Shifting Images of Human Being with Dr. Craig Chalquist

How we imagine ourselves is how we’ll be. 

And where do we receive these images of the human? They’re in our myths.

In this episode, I take a look at three images in the myths of the dominant culture that determine how many of us see ourselves and how we live: the sinner, the king of the animal kingdom, and the world destroyer/ parasite.

Are these images useful today? How do we find and live into alternatives?

I’m joined by the insightful Dr. Craig Chalquist (see bio below) in an exploration of these questions. Many thanks to Dr. Chalquist for his rich contribution to the conversation!

Much more could be said on this important topic. I hope you find this a helpful.

Craig Chalquist is academic director of the Consciousness, Psychology, and Transformation program at National University. He holds a PhD in Depth Psychology and another in Psychology and Religion. His most recent nonfiction book is the second edition of Terrapsychological Inquiry. He also writes speculative fiction and is working on a trilogy of novels dealing with how humanity will face events sixty years from today. Visit his website Chalquist.com.

Transcript of Shifting Images of Human Being with Dr. Craig Chalquist

Hello and welcome to Myth Matters an exploration at the intersection of mythology, creativity and consciousness. I’m your host Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide beautiful crazy world of ours, I’m glad that you decided to join me here today.

I want to expand on an idea that we’ve worked with before: that how we imagine our lives is how we live our lives. This is a personal and collective phenomenon. And it’s also one way of thinking about the impact of myth and the power in the images and metaphors they contain. Today I want to focus on images of the human in the dominant culture. 

 What are the common images of human being of human nature and human impact on the world offered by the dominant myths? And are these images helpful to us today? Big topic, Big questions. So, I’m very pleased to have a special guest with me today to help work through some of the possibilities, Dr. Craig Chalquist.  

Craig the is academic director of the Consciousness, Psychology, and Transformation program at National University. He holds a PhD in Depth Psychology and another in Psychology and Religion. His most recent nonfiction book is the second edition of Terrapsychological Inquiry. Craig also writes speculative fiction and is working on a trilogy of novels dealing with how humanity will face events sixty years from today.

I initially found Craig’s work in the field of ecopsychology and I have so much admiration for his contributions in that arena and so many others. His website homepage says “Applied Wisdom for Conjuring a Better World- Reimagining Changes Reality.” I couldn’t agree more.

So, Craig, I’m really excited that you accepted my invitation and thank you so much for joining me for this today.

Craig: Thank you so much for the invitation. It’s fun to be on here after having heard your voice on so many of your podcasts. So, it’s, it’s great to be here.

Catherine: Oh, good. Good. Now, I thought that what I would do is start our conversation and offer a preliminary framework by walking through three images that I see as being central and especially powerful in the dominant mythologies. Specifically, the sinner, the king of the animal kingdom, and the world destroyer. And, you know, my descriptions are going to reflect my biases and my concerns. So that’s part of the framework I’m putting out here on the table. But does that sound okay to you? We start Great. Okay. 

So, the human as sinner, we get this from the Abrahamic tradition. It comes from the story of our expulsion from the paradise of the Garden of Eden, beginning of our life of toil and suffering. And it’s also called the “Fall of Man” and it’s very important to note that that’s man, because this is all about the man and the males and it’s Eve’s fault, because she listens to the serpent. So, what I see here is the context for alienation from God, from nature, from self, and the justification for patriarchy and misogyny. And related to this sinner thing is also the notion of original sin, which tells us that we’re inherently bad, fatally flawed, and we have to be saved by God, or suffer eternal torment in hell. So that’s image number one for me, the sinner. 

And then we have this “king of the animal kingdom.” And by that I mean, once again, the human but really man, at the top of this hierarchy that we’ve created. Hierarchy of being and everything else. And the claim that we’re superior, superior to everything else. Proof of this superiority, has taken a variety of forms over the centuries; opposable thumbs, tools, language, bigger brains, whatever. 

Scientific advances over the centuries have taken those things apart. Now, we’re not the only ones who have language. We’re not the only ones who use tools. But still, we’re the ones that count. We’re  the superior ones at the top. And even the question of whether or not the others other sentient beings have rights, it’s something we’re debating. And it’s interesting to me that this one has both scientific and religious roots. I mean, in a way, it’s a response to religion and yet keeps us in that paradigm once again, because when you get right down to it, hey, God put us in charge. Gave us dominion, man, that is, dominion. 

