beliefs, quotes, thoughts

Joseph Campbell

From time to time I dip into all manner of curious authors, often returning to them at protracted intervals. One such is the late Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) the American mythologist and author who is best known for his work in comparative mythology and religion. He was one of those early/mid-20th century polymaths who managed to see deeply into everything and extract paradigm shifting ideas and ways of explaining things. His words invariably make one think long, hard and deep — even when they at the same time contain a certain throwaway humour.

So I thought I’d share with you a few I picked, some while ago, from an anthology of his work compiled posthumously. In no particular order …

Our Purpose
When we talk about settling the world’s problems, we’re barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It’s a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.

Marriage
If you go into marriage with a program, you will find that it won’t work. Successful marriage is leading innovative lives together, being open, non-programmed. It’s a free fall: how you handle each new thing as it comes along. As a drop of oil on the sea, you must float, using intellect and compassion to ride the waves.

Spiritual Need
If what you are following, however, is your own true adventure, if it is something appropriate to your deep spiritual need or readiness, then magical guides will appear to help you.

Rituals
People ask me, “What can we have for rituals?” Well, what do you want to have a ritual for? You should have a ritual for your life. All a ritual does is concentrate your mind on the implications of what you are doing. For instance, the marriage ritual is a meditation on the step you are taking in learning to become a member of a duad, instead of one individual all alone. The ritual enables you to make the transit.
Ritual introduces you to the meaning of what’s going on. Saying grace before meals lets you know that you’re about to eat something that once was alive. When eating a meal, realize what you are doing. Hunting peoples thank the animal for having given itself. They feel real gratitude.

Vegetarianism
Vegetarianism is the first turning away from life, because life lives on lives. Vegetarians are just eating something that can’t run away.

Truth
When we talk about scientific truth — just as when we talk about God — we are in trouble, because truth has different meanings. William James said, and it’s valid, “Truth is what works”.
The idea of Truth with a capital “T” — that there is something called Truth that’s beyond the range of the relativity of the human mind trying to think — is what I call “the error of the found truth”. The trouble with all of these damned preachers is the error of the found truth. When they get that tremolo in the voice and tell you what God has said, you know you’ve got a faker. When people think that they, or their guru, have The Truth — “This is It!” — they are what Nietzsche calls “epileptics of the concept”: people who have gotten an idea that’s driven them crazy.

Burqas
Those women were going around in tents! Even their eyes were covered with cheesecloth, so you did not know if it was an old hag or a glorious goddess walking around. And you can’t respond to a tent.

Awareness
“Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods”. That is James Joyce. The statement is quoted in Ulysses by Buck Mulligan. The situation is that Leopold Bloom, thinking of his home problem, is looking intently at a red triangle on the label of a bottle of Bass ale. When someone starts to disturb Bloom, Mulligan stops him, saying “preserve a druid silence. His soul is far away. It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born. Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access” and so on.

Religion
There is a wonderful line in the Portrait [of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce], where Stephen’s friend, who’s been hearing all this heretical stuff, asks if he intends to become a Protestant. “I said that I had lost the faith,” Stephen replies, “but not that I had lost my self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?”

Life
The obvious lesson … is that the first step to the knowledge of the highest divine symbol of the wonder and mystery of life is in the recognition of the monstrous nature of life and its glory in that character: the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think — and their name is legion — that they know how the universe could have been better than it is, how it would have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without life, are unfit for illumination. Or those who think — as do many — “Let me first correct society, then get around to myself” are barred from even the outer gate of the mansion of God’s peace. All societies are evil, sorrowful, inequitable; and so they will always be. So if you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it. And that no one can do who has not himself learned how to live in it in the joyful sorrow and sorrowful joy of the knowledge of life as it is.

Advice
A bit of advice given to a young Native American at the time of his initiation: “As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think”.

I’m currently dipping into The Power of Myth, so expect some more of the above in due course.

beliefs, history, links, science, sexuality, thoughts

Links of the Week

This weeks collection of the curious and interesting you may have missed …

Lord Norwich makes some sly remarks about Popes. But how does he know what Pope Nicholas V was like?

Now apparently out gut bacteria may be causing obesity. And you thought it was because I ate too much.

