The Newsletter of the Mythic Imagination Institute, a Non-profit Arts and Education Corporation
      In preparation for Mythic Journeys 2004 in Atlanta, GA
September/October, 2003 
 Book Reviews and Recommendations
 
Note: The Books reviewed on this page, as well as Terri Windling's The Wood Wife (discussed on Page 10), can be ordered online. When you order using these links, you help to support the Mythic Imagination Institite, a non-profit arts and education corporation, and our programs.

Books Reviewed:

Joseph Campbell's Asian Journals
The Runes of Elfland by Brian Froud and Ari Berk
Spirits in the Wires by Charles de Lint
The Genealogy of Greek Myth By Vanessa James
The Mythological Unconscious by Michael Vannoy Adams
 

Baksheesh & Brahman: Asian Journals -- India
By Joseph Campbell. Ed. Robin and Stephen Larsen and Antony Van Couvering
 

Sake & Satori: Asian Journals -- Japan
By Joseph Campbell. Ed. David Kudler

Reviewed by Dennis Patrick Slattery
 

Journaling is a different kind of writing because it skips consciously between the whom of the writer and the what of the subject matter. Having read some 750 pages of Joseph Campbell's reflections on a myriad of Asian countries through which he traveled for one year, beginning in September, 1954, I have a much deeper appreciation for the man and the power of myths that guided him to become a comparative mythologist. This identity, by which the world now knows him, surfaced and solidified during this year of travel. In this review I can only hope to touch on Campbell the man, the traveler, the pilgrim who was seeking something of his own life's work when he departed New York at the age of 50 to explore the worlds of India, Japan and several countries in between.

 What emerges is a character of keen wit in the face of adversity, a ferocious lover of his wife, Jean, a writer who delights in details, lists, comparing this to that, a passionate defender of the United States and the West despite its shortcomings, great compassion in the face of poverty, a night lifer who enjoys the clubs and the social engagements with others, a solitary who loved to walk alone among the streets of Benares or Calcutta or and stare the heavy poverty in the face, a lover of every country's rituals, dances, temples, museums, landscapes and who was always comparing, seeing correspondences and differences between world religions, social and economic structures, the disparities between poverty and plushness. But most of all, these pages bear witness to Joseph Campbell the writer and thinker. He is truly one on whom nothing was lost.

His humor while in India would surface when, in a hotel, he sees there is no water but what is present in a bucket on the floor. He laughs at what he calls "conspicuous plumbing." He sees, compassionately, a woman naked on the sidewalk, begging: "In India it's either too little or too much." He observes the contradictions in this country and records his frustration with them. For example, he loves the Indian monuments of the classical period and laments that the roads that lead to them are practically impassable. 

We also learn of his deep love for the scholar and mythologist Heinrich Zimmer, who mentored Campbell; through Zimmer and this year abroad Campbell discovers the parameters of his lifeís work. Trained in school in medieval literature, Campbell begins to feel into his new role as a mythologist while in Bombay, even though Hero With a Thousand Faces had already been published. He called his new work The Basic Mythologies of Mankind, wherein he vows to himself to "review the history of the symbolisms of the past from the standpoint of the living realizations through which they were brought into being." Influenced heavily by Zimmer, Freud and Jung, Campbell discovers in his six months in India that he must "find a point of view of my own with respect to the relationship of my India studies to the whole field of my science." One sees emerging a profound interior journeying into the place, which would yield for Campbell the content and direction of world mythology studies that engaged him until his death in 1987.

Leaving India for Japan offered Campbell great relief from the poverty and what he called the Baksheesh Complex in India: "something for nothing." He also hated and fought against the anti-American sentiment of the upper class of India in spite of the foreign aid the country received. He left India with a bitter taste that gradually sweetened the longer he was in Japan and India took shape in his memory. In Japan he lived the good life: floor shows, geisha rituals, steam baths, body pampering. He wanted to drink the country in with all of its luxuries and its extreme cleanliness, efficiency and openness. Here he studies Japanese faithfully every morning and enrolls in a daily class. We see his discipline and his disappointment at Americans and members of other countries who do not take the time to learn the culture into which they are purportedly entering. Here in Japan, he moves deeper into his study of world religions and sees the pitfalls when a system of beliefs literalize their symbols and metaphors so that they lose their mythic energy. 

