which he himself seems unaware of, but which is vital to bring it fully into practical understanding. There are several places we can look to for understanding of this phenomenon, which Campbell comes nowhere near, and which can explain, I think, something of the mechanism by which this is occurring and does occur. It is precisely something of the metaphysical process by which this occurs that I want to attempt to explain, from several different vestiges, one psychological, one spirito-magical, the other quantum physical.

In one of his later works, Info-Psychology, Timothy Leary posits a theory of nervous system modification related to the way in which we receive, integrate, and transmit information, and the possibilities now open to us of manipulating not only the way that our brains perceive reality, but the actual reality that they perceive. The premise is that "all realities are neurological- patterns of impulses received, stored and transmitted by neural structures. Consciousness is defined as energy received by structure. Intelligence is defined as energy transmitted by structure. For the human being the structures are neural circuits and their anatomical connections (Leary p. 32)." He is describing the means by which we interact with the information we come into contact with, such as the morals, taboos, themes, and cosmologies of myth- and specifically how it is that we can evolve new means of creating them, modifying them, and turning them into healthy templates for psychological growth, when they have become outdated and useless. It is at this crux that we find ourselves in, a 'pre-partum' depression before the next sweeping evolutionary step, which to Leary will propel us not only to higher levels of reality as a species, but to other planets as well. The process by which this occurs is an interactive one, and to Leary the choice to participate in the construction of reality has arrived because of the slow evolution of our nervous systems- for the first time in history it is a widespread possibility that we can actually create the world to be what we want it to be-- using our minds. "Whatever the mind can conceive it tends to create. As soon as humans accept and neurologically imprint the notion of higher levels of intelligence and of circuits of the nervous system as yet unactivated- a new philosophy of evolution will emerge (Leary p. 3)." These "higher levels of intelligence" are a product of our discovery of atomic and quantum mechanics, which propose such ideas as bi-location (wherein one particle can literally be shown to be in two different places at the same time), and also that matter is composed of waves of energy which are, for some reason or another, at such an incredibly slow (comparably) rate of vibration that they appear as solid, contiguous forms. Leary's thesis is that this energy is readily open to us via our nervous systems to be fully understood, interacted with, and re-composed, on a mental or psychic level, thereby addressing indirectly the possibilities of creating mythologies. "The brain is a biochemical- electric-computer in which each nerve impulse acts as an information "quanta" or "bit"; that the nervous is structurally wired into genetically pre-programmed circuits designed to automatically select and relay certain perceptual cues and to discharge rote reactions; that imprinting of models accidentally present in the environment at critical periods determines the tunnel realities in which humans live (italics mine, Leary p. 2)." The models here spoken of, which are "accidentally present in the environment," are the mythological structures which have developed sedimentally over the course of thousands of years, and which are now obviously fracturing, crumbling, and re-forming at an exponentially faster rate. It is a theory of psycho-spirito-mental evolution which greatly informs Campbell's "creative mythology."

Another system of thought which illuminates Campbell's Creative Mythology, called Chaos Magic, was advanced by a British quantum-physicist and occultist named Peter Carroll in 1992, just five years after Leary came out with Info-Psychology. Carroll's primary theory, Chaos Magic Theory (CMT) rests on the postulation of a dimension of reality in and around matter which he calls 'ether,' an ancient word, it is true, but he has his peculiar definition: "ether acts as though it were a form of information emitted by matter that is instantaneously available everywhere and has some power to shape the beavior of other matter (Carroll p. 21)." By seeking, accessing and understanding the etheric dimension, which can be compared to the 'void' from which atoms derive the velocity and trajectory of their movement, as well as the collective unconscious, we can directly interact with and perhaps even manipulate reality- material, mental, and spiritualon
a level hitherto undreamt of outside of the magical systems of the world. The novelty of CMT is that it incorporates Quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity- and builds upon them. Carroll states that "wave functions [material reality] are actually a mathematical description of etheric patterns and that this ether can be considered as a form of information exchange between material events operating over . . . Planck time . . . that the etheric dimension should be considered as somehow orthogonal to the ordinary (pseudo) time dimension of classical relativistic descriptions (Carroll p. 7)."

