The Power of Myth: Thoughts 2

Also, I noticed Campbell mentioned the separated duad, and insinuated it was a fundamental part of this "being alive". I got to thinking how there are a number of different ways people think about love, romance and marriage nowadays and not all of them involve finding one member of the opposite sex to be with until the day you die.

Man, look at all these new sexuality definitions and thier nifty colour schemes.

Also, the idealized form of marriage doesn't always happen in real life, either. No doubt throughout the long history of our race, marriages have been conducted for economic and political reasons. In the Edo period of Japan, the wife was seen as the master of the house for their samurai husbands rather than their equal partner. Ancient Roman couples were free to divorce each other. During the Middle Ages, the notion that your romantic love was not the person you married was the basis of romantic chivalry. However, the idea that men and women were once parts of a whole is not uncommon in myth, (it appears in Plato's Symposium for example) so I'll let it go for now...

Now for something completely different.

Other than that, he expressed an idea that I think exemplifies the tension between religion and modern science at this point of time in the western world. In the same interview with Bill Moyers, Joseph Campbell states:

On this immediate level of life and structure, myths offer life models. But the models have to be approperiate to the time in which you are living, and our time has changed so fast that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today. The virtues of the past are the vices of today. And many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. The moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now. And that is what we are not doing. The old-time religion belongs to another age, another people, another set of human values, another universe. By going back you throw yourself out oy sync with history. Our kids lose their faith in the religions that were taught to them, and they go inside. (http://mythsdreamssymbols.com/...)

He describes old-time religion as "vestigial" and "doesn't serve life". Essentially, that means that orthodox rules once served a purpose, but can no longer fulfill that purpose and can be quite damaging to the well-being of others.

I'm going to share an article and some blogs about spiritual abuse that I personally found eye-opening. I hope you do, too.

New York Times - Why Afghan Women Risk Death the Write Poetry
No Longer Quivering - Archive
The Pheonix and Olive Branch
The Way Forward
Love, Joy, Feminism

References after the jump.



References:
Gifford, Jerry (2007).  Myths-Dreams-Symbols. Retrived from http://mythsdreamssymbols.com/functionsofmyth.html.