A passionate photographer, Campbell loved attending any and all ceremonies in India and Japan and photographing them. His journals are packed with these photos. He was no less passionate about fine dining and patronized the most exclusive restaurants with people he met. But he became bored quickly if the conversation did not move to entertaining ideas or observations that would stimulate the imagination. In Kyoto he was able to solidify further in his mind, through numerous lists and menus he created, what would eventually emerge as his magnum opus, The Masks of God. He warned himself in his notes: "Do not try to harmonize what the philosophers of that culture itself have not harmonized. Stick to the historical perspective and all will emerge of itself."

Read his journals for his insights, his lists, his plans, his thoughts and his deep love for his wife. But read them also for those little observations he makes that are sheer delight. In Kyoto on a walk, Campbell hears a bird and looks up: "heard a hawk, whose cry sounded almost like the music of a Japanese flute. Nature imitating art?" Always observant in his journeys, Campbell's journals reveal the complex interior terrain of a soul who helped put the study of comparative mythology back on the world map. Let me end by praising the work of the Joseph Campbell Foundation in Novato, California for producing such beautiful and carefully constructed volumes of Joseph Campbell's Collected Works.


Dennis Patrick Slattery is Core Faculty in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute. His most recent work is  Psychology at the Threshold, co-edited with Lionel Corbett. He is a Mythic Journeys guest speaker.


The Runes of Elfland
Art by Brian Froud, Text by Ari Berk

Reviewed by John Adcox

For centuries, the runes of ancient Europe have fascinated scholars, artists, and mystics alike. Were they second or third century adaptations of the Greek or Roman alphabet? Religious or magical talismans? Fortune telling relics? Or are they keys? The secret entryways to the Perilous Realms?

Whatever secrets the runes hold are probably lost to time. But if anyone can solve the riddle, it’s probably an artist, a folklorist, or a poet. Between them, Brian Froud and Ari Berk have all three bases covered. In their own ways, both men have pondered the runes, wondering what they conceal. The Runes of Elfland is the result, and it is a delight.

What can be said about Brian Froud’s art that hasn’t been said a hundred times before? His work has been the basis for films (The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth) and books (Faeries, Good Faeries, Bad Faeries, and the whimsical Lady Cottington’s Pressed Fairy Book), and it has always been touched with magic that simply must have its source in the fields beyond the fields we know. Look at his work, and it’s hard to imagine that Froud hasn’t somehow managed to peak into another world, and capture what he’s seen. 

In The Runes of Elfland, Froud presents a series of paintings for each rune, each revealing something of the mystery that just may be hidden within.

Ari Berk’s text makes a perfect counterpoint. Berk is both a folklorist (he teaches myth, folklore, and medieval literature at Central Michigan University) and a poet, and both voices are in fine form in The Runes of Elfland. Berk offers a poem, a story, and a bit of speculative interpretation for every rune, each the perfect counterpoint for Froud’s paintings.

The Runes of Elfland isn’t quite folklore and it’s not quite fantasy. It’s mythopoeia -- myth making. And it’s one of the few art books that's as much a pleasure to read as it is to behold. Don’t miss it.
 

 


Ari Berk And Brian Froud are both Mythic Journeys guest speakers, as is Charles de Lint, reviewed below.


Spirits in the Wires
By Charles de Lint

Reviewed by John Adcox

Like Isabell Allende, Jonathan Carroll, and Alice Hoffman, Charles de Lint brings myth and magic out of faraway Middle-earth or fairyland and makes it live and breathe in the modern world. The result is no less wonderful, but somehow even more immediate and relevant.

In his new novel, Spirits in the Wires,Charles de Lint once again returns to Newford, the fictional North America city that has been the setting for his recent novels and stories. Newford is more than a city; like the forest in fairy tales, it is a place where magic waits, hidden and subtle, just around the next corner, or one step sideways.