In his attempt to resolve the millennia-long dispute between science and religion, and between the esoteric and the exoteric, Carroll places CMT at the crossroads between these confusedly divided means of viewing the world, and chastises both for their inherent inability to evolve their world-views- the scientific or materialist world view is empty handed because it takes no meaningful account of the transcendent and infinite, the divine and supreme, and the religious-spiritual world view because it cannot bring down its convictions about the divine into real world exploration. CMT explodes the supposedly necessary divide between these two, asserting that they only need to be separated amongst unevolved peoples. "The problem for scientists is that they are observing and trying to describe effects due to something which they refuse to believe can exist. The problem for magicians is that they refuse to believe that the effects they create or observe could be due to something for which equations could be written (Carroll, 40)."

Again, as we said above with regards to Info-Psychology, CMT goes beyond Campbell, in a sense, in that it describes the actual nuts and bolts of this shift in consciousness which Campbell's book states is upon us in novel ways. We can thank Campbell for annotating the past eight hundred years of western mythology in order to show that this shift is occurring, and that we are beginning to take an increasingly more influential role in the formulation of our myths, however he offers almost nothing as to the 'how' or 'why.' Info-Psychology and Chaos Magic Theory, in conjunction with Creative Mythology, provide an explanation for this mysterious new echelon of mentation we are, as a species, revolving closer to, without diminishing or cheapening its
mysterium.

A third theory of the nature of our interaction with the universe, which was advanced by Czech psychologist Stanislav Grof in 1985, and which was elaborated greatly upon by American writer Michael Talbot, is the theory that the universe is a sort of hologram of infinite proportions. "There is evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it- from snowflakes to maple trees to falling stars and spinning electrons are only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond space and time," writes Talbot (Talbot p. 1)." The holographic theory of reality proposes that not only does the universe seem to act and react, to manifest and maintain airtight interdependence like a hologram does, but our minds are a sort of microhologram, which are inseparable from the whole. Holograms are similar to our minds in
that a piece of holographic film, broken off from the whole, can still project a hologram when a laser is beamed through it, losing no amount of data or clarity. To this phenomenon, Talbot attributes "associative memory," "our ability to recognize familiar things," "photographic memory," "the transference of learned skills," and "phantom limb sensations and how we construct a 'world-out-there.'" The hologram theory does not state that the universe is a hologram, which would be absurd, but simply that the hologram is the best model that we have to explain the inexplicable phenomena of both universe and mind. The "ether" of CMT is related to material reality in that one creates wave patterns which affect the potential and actual occurrences in the other. The phenomenal reality of matter and our interaction with it is composed of these wave patterns, which have their inspiration in the etheric wave patterns, which are unseen except to the people who have the ability, who we usually call psychics or clairvoyants. The hologram theory states that this same process occurs, just that it is in the order of a hologram. With this theory, we have "come full circle, that the discovery that consciousness contains the whole of objective reality- the entire history of biological life on the planet, the world's religions and mythologies, and the dynamics of both blood cells and stars- to the discovery that the material universe can also contain within its warp and weft the innermost processes of consciousness, Such is the nature of the deep connectivity that exists between all things in a holographic universe (Talbot p. 81)."

If this is the order of the universe then perplexity is unfounded regarding Campbell's idea that we are taking a more direct role in shaping our own mythologies. What is more likely is that we have always had the ability to do this, but a shift in focus has occurred, and we are now more concerned than ever with ourselves as individuals and our own unique experiences as the deciding factor of the framework of our cultures and mythologies, rather than on one god or group of gods 'out there,' wielding power which must be feared and submitted to. This shift of focus on the individual as the unit of importance in culture, as apart from the family and nation, a shift that has been occurring in an exponentially quicker fashion, especially since WWII, is part of the trend towards a Creative Mythology, versus a passed-down or received mythology. For, as Campbell said in conclusion of the book, "today all norms are in flux, so that the individual is thrown . . . back upon himself, into the inward sphere of his own becoming, his forest adventurous without way or path, to come through his own integrity in experience to his own
intelligible Castle of the Grail (Campbell, 677)." And as the means of finding their own beacon or cornerstone in this world of flux becomes ever more precarious in our postmodern, post-religious, materialistic culture of plasma screen preacher-men and bible-quoting, mass murdering heads of state, the fundamentally new evolution of ideas which Timothy Leary, Peter Carroll, and Michael Talbot have provided us with can serve, I believe, to assist a new generation of truth seekers to find a new kind of light, a new kind of enlightenment, and a new kind of mythology.

