Cold Beer

by Honora Foah
Co-president — Mythic Imagination Institute
[Image: "Ares" bronze sculpture, Ganziantep Museum; "Jacob Wrestling with the Angel"]

It was 3 o'clock in the morning. Dead tired doesn't begin to cover it. They had been hounding me for the back cover of the program book and I didn't have a clue. Ads and marketing of mythology and Mythic Imagination seem insane to me. Yes, please God, I want people to come to our events, so they have to know about it, but what it IS is so remarkable that trying to attract attention in the way our marketing advisors say we have to makes my skin crawl. ('Why don't you look at how they do The Secret? Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!)

Sacred and rowdy, passionate and intellectually rigorous, incisive and sexy — more than anything else Mythic Imagination is a return to the real. It is always about embodiment. The myths themselves are not physical. They emerge from and live in the archetypal realm. So our 'applied mythology' form is where we stay close to that realm (and the silence that is the mother of the mythic imaginal world) but let it penetrate our arts, our conversation and our work in social justice and environmental balance.

To apply mythology in this sense means to be aware of what nature and the gods are saying about their own natures. It is a way of acknowledging that other beings exist. It is a way of allowing an independence of voice to the maple and the rose, to the bee and the roach, to the being of war and to the other human beings. It is a way to find your own voice through the encouragement and the exploration of the many voices that can speak through us.

So, sick to death of pretense, I wrote this:

MYTHIC IMAGINATION INSTITUTE

MORE MYTHS PER SQUARE MILE
THAN ANY OTHER ORGANIZATION
[Okay, arguable, but Mythic Journeys does pack 'em in]

The Mythic Imagination Institute is a non-profit gang of infidels [we do live in the Bible belt, it ain't easy splainin' ourselves down here] orthodox free thinkers, Catholics, Jews, Pagans, Buddhists and others, [this was a straightforward description of the leadership group who put Mythic Journeys together] who wish to God that people would relax their grip on the Truth, with a capital T and get on with a wider view.

We are dying, we are quite literally dying of smallness, exclusivity, moral certainty, self-righteousness, fundamentalism and bigotry. It's time to give everybody's story a chance.

***

When we did the program War, Peace and The American Imagination*, which was a conversation with James Hillman, Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston, it was inspired by the fact that Hillman had just written A Terrible Love of War and Deepak was just out with Peace Is the Way. We even filmed it. That conversation is still one of the best things I have ever heard precisely because it delves deeply into the causes of war that have nothing to do with politics and everything to do with human nature. How, HOW will we ever work with controlling war and greed and cruelty if we do not acknowledge these aspects of ourselves? What Hillman says is that once you accept that War is a god, once you look up at the bloody mouth of Ares, once you feel the strength and power of what you are dealing with, then, and only then, will you have any idea of what to do to manage this relationship as best we can. In fact, it is ridiculous, the comparative strengths between us and this force of human nature. So what can we do?

Well, one thing is that instead of having absurd, irrelevant, cynical, obfuscating conversations about the 'reasons' we 'need' to invade Iraq, we can insist that the conversations include our bloodlust, our powerlust, our need to conquer. The conversations about the 'justness' of war are deceptions from beginning to end. The 'reasons' are tiny toothpicks tossed on the storming sea that the gods furiously shake. How good it is to be alive! And we act as if these toothpicks are all we can see. The knowledge of the true powers involved is something people have known for tens of thousands of years. It is there in the myths. Why do we act as if we do not know these things? Why do we allow people in power to speak to the toothpicks? It is abominable, this willful stupidity.

The application of mythology is to our individual lives, to our understanding of the great life of the world unfolding around us, to the quality of our attention to the cosmos, and everything in between. If we do not choose to know what the ancestors knew and then build upon it, if we choose a willful stupidity, we will not make it as a species. We need every bit of the accumulated wisdom about our place in the natural world, about the way cultures work, about what our individual passions and defeats, triumphs and melancholia will create. As Jacob wrestled with the angel, so must we all wrestle with the forces from which life is made. As with Jacob, these forces can never be defeated, but if we can either sustain ourselves to a draw, or propitiate, or redirect these astonishing powers, we will be blessed with the gift of our own life. We will be blessed with the possibility of having the strength and wisdom to truly help. Only in the humility/reality of knowing that these forces exist and are stronger than we, will we be able to find a realistic response. The one thing the gods always punish is hubris. The hubris of not even acknowledging the great archetypal forces is THE recipe for disaster.

Educate: to draw out. To draw the gods out, to tease them out of you, and to see them is the essence of wisdom and the source of service

* Would you like a copy of War, Peace and the American Imagination?
We'll be happy to send you a DVD of the event for the cost of production plus shipping and handling — just to spread the word!

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