Spirits in the Wires gives surprising and fascinating life to the emerging new mythologies of the modern world, the spirits of the Internet, the World Wide Web, and even computer viruses. This isn't really a new idea; Neil Gainman addressed similar ideas in his American Gods

But where Gaiman relies primarily on cleverness, de Lint draws on heart, insight, and characters that we can help caring about. And that is what makes de Lint's book succeed. He shows us exactly how myth surrounds us, even in a wired world of instant messages, PDAs, and computer viruses, and how it continues to touch and change us. It's also a lovely reminder of how we all live stories, and our stories touch others in such wonderful and unexpected ways.

Spirits in the Wires is fun and entertaining. As a thriller, it's a page-turner. But the myth and the poetry of the writing make it lovely, and the characters make it come alive. Our compassion for de Lint's beautifully-drawn characters moves us, and makes the novel linger long after the last page is turned.

Speaking of the characters, some of them, especially the folklorist/author Christy Riddell, are familiar to those who have read de Lint's earlier Newford novels and stories. It's not necessary to read the previous works to enjoy Spirits in the Wires. However, it's a much richer experience if you have. The four Newford story collections make a great place to start -- epecially the stories Saskia, The Fields Beyond the Fields, and Pixel Pixies.



The Genealogy of Greek Myth: An Illustrated Family Tree of 
Greek Myth from the God to the Founders of Rome 
By Vanessa James

Reviewed by John Adcox

The Genealogy of Greek Myth is a handy resource. Packed with well-researched information, this book provides "at a glance" charts and surprisingly detailed information about the complex and often confusing relationships of the immortal Olympians and the mortal heroes they interact with. 

The author, Vanessa James, spent eighteen years putting he Genealogy of Greek Myth together, and it shows. The data is more than complete, it is exhaustive. More, it provides a truly elegant and genuinely useful way to trace the dynasties and major events of Greek and Roman myth.

The information, which includes more than 3,000 entries for gods, goddess, heroes, monsters, and mortals and 125 biographies of key characters, is nicely indexed, complete, and easy to access and grasp quickly. The family-tree style arrangement makes it intuitive to explore. It's also fun to read. 

Nonetheless, what really sets this book apart is the fact that it is just plain beautiful. It is lavishly illustrated with photographs, a mythological star chart, classical art (reproductions of paintings, sculptures, mosaics, pottery, etc.), maps, and the previouslty mentioned charts, all in lush and vibrant color. 

The uniquely designed book slides out of a slip case and unfolds to become a 17-foot long poster, making the information accessible literally at a glance. The result is an excellent reference that's also a treasure to own.



The Mythological Unconscious
By Michael Vannoy Adams

Reviewed by Dennis Patrick Slattery

I like critical and theoretical works that find themselves at home walking along the margins of disciplines or fields of inquiry. As part of a faculty teaching mythological studies, I felt my own hermeneutic interests heat up over what the title of Adams' new book promised: a venture along the cusp of dream interpretation, mythology, poetry, the unconscious and depth psychology. Although I was disappointed in some places on the journey, I was not discouraged enough to be forced off the path before I reached the end of this lengthy and involved exploration (488 pp.). More of that later.

Adams builds convincingly from his earlier study, The Mutlicultural Imagination: "Race," Color and the Unconscious. (London: Routledge, 1996) In this new work, his focus is different but not unrelated. He takes as his point of departure Jung's own observation that "the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious." (p.12) From that observation, almost a catalyst to the study, Adams develops a sustained and often subtle comparison and contrast of Freud's work over against Jung's in the areas of dream interpretation, the structure and contents of the unconscious, as well as the respective heuristics that guide each of these early pioneers of the psyche. The author is particularly strong in outlining and illustrating Jungís method of amplification, which is both a methodology as well as a certain poetic disposition towards psycheís metaphorical motion.

