CASSANDRA NOVA

“And so much of this is Denial. That we HAVE no Dark Side. You know: The Hippies, and those lovely people in The Rave Era who were all on ecstasy – they tried to pretend we HAVE no Dark Side. 

And what happened was they got fucked up by their own Dark Side. As will ALWAYS happen.

So let’s kiss our Dark Sides; let’s fuck our Dark Sides.

Get Her down there where he belongs. 

And She can tell us stuff. 

Y’know, that thing’s useful.”

“So, I decided to accept that the Aeon of Ma’at was coming down fast and I tried to align all my thinking with that, which provided me with a new bunch of metaphors and ways of framing the world. Imagine all this division and deconstruction was just a corridor we’re passing through. All the fractioning and separation —that’s typical of Horus. We can see the hand of Horus in the modern-day tearing down of monuments and statues. He’s kicking the fuck out of formerly stable systems all around the world. That’s exactly what you would expect of this spirit that Crowley said manifested first in 1913. But for me, I think he made his presence felt quite clearly on 9/11.

You can easily organize the evidence to suggest that there is an Aeon of Horus occurring now. Where systems are being taken down, where everything’s being questioned and audited, and the past is subject to major revision. So, there’s also some fun to be had in thinking “Ok, if this is actually playing out in some symbolic fashion, then what might the Aeon of Ma’at look like, artistically?’

And to me it looks like the rise of marginalized voices, it looks like more women coming into the discourse. It looks like trans people coming into the discourse. It looks like all the opportunities for groups who were disempowered by the Patriarchy, who couldn’t speak before to have their say.

Ma’at – what would her signature disease be? Well it might be a distributed network, a viral malady that could attack all of humanity. What would happen if she emptied the houses of the old gods as a show of possibility? You remember at the height of the first lockdown, all the churches were empty, all the sports stadiums were empty, all the mosques were empty, all the temples were empty. So, the Dad god had nowhere to go.

In Britain, I know, and I’m sure in America, there was a strange uprising of praise for care workers. People would go out every Thursday here and bang on pots and pans and basically thank the nurturing spirt, this caring spirit, for its very existence. It was a very religious, ritualistic thing that we were all doing. That’s Ma’at right there. Then there’s mother nature with hurricanes tearing down borders, storms ravaging everyone’s homes. It all suddenly makes sense in a new context if you use the filter of Ma’at to look at the world. For me, I’ve found some creative applications for it, like in Brave New World and the Wonder Woman comic that I’ve done.”

EMOTION

  “These stories were all about emotion. Fifties Superman plunged into great surging tides of feelings so big and unashamed that they could break a young heart or blind the stars. The socialist power fantasies, the jingoistic propaganda and gimmick adventures that had defined the previous twenty years of Superman adventures, gave way to cataclysmic tales of love and loss, guilt, grief, friendship, judgment, terror, and redemption, biblical in their scale and primal purity. And always, Weisinger’s godlike Superman became more like us than ever before. He was fifties America with its atom-powered fist, its deadly archenemy, its brave allies. Like America, he was a flawed colossus, protector of Earth from the iron-walled forces of tyranny and yet, somehow, riven from within by a gnawing guilt, a growing uncertainty, a fear of change, and a terror of conformity.

  Weisinger was in therapy, and he used the material from his sessions as raw plot ore for his writers to process into story material. The editor’s entire psychology was stretched naked on the dissecting table via some of the most outlandish and unashamed deployments of pure symbolic content that the comics had ever seen. Its like would not be truly viewed again, in fact, until the drug-inspired cosmic comics of the early seventies.”

We All Worship

“Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. 

 

There are These Two Young Fish swimming along and they happen to meet An Older Fish swimming The Other Way, who nods at them and says 

 

“Morning, boys. How’s The Water?” 

 

And The Two Young Fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at The Other and goes 

 

“What The Hell is 'Water'?”

 

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. 

The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. 

I am not the wise old fish. 

The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. 

Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a Life or Death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. 

So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about “Teaching you How to Think.” 

If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you How to Think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. 

But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about The Choice of What to Think About. 

If your total Freedom of Choice regarding What to Think About seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about Fish and Water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about The Value of The Totally Obvious.

Here’s another didactic little story. 

There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. 

One of the guys is religious, the other is An Atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. 

And The Atheist says: 

“Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. 

It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. 

Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: 

I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out --

‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” 

And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. 

“Well then you must believe now,” he says, 

“After all, here you are, alive.”

The Atheist just rolls his eyes. 

“No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”

It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. 

Because we prize Tolerance and Diversity of Belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that One Guy’s Interpretation is True and The Other Guy’s is False or Bad. [ Even though it is. ]

Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just 

where these individual templates and beliefs come from. 

Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. 

As if a person’s most basic orientation toward The World, 

and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, 

like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from The Culture, like language. 

As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of 

personal, intentional choice. 

Plus, there’s the whole matter of Arrogance. 

The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for Help. 

True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. 

They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. 

But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever : 

Blind Certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that The Prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what Teaching Me How to Think is really supposed to mean. 

To be just a little less arrogant. 

To have just a little critical awareness about Myself and My Certainties. 

Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, Totally Wrong and Deluded. 

I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the Total Wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of : 

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; 

The realest, most vivid and important person in existence. 

We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. 

But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. 

It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. 

Think about it : there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. 

The World as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. 

Other People’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.

Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education–least in my own case–is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”

This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.

By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.

But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.

Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.

But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.

Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] — this is an example of how NOT to think, though — most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.

You get the idea.

If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.

The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.

Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.

Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. 

Because it’s hard. 

It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.

But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. 

Maybe she’s not usually like this. 

Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. 

Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. 

Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. 

It just depends what you want to consider. 

If you’re automatically sure that you know what Reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. 

 

But if you really learn How to Pay Attention, then you will know there are other options. 

 

It will actually be Within Your Power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

 

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily True. The Only Thing that’s capital-T True is that 

You Get to Decide 

How You’re Gonna Try to See it.

 

This, I submit, is 

The Freedom of a Real Education, 

of Learning 

How to Be Well-Adjusted. 

 

You get to consciously decide 

What Has Meaning 

and 

What Doesn’t. 

 

You get to decide 

What to Worship.

 

Because here’s something else that’s Weird but True: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, 

There is actually no such thing as atheism. 

There is no such thing as not worshipping. 

Everybody worships. 

The only choice we get is what to worship. 

And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. 

Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.

Is The Machine Going to Crush Humanity, or Serve Humanity?

I think that Star Wars is a Valid Mythological Perspective. 

It shows The State as a Machine and asks: 

"Is The Machine going to crush Humanity, or Serve Humanity?"

And Humanity comes not from The Machine, but from The Heart.

DARTH VADER: 

Luke. Help me take This Mask off.

LUKE SKYWALKER: 

But you’ll die.

 

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I think it was in The Return of the Jedi when Skywalker unmasks his father. The father had been playing one of these machine roles, a state role. He was the uniform, you know? And the removal of that mask, there was an undeveloped man there, there was a kind of a worm. By being executive of a system, one is not developing one’s humanity. I think that George Lucas really, really did a beautiful thing there.

BILL MOYERS: The idea of machine is the idea that we want The World to be made in OUR Image, and What We Think The World Ought to Be.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the first time anybody made a tool, I mean, taking a stone and chipping it so that you can handle it, that’s the beginning of a machine. It’s turning outer nature into your service. But then there comes a time when it begins to dictate to you. I’m having a bit of struggle with my computer, actually.

BILL MOYERS: Your computer?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I just bought one a couple of months ago, and I can’t help thinking of it as having a personality there, because it talks back, and it behaves in a whimsical way, and all of that. So I’m personifying that machine. To me, that machine is almost alive. I could mythologize that damn thing.

