Myth-understandings

another consolation of philosophy....

Hi everyone,

Sometimes when you’re neck deep in the end-of-democracy-chaos underway in the States these days, it can be healthy to work up a diagnostic to make sense of it. Understanding something can, at least, help manage the horror of it. Anyway, Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius thought so and who are we to argue with someone who has that many names? So here’s a bit of philosophical, diagnostic consolation.

One of the continuing plagues, left over from the last century — socially, politically, even spiritually — is the degree to which social media has conditioned how we understand ourselves. Social media, remember, started out as radio, then nickelodeons (yeah, look it up), movies, then TV, then the internet, the web, and has now evolved into the Hail-Hydra-we-can-make-our-own-reality-bubbles-in-the-online- universe.

You know all that already.

I’ve mentioned them before but, to me, the remarkable thing is that this change was pretty well mapped out by folks at the Frankfurt School beginning in the 1930s. They worried about the effect these new fangled movies were having on how we understood our place in the world. In a nutshell, they thought movies had begun to re-train us (I want to say “groomed us”) from being participants in our lives, into a bunch of spectators who derive joy — and their identity — not from doing anything, but from watching: from being an audience. These are vastly different ways to live. Transfer that idea to our current political reality and, suddenly, a lot of the MagaHerd behavior starts to make sense. They’ve soaked up the spectator worldview and, when they try to carry that out into the real world, a world that works in an entirely different way, they get disappointed … and then they get mad. Really mad.

That’s why they act like a pack of angry Karens who paid a lot for tickets, were disappointed in the show, and are now screaming bloody murder at the kid selling popcorn.

The idea came up again in this month’s set of MythBlast newsletters over at the Joseph Campbell Foundation website.

Here’s my take on how Magicians appear in movies nowadays.

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“The Magician in Film” is the topic in this month’s MythBlast and, between Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, and Marvel’s Dr. Strange, we’ve seen a lot of them on screen over the last few years. This set me to wondering how these versions stack up against what the “Magician” means, myth-wise and not just movie-wise.

Symbolically speaking, the Magician, or Magus, (typically in the guise of an ancient Wise One) initiates a transformational, alchemical process in the world or, more to our purposes here, in the psyche of someone on their pilgrimage to a more “heroic” or (let’s bring that idea into the 21st century) authentic life. They do this by articulating the Word, the Logos, that manifests those alchemical processes in the world, in the consciousness of everyday life, and sometimes even in the form of “the word made flesh.” That summarizes it pretty well.

We’re not just talking about Abracadabra here although, in a terrifying way, Voldemort’s using a Cruciatus Curse on Harry (by “crucifying” him… is that too obvious?) certainly causes an alchemical transformation. There are happier versions, of course. My first thought for this month was to return to the figure of Willy Wonka, especially Gene Wilder’s version, who transforms the bitterness of life into chocolate gold. You can probably sort out a dozen or so on your own, but as I got to thinking about magicians I’ve known in the movies, my mind kept going back to my first movie magician: Merlin in the cartoon version of The Sword In The Stone.

Today, it’s a small world (or mythology) after all

That particularly cute version of Merlin-as-Magus got me thinking about “Disneyized’ versions of magicians, legends, myths, and symbols in general; this, in turn, got me wondering what happens when we myth-understand these figures, when a metaphor like Merlin gets co-opted as mere entertainment, as a commodity: an attractively flickering puppet show that reduces us from participants in our lives to an audience of consumers.

Consider the difference between the mythologically meaningful “Magician” and showbiz “magicians,” the Penn and Tellers of the world who perform amazing sleight of hand tricks and delightful illusions that provide an audience with the happy satisfaction of being safely fooled or surprised.

“Safely” is the key word here: it means enjoying the spell they cast without having to undergo the kind of life altering ordeals (and anxieties!) found in initiations of the sort required for an alchemical transformation of the psyche. It’s way easier, and more fun, to watch somebody else go through all that.

Looking through the prism of showbiz magic versus mythologically meaningful magic provides some interesting details in the otherwise blinding electric Edison sideshow of “The Movies.” Like this: what happens when mythology is turned into an industry? What happens when myths, or mythic figures, are turned into commodities?

Merlin is a good example of what I mean. Here’s an AI generated version of “Merlin,” one I asked for in order to duck Disney’s copyright.

Cute, right?

Rumplestiltskin: now brought to you by the Bawndo Corporation

And maybe this is a perfect example: the Disney version of Merlin is owned by The Disney Corporation. It’s a product designed for the purpose of entertainment-derived profit. At the end of the day, the purpose of movies, whatever the artistic merit, is to make money, and the story lines – more often than not these days derived from traditional mythological themes (I’m looking at you, Star Wars) – are designed as entertainments to separate us from our wallets and, only incidentally, as initiations into a more authentic life.

Movies spin straw, or whatever else is at hand, into gold—but not the metaphorical gold myths are supposed to provide. Nope. Literal gold. Lucre.

And so, and this is a bummer I confess, the function of magicians in film is not always to transform our souls, but to bolster studio profit margins. What we’re seeing (as the Frankfurt School did in the last century) is that our most important mythologies have been co-opted, swamped, overwritten, infected, and redefined by the money-making-impulse, a paradigmatic viral transport that has redefined all values as economic ones: an intrusion of industrial process into our cultural mythologies that robs them of their power.

Campbell expressed this clearly at the end of The Hero With A Thousand Faces when he says,

[T]he democratic ideal of the self-determining individual, the invention of the power-driven machine, and the development of the scientific method of research have so transformed human life that the long-inherited, timeless universe of symbols has collapsed … The social unit is not a carrier of religious content, but an economic-political organization. Its ideals are not those of the hieratic pantomime, making visible on earth the forms of heaven, but of the secular state, in hard and unremitting competition for material supremacy and resources. (333-334)

Alchemy: it ain’t what it used to be

This is exactly what Nietzsche had in mind with his phrase, transvaluation of all old values into these new ones. In Nietzsche’s case, this meant noticing the initial symptoms of the process by which our civilization’s mythological immune system was blasted into nothing by the advent of science and mercantile capitalism. Bounded in a nutshell, that means replacing meaningful narratives with cold-blooded explanations. Once that bit of humanity was erased, he thought, we’d been left open and empty, ready for whatever set of stem cells or borrowed bone marrow might first take root to reprogram our relationship to the world. And arguably that’s what happened. The timing was perfect: the coming of the Gilded Age in which greed was removed from the list of capital sins, and capital itself became the measure of all things.

And so the Media itself, not unlike Medea, is now the Magus speaking the word of our aeon: that Word is the Golden Calf and the word has been made flesh.

Yikes! Sorry about that, but thanks for musing along!

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