The more interesting exploration occurs in Adams'linking the value of comparative mythology to amplifying images in dreams, a method which can also be appropriated nicely to the study of literature in the form of what Julia Kristeva called "intertextuality." In addition, something else that lends itself to classroom use is free association with a mythic image, in order to observe what is evoked through a recognition of analogy. However, to further and deepen such a process, Adams calls for a stronger "archetypal literacy" (p. 41) that all analysts ought to have a working knowledge of in their training programs. I applaud and support his idea; such an addition would strengthen and deepen analysis through contact with the ancient images of myth.

In the same spirit of expanding the method and content of apprehending both myth and dream, Adams cites Joseph L. Henderson, who introduced the term "cultural unconscious" into Jungian analysis. Adams concurs with Henderson's observation that "what Jung called collective was also culturally conditioned." (p.106) This second order of unconscious material appears as a subset, so to speak, of the collective unconscious and develops through "cultural ingraining." (p.107) Thus, a chapter entitled "African-American Dreaming and The Lion in the Path: Racism and the Cultural Unconscious" both resonates a major concern of his earlier work and points to the value of knowing a host of mythic narratives globally and locally.

For students of mythology, especially, but not exclusively, chapters on the Centaur, Pegasus, the Bull, the Minotaur, the Unicorn and the Griffin envisioned in myth, literature and dream provide some provocative bridges between the poetic, mythic and personal imaginations. These figures, often given their own chapter, constitute the bulk of the book's content. Without stating it directly, Adams' study is concerned with the richness of the imaginationís ability and propensity to engage in what Aristotle called a mimetic action. Mimesis was understood as a making, a forming and shaping into a coherent form some construction or image, from what had been suggested or confronted in daily life, or had been imagined out of whole cloth by one's individual imagination. Part of the suggestion here is that the unconscious may not only be mythological but poetic at ground level.

By keeping the reader closely involved with these mythic images, Adams describes how the psyche seeks a confluence of experiences that graze around a central image to make sense of experience, be its source imbedded in dream, literature, mythology or waking life. He quotes Jung half way through his discussion: "symbols function to transform libido, or psychic energy." (This is what he means by "symbols of transformation.") (p.236) Given the metamorphic nature of symbols, their strength seems to rest in their power, Jung continues, "to act as transformers, their function being to convert libido from a lower to a higheríform." (p.236) Such a transformation suggests that the energy of libido can be raised to a mythic or symbolic level. Jung's interest in the transformative nature of symbols suggests that energy from libido is altered, refined, shaped into a higher form of consciousness, which may be termed symbolic.

In fact, the symbolic nature of the psyche reaches into the heart of Adams' explorations, which use individual dreams, including his own, as major texts throughout the study. Here he is careful to make some clear distinctions between mythological and archetypal dreams. His idea is that all mythic dreams are archetypal, but not all archetypal dreams are mythological. (p.245) He takes this opportunity to point out a common error regarding archetypes, an error worth noting. Again, and this is one of the strongest qualities of his study, he returns to Jung's own words for us to contemplate: "It is necessary to point out once more that archetypes are not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form, and then only to a very limited degree." (p.246) Adams underscores Jung's insistent distinction: archetypes are not images. An image becomes archetypal only when it functions as the specific content of an archetype, but the image that serves this purpose only occasionally is not the archetype. While the archetypes are more akin to "constant forms," the archetypal image is are "particular contents of these forms." This difference is well-known to Jungians, but for many entering the deep waters of Jung's Collected Works, it is a difference worth repeating.

This important distinction Adams leverages into the foreground of his study and keeps it there. The distinction offers rich possibilities for investigating the nature of poetic form in poetry, mimesis as the heart of poetic action, and the nature of poetic coherence in a narrative. It also allows one to muse that perhaps poetry, as much if not more than dreams and mythic images by themselves, takes up the material world in language in such a way that it leads psyche back to these primordial forms. Such may be poetryís archetypal fundament and its most intimate association with the paradoxical world of mythology.