BILL MOYERS: There was a wonderful story about, I think, President Eisenhower, when the computer was first being built. You remember that story?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Eisenhower went into a room full of computers, and he puts a question to these machines, “Is there a God?” And they all start up and there’s all those lights flashing and wheels turning and things like that, and after about 10 minutes of that kind of thing, a voice comes forth, and the voice says, “There is Now.”

Well, I bought this wonderful machine, IBM machine, and it’s there. And I’m rather an authority on gods, so I identified the god, and it seems to me an Old Testament god with a lot of rules, and no mercy.

BILL MOYERS: It’s unforgiving, isn’t it.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Catch you picking up sticks on Saturday and you’re out, that’s all.

BILL MOYERS: But isn’t it possible to develop toward the computer, the computer you’re wrestling with at this very moment, isn’t it possible to develop the same kind of attitude of the Pawnee chieftain who said that in the legends of his people, all things speak of Tirawa, all things of speak of God. It wasn’t a special privileged revelation, God is everywhere in his works, including the computer.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, indeed so. I mean, the miracle of what happens on that screen, you know, have you ever looked inside one of those things?

BILL MOYERS: No.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: You can’t believe it. It’s a whole hierarchy of angels, all on slats, and those little tubes, those are miracles, those are miracles, they are.

BILL MOYERS: One can feel a sense of awe.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, I’ve had a revelation from my computer about mythology, though. You buy a certain software, and there’s a whole set of signals that lead to the achievement of your aim, you know. And once you’ve set it for, let’s say, DW3, enter, if you begin fooling around with signals that belong to another system, they just won’t work, that’s all. You have a system there, a code, a determined code that requires you to use certain terms.

Now, similarly in mythology, each religion is a kind of software that has its own set of signals and will work. It’ll work. But suppose you’ve chosen this one. Now, if a person is really involved in a religion and really building his life on it, he’d better stay with the software that he’s got. But a chap like myself, who likes to play with -

BILL MOYERS: Cross the wires?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: - the various softwares, I can run around, but I probably will never have an experience comparable to that of a saint.

BILL MOYERS: But do you think that the machine is inventing new myths for us, or that we with the machine are inventing new myths?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: No. The myth has to incorporate the machine.

BILL MOYERS: A pagan deity?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Just as the old myths incorporated the tools that people used, the forms of the tools and so forth are associated with power systems that are involved in the culture. We have not a mythology that incorporates these. The new powers are being, so to say, surprisingly announced to us by what the machines can do. We can’t have a mythology for a long, long time to come; things are changing too fast. The environment in which we’re living is changing too fast for it become mythologized.

BILL MOYERS: How do we live without myths, then?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, we’re doing it.The individual has to find the aspect of myth that has to do with the conduct of his life. There are a number of services that myths serve. The basic one is opening the world to the dimension of mystery. If you lose that, you don’t have a mythology, to realize the mystery that underlies all forms. But then there comes the cosmological aspect of myth, seeing that mystery as manifest through all things, so that the universe becomes as it were a holy picture, you are always addressed to the transcendent mystery through that. But then there’s another function, and that’s the sociological one, of validating or maintaining a certain society. That is the side of the thing that has taken over in Our World.

BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Ethical laws, the laws of life in the society, all of Yahweh’s pages and pages and pages of what kind of clothes to wear, how to behave to each other, and all that, do you see, in terms of the values of this particular society. But then there’s a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think today everyone must try to relate to, and that’s the pedagogical function. How to live a human lifetime under any circumstances. Myth can tell you that.

There’s a wonderful story in one of the Upanishads, the Brahmavaivarta Upanishad, of Indra, this god who is the counterpart, really, of Yahweh. He is the god patron of a certain people and of historical life and time, with all kinds of rules for people to live by and that sort of thing. And there was a time when a great monster named Vritra had closed all the waters of the Earth, and so there was a drought, a terrible drought, and the world was in very bad condition.