And then this “world destroyer,” and I also have this “parasite the earth is going to throw off” and really maybe that’s two different things. But that’s a more recent image. I track that to environmental concerns, concerns about growth and the human population. And also, just disgust and despair with the human track record on the planet. Evil, cruelty, greed, hubris. And while I appreciate the attempt to de-center human concerns, once again, I see this is going back to this well, we’re fundamentally flawed, only this time, our retreat is into an existential cynicism about ourselves. You’re nodding your head. 

Okay, so, I think these images are all related. I think they all come from the same religious paradigm, and struggle with our perceived weaknesses as human beings. And I think their attempts to either find or claim power in a world that we can’t control. So that’s a lot. What do you think? 

Craig:  We’re facing a lot.  I go to the same place you do with a lot of this. You know, for each of those images, I think patriarchy, patriarchy and more patriarchy, right. And it’s such a paradigm of exile and duality and separation, isn’t it? From Earth, from ourselves, from each other, from spirit. That characterizes all three of those, you know, and I work a lot with people in different spheres of the environmental movement, advocacy, ecology, things like that. And occasionally, when I run across them, people who– not everybody thinks this– but you know, the one that you mentioned last, which is maybe we’re a parasite, and all that in the earth is going to get rid of us. And what I hear in that is this, there’s a certain amount of guilt, of course, you know, over what we’re doing. 

But here, again, we’re holding us as separate from the natural world, even in thinking of it that way, right? That we’re somehow different than Earth’s going to get rid of us, but we’re part of Earth. 

So, all of that, to me, one of the big words that flashes on my screen with all of those images of the human is, exile, we are in exile. 

And it’s such a different experience when you talk to people who don’t feel that way. People, for instance, from intact indigenous communities that have all their traditions still going and their stories. And I’ve heard people like Jeanette Armstrong say, how sad that you live like that in that state of feeling like you don’t belong anywhere. So, I think that’s a really resonant theme for all of these diminished, maybe, you know, mythically based, of course, models of who we are, they don’t really leave us many options do they. And I think you’re right to connect them.

I wouldn’t, I used to think in terms of that just connects to religion, period. And part of where I’ve moved over the years is I now, I now think of it as those images of exile and domination, which are all part of the same psychology in some ways. You know, if you feel exiled, then the thing to do is dominate your surroundings so you can have some, some control over them, right? I now think of it more as patriarchal religion. That we know of bits and pieces of religion that people have had many thousands of years before that, just glimpses, but they don’t have the same sense of exile or the same power hierarchies that some of these later religions do.

Catherine: So I’m curious, because I know that you’re writing fiction. And am I correct in assuming that you’re  trying to reshape some of these ideas, like including what it means to be here is part of what you’re doing and your fiction?

Craig: It is, and it’s so I was curious for will actually, I have been probably for my whole life and just, you know, more recently able to articulate it. But I’m curious about the possibility of growing up as a species. Of maturing as a species and having stories that empower us as fully mature, emotionally regulated, wise and responsible human beings. And so, I made an assumption in my fiction, in all my fiction, which is that eventually we will get there, but it’s going to be a really long hard struggle, and of course, it already has been, and one of the things we have to get rid of is patriarchy, absolutely have to get rid of that. We have to outgrow it right. 

I love that comment of Jung’s that the big problems of life need to be outgrown. It’s not something you necessarily work through, you have to mature beyond it, right? I spent six years working with violent men who had been arrested for all kinds of violence from abuse and battery up to murder and what was uniform in all of them was lack of emotional maturity. And so that has shaped my thinking and my fiction, to pose questions like, how do we get mature? How do we grow up as a species? How do we learn from members of our species who already are mature? And what can they tell us as sort of our mentors, you know? 

Catherine: Okay, I like that. Well, I definitely agree that emotional maturity is a useful way to think about what needs to change, and also what is most flexible in us that then impacts all the other constructs that we have our society and everything. I mean, we’re not going to magically evolve a third arm, you know, in the next 20 years or even 2000 years and what good would that do us anyway? 

 And when you say that, it’s reminding me, I think it’s at the end of Passion of the Western Mind, that Richard Tarnas suggests the image of a birth process and says something to the effect of oh, what might happen if rather than seeing our being and our nature as static, if we saw  ourselves as a species going through a kind of archetypal birth process. So, we had the unconscious, undifferentiated, you know, experience of unity with the All, and then became aware of aware of ourselves of separate and we’ve been in this long, extended period of alienation, speaking about our society anyway. And so maybe what is coming next is a conscious reunification.

Have you found images or a way of working with this idea in your fiction?

