OPUS awarded 13 New Mythos Grants in the winter of 2009 and all year we have been gifted in return with learning of new gems hidden in the manuscript and image collections. One of the inspirations for the grant came form Joe Campbell, of course.
In the famous “Power of Myth” interviews with Bill Moyers, Campbell said “the only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet, and everybody on it. And what it will have to deal with will be exactly what all myths have dealt with – the maturation of the individual, from dependency through adulthood, through maturity, and then to the exit; and then how to relate to this society and how to relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos. That’s what the myths have all talked about, and what this one’s got to talk about. But the society that it’s got to talk about is the society of the planet. And until that gets going, you don’t have anything.”
Craig Chalquist’s New Mythos research project focuses on the language of the Planet and I see that as a thread to the myth of the planet that Campbell was referring to. Chalquist’s preliminary research report is titled “Earthrise:Decoding the Speech of the Planet” and he writes:
“If Earth were a sentient non-human being trying to speak to us, how would we decode the message?
As the paradigm of modernity—a “Big Machine” worldview of reality as subject to linear operations of interlocking parts—continues to give way to a more comprehensive, systemic, “Deep Web” understanding of the cosmos as alive and participatory, forms of knowledge abandoned by modernity rise to the surface once again. One of these is a view of the world as animated, sensitive, and reactive, a pre-industrial view held by all our indigenous ancestors and by certain later alchemists, naturalists, and poets uninvested in mining and consuming a world of supposedly dead matter.
This essay proposes to “listen in” on the depths of nature by combining what Goethe developed as an “exact sensorial imagination” with depth-psychological methods of symbol amplification. This allows us to interpret natural events like storms and earthquakes as meaningful symbols: non-verbal, imagistic words in the vocabulary of animate Earth.”
You can read the essay on his website at www.chalquist.com/earthrise.html or visit us at www.opusarchives.org
