One of the things that people are very much confused by in the modern world is
what archaic people meant by gods.
And that's because whatever the deities
were that had the motive force that archaic people attributed to the gods
seem to have disappeared in modern culture.
Now, the Jungian hypothesis is that's because they turned into
psychological traits, fundamentally, or motivational forces.
So what archaic societies would describe
as gods, we would describe as motivational forces.
So, for example, Venus is a Goddess,
a goddess of love, and we would associate her power with love and sex fundamentally.
And the reason that that's a reasonable association from the archaic standpoint is
because the mode of quality that makes up what Venus represents is transpersonal,
which means it's not limited to one person,
and it's immortal in that the motive force that characterizes sexual affiliation
exists, whether or not a single individual exists.
So it's transpersonal. Has the force of a personality,
because if you fall in love,
you're motivated by a certain set of standards and perspectives.
Right? If you're gripped by beauty, say,
or if you're gripped by lust, that imposes a particular view
of the world on you and impels your actions, sometimes despite your will.
And so that would be equivalent from the archaic perspective to possession.
And it's clearly the case that archaic societies who are engaged in warfare,
for example, would conduct rituals to ensure that the warriors that made up
their societies were in fact, possessed by the correct God.
So it might be Mars, for example, the Roman God of war.
So that on the battlefield they exhibited
the proper characteristics of somebody who was in a battle.
Right? Rage.
You can think: Rage.
So possession by the God of war would be
equivalent to the possession by a state of rage.
Now, it's not quite that simple.
It isn't only that archaic people
externalized motive forces and gave them the status of deities.
What they did was more complex than that.
And I think you can understand that a little bit better
if you start to give some thought to the modern behavioral notion of the stimulus.
And the stimulus is a very, very weird concept because
the behaviorists who weren't interested in taking apart what was inside the brain
would attribute motive force to the stimulus, right?
They'd say if you present an animal with the stimulus, he will therefore act.
And that meant that the behaviors were making the presupposition that the mode
of power resided in some manner in the stimulus.
Well, why would they think like that?
Well, it's an archaic mode of thought, in a sense.
You can imagine a child saying,
"One of my friends today made me really angry.", right?
Which means that the child is essentially conflating his or her own internal
emotional state with the proximal stimulus that gave rise to that state.
And you see complex associations like
that taking place with regards to the apprehension of beauty, say,
because beauty is a very complex and difficult to localize phenomena.
If you're very attracted to someone, are you attracted by them?
Well, in a sense, of course you are, because there they are.
But in another sense you're not at all,
because what's happening is that you're engaged as much in the interaction as
anything that's motivating you from the outside world.
And I think that partly accounts for your
sense of foolishness, especially if the person that you're
attracted to doesn't return your attraction.
I mean, you know that from your perceptual perspective,
you're attracted and dominated
by the object, but by the same token, you know entirely that easy as it is
to presume it's them and their fault, say, pretty much it all has to do with you.
So in the modern world, where we've been able to separate out
the object and the motive force of the object, the deities have sort
of moved inside of us and become psychological forces.
But you can understand, if you think about it in this manner,
that things weren't so clear prior to the dawn of the empirical age.
That gives you a little bit of background
with regards to what the notion of deity meant to archaic societies who still
utilize those notions as explanatory terms.
We know that if you're caught up in one of these little world games that you may
be motivated by something very fundamental, right?
A tendency that transcends you,
the tendency to propagate yourself, say, Freud's fundamental motivational level,
sexual affiliation, or the tendency to maintain yourself.
Those, you could say, are the fundamental Gods of existence.
The fundamental driving forces.
And it's the interaction of those two forces over great periods of time
that produce the great diversity of life and human life that we see before us.
And each of those fundamental, most fundamental of Gods have their
differentiated minions, so to speak, so that while engaged in the meta-goal
of self preservation, you act out plots of hunger and plots of thirst.
You move from cold to hot or from hot to cold, depending on the particular
temperature of your surroundings or with regards to selfpropagation,
you're attracted to people who are repelled by them for reasons that are
frequently absolutely beyond your comprehension, by the way.
So when you come to the case of ancient Egypt, one of the things Eliade points
out, which I think is really interesting, I mean, really phenomenal.
The story I'm going to tell you right now
was essentially revealed in Egyptian culture at the dawn of the culture,
rather than developing over the course of the culture.
So the Egyptians had a revelation right
immediately that the most fundamental of Gods was the one who created as
a consequence of his tongue and his speech, very much akin to the Sumerian
idea with regards to Marduk and also to later Judeo-Christians ideas.
So here's the story.
There's four players in this drama, okay?
There's Osiris, his wife, Isis,
Horus, their son, and Seth.
And Seth is Osiri's evil brother. Okay?
Now, Osiris was a remarkable guy.
He was the founder of the Egyptian state from the mythological perspective.
So kind of like Romulus and Remus for Rome
or like George Washington for the US, right?
A mythologized figure who represented all of the Pharaohs and people,
for that matter, who had actually constructed the Egyptian state.
Osiris, father of Egypt, so to speak.
But Osiris is kind of old and little
archaic and maybe a little bit senile and even possibly a little bit naive
in that even no matter how great you were in your youth, as time goes on,
you lose contact with environmental transformations.
And the old rules that you live by are not necessarily applicable to the present.
And some of those things that you ignore become paramount in importance.
And it turns out that Osiris has an evil brother, Seth.
And Seth eventually turns into Satan as mythology develops through the centuries.
And Seth is a nasty guy, right?
I mean, what he wants more than anything is
undeserved dominion over the Egyptian state.
Now, Osiris, because he's not paying
attention and because he isn't sufficiently cognizant anymore
of the power of evil, more or less ignores his evil brother, who in turn
chops him into pieces and then
distributes his pieces all over the Egyptian state.
