The Way of the Celestial Lights
Excerpted from a presentation given
by Rebecca Armstrong, D.Min.
at Mythic Journeys '04

Rebecca Armstrong was brought up in the legendary Armstrong folk family, where she learned the old stories, tunes and traditions from the fingers and voices of folks who kept them alive. Their home was a frequent resting place for the multitude of bards and balladeers who traveled through the Midwest, including Joseph Campbell, who became a close family friend. Following her interest in sacred stories and teaching to the spirit, Rebecca became an ordained Humanist Minister, receiving Masters degrees from the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Unitarian-Universalist seminary. She has worked with the Joseph Campbell Foundation since its inception in 1990, supporting the Mythological RoundTables around the world and writing the monthly Myth Letter for the Web site. She is one of the co-leaders of the annual Campbell week at Esalen.

The subject that I want to share with you today is one that is very dear to my heart. It's something that I've been working on extensively for th epast three years. It's an entire series of a long, intensive, three-day weekend called The Four Epochs of World Mythology.

I had to choose some kind of moment in this long, three-day weekend to share with you. So I decided on the third of the four epochs because it has some relevance — it's like a tipping point. As we go through this, I'll let your know later why I think that it's a tipping point. But let me begin with poetry.

"The Song of the Chorus"
from the stageplay,The Rock
T.S. Elliott

Of all we have done in the past,
We eat the fruit: either rot or ripe.
For the temple must be always decaying,
And always being rebuilt.
For what life have we,
If we have not life together?
And where we have no temple
There can have no homes,
Although we have shelters and institutions.

For without community
There is no praise of God,
And what life have we,
If not life lived in praise?

But now dispersed on these ribbon roads
And no one knows who his neighbor is
Unless the neighbor has done something
To cause our complaint.
We dash to and fro in our motorcars,
Familiar with all roads and settled nowhere.
The wind will say,
"Now here was a decent and godless people,
Their only monument, the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls."

But when the stranger comes and says,
"Why do you gather together and live in cities?"
What will you answer?
"We gather together to make money off each other,"
Or "This is my community."
And the stranger will depart and return to the desert.

Oh, my soul, be prepared for the coming of this stranger.
Be prepared for the one who knows
How to ask questions.

I was dazzled to find this poem, because T.S. Elliott, as one of our profound, prophetic seers, has grasped some very important ideas about the nature of our coming together in cities. We're going to return to this, but the pivotal idea here are the questions that the stranger calls: Why have you gatherered together in cities? And what will we say?

The Way of the Celestial Lights is the way of the hieratic city-state. And I want to share with you some of the things that Joseph Campbell said about the coming of this epoch of world mythology. He covers this brilliantly in The Masks of God series, which is a wonderful, very heavy, erudite set of four books. Campbell says this from Primitive Mythology:

Isn't that gorgeous prose? Luscious. This is the centering, symbolic image of this entire cultural mythos known as The Way of the Celestial Lights. It is the reconstruction through the human spyche of the cosmological order of which we are a part. To give you a sense of where we have come, we are going to back up and go pre-10,000 BC to The Way of the Animal Powers. The way of the cave, the way of the great hunt. And in this time period, which lasts for thousands —tens of thousands— of years, the animals are not just our kin, they are the gods. They are the powers of danger, of life, of death, of wisdom, to which we turn. All of the symbolic artifacts, the great cave paintings, the great rituals, are about finding that connectivity with the souls and the spirits of the animal powers.

Campbell calls the next epoch that we move into The Way of the Seeding Earth. This is 10,000 BC, the great agricultural revolution, where suddenly the centering metaphor shifts. The animals are still with us, but we now have a new food source, which dominates our imaginations. We have more control. We have a steady supply of food. Suddenly, the life cycle of the plants takes on a curious fascination because the stomach, in some cases, is always the guide into the realms of deep mythology. Never underestimate the role of the stomach in the mythology.