Craig: I work a lot with myth, of course and I incorporate some of it into my fiction. Some of it, I don’t, but I published my first novel Soul Mapper last year and I’m just getting ready to do my second novel. They’re both independently published, called Heartlander. And I’m right now writing the third one, which is called Lamplighter. So it’s a trilogy. And the protagonists in all the novels wrestle with this and there’s a combination of circumstances and people who themselves are mature and adversity and other things. Also lots of visits from the gods to help these people grow up because they’re historically important. And so, I wanted to show what it looks like for people to wrestle with that. 

So, in the first two novels, the protagonists are men and the novels are all first person. And in the third one, the protagonist is a woman but her story is told from a male perspective because I don’t feel comfortable trying to write in a feminine voice. I thought that would be a better way to do it, to have a man in her circle talk about her because he admires her. And so all of them do that. Her name is Miriam and she’s actually the most mature of all of them. The things that she wrestles with in the third novel, have more to do with the struggles that you go through when you’re a mature person in a chaotic society. And to me, that’s interesting. 

And part of this is inspired by myths. Like, there’s a myth I don’t know well, but a Maori myth about initiation and maturity. And there’s a man who I can’t remember if he’s a tribal chief, or if he becomes one as a result of all this. But at some point, he actually strikes his wife. And she says, “I’m not going to deal with this” and she leaves him. So, he ends up in the underworld, with her father and her father has tribal markings. So, part of the purpose of this story is: how did we get tribal markings? He’s the man who does this is interested in this. And the father says, “Well, let me put the markings on you” and he chisels them into his head, which puts this man into a state of having to sit with his rage at being hurt like this. And part of that gives him the ability to be a better husband. 

So, in his case, being able to sit with those feelings helped him mature and that’s one of many things that we need to do in order to grow up. But there’s a lot of people running around who, and we see this a lot in politics especially these days, they’re in adult bodies, their bodies might be anywhere from 30 to, you know, to 80. But emotionally, they act like teenagers or younger. And I think that’s a huge problem for our species. .

Catherine: I agree. What I’m hearing you say is that given your experiences and your analysis of our situation, and your background in myth and many other fields, I can’t believe you actually got two PhDs.–you’re weaving those together. And what do you see? Or what’s your ideal outcome here? 

I mean, I imagine that you are having a very important thought and emotiona/ psychological experience in, in handling the material and coming up with the story. And one of the reasons, parenthetically to listeners that I’m bringing that forward is that I personally think that the more that each of us consciously takes up the task of dealing with these issues, and just move beyond the opinions and the intellectual theorizing and go, “Hey, this is really me. Who was going to make the change in the human image? If I don’t like this and take on that work?” I mean, I think that’s essential. And so I think that’s clearly one of the things you’re doing. 

In terms of a collective, do you have an image for what this offers us collectively? I mean, how we should use what you’re doing?

Craig: When I started out, all I knew is that I just wanted to write fiction. And I’ve been doing it for years just in, you know, little stories and stuff like that, speculative fiction. And I posted a collection of them for free at my website, by the way, Tales of Terrania Rising. So there’s I think, 30 of them there. But for me, it was mostly just entered entertainment and exercising creativity and things like that. And then the more I studied storytelling, the more I realized it was an effective teaching tool. And so, I started using it more in class I teach graduate students have for a long time. 

And, you know, of course, when you teach myth, you have to do storytelling, right. It’s just, you know, otherwise, it’s exactly what you just described earlier. It’s all theoretical and abstract. I hate talk. Sometimes I can’t stand it when people talk about a myth unless they tell the myth first, which is one of the things I love about your podcast. You’re a great storyteller. 

Catherine: Thank you. 

Craig: So I’ve tried to learn from that and incorporate that into my classes and into my books and what I’m hoping for to some extent is for people to go away from what I write inspired to actually take on some of what my characters do. There’s this whole trend, of course, toward dystopian fiction, which I really liked when I was in college. But then it became the news, right? I mean, we asked stuff, and it was science fiction and it’s not anymore. So, I’m on the bandwagon with PJ Manny and some of the other science fiction writers, Kim Stanley Robinson, there’s a bunch of them who write to hope, but in a realistic way. 

So, in my books, 60 years from now global warming is a lot worse. And I’ve actually done a little bit of my own research on what’s it going to look like if the sea rises the maximum amount, because we’re nowhere near controlling this? We’ve turned the whole earth into a big alchemical crucible right, and it’s getting hotter, and the seas are rising. So right away, you find out in my first novel, that the beach towns aren’t towns anymore, they’re underwater. 

So, things like that, but I didn’t want to stay there. You know, I wanted to pose the question, how will this perhaps prompt some of us to be exemplary, to move forward, to learn from the old stories, to have a different relationship with the gods, either ignoring them and pretending they don’t exist. And then of course, they show up as symptoms as Jung told us, and Campbell.

