Nations. Sovereignty. War. Democracy. Citizenship. I. We.
Unconscious monotheism. Polytheistic consciousness.
Diversity. Complexity.
Fluid myths. Culture building. Trickster.
Multiple meanings. Art.
Some thoughts and two poems.
Transcript of Not Just About the Ukraine
Hello, and welcome to Myth Matters, storytelling and conversation about mythology and why myth matters to your life today. I’m your host and personal mythologist Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle.
I titled this podcast, not just about the Ukraine, and you may recognize those words by Ukrainian president Zelensky yesterday, in a guest essay in the New York Times. He said, “We know this war is not just about the Ukraine. The Kremlin wants to create a new Russian Empire.”
A new Russian Empire. What is striking about Putin’s justification for the invasion of the Ukraine is his reliance on the past, the myth that he has spun about the greatness of the Russian Empire and the trail of grievances, the way that the Russian people have been victimized by the West. And in this interweaving of myths of some sort of golden, Edenic past and the grievances, well, you hear the speeches of Trump, you can turn to the example of Hitler, and really, recognize the strategy of autocrats and tyrants everywhere, who revive a mythology of past greatness, to attract supporters.
Now they tell a really simple story, one in which the atrocities and the injustice have been completely and conveniently erased. And you might wonder, given that we can see this pattern why it is successful? Well, it’s successful because it’s powerful. It’s powerful because it draws on images and symbols that are still alive and potent in the culture, symbols that are an integral part of identity, of cultural, national, and personal identity. Symbols that say, “this is what we stand for” and “this is what I stand for.”
There is a crucial, essential difference between supporters of democracy and those who want to impose totalitarianism. There is a fundamental difference between people who believe in the sovereignty of nations and of individuals, and those who don’t. And yet, this attraction to the symbols and images of identity, and the need to examine them, that involves all of us, my friends.
Things are getting extremely intense and everything is moving very quickly. I’ve spent some time the last couple of days with James Hillman’s book, “A Terrible Love of War” and I will probably be drawing on that in the next couple of podcasts. In his analysis, Hillman turns to the god of War, Aries. Two of the conclusions that he draws should well be held in mind right now. One is that there is a certain momentum and speeding up, speeding up, speeding up of things and a sense that we must hurry. Also, that there are no limits to force. There are no limits to force.
So, things are going to get extremely intense even for those of us who have the luxury, and it is a luxury, to be far away geographically, from the fighting. The bombs are not literally falling on my head and I suspect that is true for the majority of you listening. And yet we have been participants for some time now, in the underlying struggle, which is a struggle about the shifting meanings of personhood, citizenship, nationhood. What do these things mean? What is the definition of your nation, its purpose and place in history? What does it mean to be a citizen? Who is allowed to have the rights of citizenship? What are those rights?
These are the things we have been fighting about, with escalating levels of violence. And right now, as things speed up and get more intense, you can expect to see appeals on both sides, so to speak, of the struggle, to past definitions of those very important issues. You can expect to see the resurfacing and the employment of very powerful images and metaphors that carry the message: “This is what we stand for.”
It’s very important to remember that we are in a collective process of shifting meanings that has not yet reached its resolution. If we don’t remember this, if we allow ourselves to be captured by the old definitions, we’ll impede the progress towards something new. And most of us very much want something new, a new definition, a new set of meanings around these concepts of “I” and “we.”
Our myths are very fluid and flexible. They become a problem for us when they get fixed, when they become things that we fight about, rather than investigate and see through. And if you resist the shifts in meaning, well, that makes you vulnerable, because you don’t really understand what’s going on. And it makes you dangerous, because your fixed attachment to the meaning that you want, the one that you are comfortable inhabiting, can lead you to crazy and violent extremes.
This is one of the messages in the myths of the trickster. The Trickster is the mythic figure who personifies the shifts in meaning as an essential part of culture building. We are always interpreting. Always interpreting, and the art of interpretation, “hermeneutics,” takes its name from the Greek trickster, Hermes.
As I reflect on what it means for me right now, to be living this process, this mythic process of shifting meanings, and I look at what is at stake in this moment, the concept that is before us, I see “democracy” and democracy as the “We.” The “We.” What it means –democracy and the we.
In my view, the possibility that exists in this moment is for a We that is truly diverse and complex. Diverse and complex. These are more than social or biological ideals and goals. They are necessary to our health and survival. And they have a corollary in myth and imagination, the polytheistic. Many gods, many styles of imagination, and so many perspectives on life, many stories, many meanings, a kaleidoscope.
Many of us live in cultures that have been shaped for centuries by a monotheistic consciousness.