Well, it took this god Indra quite a while to realize that he had a box of thunderbolts there, and all he had to do was drop a thunderbolt in Vritra and then blow him up. And when he did that, of course, he blew Vritra up and the waters flowed and the world was refreshed. And he said, “What a great boy am I.”

So, thinking What a Great Boy am I, he goes up to The Cosmic Mountain, which is The Central Mountain of The World, and so he decided he would build a New World up there, a New City, and particularly his palace was going to be a palace worthy of such as He. 

So he calls Vishvakarman, the main carpenter of the gods, and gives him the assignment to build this palace. So Vishvakarman goes to work, and in very quick order he gets the palace into pretty good condition, and then Indra comes, but every time Indra arrived, he had bigger ideas about how big and grandiose the palace should be.

So finally Vishvakarman says, “My gosh,” he says, “we’re both immortal and there’s no end to his desires. I’m caught for life.” So he decided to go to Brahma, known as The Creator, and complain. 

Well, now, Brahma sits on a lotus, this is the symbol of divine energy and divine grace, and the lotus grows from the navel of Vishnu, who is the sleeping god, whose Dream is The Universe. 

So here’s Brahma on his lotus, and Vishvakarman comes to the edge of the great lotus pond of the universe, and down, and he tells his story. Brahma says, “You go home,” he says, “I’ll fix this up.”

So next morning, at the gate of the palace that’s being built there appears a beautiful blue-black boy, with a lot of children around him, just in admiration of his beauty. So in comes the boy and Indra on his throne, he’s the king god, he says, 

“Young man, welcome, and what brings you to my palace?” 

“Well,” says the boy, with a voice like thunder rolling on the horizon, “I have been told that you’re building such a palace as no Indra before you ever built” 

And he said, 

“I’ve surveyed the grounds and looked things over, it seems this is quite true. No Indra before you has ever built such a palace.” 

Well, Indra says, 

“Indras before me! Young man, what are you talking about?”

The boy says, 

“Indras before you?” 

He says, “I have seen them come and go, come and go.” 

He said, “Just think: 

Vishnu sleeps in the cosmic ocean, the lotus of the universe grows from his navel. 

On there sits Brahma The Creator. 

Brahma opens his eyes, A World comes into being, governed by an Indra. 

Closes his eyes, The World goes out of being. Opens his eyes, the world comes into being; closes his eyes 

… And the life of a Brahma is 432,000 years, and he dies. 

The lotus goes back, another lotus, another Brahma. 

And then think of the galaxies beyond galaxies in infinite space; each a lotus with the Brahma sitting on it, opening his eyes, closing his eyes with Indras. 

There may be wise men in your court who would volunteer to count the drops of water in the oceans of The World, or the grains of sand on the beaches, but no one would count those Brahmas, let alone those Indras.”

And while he’s talking, there comes in parade across the floor of the palace an army of ants in perfect range. 

And the boy laughs when he sees them. 

And Indra’s hair goes up, and he says to the boy, “Why do you laugh?” 

And the boy says, “Don’t ask unless you are willing to be hurt.” 

And Indra says, “I ask. Teach.” 

The boy says, “Former Indras, all. 

Through many lifetimes they rise from the lowest conditions spiritually to highest illumination, and then they drop their thunderbolt in Vritra, and they think, 

‘What a good boy am I,’ and down they go again.”

And then Indra sits there on the throne and he’s completely disillusioned, completely shot, and he thinks, well, let’s quit the building of this palace. 

He calls Vishvakarman and says, 

“You’re dismissed, you don’t have to” so Vishvakarman got his intention, he’s dismissed from the job and there’s no more house-building going on. 

And Indra decides, “I’m going out and be a yogi and just meditate on the lotus feet of Vishnu.” But he had a beautiful queen named Indrani, and when Indrani hears this, she goes to the priest, the chaplain of the gods, and she says, “Now, he’s got this idea in his head, he’s going out to become a yogi.” “Well,” says the Brahmin, “come in with me, darling, and we’ll sit down and I’ll fix this up.”

