Click here to listen to Finding Perspective As Things Fall Apart in the season 2 archives on buzzsprout
How can a thoughtful person think, in a useful and creative way, about the seeming insanity of many politicians and the turmoil in public life and community affairs? What does mythology have to do with the conflict, and do the old stories offer any insight?
These are big questions. The role that mythology plays in shaping every aspect of communal life is too big for one podcast, but this Yoruba story about Eshu and his love of discord offers a good starting point in the search for a healthy, helpful perspective.
Transcript for “Finding Perspective As Things Fall Apart”
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Myth Matters, storytelling and conversation about mythology and why myth matters to our lives today. I’m your host, and personal mythologist Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide, beautiful, crazy world of ours, you are part of this story circle
You know, I sometimes think that nothing can surprise me. And yet events of the last few weeks have left me dumbfounded. The conflict, the arguments about the truth of issues that seems so obvious to me have really got me wondering what is going on. I mean, how is it possible to not see Trump as the criminal that he is, for example, and impeach him? How is it possible that people are still arguing about the reality of climate change?
Is there a creative, insightful, helpful way to think about the divisiveness and the conflict and the turmoil of these times? What do the old myths have to offer us in this regard?
Turning to mythology in the search for perspective can be really helpful for a number of reasons. For one, myths help us take a bigger view, a longer view. These are old stories, and patterns in them that cross cultures remind us that the things that are happening may not be quite so unique or as a dire as we think, and that there might be a larger pattern that is simply not visible to us right now.
Myths also reveal your worldview, or an aspect of it that you didn’t see before. Maybe it shows you something that you take as a given, as “reality,” that is actually much more flexible because it has its source in myth. Another reason to go to myths for perspective and in particular, to consider myths from other cultures, is they can reveal your blind spots and help you ask important questions. Investigating mythology to look for perspective then, can help you to find alternatives. Alternatives in belief systems that you hadn’t considered, and also alternatives that come to you through the new questions that you ask.
Well, when I think of discord and conflict, I think of a well known story about Eshu. In the past, I would have called Eshu “a Trickster” but I’m rethinking that for reasons that will become clear later on in this podcast. Eshu is a central figure in the Yoruba pantheon of orisha, or deities. He’s complex. He’s ambiguous. In some stories, Eshu sow seeds of confusion, and in others he brings good luck. He is the guardian of the crossroads, a place of chance meetings and choices. He is the messenger or the mediator between the human world and the spirit world, the realm of the gods, and Eshu is very present in our time in this world.
So let me tell you this story of “Eshus’s Cap” and then we will unpack it a little bit together, to look for a way to think about what’s going on in the world right now with all of these profound and important and heated disagreements that carry such consequence.
“Eshu’s Cap”
Once there were two men who were the very best of friends. These men loved each other like brothers. They lived in the same village and had known each other since boyhood. As grown men, they built their houses next door to each other. They did many things together. The people in the village were so used to seeing them together that they could barely think of one man without thinking of the other.
These two men were both farmers and they even tended fields near each other. One farmed the land on the south side of the road that led out of the village, and the other farmed the north side. Every morning, they met with their lunch and tools in hand and walked up the road to their fields together. All morning long, one of them would hoe and chop in the field on the north side of the road and the other would hoe and chop in the field on the south side of the road. At lunchtime they would stop and come together under a big tree and eat lunch together. After lunch, and maybe a nap, they would go back to work until the end of the day and walk back home to the village together.
One day, Eshu came to the village. He saw the two men greet each other in the morning and he saw how close they were and decided to have a little bit of fun with them. On that day the two friends, who loved each other like brothers, walked up the road and went to work in their fields on the north and south side. As always, they chopped and they hoed and they chopped and they hoed. It was a very hot day, so at one point they both paused to wipe the sweat from their brow. They saw a stranger coming down the road, a really handsome man on a horse. He was wearing a cap.
Now there was not a lot of traffic on this road. The village was small and not many people had their fields out that direction. So, the passing of this stranger was an event and both of the men stopped to watch him ride by. He waved at them and they waved back.
When it was time to stop for lunch, the two friends met under the tree, opened up their lunch, and began to talk about their morning. The man who tended the field on the south side of the road said, “My dear friend, did you see that fine looking man come by on the horse?” And the man who tended the field on the north side of the road said, “I certainly did. He was a handsome man on a fine horse, and I really liked his black cap.”