Now, you might say, why didn't he just kill him?
Right?
I mean, you think chopping them up would kill him, but he's a God.
You can't just kill him.
The reason in mythology and you see this
in movies as well, where the villain never quite dies or the hero never quite dies is
because even if you eliminate individual embodiments of what those figures
represent, new embodiments manifest themselves virtually immediately.
So one of the things mythology is quite
clear about is that you never win a final battle with evil.
It's a permanent property of the world.
Anyways, Seth hacks up Osiris, spreads them all over the land.
Osiris ends up living a kind of shadowy
and nebulous ghostlike existence down in the underworld.
And Seth becomes the ruler of the state.
A nasty story, all right.
But Osiris has Isis as a wife.
Now, Isis had a huge cult.
She was a powerful Goddes,
Goddess of the underworld, a kind of combination of Callie and Diana,
so to speak, capable of tremendous destructive power,
but also the source of all good things, something very much like Tiamat.
Now, Isis got wind of her husband's disintegration, so to speak,
and she went searching around Egypt until she found his phallus.
And with it, she makes herself pregnant.
Okay, so what does that mean exactly?
It means something like this.
The collapse of any great order
brings with it new potential.
And I think this is something
that capitalism has way over forms of government.
Like communism.
Capitalism has mechanisms in place
to allow large structures that are no longer meeting their function to collapse.
But frequently, when they collapse.
It's not like they disintegrate into dust, right?
They disintegrate into subcomponents, so to speak, many of which then
come to terms with the fact that the order has collapsed and build something new.
So you can't get rid of culture so easily,
you can hack it up into bits, you can disembodied it, so to speak.
You can spread it all over the state.
You can introduce chaos into it.
But that's something that has the potential
of new birth, like the Phoenix rising from the ashes.
So anyways, Isis, who's the Matrix, who's Tiamat gets Osiris's phallus,
which is the container of the germ of culture, right?
The phenomenon that's capable of the seminal idea.
And she makes herself pregnant and she
gives birth to Horus, who's the long lost son of the rightful King.
Right? A very typical mythological motif.
Okay, so Horus is
alienated from the Kingdom, which is another very common mythological
motif, like how King Arthur, for example, is raised by commoners.
This same story pops up
in the story of Christ, for example, because Christ has heavenly parents.
But then he also has his kind of ordinary parents and it's a very common motif.
Anyway, so Horus grows outside of the classical structure of the Egyptian
state, which is tilted terribly towards evil because Seth is dominated because
Osiris was too blind to his evil brother to take appropriate defensive actions.
And he grows to maturity.
And then he decides,
like all rightful sons of the long lost King, to reclaim his heritage.
So he goes back to Egypt, right?
And he has this vicious battle with Seth,
and in the process, Seth tears out one of his eyes.
And that's an indication of just exactly
how devastating a battle with the forces of evil, so to speak, precisely are.
They represent a critical threat to the integrity of consciousness, right?
That's why he loses his eye.
Well, luckily enough Horus has got his act
together and he does defeat Seth and he banishes him and he gets the eye back.
And then you think, okay, great, pop the eye back in, become Emperor.
Everything's fine.
Now let's backtrack a little bit and think about this politically.
Now, the Egyptians had this really weird idea.
They had the idea that the living Pharaoh
was the living Pharaoh and the dead Pharaoh at the same time.
That makes no sense rationally, but it makes a lot of sense
from a narrative perspective, because what they're saying is something like this:
Look, you got to think that when you become King or when you become President
or when you take on a role of that absolute magnitude that then
you're partly you but you're also partly this role.
And there's really no way out of that. Right?
And the role is composed
of the unbelievable weight of the cultural tradition that you're representing.
And you can say, well,
that's true for being King or for being President, but it's also true if you
become a doctor, a lawyer or any sort of specialized occupation.
It's partly you.
Because you're embodying the role.
But it's partly the role, too. So the Pharaohs.
The live Pharaoh and the dead Pharaoh.
Because the dead Pharaoh represents culture, right?
King is dead. Long live the King.
Okay. But paralleling that idea was the idea
that the Pharaoh was not only the dead Pharaoh,
and the live Pharaoh at the same time.
But that he was Osiris and Horus at the same time.
But then you think in the story Horus is taken over Seth.
He's got his eye back.
He can be King, but he isn't King yet.
And this is where the Egyptians really get their act together.
I think of the two stories that I'm telling you.
This is the one that has the most significance, I think, for modern people.
Because we're so likely to sidestep our obligation to our culture.
Whatever that happens to be.
So instead of popping this eye back in his
head, which is the first thing you think he does.
He decides he's going to go back to the underworld.
Where Osiris is living in this ghostlike and dead manner,
since he's been chopped up by Seth.
So he goes down into the underworld, which is no piece of cake.
And he finds Osiris there in this kind of half dead state.
And it gives him his eye.
And that enlightens Osiris. Right?
It gives him vision.
And so then he takes Osiris back to Egypt.
Arm in arm, so to speak.
And it's the conjunction of Osiris
and Horus that constitutes the basis for Egyptian sovereignty.
And that is bloody brilliant, right?
Because the Egyptians figured out that...
So, Horus is Marduk for all intents and purposes.
Right?
He's this avenging hero in the Egyptian story.
He fights political corruption rather than chaos.
But you can understand that those are two flip sides of the hero archetype.
They are. The hero archetype has two basic elements.
One is the confrontation of the terrible aspect of nature.
Chaos in its most brutal form.
And the other is the confrontation with the archaic aspect of culture.
And in some ways, those aren't distinguishable.
Because if culture isn't archaic, chaos never makes itself present.
Which is to say, you can't separate
out political degradation from environmental degradation.
So it's the same idea.