Sources Used

Campbell, Joseph. Creative Mythology (New York, Penguin Compass: 1968)
Leary, Timothy. Info-Psychology (Phoenix, New Falcon: 1987)
Carroll, Peter. Liber Kaos (York Beach, ME, Weiser: 1992)
Talbot, Michael. The Holographic Universe (New York, HarperCollins: 1991)

What is the Path of the Hero? pt. 1

Arbor
Fall 2006

Across the banner of human history, in all ages and climes, is emblazoned the phenomenon of the hero, and our unique attachment to its ideal. The will of humankind, the desire of all peoples who have left us record of their existence, reflects a yearning towards this state of development, the crown-point of positive intent. Whether the image is of New York firefighters risking everything to rescue the victims of the World Trade Center attacks, or of a Socrates who spoke only the truth and because of which was forced to drink poison, or of a world savior nailed to a cross in order to save the world from its dastardly state of ignorance and spiritual vacuity, this ideal, or archetype of the hero, has persisted throughout our story on this planet. The names, faces, scenarios, and motifs evolve, however the essence of hero-nature persists as does gravity or photosynthesis. We are shaped and informed by this ideal of hero-nature just as much as we shape and inform it. The hero character or hero-nature represents to us the cumulative model of all of our achievement as humans, on the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual planes. We have the choice, every second of every incarnation, to embody this archetype, and strive in the only way that we uniquely can as individuals, towards its light. It is a beacon, a lighthouse, which we use, consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or erringly, to understand our actions and decide which further to perform. Hero-nature represents the goal which we all feel and know we must attain to, through triumph or tragedy, sickness or health.

A work which, since its publication in 1949, has been the makeshift authority on the subject of the hero, is Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces. It is a review of the subject of the hero through the lens of the world's mythologies from the prime authority on comparative mythology. As the work I will be doing over the course of this semester revolves around the axiomatic question of "what is the path of the hero?", I decided to choose this book as the first I would be studying, since it is such a renowned authority on the subject, above all others. The work is outlined so that the entire path of the hero, from the prophecies of hir birth to the tales told after hir death, is presented and scrutinized, using as its raw material the mythologies of most of the known civilizations on the planet, from the Eskimos to the Aboriginees, from the Sumerians to Star Wars. Written in high literary style, and mostly free from the bonds of academic pomposity, it speaks of the entire palette of humanity's understanding of its own unique, universal schema; that of the hero. It is the purpose of this paper to comb through this work and provide an adequate synopsis of its message, and to further answer the question of just what we have to learn about our own collective existence and disposition, and what we can each individually do to aspire to the "height of our halo," by studying the mythologies of the world.

Hero With a Thousand Faces is broken up into chapters which describe the elements of the hero's archetypal journey in sequence. Part one outlines the adventure of the hero, from hir departure, through the initiatory experiences sHe then must experience, to the variegated stages of hir return to the world of everyday, temporal existence, and the trials sHe must undergo therein in light of hir newfound, cosmic boon.

The departure of the to-be-hero usually begins with some sort of uncanny experience which acts to press the character beyond the scope of everyday understanding of the world. As Campbell says, "a blunder- apparently the merest chance- reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood (p. 51)." There is some sort of unexpected herald of a future sequence of events, to which the character is drawn inextricably, if sHe is ready, able, and willing to heed the call. The bringer of this message is "often dark, loathly, or terrifying, judged evil by the world; yet if one could follow, the way would be opened through the walls of day into the dark where the jewels glow (p.53)." At this stage, the to-be-hero is another mere mortal, a john doe in the world of everyday comings and goings, however, for one reason or another, sHe has manifested enough inner purity, understanding, and moral scope to be able to receive the message which is in order, waiting and ready to be assimilated. By definition, the herald of the existence of the path must be in some sense bizarre or mystifying, and must be worthy to chase after. Campbell tells of a fairy tale wherein a young princess has dialogue with a lonely frog who retrieves her golden ball from a stream in return for the fulfillment of its wish to be her companion, and an Arapaho tale of a young woman who sees a porcupine scurrying along a tree branch, following it out further and further, until she cannot anymore be seen by her peers who remain on the ground. This occurrence marks the transition of the character from the mundanity of everyday existence into the otherworld, the strange, the dark, or the subconscious. Campbell calls this the "call to adventure," which "signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown (p. 58)." It represents the call to delve into the deep, rich, black silt at the ground of our being, wherein our hitherto hidden desires, motivations, and memories lie, where we must go if we are to understand our true nature and integrate the
elements of it which we had previously kept banished from our waking consciousness.

