Think Piece

I think that the strong Neo-primitivist urge of the Neopagan/New Age movement is problematic in that it turns us toward a lost past instead of the present and future, and it creates a lot of wannabeism that is futile because we cannot become anything like authentic tribal people in the innocent, naive, Noble Savage mold in which we imagine them. The appeal of the the urge to go back to a simpler, nonharming, integrated, spiritually fulfilled and saner culture is understandable in these times, but this ideal state, if it ever existed as we imagine it, is out of our reach, and we couldn't fit ourselves to it if we could reach it. It becomes ever more distant and vanishing as modern civilization progresses, in the way the world changes inexorably, and we can never recover what has been lost or destroyed. We can't go back, even innerly, because we are shaped by the world we live in, which is radically different from that even not too long ago. We have to accept that our nature, our mentality, is novel. We don't have to like it, but it is where we are, and wanting, trying, to go back, is not going to work. But we don't have to passively succumb to the fatal trend of civilization-- we do have some independence from our environment, some freedom to assert some resistance to its influence, so we can influence our own thoughts and feelings and desires, our behavior, our influence on others. Personal transformation, a major idea of the New Age movement, may be an unrealistic goal for all but a few, but we can still try to make the best of what we cannot help, try to 'turn ill to good'. Specifically, we can try to take advantage of our Postmodern unmoored fragmentation of identity and psyche and world-picture to try to save our Biosphere and our species. In this regard, I've been thinking about personal transformation. It is certainly the major idea in the Shaggy Mythos after Ecology. Two thinkers about transformation have had a particularly strong influence on me. The first is Robert Jay Lifton, a 'psychohistorian', whose concept of Protean Man as a characteristic, iconic figure in the traumatic twentieth century was the first major idea to really change my worldview when I first went to college at the end of the Sixties, and it has stayed with me more than any other basic intellectual concept I was exposed to then. Then, in the last few years I came across anthropological theorist Anthony F. C. Wallace's writings about Revitalization Movements and Mazeway Resynthesis as a response to historic/cultural trauma of the sort that Lifton studied, but with different results. You might want to look up these authors and their work.

The reason I mention these thinkers and their ideas is that the Mythos has been shaped in its organic evolution by ideas such as these, which I have sought down every byway I could find. And so there is ideology inherent in the elements of the Mythos, inextricable from it. The long, halting, inchoate growth of the Mythos has been driven by material unearthed in my researches, in my reactions both conscious and unconscious to it, and in the creative interplay of the conscious and unconscious. I suppose this is my kind of shamanism, the only kind I seem to be capable of, and also the closest I can get to scholarly analysis, since I lack a sharp, orderly, complexly capacious scholarly mind. So when you read one of my pieces written in mythic language, like the foundational myth of the Shaggy Mythos which will be the next post, be aware that there is an embedded ideology-- not that I am some rigid, doctrinaire ideologue, but that an ideology has evolved organically together with the Mythos, though I don't like to state it baldly, as it detracts from the magical mystery of myth-- it's deadly, really. But I just want you to know that there has been a lot of dithering and worrying about what was good for the ecological mythos and what was not, and especially about having it be cohering and practical and something that worked, despite being not really a true authentic, organic creation like a visionary revelation, but a thought-out, tinkered-with, agonized-over fiction invented for a specific purpose, which I suppose is to help one engineer, as far as one can, personal transformation through a coherent system of mythic icons, toward ecological salvation.