What's really exciting about this marvelous plant mythology (again, it springs up everywhere along the same modalities, along the same linew) is that the plants have a similar life cycle and structure all over the world. Annual cycles follow the rhythms of the plants. We imaginer ourselves not just as animals; we imagine ourselves as if we were plants. We have the redeeming savior who is a world tree. We have the grain. We have the vine. All of these images come into the sacred lexicon. We imagine ourselves, our own soul-life, as taking on these organic frameworks.

Then, as Campbell notes: 3,200 BC — BOOM! Within a couple-hundred years there is this enormous explosion of a brand new idea. Of course, this is an idea that has been working along for at least a millenium before it evolved. The reason that it does so is interesting. I think it will please the deep matriarchy whose energy is already in this room by virtue of the dreams we've been having.

Campbell attributes it to the women: the insight that is the key — the cornerstone to the new cosmic order. He loved to show a particular image of a marvelous goddess dug up by Maria Gimbutus. I'm not sure if it was, but this was certainly one of the images that she used a lot in her lectures. It is the image of a voluptuous goddess. In one hand she holds a crescent moon. In the crescent moon are twenty-eight notches carved along the bottom of the moon. The other hand rest right over her very round womb. When Campbell showed this picture he said, "Now, let's just contemplate this for a moment, and ask ourselves, 'What could this mean?' This is clearly a counting device. We have twenty-eight notches. What do we know about the number twenty-eight? It's a lunar cycle. What do women know about lunar cycles and twenty-eight days? Aha! Women would be the first to make this cognitive, dramatic leap in recognizing that there is something in me that corresponds to a cosmic cycle of vast proportions, and to make an image of it — to celebrate that profound, powerful link between the little 'I' and the great, starry cosmos."

Now if you have this insight, what do you begin to do? You look for other links. Obviously, this so exciting. We are related! There is something happening out there and I can predict. So, you begin to look for other links. We begin to look at all of the other counting devices that have used in agricultural lands. Now that you're stationary, you can actually begin to have observatories of these cyclical patterns of the planets and stars. Because you're in one place long enough to chart them, record them — you can pass this wisdom to the generations that follow you.

A digression: Outside of Vilna, Lithuania is a fabulous museum. It's the brain child of one magnificent astronomer who managed to get the private funds to put up this beautiful little museum of archeo-mythology. It has an old, wooden observatory tower that he got from some US observatory that was changing to one with fancy-schmancy, all-metal buzzers and wheels and things. He got this gorgeous old wood, and he recreated the observatory in Lithuania. The museum is on seven levels, and each level shows a different period of northern European history of star observation. The most ancient level is a big, flat stone on which are chinked little fissures, little holes in the rock. It might look just like a rock with holes in it unless you knew something about star patterns. Then you would look at it and recognize that it's a star map reflecting the way the heavens looked to the ancient northern European Celtis eyes 10,000 years ago. There follows successive measurement tools. The earliest ones after these stones are primitive farming implements that would have notches to mark the cyclical calendar showing when to plant.

Now we have all of these systems for keeping track of things. If you do this long enough, you see the pattern. Once you see the pattern, you can predict. If you can predict, you can control — at least you control the imagination of the other humans who cannot predict. This is the key.

Plenty of people have seen this. Campbell is the only one that I've read who immediately gets the psychological importance of what's going on. This is how he describes it in Primitive Mythology:

Insane? Playful? Yet potentially terrible insight? Those are some pretty powerful adjectives, aren't they? What would be terrible about this knowledge? If there are stable, predictable laws of the universe, it means that there is something in charge. There is something governing us. It suggests a necessary obedience which, if not attended to— if violated — could destroy the fabric of life.

This is the potentially terrifying insight: "Oh-my-God! Now I know too much. I can never go back to this kind of carefree, irruptive, joyful, spontaneous, child-like existence on the planet. No, there are laws. They are knowable. Therefore, we must follow them."