Whether or not you believe in the One God is irrelevant. Your interpretation of the world and of yourself, and what it means, is shaped far more by your culture than we like to admit. I mentioned James Hillman’s “A Terrible Love of War” earlier in this podcast. I’d like to share a passage from that book, about the way that monotheistic view and specifically, Christianity, shows up in consciousness, regardless of belief,. Hillman writes:
“If your psychology uses names like ambivalence, weak ego splitting, break down, ill-defined borders for conditions of the soul, fearing them as negative disorders, you are Christian, for these terms harbor insistence upon a unified, empowered, central authority. Once you consider the apparently aimless facts of history to be going somewhere, evolving somehow, and that hope is a virtue and not a delusion, you are a Christian. You are a Christian too, in holding the notion that resurrection of light rather than irremediable tragedy, or just bad luck, lie in the tunnel of human misfortune. And you are especially an American Christian, when idealizing a clean slate of childlike innocence is close to godliness. We cannot escape 2000 years of history, because we are history incarnated. Each one of us thrown up on the Western shores of here and now, by violent waves of long ago. We may not admit the grip of Christianity on our psyche. But what else is collective unconsciousness, but the ingrained emotional patterns and on thought, thoughts that fill us with the prejudices we prefer to conceive as choices.”
What is happening right now is not just about the Ukraine, not merely pointing to the reemergence of the Cold War. The meaning and the definition of democracy that is central to struggles around the world right now, is not the same democracy that existed even 10 years ago, let alone 20, or 30, or 50, or 100. “Democracy” is an institutional and political word, a philosophical term for “we.” If the bombs that are falling on the Ukraine right now, are placed in this larger backdrop of shifting meanings, we may be able to respond with greater consciousness and creativity.
I suggested the possibilities of a polytheistic consciousness. That a move away from the monotheism of a one-god-style of consciousness to something more expansive, diverse and complex, may be the way forward. You find this multiplicity of meanings, the preservation of this consciousness, in art. Multiplicity of meaning is a central cultural function of art. To discover, reveal, and express diverse viewpoints, to explore the layers and to maintain them. This is what separates art, from propaganda.
Art is our link to the mythic imagination. Without this, we are left with the literalizing, the hardening that sets up opposition, that demands blind belief and obedience, and kills. Kills what is human in us. So let me leave you today with the words of two Ukrainian poets.
Anton, age thirty-two.
Status: ‘living with parents’.
Orthodox, but didn’t go to church,
finished college, took English as his foreign language.
Worked as a tattoo artist, had a signature style,
if you can call it that.
Lots of folks from our local crowd passed through
his skilful hands and sharp needle.
When all this started, he talked a lot about
politics and history, started going to rallies,
fell out with friends.
Friends took offence, clients disappeared.
People got scared, didn’t get it, left town.
You feel a person best when you touch her with a needle.
A needle stings, a needle stitches. Beneath
its metallic warmth the texture of a woman’s skin is so supple,
the bright canvas of male skin’s so stiff.
Piercing that outer shell,
you release the body’s velvet beads
of blood. Carve, carve out
angels’ wings on the submissive surface of the world.
Carve, carve, tattoo artist, for our calling
is to fill this world with meaning, to fill it
with colours. Carve, tattoo artist, this
outer lining, which hides souls and diseases –
all that we live for, all that we will die for.
Someone said they shot him at a roadblock,
in the morning, a weapon in his hands, somehow by accident –
No one knew what happened.
They buried him in a mass grave (they buried them all that way).
His possessions were returned to his parents.
Nobody updated his status.
There will come a time when some bastard
will surely write heroic poems about this.
There will come a time when some other bastard
will say this isn’t worth writing about.
This poem is titled “Prayer” by Lyuba Yakimchuk. Translated from the Ukrainian by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky
Our Father, who art in heaven
of the full moon
and the hollow sun
shield from death my parents
whose house stands in the line of fire
and who won’t abandon it
like a tomb
shield my husband
on the other side of the war
as if on the other side of a river
pointing his gun at a breast
he used to kiss
I carry on me this bulletproof vest
and cannot take it off
it clings to me like a skin
I carry inside me his child
and cannot force it out
for he owns my body through it
I carry within me a Motherland
and cannot puke it out
for it circulates like blood
through my heart
our daily bread give to the hungry
and let them stop devouring one another
our light give to the deceived
and let them gain clarity
and forgive us our destroyed cities
even though we do not forgive for them our
enemies
and lead us not into temptation
to go down with this rotting world
but deliver us from evil
to get rid of the burden of a Motherland –
heavy and hardly useful
shield from me
my husband, my parents
my child and my Motherland
I want to give a big welcome to new subscribers Anna and Doug. Thank you for subscribing for email announcements about the podcast and my other programs. If you’re new to Myth Matters, I invite you to head over to the Mythic Mojo website, where you will find information about the podcast, a variety of ways to subscribe, and also information about the other work that I do with people to use stories to gain insight into life.
Feel free to email me if you have comments or questions about today’s episode. I always enjoy hearing from you.
And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Thank you so much for listening. Take good care of yourself. And until next time, happy mythmaking and keep the mystery in your life alive.