Or on the other hand, when we simply submit to them, and have a childish relationship with them a childlike relationship to them, that’s no good either. And so, the gods show up a lot in visionary experiences in dreams, all kinds of different forms. And one of the things they most often say, to the protagonist is quit depending on us. We want a relationship with adults.

So that rubs off too. There’s a whole chapter with the trickster. All the gods are called powers with a capital “P” in my fiction, and the Trickster power Kluni, I did some etymology on all of this, and I took it from different cultures. So, his archetypal name is Cluny. He’s called different things on different worlds. And there’s a whole chapter with him ranting at us about, you know, we don’t want your worship, and we don’t — I’m tired of being your devil. You’re the devil and stuff like that, you know? So it was fun.

Catherine: I bet. I bet. It sounds really cathartic too. Well, there are a few things that you said in there. I guess the main thing I’m thinking about in response to that is that I feel over the years of being engaged with mythology, one of the things that I’ve been asked or things people have approached me with repeatedly has been the new myth, THE new myth. And in thinking about our conversation and these images, I keep returning to the fundamental understanding that there is no the. The image, the story. I think maybe our shared humanity, and this may be also then where to what to the degree that we have a shared image, it comes from– stems more from understanding ourselves to be subject to similar forces and going through similar patterns.

You know, that there’s a certain arc to a human life, you know, and challenges that we all face and different ways and turning to stories then, as a way of articulating the shared experience rather than going “oh, well, this one’s true and that one’s not.” More being like, “wow, we have a million stories like Psyche and Eros of the person going from being blind or living in a state of darkness, to making what seems like a mistake, to then being you know, in some enlightened union with their deepest desire.” So we are the ones that do that. Does that make sense?  

Craig: So in terms of the new myth, and of course, many people have talked about that, and particularly the European Romantic poets and philosophers. They thought we needed a new mythology. And when I first heard about this, I liked it. And then I read Thomas Berry, who’s great. And, you know, such a wonderful, spiritual, ecological thinker all at once. And then I know Brian Swimme. We’ve worked together a little bit at school. And he is part of that group that says, “We need a new story.” And there’s a part of me that’s always resisted that, I think because of what you’re saying, which is, there’s no one story. There’s no single story that can capture all of human experience. We’re too diverse. 

And Thomas Berry talks about well, at one time, the big story was Christianity. And I keep thinking not for most of the planet, it wasn’t. I mean, maybe Europe, right, and parts of North America. So I went away from it for a while and now I’m kind of taking up a middle position, I think, partly as a result of that second PhD, which let me study it a little bit more. As a sidebar, my friend Mary Watkins, when I told her I was going to do it, she goes, you know getting your head examined would be a lot cheaper.

Catherine: Oh, I like that. 

Craig: But. as a result of that study, I like the idea now of a planetary mythology. Not just one story, but a whole bunch of stories, stories collaboratively made for by people from every  culture, every background. You know, I think about the Kalevala, which for those of you who aren’t familiar with that term, it’s a finished book of folktales. Elias Lönnrot wrote was the storyteller who put it together a long time ago, early 1900, I think it was. And it’s hugely popular in Finland and has been for a long time, it’s, it gives the Finns a sense of heritage and solidarity. And there’s even a colleague all the day, and it’s a bunch of, you know, a bunch of folktales. They don’t say anything about solidarity. They don’t tell you how to run a government or, you know, supportive people or anything like that. It’s the stories and the magic itself, that they find compelling. 

And so, I keep thinking what if we had a Kalevala for the planet? You know, what if human beings could get together as a start on it? It could even be transhuman in some ways. But what if we got together and started putting our stories together. So that’s one where one direction my mind goes in. 

And the other is Campbell’s insistence that the traditional myths are in a state of fragmentation, except for a few pockets of culture here and there. And we have them and we can still learn from them. I love the old stories. But he also said that the zone of creation of myth now is with the writers and the performers, and the artists and people like that. 

So, I’m hoping that I’m doing my tiny little bit to move forward the idea of a planetary mythology in the form of hopeful fiction. Hopeful, speculative fiction, and it can take many forms. But that’s why I’m doing it. And it took me a while, I think I had to write my first novel to realize that’s what I was actually doing.

Catherine: When you’re really creating something, you know, not just putting something together, or explaining, it’s always got to be a bit out of control. There has to be a groping feeling, you know, that you’re, you’re on the edge of something that you understand. Personally, that’s what makes it exciting to me. 

I really like this idea of a planetary mythology. I like that image a lot. And I feel it dovetails with another piece of my vision when I say there’s no myth, no image, no, no single thing that brings us together And I’m realizing actually kind of loops back to our earlier theme here of emotional maturity. Part of what I what I see is that is that the, as as many as much conflict as there is right now– appears to be right now– between the rights of the individual and the collective.