Human beings begin to organize themselves into hierarchies. Campbell points out that, along with the establishment of the city-states, a new archetype comes into being which has never been on the planet before — the mediating archetype of all this new power: the priestly class. This is an entire group who are paid for nothing else other than being the mediating force between the great cosmic laws and how everybody else should be living their lives.

This is a really critical insight. Campbell connected the anthropological and archeological data with the psychological importance. He shows us sociologically how we'ver arrived at where we've arrived. If you buy into this, then you permit yourself to become part of the great mandala of the organized society. In your soul of souls, you believe that this vision of the world is true. Not just a theory, this is true: there are laws and we must work together. Now we have the coordinated mandala societies that Campbell talks about. This is the foundational myth of this entire epoch. Very significantly, this is the epoch in which we are living.

Think about it. What vast percentage of the population lives in cities? Ever more so, every year the population continues to move into cities. We have a profound belief in astrology. Whether or not we say we really believe it, there is an astrological column in every newspaper in the civilized world. We pay people to tell us what the planets are doing. So we are very much in this — this is our epoch.

Campbell calls this unifying idea, this unifying principle, a monad. There are some marvelous things about this monad. If you are participating in it, it means that you are not thinking outside of it. You are part of the monad. Of course, it has given rise to the kind of cultural pleasures, beauties, delights that we all celebrated. When you have this possibility for the division of labor, many kinds of specialties grow out of that. This developing monad creates civilization as we know it. Later on we're going to talk about some of the shadow side of this monad of civilization.

On of the things that I found enjoyable to do in discussing the four epochs of world mythology was to look all through Campbell's material and other mythological collections to find the specific myths that show the transitional myths between epochs. It's really fun because you can find them; they are there. One of the transitional mythologies that will probably be familiar to all of you, which you've probably not thought of as transitional, comes out of Greek mythology. Ancient Greece, and some high classical Greek civilization, is going to extend through this period: 3,200 BC. Those living in the early phases of this great mythological epoch have stories that remind us of this transitional phase.

Edith Hamilton and Bullfinch tell this well-known tale of Daphne and Apollo. What many people do not remember was that Daphne was a granddaughter of Gaia. Grandmother Gaia, one of the Titans, who is the great goddess of the Earth itself. Daphne is one of the speakers, one who brings the deep, prophetic wisdom of the Earth, and gives it forth as an Oracle. She is a temple daughter, and one of the great oracular speakers of her time.

Obviously, as a temple goddess, she is virginal. So when Apollo is attracted to the beauty of Daphne and begins to persue her, she recognizes it as an "either/or" choice. If she submits to the advances of this young, upstart god (for remember, Apollo is third generation), she will lose her capacity as the great oracle. We don't want to simply interpret her flight as distaste for sexual exploration. In fact, Apollo is said to be quite charming. Imagine what loss there would be in giving up your position as spokesperson for the wisdom of Gaia.

So Daphne flees and Apollo pursues. As Daphne feels the hand of Apollo upon her, she calls out to Gaia for preservation and protection that she may not lose this great connectivity to her source. Gaia sends her energy up through the feet of Daphne, pulling her at once into a deep-rootedness through her limbs. And Daphne sprouts, becomes the laurel tree. The laurel tree.

When Apollo wraps his arms around his beloved and recognizes only the bark and twigs and leaves, he is angry. But he is still impassioned and in love, and says, "If I cannot have her as a woman, I hall have her as her energy. I shall still have her soul. Apollo takes the beautiful arms of Daphne and wraps them around his forehead. With the crown of laurel leaves, he becomes the new oracle, the Apollo oracle.

Do you see the connection now? The laurel leaves of Apollo are directly through the feminine into Gaia. Apollo, as you remember, is the god of intellect, of the cosmos — the stars, mathematics, music — all of which have their origins in the epoch of the Celestial Lights. The music, as we have inherited it from the Greeks, is all based on the celestial mythologies. The harmonics, the diatonic scales, are all parts of the celestial mythology. Here in this one image is the movement from the Earth, the seeded earth mythology epoch, into the celestial lights. Swooosh! There you have it.