Scientists also think they’ve discovered why some of us hate Brussels Sprouts. Yes it’s all in the genetics, and our taste buds.

In other news, speculation is rife that Palaeolithic man went in for piercing his penis. It all sounds pretty tenuous to me, but then there’s nothing new under the foreskin sun.

And finally … And finally someone in “authority” has come to realise that what we’ve been saying all these years might just be helpful: prostitution could be solved by decriminalising brothels. Government: smell the coffee … it ain’t going to go away and if you licence it you can tax it!

beliefs, books, quotes, science

Quotes of the Week: Sublime & Ridiculous

The Tuesday scowls, the Wednesday growls, the Thursday curses, the Friday howls, the Saturday snores, the Sunday yawns, the Monday morns, the Monday morns. The whacks, the moans, the cracks, the groans, the welts, the squeaks, the belts, the shrieks, the pricks, the prayers, the kicks, the tears, the skelps, and the yelps.
[Samuel Beckett, Watt]

The moon lives twenty-eight days and this is our month. Each of these days represents something sacred to us: two of the days represent the Great Spirit; two are for Mother Earth; four are for the four winds; one is for the Spotted Eagle; one for the sun; and one for the moon; one is for the Morning Star; and four are for the four ages; seven for our seven great rites; one is for the buffalo; one for the fire; one for the water; one for the rock; and finally, one is for the two-legged people. If you add all these days up you will see that they come to twenty-eight. You should know also that the buffalo has twenty-eight ribs, and that in our war bonnets we usually wear twenty-eight feathers. You see, there is a signif­icance for everything, and these are things that are good for men to know and to remember.
[Black Elk, quoted somewhere I now forget by Joseph Campbell]

Moyers: What happens when a society no longer embraces a powerful mythology?
Campbell: What we’ve got on our hands. If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.
Moyers: And you’d find?
Campbell: The news of the day, including destructive and violent acts by young people who don’t know how to behave in a civilized society.
Moyers: Society has provided them no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind …
Campbell: That’s exactly it. That’s the significance of the puberty rites. In primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done. So you don’t have your little baby body any more, you’re something else entirely.
When I was a kid, we wore short trousers, you know, knee pants. And then there was a great moment when you put on long pants. Boys now don’t get that. I see even five-year-olds walking around with long trousers. When are they going to know that they’re now men and must put aside childish things?
Moyers: Where do the kids growing up in the city — on 125th and Broadway, for example — where do these kids get their myths today?
Campbell: They make them up themselves. This is why we have graffiti all over the city. These kids have their own gangs and their own initiations and their own morality, and they’re doing the best they can … they have not been initiated into our society.
[Joseph Campbell; The Power of Myth]

Out of this scrimmage Thomas Drury emerges as something of an orchestrator, an impresario of knaveries …
[Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe, 2nd edition, 2002]

A fair hot wench in flame-coloured taffeta.
[Shakespeare, I Henry IV, I ii]

current affairs

More on Greece

Thinking more about the Greek situation last evening, I realised there was one thing I hadn’t said — and which is picked up today by the news reports.

Papandreou clearly knows that in order to make the rescue deal work he has to take the Greek people with him. But that ain’t about to happen just because he (or anyone else) dictates the deal. So they have to agree voluntarily and than means getting them to vote in favour of the deal. Hence he has to hold a referendum — however much is pisses off Merkel and Sarkozy. Fortunately the Greek Cabinet seem to have got the message.

current affairs

Greece

I don’t normally blog about politics, economics, etc. but I’m amused that the Greeks are playing chicken with the world monetary system and planning to hold a referendum on whether to accept the deal brokered last week by Germany and France.

From Papandreou’s point of view I guess he figures he has little to lose as outlined by Robert Peston on BBC News. Whatever he does he knows Greece will be a pariah. And by holding a referendum, what ever the outcome is, it won’t be Papandreou’s fault — the people not the government will have made the decision.


So what are the possible outcomes. Not good whatever the Greeks decide.

Greek parliament …
It seems to me that in calling a referendum Papandreou is hoping it will stimulate a paradigm shift in the brains of his party members opposing the deal. But news reports seem to indicate this is unlikely and that there will be fierce parliamentary opposition to a referendum. If parliament reject a referendum (or indeed the deal) then the Greek government falls. That might be as catastrophic as the Greek people rejecting the deal, and will be further uncertainty which will force the markets even further downwards (they are falling already).