See, I look at that, and I go no, actually, we have yet to be individuals, the vast majority of us. Because we don’t really appreciate our creativity, our inner authority, the our power. We talk about it in these increasingly negative ways, oh, look at what we can tear down. But that’s different from really taking responsibility for your story. For knowing who you are and for expressing that in the world in the way that is true to you, you know, and useful for other people. 

Wasn’t there someone who wrote a book that called “the storytelling animal”?

Craig: Or it was a term that was coined. I can’t remember which. 

Catherine: Maybe that would be the handle, I guess, if I had to use a come up with some sort of a metaphor or phrase to capture what I feel like we’re talking about here.

Craig: There’s some troubled history I won’t go into behind Homo sapiens sapiens, and how we got to be called that. But homo, whatever it is in Latin for “storyteller,” I think would be a way more accurate. In my earlier career, I was a psychotherapist for nine years and at the end of that time, when I transitioned into being a full time academic, I was already really appreciating how much story is not only part of our experience, but it’s who we are, it’s how we define ourselves individually and collectively. So when you’re talking about people who aren’t yet individuals, right, they’re not really individuated or mature, I sometimes think of that in terms of an incomplete story, they’re stuck to the story that they do have and unconscious of most of it, in terms of how I tend to think of it. 

So, my characters go through that. And they’re also educating me about it as well, because I use a lot of active imagination when I write Jung’s technique. And there are a lot of unexpected plot twists that I didn’t intend to put in the novels that the characters suggested to me. And so, they’re going through this too. All three of the protagonists are discovering that the story that they have about themselves is incomplete, and largely unknown, and that they’re actually in a much bigger story.

Catherine: I love that. I love that. Now, I kind of hate to interrupt this flow, but I feel like, well, I could imagine someone saying to me, “Okay, Catherine. So now you guys are breezing past the difficulties with such ease into the more exciting possibilities.” What do you think it would take? Or can we or should we, be shed of these other images? I mean, what would it take for us to stop being the center, for example? I mean, I’m assuming that speaks to some kind of some truth.

Craig: Not only in the Abrahamic religions, I mean, there, you can go to some parts of the world and it’s, you’re in dire straits because of your karma you screwed up last lifetime. So you’re being you know, it’s not technically held as punishment, but it kind of amounts to that. So it’s a pretty frequent paradigm. I always think of the negative father, the archetype of the of the father at his worst, like Kronos or Saturn, eating his children, right. And in terms of maybe working our way past that, there’s all of these– and I think myth is great for this–there’s all of these stories that never went mainstream that still exist, that can give us some guidance, and also the stories that we create a new.

But when you mentioned Eve, I immediately thought of the Gnostic version of Eve, who is basically a goddess. And when Adam was created by the Demiurge, a lower power hungry god, he was just nothing. He was physically created but without spirit, and so he was just kind of laying there on the ground and doing nothing, you know. And then Eve comes along, and in one of the Gnostic stories shre says, “Arise.” And she’s the one who animates him in some of the stories right? And tells him “beware of the deep sleep,” which Jung would have thought unconsciousness is what she meant. So, some of those old stories I think can help us understand where we are with these kinds of situations and also help us push back a little bit.

Gnosticism itself failed, largely because it didn’t push back and kept its stories exclusive. This is just for us and that kind of thinking, you know and they were laughing at the Orthodox Christians.  They shouldn’t have laughed. Because, you know, in the in the year 300, and something or other I think it was 345, Gnosticism was banned. It often makes me wonder what if they had gotten more active in the outer world and pushed back a little bit?

Catherine: Right, right. Oh, that was a really interesting example of the archetypal, expanding beyond the idea that there’s some sort of catalog of set things, but rather, you know, these all kinds of prolific meaningful images and patterns. One of the things that I’m most intrigued by in that idea is that there’s the “pro” and the “con,” the problem and the solution. And it’s really interesting to me, what you just said about Gnosticism because “gnosis” has this air of secrecy. And yet the ones who have the secret knowledge actually have the knowledge that would benefit everyone, you know, and you succumb to the secrecy and then you lose the hidden gift that you didn’t see. 

And I think you’re right, that expanding our catalogue of stories, like bringing more of them into the fold. This is sort of weirdly frustrating and unlimited contact that I’ve had with some people are in the film industry. And they’re like, Oh, the hero’s journey. Some of them contact me and ask “do I have the hero’s journey right? Have I left a step out? Because I want to use that for my screenplay and then there’s other people who are like, what am I going to do? I don’t want to write a hero’s journey. And that’s my only option. So not true. 