I think that it is very important to recognize what it is that we are gaining. Let's imagine for a moment that Ruper Sheldrake's theory of morphogenetic resonance is true. Jung seems to get a lot of mileage out of this idea that there is a collective unconscious — there is a field of knowledge which belongs to us because we are all part of the same species, and it is not a linear field. When we enter this field, we tune in the way that a radio tunes into a certain wave length. When we are in that field, we can access everything that has been entered into this vast database, which means that we can pull from our ancestors' wisdom. When we move into this database, we have access to the way of the animal powers, the way of the seeded earth, and the way of the celestial lights. With that, which comes very often through our own dreams, we can access these tremendous powers that have been given to us imaginally through these eons-long engagements with fabulous powers of our manifest world.

I would like each of you to take a moment to think of some way in which your own life has been empowered, blessed, transformed, gifted by the mythology of the constellations: the images of the sun, the moon, the planets moving in their spheres-the very idea that we are part of a celestial dance that progresses in this serene, dignified fashion eon after eon with great predictability-every planet moving through its great elliptical phases. All of these energies impacting our little planet and we, as little, human receptors of these vast energies. And just ask yourself, how have I benefited? What are some of the gifts of these mythologies: the planets, the cosmos, the cosmic dance, the harmony of the spheres?

One of the things which is distinctly different, for instance, between this epoch and the epoch of the animal powers is that in the time of animal powers, you would never have a concept of scientific inquiry. It would just never occur to you. It's all about magic. It's all about intuition. Because while the animals may have some kind of pattern: around this time of the year they come to graze because then they have their mating season. It's not precise enough that you can predict it. You have to tune in to the animals' wave length, their morphogenetic field—move spontaneously, intuitively. There has to be cunning and quick decisions. It's a very different mental construct of belonging.

Once you have this kind of highly predictable regularity, the mind can suddenly begin to construct a perceptive vehicle that allows for scientific inquiry. It never could exist before, because we were not living, we were not belonging to the cosmos, in such a way that we recognized those patterns, or even the possibilities of that kind of precision of pattern.

Our primitive ancestors would eat the brains of the intelligent animals with great ceremony in some magical belief that they would then incorporate the power of the animal. At that level, this belief is perfectly logical. Whereas, we now go in with our delicate little, seismic, digital instruments and define the levels of the brain; it's a very different construct.

Carl Jung attaches the spiral to the second epoch, to the way of the seeded Earth. This is just based upon his own observation of his clients.

There's a fascinating set of books based on a three-year seminar cycle that Jung gave to his analysts—to his training group in Zurich—based on the gorgeous paintings of one of his American clients, a very exciting, creative woman named Christiana Morgan. Over this three-year period, he showed several hundred of her paintings that she had done during therapy. When I saw them laid out in this two-volume set, I said, "Oh-my-God! She has recapitulated the four epochs of world mythology." I don't know if Jung noted that, but one of the things he certainly noted was the shift between animal symbolism and plant symbolism. He said when a client moves from dreams and symbolic paintings of animals into plants, I know that they have reached the beginning of their spiritual or their soul evolution. That's the shift. It moves from circles to spirals because the plant energy is a spiral. Not animal; animal movement does not spiral. Plant energy always spirals like this, so he made that attribution to that second epoch.

Now Campbell put the mandala as the symbolic, centering image for the way of the celestial lights of the hieratic city-states: not a circle, not a spiral, but a mandala. If we think about that for just moment, this is very important, because the mandala in one sense is static: it's not moving this way or this way or this way. 'Mandala' is the Sanskrit word for circle, but it always has the implication of a center that radiates out to the circumference.

When Jung's clients entered the healing phase of their treatment, they would always begin to draw mandalas-untutored. It's not that he suggested they do that, no, the soul does that. It begins to create mandalas because the mandala is the gravitational energy in your psychic life.