The stage which commonly follows the "call to adventure" is the hero's refusal of the call. The reason that the call is usually refused is simply because it requires changes in the character and actions of the hero which are altogether inconvenient and painful, which is "essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one's own interest (p. 60)." The difficulty lies in the newfound existence of a choice. If one is stuck in the mire and has no chance to get out, then at least the internal anguish of being able to will the positive changes to occur cannnot be experienced; only the baneful, dull, unsurprising decay of everyday life. But when one receives the call to rise to greatness, and sees the distant possibility of its attainment, "one is harassed, both day and night, by the divine being that is the image of the living self within the locked labyrinth of one's own disoriented psyche (ibid)." When the call is refused, the entity who sought the hero with the call typically reels in spiteful anger and vengeance, at the dismissal of its crystalline offer to escape the realm of normalcy, a gift for which no one can directly apply and which very few are offered. In short, the hero offends those who are trying to help hir, and usually this action stacks the cards against hir evermore wretchedly, to a degree far more devastating than the hero's state prior to receiving the call in the first place. However, the refusal of the call does not bar the hero from taking it up in the future, in fact, the refusal can be the harbinger "of a providential revelation of some unsuspected principle of release (p. 64)." By nature, the awesome and terrifying call to greatness the hero first experiences drives hir deep down into hir own being, initially out of fear, however "willed introversion . . . is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device. It drives the psychic energies into depth and activates the lost continent of unconscious infantile and archetypal images (ibid)." If the call must be refused, it must as well be yet another source of wisdom for the hero; for it is an unfortunate circumstance of humanity to be afraid of greatness, and the reclusive fear contingent upon our realization of the possibility of our own greatness is one more galvanizing step that the hero must, of necessity, take.

If, however, the call is accepted and the hero lays down hir own will to be broken and aligned with the will of hir own, unique, divinely designed path, then supernatural aid must surely be in store. This aid is usually in the form of a "protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass (p. 69)." After receiving welcome from the herald of the bizarre, the hero experiences the assistance of an altogether disinterested but wise figure, who proves to be (unknowingly to hir at this point) a sort of replica of hir own higher self, or guardian angel. "What such a figure represents is the benign, protecting power of destiny. The fantasy is a reassurance- a promise that the peace of Paradise, which was known first within the mother womb, is not to be lost . . . that though omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within the sanctuary of the heart (p. 71-72)."

Campbell notes that the typical figure who delivers aid to the hero at this stage is usually masculine, "in classical myth this is Hermes-Mercury; in Egyptian, Thoth," as these two deities, to their respective cultures, are the gods of not only communication and magic, but the messenger gods, those who deliver lost souls through to the underworld safely (p. 72). However, they can also be and are usually portrayed as tricksters or thieves, "and not infrequently the dangerous aspect of the "mercurial" figure is stressed; for he is the lurer of the innocent soul into realms of trial (p. 73)." The hero cannot be handed anything on a silver platter until far later in our story, and must remain intrepid and watchful through this initial period directly precedent to hir descent into the darkness.