This narrowing which seems to be another feature of our, of what’s going on, you know, at least in our country, and those in our orbit, or whatever the consolidation. When I have done work with people who were interested in fairy tales, for example, with women protagonists, they’re shocked that I can find them so easily. And it’s like a hello, because there’s a lot of variation. 

Craig: I sometimes recommend to my students, that great collection that Jack has is put together. I love the title, Don’t Bet on the Prince.

Catherine: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So, in terms of how we get around, or deconstruct or get beyond, you know, the I’m just I guess I’ll use the jargony world, we’re toxic images that we’re primarily engaged with expanding our story base. I think that’s an excellent strategy idea. 

I am also thinking about changing our relationship to some of the elements you mentioned the I can’t remember if you said that toxic father, but you know, this authoritarian, judgmental. And maybe it’s the limits of my imagination, it’s hard for me to imagine a world in which there is no such thing. Again, that could be me, but then that makes me think about Hillman’s work around war. Here is an example of Hillman working with this very difficult idea which he claims we cannot get rid of. But then thinking through what our proper relationship is to it, and I think one of our great underutilized tools is creating rituals and symbols. A relationship of ritual and symbol to some of the psychic realities so that they don’t remain unconscious and they don’t become literal actions.

Do you think that works? 

Craig: I’ve seen it work in my men’s groups. I taught them the hero’s journey, but I also taught them where it sticks to us too much. And these were men’s groups so I had a male angle on it but there’s, you know, all the  Jungian work on cultural complexes and, and how a culture can have a fixation as well as an individual. And I’ve sometimes thought that here in the States, one of our big complexes is that monstrous figure of “the hero” that we can’t seem to get out from under. But it gives me hope that so many men and women who get trapped by the hero or the heroic or the heroine, are starting to come to voice about what a huge burden that is and how destructive it is. 

I know a screenwriter in Hollywood who is challenging everybody about the hero’s journey and saying this is not only worn out, but there’s all kinds of interesting stories we could tell about protagonists who aren’t heroes. That was something that Ursula K. LeGuin was on about to in her writing, especially her later writing, which is brilliant. 

So, I’ve seen people get unstuck from that archetype, Jung warned us about archetypal possession. In his Red and Black books, there’s that wonderful dream where he and another man shoots Siegfried, the huge German hero figure at a time when I think Jung was ridding himself of his hero complex. And the savior complex too goes with it, you know, Jung had a bit of both. And when he was starting to get over it, he makes this great comment in the Red Book, I don’t know if it’s in the Black Book, about how in battle, if we don’t overcome the hero within us, if we if we can’t step back from this archetype, then we do the heroic thing outwardly and sacrifice each other. I just thought that was hugely important.

Catherine: I really like that. I’ll have to go find that

Craig: I think he was way ahead of us there. In his encounter with Gilgamesh, who he calls Izdubar in the in the Red Book and the Black Book, same thing, melting him down into an archetype, you know, into a fantasy as he puts it there. You know, really, it’s, it’s that standing back, isn’t it from our stuckness to these gods? We don’t even know we’re stuck to we think it’s us.

I’ve talked to I’ve done a lot of counseling with military veterans. And, you know, most of them will just say, “I hated the whole experience.” But there’s a few who, who say that, like Hillman talked, talked about in his war book that in battle, they felt godlike, they felt like Mars, or one of those big ones, you know? And it’s like, there it is, there’s that stuckness to the archetype that Jung was talking about.

Catherine: Right. Right, right. Yep. So important to be in conversation with things that can help you bring that to consciousness. And, you know, I think there are a lot of different vehicles. I mean, for me, the story has been super helpful. Because it’s such a, a, sort of a gentle and also very provocative way to stir yourself up.

You know, another thing that I think is part of the power of those three images–, the sinner, the king of the animal kingdom, and this world destroyer/parasite thing— is our problem with death, you know, I mean, in a way, those all addressed well, they don’t address that’s kind of the problem. Well, to some degree, but part of the part of what’s involved there is our feeling of mortality. 

I think that one of the really terrible effects that we’re, that’s right in our faces now with climate change, is how all of those have fed our avoidance of our mortality, the inadequacy of the answers that they offer us. I think we’ve created a death culture in our attempt to avoid the reality of death.

Craig: The return of the repressed, right? Mm hmm.   .