It's when you have no center-when the center cannot hold-that you lose your psychic grip. You become disturbed or crazed. When you go into healing, you have a container. A mandala is the psychic container. It always implies a center, which is the Self with the large S, and all of the revolving energies which eventually find their way into harmonious balance with each other. It's fascinating to look as Christiana Morgan's series of paintings move into a mandalic phase about three-quarters of the way through her treatment. The mandalas move from just wild, abstract, circular things to polarities, to three-serpent, to quadrant... This is just so delicious.

So the city-state, and this is very important for any of you who have studied architecture or urban planning particularly in these ancient cities, they are mandalas. The temple, which is now also usually the house of the emperor, the reigning king, the monarch, is the center of the city. And things radiate off of that, or there is...well, even like this rug...this is a perfect example. You have this larger circle, and then you have the temple here. The great public square here, and the king's house here, and then you have the gates to the city here and here, so it's all laid out in these very discernable patterns.

Not only that, but at the other end of that very important sacred text for our culture, we have revelations. We have the heavenly city. And that was the first thing that I thought about when I threw the question out, you know, because think of how important that single idea has been in the last 2,000 years. I mean just think for a minute about the concept of a heaven-a heavenly city. Wow, this is huge. I mean, we can attribute all sorts of morés and other horrendous things to this apparently benign image, which is not necessarily so benign, because when you have an idea of what it's supposed to look like, you can easily see when it doesn't look like that. And if it doesn't look like that it must be wrong. And if it's wrong, it's bad.

"He carried me away in the spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the whole city Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God. And it shone the glory of God. And its brilliance was like that of a very precious jewel clear as crystal and it had a great, high wall with twelve gates and twelve angels at every gate."

There you are. There is one of the great mythologies of the hieratic city-states. This has given rise to how many generations of warfare in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world? This is one of the shadows of mythology, because we have the mental construct. I don't know about you folks but I was raised Roman Catholic. The whole point of being created on Earth was to bring the kingdom of heaven to Earth. That is a cosmic 'You Should.' That's a big finger pointing down from heaven. We've got the game plan laid out for you. This is what it looks like.

But this is not just Christianity. This goes back another 3,000 years before we have the extraordinary, powerful mythology. The kingdoms of China are laid out really in these cosmic fashions. I have a friend who has made life study of royal tombs in China because it was very important that when you buried someone that they had to be oriented exactly right to pick up the energy of their ruling planet and stars. The head and the feet would be lined up...and the paintings around the interior of the tomb...to harness the energies of the planets and the stars to make the passage to the next world, the upper realms, easy and predictable.

Egyptian mythology is the same thing.

So there we have part of that incredibly important mythos which impacts us all. We're all impacted by Christianity even if you're not Christian. We live in a society in which these ideas are constantly being thrown at us. The idea of heaven is a construct, a mental construct, of this epoch. The implication of being able to envision the heavenly city, and bring it down to Earth, has enormous psychological implications.

If you've seen the movie Troy, think of how important it was to be part of the city.Think of those walls. The protection within the city, the walled city, for what, three-four thousand years? Up through the Middle Ages, the walled city is where you have to be otherwise there is no safety, there is no security. You are at the mercy of every wandering bandit. But if you can be a city dweller, ah, then you have access to food, to safety, to a spouse, to health, and to the next world. You know, people will say the right prayers to send you to your heavenly reward. The city becomes the cultural matrix for everything in your life. Everything in your life. The city, in a sense, becomes the substitute for the great goddess. (View a digital reconstruction of the city of Troy.)

Remember that in these cosmologies there was not just God, God always had someone to oppose. There were demons just outside the gate, and you definitely needed those angels with very big swords at the twelve gates to the city. Not only is it a powerful and beautiful sense of belonging, but it also implies an enormous amount of sociological control over the behavior of every individual who believes themselves to be part of this matrix of the city.

When I do this as a five-hour workshop, I usually do an exercise with a ball of twine, and maybe you've done this with a therapist because I learned this from a therapist, where we actually create a matrix where we're all holding part of the web. And then one at a time you let go and the others who are left try to adjust to try to keep the appropriate tension in the web and as you get fewer and fewer people you realize what an enormous burden it is if you don't have everybody holding their end of the web. Because basically you just have a tangled mess if there are too few. This is a very visceral example of the matrix at work. Everybody needs to hold their piece of it to maintain the communication.