His friend looked at him and said, “I liked the cap too brother, but, um, it wasn’t black, it was red.” And his friend, who loved him like a brother, frowned and said, “No, no, the cap was black.”
The other man, who had never disagreed with his friend before, insisted. He said, “I tell you, the cap was red!” “Black!” “Red!” “Black!” “Red!” “It was a black cap and you know it, why are you being obstinate?” “It was a red cap and why are you being stubborn?” “Black, and you must be a fool.” “Red, and you must be blind.” Well, the two men got quite angry and soon they were cuffing each other and rolling around in the dirt, yelling and insulting each other at the top of their lungs.
People in the village heard the commotion and they ran up the road to see what was going on. They were shocked to find these two friends, who loved each other like brothers, fighting in this way. The people jumped into the fray, pulled the men apart, and asked them what was the trouble. The man who tended the field on the south side of the road said, “A man on a horse came by in a fine red cap and this fool insist that the cap was black.” The man who tended the field on the north side of the road said, “Well, this idiot needs to do something about his eyes because the cap was black.”
The villagers scratched their heads. They weren’t sure which was more confusing, the bit about the cap or the sight of these two dear, lifelong friends fighting. In the midst of the confusion, Eshu appeared on his horse, wearing his cap. The two men said, “There he is, there is the man.” Eshu waved at them and they waved back. Then Eshu slowly turned his head to the right and then to the left. The two men were dumbfounded. The cap was red on one side and black on the other.
They got down on their knees and asked, “Eshu, why did you mess with us like that?”
“Well,” Eshu replied, “Causing discord is my greatest joy.” And then he rode away.
Causing discord is my greatest joy. Okay, first, let’s talk about the two men. They were both right, and they were both wrong, about the cap, depending on how you look at it. Eshu’s trick on the two men reminds us that what you see is a matter of perspective, and that your perspective on any given thing, at any given time, is always limited. Understanding that there are limits to your perspective doesn’t mean that you can just give up and not have one. I mean, even closing your eyes is a perspective, so we’ve got to work within the limitations of what we can see, that is what we can know, based on who we are and where we are, relative to the issue.
You have to be aware that you have a perspective, investigate it, and own it. A lot of the conversation that’s going on it right now has to do with this exact issue.
Sometimes it’s called reflexivity. Sometimes it’s called intersectionality. Sometimes it’s called subjectivity. The point is, what is your cultural identity: your gender, your race, your sexuality, economic class and age?
Many of us have a bifurcated relationship to these identity markers and their significance, how they help or hurt us. We argue for their importance in some situations and in others we also argue that they don’t matter, especially if someone is questioning our perspective and suggesting that maybe what we see is a matter of who we are and our position in the culture. In this way we keep the system going. White people, for example, who say that race doesn’t matter are perpetuating a racist society because race does matter and the implications of our race affect us in different ways.
So back to why I told you that I want to talk about Eshu without talking more generally about “Tricksters.” Well, because that’s a Western concept created by people outside of the culture, a concept that collapses differences and that creates a category called “Trickster” that carries unexamined assumptions and value judgments.
You know, your cultural position helps you understand and own your perspective. Now our perspective, our subjectivity, it has more personal layers, also right? Our way of interpreting life and events is also a matter of our experience and our personality, and the workings of soul. Our perspectives on things, even things that seem very personal, are inherited from our culture to a much greater degree than we often realize, and yet they are also unique. We need multiple perspectives. Back to the story- you see that together, the two men saw the whole cap. It was both black and red, and they understood how they had both been right and wrong. They saw the whole situation.
Back to where we are now. Don’t you think it’s time now, to hear more perspectives and a wider range voices, a wider range of stories? I know, sometimes it seems like it’s just a cacophony, right, everything coming at you, the increased number of stories and perspectives. It seems to be contributing to the rising tensions. But can we see this as part of a necessary process rather than a problem, and participate?
Now, did you wonder about how quickly these two dear friends who loved each other like brothers, got angry? About the level of animosity over a relatively trivial matter? One of the other things that the action of Eshu can reveal is the superficiality of our ideas. Like unity. The two men lived as if they were one person almost, as if there couldn’t possibly be any disagreement between the two of them, as if they were so similar that there could be nothing that would divide them. And yet they’re two separate people. And if you look more closely at how they lived, well, they each had their own house. And what about that boundary, that road between their two fields? Unity is a much more complicated matter then agreement about certain kinds of convention, and relying on conventions is clearly not going to carry us far enough anymore.
