The promised Twilight episode and why it does not work as a myth. Well, sort of.
3 The Promised Twilight Episode
In this episode, I critique Breaking Dawn and the Twilight saga and why Stephenie Meyer’s attempt at re-visioning the vampire myth does not work too well. We also have our first Ancient Myth Showcase from Randy at Journey to the Sea talking about Achilles.
Plus, iTunes just approved this feed yesterday. It should be searchable soon.
Links to the pop culture references: Don’t Eat the Pictures and Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land.
Contact info: Web: www.mythicthinking.org (for now at least)
e-mail: mythinginaction at gmail dot com.
The music is “Song #9″ by Avagadros Number. I found them in podsafemusic and they are totally awesome.
September 21st, 2008 at 4:40 pm
In Randy’s part of the podcast, he said that he originally felt that philosophy would be the path to the highest truths; while myth, fairy tales and the like would be more a source of amusement; but then he came to feel that myth etc. was actually the higher. An excellent litmus test for gauging this evaluation is to look at the number of philosophies out there: Their sheer number only demonstrates that the “correct,” comprehensive one hasn’t been described yet. Each is more a revealing of the psychological typology of its author. In “Beyond Good and Evil” Nietzsche writes “Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; also that the moral(or immoral) intentions in every philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant had grown.”
I think another indicator of the non-absoluteness of the various philosophies is the emotion invested in them. In Jungian thought, the degree of vehemence and fanaticism by which a position is espoused is proportional to the unconscious uncertainty of the position. This deals more with secular philosophies like nationalism, materialism, communism, national socialism, and, ironically, religious philosophies. The plethora of religions and their philosophies are very much a subjective affair; that is, until we read Campbell and Jung and discover the mythological commonalities underlying them.
Mythology, and especially fairy tales, on the other hand, pass the litmus test due to their uniformity. I don’t need to point out to a bunch Campbellonians and Jungees that comparative mythology has demonstrated the uniformity of myths and fairy tales among all geographies of the planet throughout all epochs. If the world survives its search for a “new” myth, it’ll in most respects resemble all of the “old.” We have to put parenthesis around “old” and “new” because myths are “old” and “new” only from the temporal perspective of humanity. From the viewpoint from beyond the veil, the archetypes that are the foundation of myths are eternal: outside of time. But from our temporal perspective, we’ll see myths evolve as the penultimate Archetype of Evolution unfolds.
Myths take us towards that ineffable metaphysical ground where we can experience a unity with everyone else and everything in Creation as well; which makes myth the highest truth(when we use the word “myth” to refer to something that is held to be true but that we know isn’t, we couldn’t be using the word more wrongly).