And yet there is a sense of if I can't let go of this, I'm in custody to this mythos, if I can't let go without loosing my own place in the order of things, or terribly inconveniencing my neighbors if I'm not here to hold up my end of things. So again, viscerally this is an important piece of the puzzle of this mythos that we are in. Because what we have all been taught is, you are necessary piece of this social construct. There is a role for you. If you find it, you will be rewarded. Stay with it. Hang on 'til the very end. Hang on! Don't let go!

Okay, now that idea of 'don't let go' is the stick. There are plenty of carrots, but the 'don't let go' is a very big stick. And the final epoch, the epoch which was announced by the troubadours according to Joseph Campbell in the middle ages in the renaissance, which is still trying to come to birth, is the epoch called the way of the human where the individual recognizes that so long as I am not free to let go, I am simply part of a mandala matrix. And I may never truly know who I am as an entity unto myself. The tension between the individual and the society looms larger and larger and larger as we go through the last five hundred years of human history.

This is your role. This is the model. This is what it looks like.

Oh, there is definitely, you know, dark and light, positive and negative in each of these, but just to place ourselves on this huge map of epochal movements or shifts of mythology, the kinds of ideas that we can entertain after the troubadours is different that can even be entertained in the mind prior to that. These are paradigm shifts using Thomas Kuhn's important word, and Campbell has, I think, accurately identified this. He says this comes about at the moment when the first troubadour or the first royal woman says: But what if I actually want to love somebody? What if outside the required mate that I have to take because of family needs...to shift this residence in this palace and these armies in order to go off and be safe...what if I felt like falling in love with somebody? I mean this idea cannot exist before this moment in time. This is the new mythological epoch. And Campbell says it comes from the troubadours who decide that a personal love is possible. Not only possible, but sacred. It's through this impossible love one attains God.

Now he says you have to have that much riding on it because to go against the system-to go against the current mythology-is so huge a current you would never be able to do it. You would not have the psychological strength unless the ante was so high that it is worth death, disfiguration, dismemberment, exile, whatever, in order to go towards that new idea. The idea of a personal love of this one, not another one, this one, is absolutely radical and revolutionary and heralds the coming of the new mythological epoch, which we are currently in-in which the role of the individual suddenly becomes an important and entertainable idea. Prior to that you've got your web, you've got your end of the net, and everybody is modeling a role, the better you live into your role. You know what the word sate means? "She who has become something." The Indian widow who lies down to be burned immolated with her dead husband is sate: she who has become something. She who has lived into the ultimate possible role for a wife. So that's a very important distinction to make. The word says a lot. It has nothing to do about death. It has to do about becoming.

This new idea that I might be something outside of the matrix of this mandala mythology, this is very radical. And there is so much riding on it that there has to be huge, huge rewards. Now the rewards are not seen by everyone not even in this day and age are the rewards seen by everyone. That's why the hero myth becomes so wild and exciting an innovation and the rewards have to be enormous. You don't just get to sleep with a woman, no, she is a goddess and will crown you and you become the new king. All right, that's your reward. You get to go to the top of the hierarchical ladder. Because you're not going to dissolve the hierarchy. The kingdom is still there. But if you dare to leave the matrix and go alone into the forest and face the monsters and return, you will be the new king.

Suddenly the rewards are high enough that the psychological risk is worth taking-for some. Campbell clearly, and those of you who have read his works or heard him give lectures, know that he champions this last epoch. For him there was something so glorious in this idea, not yet fully realized: the idea of the individual who not as a member of his tribe but as something unique in the ___ self, such a one as has never been. Just that. Just to have arrived at a place of your own-live into authenticity-phooo-and to what end? Well, this is where you go back to Jung; you begin to glimpse what is going on if we buy into the idea of one great human soul yearning its way through each one of us individually into something. Jung said the God concept, it came about with this hieratic city-state where you had God, and then you had the king, and then you had the king's counselors, the ___ cretes? And then you had the peasants at the bottom, is dismembered. It cannot hold. That center does not hold. Even those who call themselves Christians have lost the kind of faith that used to be a crystallizing faith. Job who pulled the linchpin out of that epoch.