We’re going to have to do the work of understanding and listening. We’re going to have to do the work of walking in the other’s shoes, imagining another person’s life to get the full picture and to find the real commonality. What is a real commonality in the story you might ask? Well, the two men shared something. In fact, the whole village was brought into it. This conundrum, the problem of Eshu’s cap, that is the problem of discord and real unity, of subjectivity and limited perspectives, truth, morality, chaos, uncertainty. They’re all in it together. And although it could be discouraging to discover that you do have blindspots, that you can’t see it all and that some of your cherished ideals maybe rather superficial fantasies, the realization opens up the possibility for a deeper, truer version, doesn’t it?
So now let’s consider Eshu. At the beginning of this podcast, I mentioned worldview; that each of us has a worldview, and one component of that is your concept of order: of order in a society, of order in yourself, of cosmic order, and how that is maintained. The Western view of order historically, has been based on the notion of laws. That we discover the laws, that God gives us the laws, that we create institutions and agree on laws together, that laws and having everybody follow them will guarantee a necessary amount of order. There is, however, another view of order, a view that paradoxically rests on the understanding that cosmic order and world order, and even the necessary stability and orderly relationships between people, are dependent upon a certain amount of chaos and instability. That they are dynamic, and that ambiguity and uncertainty are built in and unavoidable.
Eshu represents that dynamism, that chaos, the chaos that is necessary to keep the cycle of destruction and creation and renewal and newness going–that is, in fact, necessary to maintain and sustain the larger order. Now, I’m not suggesting that this is easy, nor am I suggesting that there is no such thing as peace or that we shouldn’t want that, that we should just give up any hope for any kind of calm and reliability in our lives. What I am suggesting, though, is that if we understand change and even chaos, frightening dissolution, as being part of a larger cycle, then it changes our perspective on its necessity.
It also changes our perspective on the cause. So Trump, for example, and his cronies here in the United States are part of the process. They are symptomatic of what needs to be changed. They are pointing at the things that need to be dissolved and remade and reframed in American society, and they are also in this transformation. They are not making it happen. They are part of what’s happening. One of the gifts or opportunities that’s presented in adopting this perspective, entering the realm of Eshu, is that it gives you a certain distance, a certain detachment. The ability to care, and do what you need to do on the side of what you feel is right, and at the same time let go.
This reminds me of a quote from Gandhi that I first encountered in my early twenties, when I was beginning my life as an activist. He said that what you do is not important, and yet it matters that you do it. What you do is not important, and yet it matters that you do it.
Eshu loves to create discord. He loves to create discord, and this keeps us on the creative edge. It’s exhilarating, and it’s frightening. But this is also the place of aliveness, my friends, and this is the place where something new, something that we have not experienced before can enter. An important tool that we have right now is the question. The ability to question: to question ourselves, to question the news, to question our friends, to question the culture. To enlarge our perspective on things, to add to it, and to look for the ways to reframe the conversation.
You remember the cap in the story. As long as the two men were arguing red, black, red, black, red, black, there was no possibility of resolution. But as soon as the conversation was reframed and it was Eshu’s cap, they could understand the situation. They could see how they were both right. They could see how they were both wrong, and they had the shared experience of Eshu. Something new came in to the picture in the form of Eshu and new possibilities then appeared.
He was the thing that they didn’t expect. And I guess that’s the last comment that I want to make about this story. It’s tempting to make predictions. At least I know that I’m tempted to make predictions about the future, to spin out scenarios, and the news is jampacked full of them. But the fact is, there is always room, my friends, for the unexpected. There is always the role of Eshu.
And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. If you are new to Myth Matters, I invite you to head over to the Mythic Mojo website, where you’ll find information about the podcast and a variety of ways to subscribe or listen from your favorite podcast platform. This is also where I post transcripts to each episode. If you are getting something of value from Myth Matters, and you have the means to provide me with some financial support, then please, please go and find Myth Matters on Patreon. There’s a link to my patreon site at the mythicmojo.com website, and you can go and check out the benefits that I offer to my patrons.
I am so grateful for any form of support that you can offer me, and that includes comments and questions! I love to hear from you. It means so much to know that you’re out there.
Thank you so much for listening. Please tune in next time and until then, happy myth making and keep the mystery in your life alive.
“This Danish ad will challenge you to step outside your defining box”
This video is a short and lovely illustration of the power of the question to reframe and reveal our shared humanity. I think you’ll love it too.