We come to the point in the hero's journey where sHe must make the descent into the dark, unknown, bizarre worlds underneath the surface of everyday waking reality. This is the realm where the hero must face all of hir fears, in order that sHe might be able to become freed from them. It can be characterized as basically anything which is beyond the pale of everyday, known phenomena. It is outside of the hero's comfort zone, culture, and dimensional reality. It is an arena (or lack of one) where two and two equal anything other than four. It is the fear of this plane which keep most of us locked in our safe and stagnant places in life. "The usual person is more than content, he is even proud, to remain within the indicated bounds, and popular belief gives him every reason to fear so much as the first step into the unexplored (p. 78)." We may find ourselves face to face with a monster, ogre, troll, homunculus, giant, dragon, leviathon, demon, or satan himself. This stage and its counterparts have much psychological import, for "the regions of the unknown . . . are free fields for the projection of unconscious content. Incestuous libido and patricidal destrudo are thence reflected back against the individual and his society in forms suggesting threats of violence and fancied dangerous delight (p. 79)." In whatever form or shape the evil, otherworldly force manifests itself, it must of necessity be somehow connected to the hero at a very deep, unconscious level, and must reflect a deep seated fear or agonized memory of something traumatic and embarassing. Facing these demons in this realm represents facing these elements of our character and our past which we have been hiding from for so long, and the longer they are kept locked in the storehouse at the bottom of our minds, the more impish, terrifying, and malicious they will surely become. To stave off this encounter may provide temporary, superficial solace for the hero, however if sHe is to experience any true peace on down the line, sHe must face them.

This process finds its culmination in the complete annhilation of the hero, which is usually the next step. After the hero accepts the challenges which the threshold guardians and demons put hir to, sHe must now take the penultimate sentence; the extermination of hir ego-mind, personality-identity, or otherwise false self which was taken, up until this point, to be hir true self. A familiar story which recalls this theme is the story of Jonah, who refused to spread the word of god in Ninevah, and was therefore swallowed by a whale, wherein he stayed for three tumultuous, tortured days (the three days in the underworld being a universal motif). "The dissapearance corresponds to the passing of a worshipper into a temple- where he is to be quickened by the recollection of who and what he is, namely dust and ashes unless immortal," for "the devotee at the moment of entry into a temple undergoes a metamorphosis. His secular character remains without; he sheds it, as a snake its slough (p. 91-92)."

This motif is present in two of the most important myths in the world, that of Osiris and that of Jesus Christ. Osiris, symbol of the sun's light and goodness, and its mercy and justice, was slain by his jealous brother Set (from where we get satan) and cast into the Nile. After coming back to life, Set killed him again, this time scattering his body across Egypt in fourteen pieces. Isis, Osiris' consort, mournfully traveled throughout the country searching for all of the pieces of his body. She found all of them but his phallus, and after putting them back together, he once again came back to life, effectively dismantling Set's destructive force on the Earth forever- this was basically an analog to the sun's rising, setting, its complete descent through the 'underworld,' and its rising which victoriously follows, renewing the Earth and its inhabitants. The story of Jesus has parallel themes- that of a hero nailed to a cross, which symbolizes the three dimensions of material reality and its four directions and elements. After having been tortured and slain on this macabre device (which, funny enough, christians celebrate with pendants and bumper stickers), he descends to the underworld, faces Satan himself, and returns to earth three days later, renewing the world by delivering a novel type of salvation to humanity. Both characters are destroyed- their annhilated bodies symbolize and become the means by which a new sort of atonement can be availed to the seeker; they absolutely had to go through this violent, horrific process in order to bring it about. "And so it is that, throughout the world, men whose function it has been to make visible on earth the life-fructifying mystery of the slaying of the dragon have enacted upon their own bodies the great symbolic act, scattering their flesh (p.93)."

But the annhilation of the ego-self, or false self, is far from the final step. Armed with hir newfound knowledge of the eternal nature of her soul, and of the continuity of consciousness itself, the hero must undergo a series of trials which will decide if the initial choice to enter onto this path was made from a place of power. Campbell describes this as the "process of dissolving, transcending, or transmuting the infantile images of our personal past," where the hero "discovers for the first time that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage," a power not still limited to the amulet or entity which initially reached out to help hir, but to be found perhaps within the hero hirself (p. 101/97). These fabled trials and tribulations are often of the carnival variety, however equally dangerous and unwholesome. It is now that the hero must integrate hir own dark, hidden, occult ingredients from the shadow, back into the waking self, or the recently discovered true or higher self, "either by swallowing it or being swallowed. One by one the resistances are broken. He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty, and life, and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable. Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of differing species, but one flesh (p. 108)."