But the new god will emerge and where it's showing up is in the center of the individual human consciousness is an apotheosis, not an atonement, Jesus was an atonement: I and the Father are one. The new god is an apotheosis: I am the Creator. I...am...God. That's where it's needed.

Suddenly we are not just individual cogs in a great matrix, each on of us in a great jewel in that net of Indris reflect all of the contained god-like properties of the human imagination in a unique individual constellation. And there we are. We are using the old mythology to help us guide us into the new passage. But says Joseph Campbell, you will find this passage in the Flight of the Wild Gander, one of my absolutely favorite books of Joseph Campbell, in the chapter called The Symbol Without Meaning, where he's talking about this, the decay of the old order. He says: There was something very powerful in the old epoch, the shaman, the individual hunter who went out into the dark forest to find the beast alone. There is something in that capability of experience which is not ever going to be found in the mandala-like consciousness of the city-state human.

In other words, the soul has not grown into a courageous portion sufficient enough to allow us to really inhabit this new epoch. And he says that is the great challenge of the times we are in. The last five thousand years have 'unfit us,' that's his term, have basically unfit us for any kind of understanding of sacred risks. We cannot really fathom it. We don't have the inner architecture to contain the god-like energies and that's exactly what's required. And we've got all these people unfit for heroism that the universe is demanding that we now enter into.

But, if we go back into the way of the seeded Earth, back into the way of the animal powers, so it's by going back through the epochs, into the great, long body of the ancestors' memory and reacquainting ourselves with the kinds of courage that were required of us in these ancient times, and pulling them back through that we can face in the right fashion the demands and challenges of our times.

This was Campbell's challenge: Follow Your Bliss. I don't know how many of you were aware of how much flack Campbell got for that little phrase. People who were very much engaged in the matrix of this civilization saw that as a clarion call for chaos, disruption, unbridled hedonism-of selfishness of unparalleled proportions-and would decry him from the pulpit or the radio station or anywhere else: Follow your bliss is a bad thing. Don't do it.

Lightning, by the way, is also a child of the epoch of celestial lights: mathematics, science, engineering, almost everything that we think of being the hallmark of civilization comes about through this epoch. Specialization.

The hierarchy gives rise to the pathways of the human imagination to go off on these tangents and explore these new realms.

There are a lot of theories. I think part of Joe's theory is that the movement of the knights outside of their habituated domains into the crusades, I mean they saw the holy city of Jerusalem and suddenly it was just a city and they sacked it and killed the people and tore the buildings down and god didn't rain fire on them. The enemy did. So they encountered sacred glimpses like that, but in a very human, realistic way, they also encountered a culture, a very highly advanced Islamic culture that blew their minds. The advances in medicine, in art, in textiles, in warfare, in life...it was unbelievable to them. And suddenly the world became much bigger. And there were different possibilities and suddenly you weren't under on lord. You came back and you had money, you had riches, you had experience. You had authority of your own experience. Your own bravery. And so the hierarchy was breaking down. You had more and more people who had proved themselves during the crusades, and came back to establish their own kind of way of existence. And it was exactly during those hundred-and-fifty years that the troubadours and all of the extraordinary poetry of the women, Queen Eleanor-who herself went on a crusade-she went on the second crusade with Louie. But this whole rise of the courtly love comes out of that very tumultuous period.

And to take that another step, why should there be so much fear right now? Because for the first time we recognize that I am, not just we, I am the eagle. In order to attain god-like energies, the eagle has to become so fierce and so self-attuned, but now to recognize its own mortality-the possibility of its own death and extermination-that will give rise to enormous fear. So you will have to have both. Fear is a sign that we are arriving at a point of extraordinary individuation.