So he talks to Indra, they come in and they sit down before the king’s throne, and he tells him, “Now, I wrote a book for you some years ago on the art of politics. You are in the position of the king. You are in the position of the king of gods. You are a manifestation of the mystery of Brahma in the field of time. This is a high privilege, appreciate it, honor it, and deal with life as though you were what you really are.” And with this set of instructions, Indra gives up his idea of going out and becoming a yogi, and finds that in life he can represent the eternal in the way of a symbol, you might say, of the Brahmin and the ultimate truth.

So each of us is, in a way, the Indra of his own life, and you can make a choice, either to go out in the forest and meditate and throw it all off, or stay in the world and in the life either of your job, which is the kingly job of the politics and achievement, and as well in the love life with your wife and family, you are realizing the truth. Now, this is a very nice myth, it seems to me.

BILL MOYERS: Do we ever know the truth? Do we ever find it?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, each person can have his own depth experience and some conviction of being in touch with his own satyananda, his own being, true consciousness and true bliss. 

But the religious people tell us we really won’t experience it until we go to heaven, you know, till you die. 

I believe in having as much as you can of this experience while you’re alive.

BILL MOYERS: Our bliss is now.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I think in heaven you’ll be having such a marvelous time looking at God that you won’t get your own experience at all. 

That’s not the place to have it. 

Here’s the place to have the experience.

BILL MOYERS: Here and now.

Print is Dead

Inside Ghostbusters HQ

The secretary, JANINE MELNITZ, sits at her desk reading a magazine. PETER comes up.

PETER

Janine! Any calls?

JANINE

No.

PETER

Any messages?

JANINE

No.

PETER

Any customers?

JANINE

No, Dr. Venkman.

PETER

It's a good job, isn't it? Type something, will you? We're paying you for this stuff!... 

Don't stare at me, you got them bug eyes... 

Janine! Sorry about the bug eyes thing. I'll be in my office.

PETER goes off. EGON pops up out from under JANINE's desk.

JANINE

You're very handy. I can tell. 

I bet you like to read a lot, too.

EGON

Print is Dead.

Crowley said that the general tenor of the last six thousand years of human civilization could be summed up by the personalities of a family of Egyptian gods. And the first two thousand years up to the birth of Christ, this was the Age of Isis, the Mother Goddess, where people were hunter/gatherers or early agrarians living off the land, relying on ‘Mother Earth’, the seasons and the tides. 

So, the next Aeon from Christ onward is the Aeon of Osiris, The Dying and Resurrected God. Osiris is also The Law Giver and He brings with Him The Written Word, so now Ideas can be enshrined in Books and Books can outlast Generations and they take on The Aura of Gods Themselves.

God Himself is present in the works of The Bible. God Himself is present in The Quran. So certainly, there’s this programming code language, the instructional Dad language, which can take people over just from reading a book and turn them into agents of The Dad God’s Expansionist, Controlling Agenda. This is when Nature goes from Provider to something that exists to be Tamed and Exploited. That’s The Aeon of Osiris.

Following Osiris, comes this fiery breakdown, the child Horus is the son of Osiris and he’s every jihadi, every warrior, every rock star reformer, every young man who sees as his sacred mission the tearing down of structures, the questioning of rules. It’s punk rock, “I gotta tear it all down.” But running in tandem with that, according to Kenneth Grant, is the shadow Aeon of Ma’at, Horus’ sister and she’s the goddess of truth and balance and harmony and all that Wonder Woman stuff.

For me, having gone through the Abyss of Daath in the Thelema structure of initiation — having undergone that in a really experiential and exhausting way, I found myself in the Qabbalistic sphere of Binah, and the entire world suddenly looked very different and made sense in different configurations which re-energized the work I’d been doing.  

