Shaman of Snakes

And in this there is serious danger. For not only has it always been the way of multitudes to interpret their own symbols literally, but such literally read symbolic forms have always been - and still are, in fact - the supports of their civilizations, the supports of their moral orders, their cohesion, vitality, and creative powers. With the loss of them there follows uncertainty , and with uncertainty, disequilibrium, since life, as both Nietzsche and Isben knew, requires life-supporting illusions; and where these have been dispelled, there is nothing secure to hold on to, no moral law, nothing firm. We have seen what has happened, for example, to primitive communities unsettled by the white man's civilization. With their old taboos discredited, they immedietly go to pieces, disintegrate, and become resorts of vice and disease.

One cannot help remarking , however that since about the year 1914 there has been evident in our progressive world an increasing disregard and even disdain for those ritual forms that once brought forth, and up to now have sustained, this infinitely rich and fruitfully developing civilization. Americans abroad, from the period of Mark Twain onward, have been notorious exemplars of the ideal, representing as conspicuously as possible the innocent belief that Europeans and Asians, living in older, stuffier environments, should be refreshed and wakened to their own natural innocencies by the unadulterated and boorishness of a product of God's Country, our sweet American soil, and our Bill of Rights.

It is this: that in a small community like Athens the relationship of the creative artist to the local social leaders would be forthright and direct, they would have known each other since boyhood; whereas in such a community as, say, our modern New York, London, or Paris, the artist who would be known has to go to cocktail parties to win commissions. and those who win them are the ones who are not in their studios but at parties, meeting the right people and appearing in the right places. They have not been quite enough engaged in the agony of solitary creative work to press beyond their first acquisitions of marketable styles and techniques. And the next consequence is "instant art," where some clever individual with as little formal agony as possible simply renders something unforeseen - which is then criticized and either advertised or suppressed by either friendly or unfriendly newspaper folk, who have also had a lot of socializing to attend to and, with insufficient time for extra-curricular study or experience, find themselves baffled before anything really complex or significantly new.

-Joseph Cambell

WE LIVE IN A TIME OF NO FAITH. PEOPLE BELIEVE IN NOTHING. IT USED TO BE THAT EACH HAD THEIR OWN VERSION OF GOD BUT NO MORE. WITHOUT GOD, WITHOUT OUR GURUS, PEOPLE PLACE LOOK TO OTHER THINGS TO FILL THAT VOID THAT THE ABCENSE OF FAITH HAS LEFT, LIKE PUTTING FOUL WATER ON AN OPEN WOUND. GANG GREEN OCCURS, AMPUTATION BECOMES NESCESSARY, BUT ALL THE WHILE PEOPLE STAND IN THE BACK AND SING SAVE THE WHALES.