The mythogenetic zone today is the individual in contact with his own interior life, communicating through his art with those ‘out there.’

--Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology, p. 93

 

One of Campbell’s most intriguing theories was that mythogenetic zones--those intersections in actual time and place where a group of people shared both the historical need for a regenerative mythology and the spontaneous language of a deep signal code--were impossible in this day and age of dissolving symbol systems and outmoded cosmologies. His claim in Creative Mythology was that since “in our world there exist no more closed horizons within the bounds of which an enclave of shared experiences might become established, we can no longer look to communities for the generation of myth.” Out of this conclusion he drew his correlative truth stated above, that the only true mythogenetic zone lies in the creative soul matrix of the individual.

 

Needless to say, this is lonely work.

 

The closing words of Campbell’s great work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, also speak to this solitary struggle:

 

The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice and sanctioned misunderstanding. “Live,” Nietzsche says, “as though the day were here.” It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us who shares the supreme ordeal--carries the cross of the redeemer--not in the bright moments of his tribe’s greatest victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.”  --Campbell, Hero, p. 391

 

I have recently returned from South America, where I spent time in Brazil and Ecuador sharing Campbell’s work and listening to the stories of those who are descended from conquistadors, from missionaries, from refugees, from business entrepreneurs as well as those who can trace their native lineage back to times before colonization.

 

One conversation stands out among the rest as touching the heart of mythogenesis. An Ecuadorian native and founding member of the new Quito RoundTable spoke with me about the deep struggle to find or forge a “new identity” for the country, which is being submerged in a whirlpool of capitalism and foreign imagery to such an extent that the whole country recently abandoned its own currency and adopted the American dollar for its own use. I was consternated to feel the familiar, though much used and abused, greenbacks passing from my hands to the hands of natives in the marketplace for colorful treasures and trinkets that shouted out their ethnic identity--almost as if the U.S. economy had swallowed Ecuador alive--a feeling shared by many Ecuadorians as I was to discover.

 

My friend, a photographer, artist and master of several languages, turned to me and spoke solemnly about the situation. “My people have lost their soul,” he explained. “Until we find it we cannot really grow.”

 

“Where and when did you lose it?” I asked with curiosity.

 

Without missing a beat he replied, “At the death of Atahuallpa!”

 

I gazed at him with astonishment. “How can you pinpoint it so precisely?” I wanted to know. “After all, that event took place nearly 500 years ago.”

 

“Yes,” he replied. “But it was the nature of the death; a surrender so fast and complete that the soul had nowhere to go, no place to run.”

 

“You know,” I mused, “this reminds me for some reason of that moment in the first Star Wars film when Obi Wan Kenobi is battling Darth Vader and we see Vader’s light saber come down in a fatal swing over Obi Wan, but the sword cuts through thin air--Obi Wan has vanished. He is mourned as if he is dead, but we know somehow that this is not the whole story. This death-which-is-but-a-seeming-death is a familiar motif in mythology. King Arthur, for instance, is also supposed to be sleeping somewhere, ready to rise again when his people need him the most. In Norse myth, it is the light god, Balder, who will return from the land of the dead to lead the people once again. The death of Atahuallpa was too quick, too easy. But what happened can be read, not as defeat, but as a long end-run around the offense. As Manco urged, ‘reveal only what you have to and keep the rest hidden, close to your hearts.’

 

“But where is it hidden now?” my friend continued. “We have lost so much of our culture.”

 

“Well, Campbell would say that it must be found deep in the creativity of the individual who still carries the spark in his soul. Individuals like you,” I suggested, looking closely at him. “Somewhere, perhaps in your own dreams and struggles and the artwork that has come from it, lies the spark that reawakens the sleeping hero.”

 

He looked at me thoughtfully, and--I thought--with the appropriate amount of trepidation at such a tall order.

 

“The next generation of Ecuadorians and Peruvians will be the inheritors of the 500 years of mythic sleep,” he said. “There is a legend that when 500 years is through, that a new spirit will emerge on the land. We must be ready.”

 

And so must we, the sons and daughters of the conquistadors, I thought to myself. We must climb down off the high horse we are still riding and learn to acknowledge the immense beauty and value of another way of seeing. As conquistador Mansio Serra de Legui Zamon wrote, wrote on his deathbed, to King Phillip II of Spain:

I wish your majesty to understand the motive that moves me to make this statement is the peace of my conscience and because of the guilt I bear. For we have destroyed by our evil behavior such a government as was enjoyed by these natives. We found these realms in such good order that there was not a thief or a vicious man, nor an adulteress, nor were they an immoral people, being content and honest in their labor. All things from the smallest to the greatest had their place and order. They were so free of crime and greed, both men and women, that they could leave gold or silver worth a hundred thousand pesos in their open house …this is something which must touch your majesty’s conscience as it does mine, seeing that I am the last to die of the conquistadors.
--Wood, Conquistador, p. 274

We stood in silence on top of the hill gazing down upon the beauty of modern-day Quito nestled between the great peaks of the Andes on either side, the sunlight breaking through the clouds to illuminate a church steeple here, a red tile roof there, a ribbon road between the trees. I thought of all the extraordinary people I had met and the great soul work going on in cafes, galleries, museums, universities, and centers of initiation into the mysteries of life. I glanced up at the profile of this earnest young man with the deep, dark eyes, the ready smile and the brooding brows and decided that the future looks good, very good, for Ecuador.

As Joseph Campbell said:

And so proceeding, we come to the question of translating actual experience of life into the language of these dead--who are, however, not dead, but sleep, and among whom (as even the most pessimistic social critics must know) there move many who are neither dead nor asleep but searching; many others, furthermore, who have already roused within themselves a life more awake… -- Campbell, Creative Mythology, p. 92

 

……………………………………………………………………………………………..

 

Rebecca Armstrong is collaborating with MYTHOS MEXICO (Pedro Servin Fernandez and Maria Rodriguez) to create a worthy container for incubating the new dreambody of the Americas. In January of 2006 there will be a workshop given for the Mythological Roundable in Denver, Colorado (with Syd Sol of Mythic Yoga) to further the work, leading to a multi-national weekend workshop in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico in February of 2006. If you are interested in participating, please contact Rebecca for further details.

 

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