Catherine: So I haven’t thought through any elegant approaches there. But I do also have in my mind, the idea that if we were to come to terms with that, if we were really to take seriously Campbell’s observation that the origin or the core motivation behind all of our mythmaking and so therefore, then the construction of our societies and our realities is our consciousness of death. If we were to take that seriously and instead of attempting to change that reality, said “well, so while we’re here, how do we support life? What’s the best way? How do we make a life sustaining culture”? That feels to me like another way of undermining or going sideways at the concerns that keep these other images in play.

Craig: I sometimes link we’re reluctant to let death in as an experience with that heroic psychology we were talking about. The hero doesn’t often die, they, they sometimes do. But usually, it gets put off till the very end, or they try not to. They have different ways of dealing with it. 

But there’s a part in The Odyssey I love where Odysseus goes to the underworld. And after being heroic all through, he finally realizes “I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know how to get home.” And so, he goes down there, and he talks to all these dead shades, these dead figures, you know, old heroes, and Agamemnon’s down there and Tiresias is down there and a bunch of others. And after doing that, it feels to me like he begins to shift from the hero, his stuckness to the hero, to a storyteller. And from that point forward, he spends much more time telling the adventures that he’s been through. 

And so I think he might be offer us a little bit of guidance there about how we can do that to how we can accept the underworld journey and actually go into and live into it and realize that the underworld is always here. It’s around us. And do that instead of turning the world into an underworld, right? Consciously. We even have fiery rivers, you know, that when I first started heard about oil spills setting on fire, I thought of Phlegethon, the river in Greek mythology that always burns and I thought we brought it up here. That’s what we did. I think we’re trying to get. initiated, I think we’re trying to face death. And so we’re creating it on the surface of our planet.

Catherine: Oh, now that is an interesting idea. You know, when you bring that scene of that part of Odysseus’s story to mind–that’s where he meets Achilles, right? Who says, And he and Odysseus is like, “Oh, man, you must just be rockin’ it down there, because you were the best ultimate hero.” And Achilles is like, “Rockin’ it, schmocking it  man, I would rather be a peasant alive on the earth than be a dead hero.”

Craig: They don’t end well usually. I can’t think of many myths where the hero’s happy at the end, right? Look at Hercules, Chulainn. I guess Peach Boy, he’s not very typical. But you know, from Japan, he doesn’t change though. He goes and does some saving as people things and then he goes back home and he’s like, Alright, I’m good.

Catherine: Right, right. Well, you know, you mentioned Gilgamesh. There is an example of like, someone who sees his friend die and then becomes terrified of death. And up until that point, he was a heroic in the just most grotesque way, abusing people, you know, like, unnecessarily creating damage, rampaging around to make a name for himself. You know, it’s just the whole classic immature thing. Then the friend dies and he’s like, Oh, shit, there’s no matter what I do, I can’t change that. And tries to do it. Fails. Loses the plant the herb of immortality on the way home, and then ends up telling his story. What he leaves to his people– who then say at the end that he was a wise king– is he writes his story down.

Craig: Yep. That’s a great example. I like how the old man who guides him and tells him where the herb is–he probably knows what’s going to happen, right? And so, when the when the snake steals the herb, Gilgamesh is all bummed because that’s his early mortality right out the window. And the old man is like “yeah, bummer.”

Catherine: Right. As I recall, the old man takes a very dim view of it when he gets down there. 

Oh, I really like this idea that we are initiating. ourselves, I think these reframes. I mean, in, in a sense, that’s really what we’re talking about here is one way or another as individuals as a culture, bringing things to consciousness and then looking for the reframe, We’re in process. So. So what do we make of it? I mean, seeing the horrors that we’re in right now, and what we’re doing to each other, and especially climate change, as an initiation. And again, I would make the move to ritualize this in a way that enables us to pass the test.

Craig: That may be where our mentors come in, or our elderly mentors, our younger mentors, especially the elderly ones, I think. There was a documentary made here in California about the fires that we now have, that are 100 times more powerful than they used to be. And at any given time, there’s 500, fires burning in somewhere in California, all over the state. 

And so, one of the people who was interviewed for this was Ron Goode, who I don’t know if he still is, but he was the chairman of the North Fork Mono tribe here in California. And he was asked about the indigenous practice of clearing forests and burning brush, which now it’s dangerous to do, because all of that got outlawed for decades. And so that the state would have to burn like 20 times over to even get to fire parity now, it’s really dangerous. But his people and everybody in California who lived here before the settlers got here knew that it needed to burn. 

And so, somebody was talking to him about it. And he did this really interesting move where he said, he was working in image. And he said, when you when you clear the brush out, you see through the forest, it’s one of the ways we know that, that the brush has to get cleared, because we can’t see through the forest. And he says, Just like a child on the back of a parent, we weave our baskets in such a way that the child sees through the basket. And so, it’s like, this image, I was thinking of Hillman, too, because he uses the same term “seeing through.” But it’s like for him. Part of the initiation, part of being matured, is to learn to see through fire and what it does, right. And I liked that move a lot.

