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| She Who Watches Milkweed pod blowing in the chill winds after the 1st hard frost CC Jean Stimmell: 10/26/13 |
We live utterly
out of balance in a monoculture of rationality, bureaucracy, and corporate
bean-counting. If Uncle Sam were a
person, he would be in desperate need of a chiropractor from walking
bent-over-sideways, from favoring his rational side at the expense of his
imaginative, instinctual and soulful parts.
We live and die
today by only one myth: our god is science. As myths go, this one is as
nourishing as a two-year-old Twinkie; it is a monoculture as dry and arid as a
desert. Yet we go on staggering along like thirsty folks in Death Valley with
no water in sight, blindly following this dead myth.
To work on
behalf of society, myth must have certain key qualities that resonate with and
give sustenance to the individual.
According to Joseph Campbell, myth is what makes human life
“psychologically true, significant, and meaningful.”1We were not meant to dwell in the arid desert of scientific rationality,
a monoculture of dried up theories and numbers. Campbell says that what humans
seek is not more spreadsheets and cognitive therapy but “the rapture of being
alive.”2
Monotheistic
myths, no matter how expansive, can’t do justice to the human soul or psyche
which is made up or many parts, each an essential part of the whole. What we
need, according to James Hillman, is a polytheistic myth that can
embrace all our various selves3.
Not only do our
psyches have many directions and sources of meaning, these different parts are
often in an ongoing conflict, according to Hillman. The question then becomes,
if we take the polytheistic view, how do we make sense of our multiple parts
that often are in conflict, how do we harness them to work together to move
forward and create meaning in our lives.4
The way out of
our “psychic turmoil” lies in reclaiming our imagination by having the courage
to shift paradigms: To shift from viewing our lives through a single, limited
viewpoint, governed by one god, to a polytheistic psychology inhabited by many
gods. This is not as earth shattering as it seems: we are merely reactivating
our imagination and reverting to the polytheistic worldview of our forebears.
For instance,
according to Christine Downing, the classical Greeks viewed the world through
the eyes of many gods, not just one; they saw the gods not as omnipotent and
perfect but as energies that affect everyone; the gods were referred to “as
theos, that is, as immortal, permanent, ineluctable aspects of the world.”5
No god in the
ancient classical civilizations ever denied the existence of another god
because as Downing says: “to deny even one of the pantheon diminishes the
richness of individuals and of the world.6
No wonder our
monoculture world of science is so diminished, artificial and plastic.
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Throughout this
essay, I have used monotheistic and monoculture interchangeably and I did that
for a reason, making the connection in my mind after reading an excellent piece
by Mark Bittman on agricultural monocultures; the article rails against annual
monocultures controlling agriculture in the same manner that Hillman rails
against monotheistic myths controlling society.7
I will writemore about this soon in the next entry in my blog, attempting to explain why
the future of humanity depends on changing to a new paradigm based on perennial
polysystems agriculture and polytheistic psychology –which, in reality, are two
sides of the same coin.
Doing more
research after writing this blog, I discovered that Craig Chalquist has already
written extensively on the connection between how monocrops currently rule
farming in the same manner that patriarchal monotheism rules society.8
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1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytheistic_myth_as_psychology
2 Campbell, J. (1988). The Power of myth. New
York: Doubleday p.5
3 Hillman, J. (1989). A blue fire: Selected
writings by James Hillman. Thomas Moore (Ed.). New York: Harper Collins
4 Ibid.
p. 41
5 Downing, C. (1993). Gods in our midst:
Mythological images of the masculine: A woman’s view. New Orleans: Spring
Journal Books p.9
6 Ibid.,
p. 10
7 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/opinion/bittman-now-this-is-natural-food.html?ref=markbittman&_r=0
8 http://www.chalquist.com/earthrise.html
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