This conversation of neutralizing the charge from taboo words is also a premise of RAW’s Ishtar Rising, which you wrote the introduction of the newest reprinting of the book by Hilaritas Press. Also, in that book, Wilson explores the mythical trope of the underground journey, something explored and unpacked in nearly all his books.
Joseph Campbell has some cool stuff to say about the Underground Journey, mainly that in all his studies of world myths he had observed two types of underground journey stories. One type was when the underground swallows up a poor soul like the whale did to Jonah. When this happens, the sole purpose of the seeker is to just survive the ordeal and return to the surface in one piece. The second type of journey through the underground occurs when the hero or heroine must descend into the depths and kill a monster. Campbell mentions one myth where the hero must slay a dragon then drink its blood to gain its power and move on and continue their quest. Campbell associates this killing of the dragon and drinking its blood as an integration of our shadows into our psyches. By integrating these elements of ourselves we then gain the sort of personal power needed to live a joyful and energetically engaged life.
GM: Yeah, and the story of the underground journey in Britain often involves someone finding a cave where he sees all of King Arthur’s knights asleep just waiting for the time of England’s greatest need when they will have to rise up and fight the final battle against evil. So that’s a more passive version of the story. Someone goes in and finds these sleeping warriors. That’s the personal power, that’s the higher self that will arise when you need it most.
Wilson has a dark side version of this exact legend at the end of Illuminatus with the undead Nazi battalions awaiting their orders to rise from Lake Totenkopf and reclaim The World!
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