kindred spirit - potnios theron - other cat-herds & deer-herds - and any other surviving mythagos.
The purpose:
This space will probably not contain any content of mine other than in the form of comments, reviews and perhaps some recommendations. The blog will be the pinnacle focus. It will include links and offline references in order to help others to rediscover works which might otherwise be lost.
This is perhaps a quest for mythic and mythopoetic integrity. The expanding company of friends is being brought together for mutual benefit and to make it easier for any who discover this space and to follow the links to other spaces and resources in this MySpace matmos as well as to discover each other.
All choices are being made with care, I can promise you that. It is my profound hope that from this new alliances will be formed and new works made possible and that older works which deserve to be remembered are recovered.
If we lose our contact with the primordial will we begin to lose our humanity and our connection to each other?
Mass-media entertainment seems intent on turning us all into sociopaths. Could we deepen our perceptions by the replacement of stereotypes with collective archetypes? This is one path that has been followed for millenia.
Robert Graves stated on several occasions that he was writing for poets. Perhaps that is what this space will be about - but poetry in its widest sense - comprising all of the arts inspired by "the one Muse who variously haunts this island Earth".
(quote from " Darien " by Robert Graves - for Adam)
EnTrance
Symbolic Relationships
from "The Life of Symbols"
edited by Mary Le Cron Foster and Lucy Jayne Botscharow
(pp.84-85)
_______
If we examine language, we discover that no linguistic symbol stands alone. All are integrated into a temporal-spatial system of relationships. In order to have a real understanding of a part it is necessary to have some grasp of the whole. The sounds of language are only meaningful if integrated into words. Words are only meaningful if integrated into sentences. Sentences have no meaning unless integrated into some larger context, which may be verbal, environmental, or a combination of these. This is equally true of other symbolic systems. All symbols are integrated into larger structures.
The trance susceptible shaman and the initiated antelope-priest are not unsophisticated in the wisdom of the world, nor unskilled in the principle of communication by analogy.
The metaphors by which they live, and through which they operate, have been brooded upon, searched, and discussed for centuries -even millenia; they have served whole societies, furthermore, as the mainstays of thought and life.
The culture patterns have been shaped to them.
The youth have been educated, the aged rendered wise, through the study, experience and understanding of their effective initiatory forms.
For they actually touch and bring into play the vital energies of the whole human psyche.
They link the unconscious to the fields of practical action, not irrationally, in the manner of a neurotic projection, but in such fashion to permit a mature and sobering, practical comprehension of the fact-world to play back, as a stern control, into the realms of infantile wish and fear.
• by Joseph Campbell