Greenwald's Oddities

Myths Function Like Marsupial Pouches and Burlap Sacks

GG: The core assumption is that if it can be established that this is the right thing for Israel to do, then it must be the right thing for the U.S. to support it. The notion that the two countries may have separate interests -- that this may be good for Israel to do but not for the U.S. to support -- is the one issue that, above all else, may never be examined.

"Myth" is the word! The power of myth is that it shapes the world in which we enact the theater of life.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: A perfectly good definition of mythology is: other people’s religions. [Laughter] The definition of religion isn’t much more difficult; it is: misunderstood mythology. [Laughter]

This misunderstanding consists, typically, in interpreting mythological symbols as if they were historical facts. And this is a particularly crucial problem in our tradition, in the West, where the whole emphasis has been on historicity of the events on which our churches are founded.

The um fact that one finds the basic mythological themes in all the great religions of the world, and one way or another, also, in practically all of the more primitive religions, would lead one to conclude, I should think, that the primary referent of these symbols, such a symbolic image as the Virgin Birth, cannot possibly have been to an historical event. The historical event, if it was an event, would have significance spiritually because it was an historitization of a symbol that had some kind of sense of its own, before the historical event.JosephCampbellAudio Collection4ManandMyth4NecessityofRites

Our authority rests on a false narrative, not in nature.

ALAN WATTS: "[T]he imagery affects us because the image of the monotheistic god of the West is political--the political governor and lord of the universe, who keeps order and who rules it, metaphorically speaking, from above....

"See our image... is that the world is a construct... So there is the fundamental supposition that even underlies the development of Western science: that everything has been made and then someone knows how it was made. And you can find out, because behind the universe there is an architect. This could be called, The Ceramic Model of the Universe.

"Because there's a basic feeling that there are two things in existence: one is stuff, material, and the other is form. Now material, like clay, by itself, is stupid, it has no life in it--has no intelligence, and therefore for matter to assume orderly forms it requires that an external intelligence be introduced to shape it..." [Alan Watts: "The Relevance of Oriental Philosophy," podcast downloaded 12/26/2007 from http://www.alanwatts.com]

We believe in a cosmic surgeon who is also a Thunder Hurler: Yahweh, Zeus, and Indra are typical of the type. To us, everything outside our own skins is just god-forsaken stuff to be forced into order "from above."

We're playing God the Cosmic Surgeon. Shock and Awe, Klein’s epochal Shock Doctrine, powered by myths, is how we machine the world to our liking.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Now in that mythology of the cosmic order, the whole sphere of the universe is the womb of the goddess mother whose children we are. She is the primary divinity. She is the one that is represented: the Great Goddess World, and the deities by whom she is fecundated are represented usually in animal form. They are secondary to Her. And the early deities were Her consorts.

But with these warrior people, you have a masculine god as the dominant figure, **__not one who prays to the Goddess to bring forth the fruits of the earth, but one who comes in and takes them, the Thunder Hurler, whether his name is Zeus or Yahvay (ph) or Indra, they are all of the same order. And they despise the other people.__**

So you now have a very interesting conflict between a culturally inferior but physically more powerful people of patriarchal orientation coming into an area of much higher sophistication and assimilating their mythologies.

...[A]ll the Old Testament themes come right from the Sumero-Babylonian complex and can be equated there and shown to be there.

And now look what happens as a result.: the myths that originally pointed to the Goddess as the source of All point to the God. This is a curious transformation. And it's one of the baffling things in our tradition.Joseph Campbell Audio Collection Volume 4 Man and Myth Disc 1 Man and Myth

-- knowbuddhau2

[Read knowbuddhau2's other letters]

Permalink Friday, January 2, 2009 06:44 AM