So, I decided to accept that the Aeon of Ma’at was coming down fast and I tried to align all my thinking with that, which provided me with a new bunch of metaphors and ways of framing the world. Imagine all this division and deconstruction was just a corridor we’re passing through. All the fractioning and separation —that’s typical of Horus. We can see the hand of Horus in the modern-day tearing down of monuments and statues. He’s kicking the fuck out of formerly stable systems all around the world. That’s exactly what you would expect of this spirit that Crowley said manifested first in 1913. But for me, I think he made his presence felt quite clearly on 9/11.

You can easily organize the evidence to suggest that there is an Aeon of Horus occurring now. Where systems are being taken down, where everything’s being questioned and audited, and the past is subject to major revision. So, there’s also some fun to be had in thinking “Ok, if this is actually playing out in some symbolic fashion, then what might the Aeon of Ma’at look like, artistically?’

And to me it looks like the rise of marginalized voices, it looks like more women coming into the discourse. It looks like trans people coming into the discourse. It looks like all the opportunities for groups who were disempowered by the Patriarchy, who couldn’t speak before to have their say.

Ma’at – what would her signature disease be? Well it might be a distributed network, a viral malady that could attack all of humanity. What would happen if she emptied the houses of the old gods as a show of possibility? You remember at the height of the first lockdown, all the churches were empty, all the sports stadiums were empty, all the mosques were empty, all the temples were empty. So, the Dad god had nowhere to go.

In Britain, I know, and I’m sure in America, there was a strange uprising of praise for care workers. People would go out every Thursday here and bang on pots and pans and basically thank the nurturing spirt, this caring spirit, for its very existence. It was a very religious, ritualistic thing that we were all doing. That’s Ma’at right there. Then there’s mother nature with hurricanes tearing down borders, storms ravaging everyone’s homes. It all suddenly makes sense in a new context if you use the filter of Ma’at to look at the world. For me, I’ve found some creative applications for it, like in Brave New World and the Wonder Woman comic that I’ve done.

The Renfields

Frank Renfield :

[Filling in a crossword puzzle]

6-Down, 7 Letters :—

Dracula — is — My — LORD.

My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. 

I shall have to invent a new classification for him, and call him a zoöphagous (life-eating) maniac; what he desires is to absorb as many lives as he can, and he has laid himself out to achieve it in a cumulative way. 

He gave many flies to one spider and many spiders to one bird, and then wanted a cat to eat the many birds. 

What would have been his later steps?

“I feel like every word we say is now a potential indictment, you know. The last malignant thrashing of the passing Aeon of Osiris. 

The Echoes of The Inquisition, accusations of ‘WrongThink’, The Return of Original Sin, The Demonic GLEE taken in any stumble or falter from The Approved Path seems almost mediaeval.  It’s terrifying. 

The potential for misunderstanding is almost infinite and its almost fated that we will struggle to abide by Rules That Grow ever more Authoritarian and Specific every day. 

Again, all that feels to me like the last ferocious attempts at asserting its fading Power by The Osiris Energy of The Last 2000 years, now gone Rotten and Unsustainable but trying HARDER to Keep Everything and Everybody under Increasingly Deranged levels of Control in every area of our lives.”

Tough talk, cowboy...

But you're not gonna catch him napping in a crypt.

No.... The Count has to have

his luxury estate and his bug-eaters and his Special Dirt, don’t he?

Here's a jelly one. You want it?

No.

Got it. Got it! Mine, mine.

Well, I think we have Dracula factoids.

Like any of that's enough to fight the dark master...

Bator.

A lot of it we already knew.

Wood, fire, crosses, garlic.

Nice duds, minions,

long, slow bites that last for days.

Riley: Yeah, I did a little research, too.

Dracula likes to live in style.

Which means we can rule out the usual dumps vampires haunt.

Ah, but he's smart enough to figure

that we probably already know that.

I'm guessin' he's layin' low.

Actually, my research backs Riley up.

Drac isn't the lay-low type.

So we can check out the nicer places.

Don't you think, Buffy?

Buffy?

Yeah, we'll check all the swanky places first.

What else did you guys get?