Also central to his study, in addition to the images mentioned above, are the shapes or structures of the labyrinth and the spiral, which he investigates through Freud and Jung, as well as the thought of James Grotstein. What emerges from his discussion is a provocative connection between, for example, the labyrinth and the interior of the body. A strength of the study resides in the manner in which Adams will offer several major thinkersí interpretations of the same theme; the overall effect is a large and sustained comparative approach to psyche and myth, all finding their common ground in the unconscious. "For Freud (and at least some contemporary Freudians), the mythological unconscious is ultimately an anatomical unconscious." (p.268) One can easily make some connections between Freud and Joseph Campbell's work on mythology and the organs of the body through what Adams evoked here in psyche's anatomical unconscious. Campbell's fundamental belief that mythology has its genesis "in the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with each other." (The Power of Myth. New York: Doubleday, 1988, p. 39) 

He also treats the spiral well through both his own insights and those of Jung: "According to him[Jung] the analytic process is not linear but circular (or cyclical), or, more accurately, spiral, and finally centripetal." (p.279) The spiral is the sine qua non archetypal image for psychological development. In Dante's Commedia, for instance, this image is essential for the pilgrim's progress through the territories of Inferno and Purgatorio, both of which consist of continuous spiral movements as they lead to the central image of the Griffin in Paradiso. This same spiraling assumes the form of the whirlpool generated by the white whale in Melville's epic Moby-Dick as it pulls the Pequod with its entire crew down into the realms of the unfathomable Pacific ocean, leaving only Ishmael, swirling and spiraling at the margins of the whirlpool, finally popping to the surface and rescued to tell the tale of the hunt to us. 

To speak of Dante the poet and Ishmael the writer is to tap another image Adams values: that of the hero, often bashed today as nothing more than egoic testosterone ebullience. Adams confirms some of my own beliefs regarding James Hillman's harsh treatment of the heroic when he writes that it is an image Hillman tries to slay. Claiming that Hillman literalizes the hero, Adams rightly identifies the fact that the heroic can appear in many guises. This important archetype transcends Hercules as the absolute and only image of the heroic. Adams allows us to think more freely and range more widely, for example, to include the wide differences between, say, Achilles and Odysseus, Penelope or Portia from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, or Bilbo Baggins or Harry Potter, for that matter. The tragic, comic and epic heroes are very different figures of psyche, existing most often in very varied landscapes, and Adams is to be credited for insisting we make distinctions between them. 

Towards the end of his study, he returns to the different methodologies of Jung and Freud, in order to consider the writings of Jacques Lacan, who follows in the grooves set down earlier by Freud himself. At times jargon in the writing detracts rather than promotes interest in the discussion. For example, one section refers to Lacanís and Freud's methods as "derivative-reductive" and the method of Jung's as "explicative-amplificatory." A Jungian will follow within this method what Adams has termed in his earlier book "phenomenological essentialism," by which he means that the dreamer of images "sticks to them and defines them in terms of what they essentially mean." (p.376). Perhaps simply describing the phenomenon in a shared prose style would help the average reader grasp the various theoretical ideas and methodologies.

These phrases should, however, not block the perceptions and insights that offer the reader a thick and sophisticated comparative approach to dream analysis, myth studies and image making. I must commend the excellent bibliography that will guide the reader not only to the citations of Freud and Jung, but also to the writing of poets like William Blake and H.D., novelists like Herman Melville, Jorge Luis Borges and Ursula Le Guinn, and to additional psychologists like Edward Whitmont, Edward Edinger, Marie-Louise von Franz and Rafael Lopez-Pedraza. Adams successfully bridges the chasm between disciplines in order to move all of us towards a more holistic approach to working psychotherapy, teaching literary works from a depth and archetypal perspective, and seeing with a fuller vision the myth-making or mytho-poetic impulses of the psyche, which is incarnated in its movement in the world, seeking to create meaning through imagining and remembering.

I recommend his study to people interested in mythology, poetry, literary theory, depth psychology, theology and counseling psychology. The Mythological Unconscious is a secure and seasoned witness to the truth that psyche moves in and finds its meaning through images embedded in narratives. The storied or poetic psyche lives a healthy full life within the pages of Adamsí study.



Author Michael Vannoy Adams and reviewer Dennis Patrick Slattery are both Mythic Journeys guest speakers.

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