Following these manifold trials and tests, through which the hero had to pass with courage and fortitude, with a near-insane zeal for future attainment, comes the resting place wherein sHe can rest for some time, and come to know the first fruits of hir ardor. This is classically taxonomized by Campbell as "the meeting with the goddess." It is now that the hero can lay down hir sword and come to know the rewards of hir seemingly endless, backbreaking, agonized suffering towards the 'life which abideth in light, yea, the life which abideth in light.' When sHe has traveled past the demons and dragons, through sheer might of will, hir wounds can now be temoporarily dressed, and her mouth can once again be wetted by cool water, which Campbell calls the "crisis at the nadir, the zenith, or at the uttermost edge of the earth, at the central point of the cosmos, in the tabernacle of the temple, or within the darkness of the deepest chamber of the heart (p. 109)."

This "meeting with the goddess" carries within it a veiled portrait of the later, ultimate boon; the complete unification of the hero with the divine Source of all being, the merging of the microcosm with the Macrocosm. As Campbell desccribes it

She is the paragon of all paragons of beauty, the reply to all desire,
the bliss-bestowing goal of every hero's earthly and unearthly quest.
She is mother, sister, mistress, bride. Whatever in the world has lured,
whatever has seemed to promise joy, has been premonitory of her
existence- in the deep of sleep, if not in the cities and forests of the
world. For she is the incarnation of the promise of perfection; the
soul's assurance that, at the conclusion of its exile in a world of
organized inadequacies, the bliss that once was known will be known
again: the comforting, the nourishing, the "good" mother- young
and beautiful- who was known to us, and even tasted, in the
remotest past. Time sealed her away, yet she is dwelling still,
like one who sleeps in timelessness, at the bottom of the timeless
sea (p. 110-111).

After the hero's arrival at this stage, it is now that sHe can totally, for the first time, comprehend and experience the union of all perceived 'opposites.' She hirself, as the subject of all death and decay, and all error and incomplete understanding, can unite with the goddess; the rejuvenating, illuminating, beautiful, bountiful source of life and love in the cosmos. The hero is finally able now to enter into holy communion with hir own source of being; hir mother figure. Any and all neurotic associations and complexes which had beaten against hir sails while in the normal, waking world, all of hir Oedipal and life-denying dis-connections from the divine mother, wrought from the decayed experiences of infantile development, are to be here dissolved.

Our disconnection from the divine mother comes from our rejection of her role as life-taker, as the annihilator of form and presence. Campbell provides the image of the Hindu goddess Kali as adequate analogy for this figure. Not only is she the divine mother, the bringer of all forms into existence, but she is also the bloody-jawed taker of life as well, terminating all temporal forms into their eventual nonexistence. The two seemingly opposed roles she plays must be integrated into the hero's understanding of hir own development as an ultimately spiritual being. "The whole round of existence is accomplished within her sway, from birth, through adolescence, maturity, and senescence, to the grave. She is the womb and the tomb: the sow that eats her farrow. Thus she unites the "good" and the "bad," exhibiting the two modes of the remembered mother, not as personal only, but as universal. The devotee is expected to contemplate the two with equal equanimity. Through this exercise his spirit is purged of its infantile, innapropriate sentimentalities and resentments, and his mind opened to the inscrutable presence, which
exists, not primarily as "good" and "bad" with respect to his childlike human convenience, his weal and woe, but as the law and image of the nature of being (p. 114)." It is illuminating that here Campbell refers to the goddess at this stage as the totality of the world-to-be-known, and the hero as the knower of the world-to-be-known.

Whence, after luring and posessing the queen or goddess, the hero looks about at where sHe has brought herself to, there is a crucial and often unfortunate realization; the goddess represents, still, a lesser form of union with divine energy than sHe ultimately set out to attain. For, as beautiful and illustrious as her caresses and sounds may be to the weary wisdom-seeker, they still reap not the harvest which the hero really deeply wishes to make manifest within. For the award, or holy grail, is not to be attained through temporal or material means, of which the "meeting with the goddess" represents the highest echelon of. After the shudderings of all night wing flappings and brazen, sweat-soaked, euphoric laughter have subsided, the hero still remains in the same decadent state of body-reality. Therefore a stage exists after the "meeting with the goddess" wherein the queen represents rather a temptress, or an anchoring force bonding the hero to the needs and desires of the body-reality, from which sHe originally sought refuge from. This revelation proves to be rather detrimental to the hero, for "when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul (p. 122)."

