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Myth & Understanding
Myth & Understanding
I have been reading about mythology written by Joseph Campbell. In his attempt to make it possibly for the reader to comprehend how myth works he speaks about the human ability to ‘make-believe’. He speaks of the universality of childhood make-believe and of how this same characteristic is exhibited in human rituals. For example he uses the Catholic Church practice of mass when the priest changes the wine and bread into the body and blood of Christ. In other words it seems to be inherent in humans to make-believe and in the process to truly believe and in truly believing experiences a form of ecstasy. Such is probably our experience of understanding. In the process of trying to understand I create a model and then somewhere in this process of creating and modifying my model I pass to the point of believing the truth of my model thus the feeling of ecstasy. In an attempt to explain to the novice the meaning of myth Campbell says that the “grave and constant” in human suffering may, and sometimes does, lead to an experience that is the apogee of our life. This apogee experience is ineffable (not capable of expression). Campbell considers this to be true because it is verified by individuals who have had such an experience. “And this experience, or at least an approach to it, is the ultimate aim of religion, the ultimate reference of all myth and rite.” “The paramount theme of mythology is not the agony of quest but the rapture of a revelation.” |
Re: Myth & Understanding
I've never thought of that before. I preliminarily really like that explanation.
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Re: Myth & Understanding
Campbell adds that the primitive wizard is as capable of this experience as is any person of the highest modern religious repute and is capable “also of wantonly producing parodies of his own mythology to intimidate or impress his simpler fellows” as is the highest modern religious personage. Since the ultimate reference of religion is ineffable it is often used to bamboozle and to manipulate simpler fellows.
It appears that Joseph Campbell is the modern expert in myth and I have decided he is ‘my man for myth’. I have started with his “The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology”. I quote Joseph Campbell--“poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it…the intellect is not the font of poetry, it may actually hinder its production…the first axiom of all creative art…is that art is, not like science, a logic of references but a release from reference and rendition of immediate experience: a presentation of forms, images, or ideas in such a way that they will communicate, not primarily a thought or even a feeling, but an impact.” “Mythology was historically the mother of arts” and cannot be understood rationally. Myth, the “mother of arts”, cannot be understood by reason but by emotional “impact”. Joe tells me, here in the beginning, that myth is an art form that can be understood by its impact upon me. Just as myth impacted the primitive (and everyone I guess) so I can understand it only if I use an entirely different way of understanding than I used to understand the “conceptual metaphor”. Evidently an understanding can be created by more than one method. Can I will an impact? Can I find a means to become impacted? How does one set a stage for self-impact not through reason but through, not through feeling, but through ‘what’? Campbell speaks of absolute truth as being unknowable because absolute truth is without attributes. That which is without attributes cannot be contemplated by the mind therefore in an effort to ascertain form which is without form attributes are ascribed to the absolute. The author speaks of poetry as the art of causing the “Word to resound behind the words”. The inferior is ascribed to the superior but then the inferior is sacrificed to “understand” the superior (therein the suffering). The science of comparative mythology is the comparative study of the deceptive attributes of being. The attributes created are a function of local culture and environment and also of the inherent nature of humanity. |
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