You can see your death, but not in the same way, if you see what I mean. If you're living so close to the we-ness, the us-ness of things, and you're going right back to join the ancestors, there's a very small move. But if you have pulled yourself away out of this very elevated sense of I, of ego, there's a lot greater distance to fall into that nothingness.

Fear of risk and responsibility. Fear of making a mistake. Remember Campbell quoting James Joyce, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? Where we have that marvelous statement where Stephen says-he's about to say that he's not going to be a Roman Catholic anymore and his friend is horrified: "How can you say this? You're going to leave the church? You're going to leave your immortal soul?" He says, "Yes, I am willing to risk even that. Willing to risk loosing to make a mistake as long as life and even longer in order to stand in my integrity. I will not believe that which I cannot believe."

Wow! Now there is 'I am that I am' confronting everything that has gone before, the willingness to lose everything. But where did we hear that line previously? In the myth of Tristan and Isolde. Five hundred years earlier, as Tristan drank the love potion and the nurse said, "You are drinking your death," he replied, "I drink it willingly...to love the one I want to love."

There you have it. There's the introduction of the new epoch. It is a tragedy, yes, but the good tragedy, the really good tragedy: lift up the possibility. It lets us see the contour of the possible epoch. And that's all we need. That's our guiding star, even if it's an old celestial myth, to keep us going.

But the old society still cannot shift its way around to accepting this out- of-alignment-with chaotic-to go into this element of chaos. You almost have to just go intuitively inside this construct and see if you can imagine because it was clearly a trade off. Once you knew you could have food year-round you would trade it off. You would trade off that moment of the thrill of the hunt, or let the thrill of the hunt be a singular occurrence as a sporting event. Ernest Hemingway covers that one brilliantly. But knowing that you can go back to the safety of the tribe where you've got, you know, a granary in case it all doesn't work out too well here.

It's reminding me of a very extraordinary story I was told in 1999 in Cape Town, South Africa at the Parliament of World's Religions. I was waiting to go onstage as the folksinger opening act for Nelson Mandela. They were doing a full security check of the building because Nelson Mandela was going to be there. I'm hanging out back while the security guards are walking around with the dogs. After they did the check, one of the security guards came over and stood next to me by the railing and we started chatting. I asked him about himself. He said, "The way you see me now is not my true self. In the troubled times, I was once a poet. I was one of the Voices. They would call me when the great movements were about to start. Two or three of my colleagues and I would be given the microphones where the voice of the people spoke through us. We would call the courage of our people, and they would dance, and they would sing. And we would take to the streets. I was the voice of the people. Am I glad those times are over? Look at me now. I wear a uniform and I walk this dog around."

Now there, right there in one man's life-he was a shaman. He had the experience of being the shaman for his people. And now the best job he can get, you know, is minimum-wage security guard. But where did the courage go, you will ask. Is it still alive in him? Has it migrated? Is it still a part of his people? Of his race? Is it ours? Can we tap into that? The courage to stand in front of 20,000 armed, white policemen and take the microphone and call up the courage of the people? That takes something in here, doesn't it?

So it's there. It belongs to us, and we have to learn how to access it. But that story springs to mind and it is 12:30 and I don't want to keep you here so I'm going to leave you with one of my very favorite Joseph Campbell quotes to go off into the world with, my friends, because Campbell saw all of this and if you want tools for how to live your life, they are there.

"Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us-the labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."

"This terra-cotta mask shows the unlovely face of Humbaba/Huwawa, the guardian of the cedar felled by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The title of "God of the fortress of intestines" is also given to him, and some scholars conclude from this tile, as well as from the pictorial evidence, that Humbaba was the inhabitant and lord of the labyrinth, a predecessor of Minotaura."

Learn more about Rebecca Armstrong from her bio at
revreb.com

Return to the Mythic Passages Menu

Subscribe to the Mythic Passages e-zine