This discovery of the nature of the initial meeting with goddess, however ecstatic and epiphanal in nature, represents a necessary ascent up the octave of human consciousness. For what was initially taken to be the grail itself is seen plainly as merely yet another exoteric symbol of the grail- and disappointment is sure to follow. For "the innocent delight of Oedipus in his first posession of the queen turns to an agony of spirit when he learns who the woman is . . . he turns from the fair features of the world to search the darkness for a higher kingdom than this of the incest and adultery ridden, luxurious and incorrigible mother. The seeker of the life beyond life must press beyond her, surpass the temptations of her call, and soar to the immaculate ether beyond (ibid)." Hence, at this point, it is for the hero to move past this stage, and, with more bravery than was necessary to face the ogres and dragons before meeting the goddess, he must seek union with the father, the true inspiration behind his fears which he thought he had completely destroyed.

The importance of the stage Campbell calls the "atonement with the father" is at a level more rarified than the previous two, which dealt solely with the feminine aspects to which the hero was forced to align hirself. The father-figure, from birth, represents the sum total of all resistance to the will of the child. The hero must overcome hir own desire to murder the father for being the authority which not only has the ultimate voice in deciding hir fate as a personality, but who the hero has subconsiously battled with to wrest control from over hir own destiny from birth. For we have not yet dealt with the father until this stage. The hero has left home and started out on hir own quest of transcendental meaning and redemption, however sHe has not put to rest the patricidal cravings which have not only followed hir from birth, but have been the subconscious motivation for all assertive actions since leaving the womb. The father represents, at this stage, the ultimate summit to scale; the ultimate monster to defeat. This is so because the son must receive the keys to the kingdom, as it were, from the father. And the father "is to entrust the symbols of office only to a son who has been effectually purged of all innapropriate infantile cathexes- for whom the just, impersonal exercise of the powers will not be rendered impossible by unconscious (or perhaps even conscious and rationalized) motives of self-agrandizement, personal preference, or resentment. Ideally, the invested one has been divested of his mere humanity and is representative of an impersonal cosmic force. He is the twice-born: he has become himself the father. And he is competent, consequently, now to enact himself the role of the initiator, the guide, the sun door, through whom one may pass from the infantile illusions of "good" and "evil" to an experience of the majesty of cosmic law, purged of hope and fear, and at peace in the understanding of the revelation of being (p.136-137)." For just as much as the father needs to be symbolically killed by the son, does the yearning of the son to kill the father need to be snuffed out of the hero's being. It must be moved past. As long as the desire to kill the father remains in the hero, sHe will be hampered by hir own "infantile, innapropriate" desires, which represent longings which find their origin in the nursery, and, although representative of legitimate needs at that time, no longer serve a positive purpose in the hero, and therefore must be let go of, or destroyed. In short, the hero must assimilate the father/prime authority figure into his consciousness just as the mother-destroyer needed to be similarly assimilated. As Campbell writes, "the problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being (p. 147)." And again, "as the original intruder into the paradise of the infant with its mother, the father is the archetypal enemy; hence, throughout life all enemies are symbolical (to the unconscious) of the father (p. 155)."

With the "atonement with the father," the hero has reached a crucial point in hir development as a spiritual being. SHe has conquered the confused relationships which bounded hir to hir own childhood and material investments. SHe is now free to return to the world of hir peers, to the world from which sHe came, to make manifest the message which has been so long in the making. Campbell terms this stage "apotheosis."

A classic rendition of the apotheotical state is provided by the symbol of the bodhisattva, a being within Buddhism who has attained prajna, or enlightenment, but postpones nirvana in order to return to earth and help others attain the same. At this point, the hero has purified hirself; however as sHe knows now that all human beings are essentially one, and connected interminably throughout all time, out of love and instinctive charity, must save the world if sHe is also to be saved. This is similar to the Christ who returned after three days in heaven and hell; he didn't have to return after attaining to such a rarified state. Most christians miss this point: that Christ already came back, and this was the entire point of his giving of the great commission to the disciples. Now we all must do as Christ, the Logos, the source of spiritual wisdom in our cosmos, has done. There is now nothing more to wait on, no more necessity for decay and death. However, the message obviously has fallen on deaf and ignorant ears for the past two millenia.