Catherine: I like that too. I use that concept of seeing through a lot. 

Craig:  So, I think it’s helpful to know that when things are disastrous, which they often are now disastrous and chaotic, that there’s a bigger picture. That story brings us. Not necessarily analysis, but it reframes it, as you were saying earlier, it gets us a different perspective on it.

Catherine: No, I feel like that I take along the long view now.  And although I do feel that with climate change, we are in certain facing circumstances that  humans have not faced before, we are not the first group of people on the planet, to feel that our civilization and our worlds were coming to an end. So, there’s something to be learned from people who have had this same experience have been grappling with this kind of loss and dislocation in the past.   

Well, I think this is like, this has been a fantastic conversation.

Craig: I’ve really appreciated this.

Catherine: Is there anything what have what have we left out? You mentioned patriarchy at the beginning of this conversation, and we haven’t circled back to it.

Craig: I keep thinking of in some ways of patriarchy is mythology gone wrong. When people hold their mythology unconsciously when they’re stuck to it in the way that we’ve been talking about, then the gods tend to regress, which is something that Jung points out somewhere to that they become dangerous and archaic and in all the worst ways. And so it seems like it would be possible to have a better relationship to what Jungian’s like to call the archetypal masculine. There are other ways of thinking about it. I like the mythic way of thinking about it. These different father figures that come through, and I think they come through when we step back from them a little bit and think about what we’re doing and feel into it. 

So, with patriarchy, it seems like it starts to dissolve when people step back and ask themselves does this what is this doing to me? Am I really happy like this? And what are my symptoms telling me? 

I know a number of people from my group days who, you know, they came in, you would, you’d probably say they were male supremacists. That’s they were that that stuck to it, you know, and by the end of group, we had really good results with a lot of them. By the end of group, they were not only questioning all that, but they were finding different stories to live by different ways to feel into all this. So widening this, the horizon of stories seems like really important work to me.   

Catherine: I’m happy to hear about a real life example of, of that kind of, of that kind of transformation. And I think you expressed some optimism earlier in this conversation about the conversation around patriarchy. And well in gender, I mean, that’s a whole other topic that I think will save for another day. But I find that conversation very interesting. It’s a conversation going on in the culture that I really encourage people who do feel aligned with their biology to pay attention to because I think it shows us in a very powerful way, the incredible fluidity of human being. And that’s something that I think we really need to recover, it’s part of being able to appreciate the diversity. 

You know, I think that when you see us as a as individuals, but also as a species, and as cultures really in process, it sets the stage for this global story telling project that you were talking about, because there’s a link between the feeling that we’re irredeemable and that human nature is fixed, and that nothing can be changed, we’re going off the cliff, no matter what we do, the messages in those images that I laid out at the beginning, and, you know, despair about how things change, and yet we’re surrounded by examples of the incredible flexibility that we possess. 

Craig: I love that way of putting it. I’m thinking of that wonderful retelling of yours of that, that scene out of Norse myth where Loki becomes a mare and gives birth. That was a great story. And you know, I told that part of that story in class once when I was teaching graduate students and one of my students said myth is really queer. It is queer fluid, all possibilities full of new directions to go in, absolutely. It is. So I think it’s a relief to some people I know it is actually to to discover that about the old stories, that they can take us places that our normal thinking won’t and even give us some hope. 

I mean, Hope was a goddess, right, Elpis, and you know, all the others. And that’s something I think that Hillman missed, you know, he didn’t want to invite hope to the table. He liked all the other gods but not Hope so much. Could have argued with him about that. But that’s part of it, too. And, you know, the other position you’re mentioning in terms of, you know, we’re sinners and we’re doomed and all that. I mean, it’s such it. It’s such a lazy position in some ways, because it doesn’t ask anything of us. ou don’t have to try her right. You can just kind of subside into misery or whatever it is, and it actually feels safer in some ways, when people embrace that in their own way, but I just think it’s much more adventurous to say well, what what might we do. Right?

Catherine: Right, right. What’s waiting? what’s waiting for us?—–

I hope you found this conversation useful my friend. Feel free to email me with comments or questions or post them on the Mythic Mojo website. I’ll include a link to Craig’s website with the transcript of our conversation so you can contact him or learn more about his work.

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If we have a better understanding of our need for myth, and all that our old stories offer, we can live more satisfying lives. We can inhabit a better story and create a more beautiful, just and sustainable world. 

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, keep the mystery in your life alive.