Well, Willow has most of it, actually.

Only because you gave me super pointers.

I never would have...

Just... Go ahead, Willow.

OK. Dracula's modus operandi

is different from other vampires.

He will kill just to feed,

but he'd rather have a connection with his victims,

and he has all of these mental powers to draw them in.

He... he can read and control minds,

appear in dreams.

Uh-huh.

Makes sense.

That stare...

He just kinda looked right through you.

Didn't you feel it, Buffy?

No.

No, I didn't.

See?! Buffy didn't feel it.

I think you're drawing a lot of crazy conclusions about the unholy prince!

Bator.

The point is, though he goes through the motions

of an intimate seduction,

the end result is the same...

He turns them into a vampire.

Well, that is intimate.

Dracula's gifting these ladies with his own blood.

And blood...

Blood is life.

According to them.

Uh, just be aware that

he tends to form a relationship with his prey.

It's not enough for him to take her.

She must want to be taken. She must... Burn for him.

That's interesting. I'm gonna go find him.

You shouldn't go by yourself, Buffy.

I mean, this guy's seriously dangerous.

It's cool. I got it.

Hey.

Take off that scarf.

What? No.

You're under the thrall of the dark prince.

I am not under the thrall of the dark prince.

Then take off the scarf.

Oh, let go of me! This is ridiculous.

Giles: Well, why didn't she say anything?

'Cause she didn't want to worry us, right, buffster?

It's nothin'. Just a scratch.

2 deep, puncture-y scratches.

I'm not sure why I tried to hide it.

Uh, there was just this voice,

and it was telling me to cover it.

And what did I tell you?

That's thrall.

You're saying Dracula has some sort of

freaky mind control over her?

You're watchin' too many creature features, man.

Buffy: But it does seem like he has this control over me,

even though a big part of me is resisting.

No, that's OK.

I... i shouldn't take this personally.

I mean, what with angel,

I mean, it's understandable that there would be transference.

I mean, they're both broody immortals.

I am not transferring.

I swear to you...

I'm your girl, and I'm gonna stay that way.

OK, but you are not going anywhere near him again.

Riley's right. You should stay out of sight.

Let the rest of us look for Dracula.

I can't go home. He already got inside once.

You can come over to my place.

I'll make sure you stay put.

Good. Riley and I can...

Can search for Dracula.

Willow, you and Tara could do a protection spell at Buffy's house

to prevent him from returning.

Got it. How'd he get inside, anyway?

He seemed so nice and normal...

A little pale.

A good sunnydale rule of thumb...

Avoid white-skinned men in capes.

I'm not like this. I don't invite strange men over for coffee.

It's just...

Oh, when you girls are older, you'll understand.

It's hard to date.

Sometimes you just feel like giving up on men altogether.

Another bust.

And it's getting dark.

I should have turned up a better lead.

There must be an easier way to find him.

Ah, too late to worry about that now.

If we hurry, we can hit these last places.

So how come I have to be here slayer-sitting

while the other guys get to look for Dracula?

I mean, just because I'm...

What time is it?

Uh, almost 6:00.

Look, I mean, I'm the one who knows him.

I'm the one who had a really good look at him,

and so, I mean... What? Hey, what? Hey!

I'm supposed to deliver you to the master now.

There's this whole deal where I get to be immortal.

You cool with that?

Take me to him.

Anya: Come on, Xander. This isn't funny. Let me out!

Master?

I delivered the slayer.

She who you most desire.

Sorry. Whom.

So now comes the immortality, right?

You do the thing and...

Leave us.

We must not be interrupted.

You bet.

I knew you'd come.

Why?

Because I'm under your thrall?

Well, guess again, pal.

Put the stake down.

OK.

Right.

That was not you.

I did that.

I did that because... I wanted to.

Maybe I should rethink that thrall thing.

Ohh...

I've lived in sunnydale a couple of years now.

Know what I've never noticed before?

Uh, a castle?

A big, honking castle.