Campbell makes the point that the hero at this stage is freed from the bonds of locality and temporality; it is no longer the hero's own self, family, tribe, or nation which must be duly saved, but all human beings on the earth. There can be no more division between Jew and Gentile, between black and white, between man and woman, between old and young, indeed between good and evil, for all must receive the message of light and duly take up their own cross for the good of the world. "Once we have broken free of the prejudices of our own provincially limited ecclesiastical, tribal, or national rendition of the world archetypes, it becomes possible to understand that the supreme initiation is not that of the local motherly fathers, who then project aggression onto the neighbors for their own defense. The good news, which the World Redeemer brings and which so many have been glad to hear, zealous to preach, but reluctant, apparently, to demonstrate, is that God is love, that He can be, and is to be, loved, and that all without exception are his children (P. 157-158)."

When the hero returns, by hir own accord or by command of the gods, challenges are still at hand, perhaps greater in some sense than before ever embarking on the journey. For to return to the world of ignorant, fearful, and childish men and women is to risk not only losing what one has learned, but one's own life as well. And how can sHe suspect that the world of normalcy will accept hir message? How can they see the truth that sHe has seen, when they have never left the comfort of their own village?

The first challenge is that of the transmission of the message, for how can the hero "teach again, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the milleniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate task. How render back into light-world message language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? How represent on a two-dimensional surface a three-dimensional form (p. 218)?" Certainly this must be a humbling and herculean task. For the hero is back in the world of shopping malls and estate taxes, of crime infested cities and corrupt governments, and must accept them as equally real and necessary, "after an experience of the soulsatisfying vision of fulfillment (ibid)."

As the character in the song "Rosetta Stoned" by the band Tool, after having been taken aboard an alien ship while on DMT, and having been shown the fate of the world and his own now-inescapable task of saving it, recounts:

and after calming me down with some orange slices and some
fetal spooning, ET revealed to me this singular purpose: he
said "you are the chosen one, the one who will deliver the
message, a message of hope for those who choose to hear it
and a warning to those who do not." Me, the chosen one, they
chose me! and I didn't even graduate from fucking high school . . .
[I am] overwhelmed as one would be, placed in my position, such a
heavy burden now to be the one born to bear and read to all the
details of our ending, to write it down for all the world to see...
but I forgot my pen, shit the bed again...typical...[I'm] strapped
down, to my bed, feet cold, eyes red, I'm out of my head, am I
alive, am I dead? I can't remember what they said to make me
out to be the hero...can't remember what they said...

The boon the hero receives on hir cosmic, psycho-spiritual journey is a blessing and a curse, for there is no returning back to the world of easy comings and goings, of boogie nights and missed lessons. SHe must do what she must do, and it will be perhaps more difficult than the slaying of the dragons which initiated hir voyage into hirself. There will be manifold doubting Thomas's along the way, and no holes for them to easily stick their fingers through.

In the book, Campbell goes on to describe that the inherent cycle the cosmos must go through necessitates this pattern, and how all must essentially travel this path, if inner and outer redemption is to occur within this cursed kingdom of matter. The cycles of the ages of the manifested universe are exhaled into existence as the book of genesis states, that God spoke and it began, and sometime he will inhale it all back in, at the end of the present age. But all is, in its own uknowable way, returning to its original state of purity, for God created the universe so that he might know himself. Innumerable cultures include this idea in their cosmologies, such as the "great cycle" of the Mayans, the precession of the equinoxes of the Egyptians, the passing of the yugas (aeonic increment) of the Hindus, and the Apocalypse of Christianity. There exists a point where this, all of this, must be reabsorbed or dissolved back into the source which originally banged it out into existence. And it seems that all must be 'saved' before this can occur. It is this process of salvation which the path of the hero describes to us; the path spells out to us what we must do to manifest this purity within so that we can pass onto the higher, unseen levels of spiritual existence. As Bill Hicks said, this involves making one choice that must be made and followed out: that of fear and hate, or hope and love.

Sources Used:
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces (Princeton University Press, 1973)
Tool. 10,000 Days. Tool Dissectional/Volcano Entertainment, 2006.