If the Greek people accept the deal …
Well they may as well be turkeys voting for Christmas as all they’ll get is austerity and yet more austerity.
But the Euro and the banks get a reprieve for a year or so until the next round of threatened defaults by one of the bankrupt Euro-zone countries. Oh that’s all of them then!

If the Greeks reject the deal …
Greece has little choice but to default on it’s debts.
While this will save the Greek government the repayments, it ain’t going to do much ‘cos they’ll still have no money and not be able to borrow any. So the people will still get austerity.
And once Greece defaults there will be a domino effect. Italy, Spain and Ireland will likely follow suit.
Which means France will lose it’s AAA credit rating and Germany will ultimately end up picking up the tab for the whole of Europe.
That in turn will likely bring down the Euro, a number of world banks and possibly even the EU.
Which is going to be messy because the world leaders — and especially France, Germany and the USA (whose banks are also hock deep in all this) — can’t afford to let this happen.

So from a Greek perspective it looks like a “heads we lose, tails we don’t win” scenario; either way the Greek people lose.
And from everyone else’s point of view it’s “heads we can’t win, tails we lose everything”; the best that happens is the next banking crisis is postponed by a few months.

And whatever the Greeks now do, they manage to piss off Merkel and Sarkozy big time — even bigger time than they have already. The meeting between Papandreou, Merkel and Sarkozy scheduled for later this week could be fiery, to say the least.

Plus Greece is on the slippery slope to becoming a third world country.

Interesting times we live in, innit?!

beliefs, memes, words

Word of the Week : Amniomancy

Amniomancy

A method of divination whereby the future life of a child is predicted from the caul covering their head at birth. The colour and consistency of the caul are used to interpret the future. A vivid colour is supposed to reflect a vivid life whilst the opposite is also true.
A form of divination by examining the embryonic sac or amniotic fluid.
Divination using an after-birth.

amusements

And there's yet more …

I just don’t know where our local auction house finds this stuff, but here’s a further selection of oddities from their latest sale.

A diamond and cabochon ruby nappy pin
[For the man who has everything]

A miniature of Nivrutti said to be by Hagargrundji

An advertising print dated 1903 showing a policeman on a horse drinking Cadbury’s cocoa “Most Refreshing”
[I knew that horses drink water, but not cocoa!]

A bottle of Nuits St Georges Grand Vin de la Cote D’Or 1955, a 2nd edition ‘The Heroes at the Victoria Cross’ painted by Harry Payne, twelve reliefs portraying the various deeds of daring valour performed by British soldiers from the Crimean War onwards, an old decorator’s handbook and a Tegamsee Bavarian doll, etc.

A George V silver square nut dish and an American nut dish similar …
[Ooo-errr Missus]

South American embroidered ties and carved nuts …
[Painful]

Five old metal underground signs, – via Bank, via Charing X, Northern Line, etc.

Two knob kerries, probably Zulu, each with two bands of plaited copper …
[And there was I thinking knob kerries were some sort of Scotch rock bun]

An important taxidermy specimen of a quetzal, mounted upon a branch rooted in moss, grasses and dead leaves, the glazed case with label of James Gardner …

A superb full length beaver fur coat, double breasted, half belt, pocket flaps
[Snigger]

A fantastic lot … including a Beswick robin, a Sylvac bowl, a large quantity of tea wares including Gladstone china Country Garden pattern, tea cups and saucers, vases, tureens, Coronation mug, ginger jar, balance scales, an old mincer, copper kettle, wooden elephants, Mrs Beeton’s Everyday Cookery, gardening book, a book by Vitalogy, CDs, a mobile record player, a Morris 1000, a metronome, handbags, Chinese figures, a wicker basket, silk scarf and fabrics, board games, scents, etc.

A stuffed otter and a stuffed otter head, the latter mounted on an oak board … in poor condition

A Brixton picnic hamper with original fittings …
[Is this a new euphemism for an Italian violin case?]

An electric single bed with mattress and frame
[Interesting variant on an electric fence! Presumably it’s to ensure your teenagers don’t misbehave?]