Gods have hibernation cycles // Thought and culture are not the sort of thing that can have distinct units

Infra #3

Strata

Gods have hibernation cycles.

When one is awake, their mythopoetic currents course through our world, evidencing themselves everywhere, in everything.

Look around: In every time and culture, we’ve recognized a current that’s in charge of quick communication, heady thought, and movement from one reality to another. It’s been called Hermes, Mercury, Thoth, The Messenger Archetype, Angels, Odin’s Ravens… a hundred other things. If Twitter and Substack have a patron deity, that’s the one. It is awake and it flies chaotically every which way through our world on wings of fiber optic cable and radio waves and touchscreens. Centuries ago, when he hibernated, we got a little lacuna in the histories, a dark age.

Nietzsche said God is dead, but really the Monotheistic current was just bedding down for a nap. Deep change was beginning to pulse through history, and there’s little space for a single Monotheistic god in the multiplicity of that pulse (except as one more voice in the polytheistic clamor).

The Warrior archetype also seems to be napping. Even the actual wars today are more administrative, technocratic affairs than they are beserker battlefields. Ares dwells in the sleek lines of newest drones, but not so much in the furied veins of youths bent on bloody glory.

You may have noticed — the would-be acolytes of the Warrior god have gotten a bit squirrelly. Many young (and not so young) men are looking everywhere for a fight, buying guns and tactical gear off Amazon, tweeting the timbre of conquest and Roman generals and primal aggression — but they can’t find anywhere to embody that warrior spoiling for a fight. Not much place in the physical realm for them to rage and strike and festoon themselves with teeth and tongues and fingers of the conquered. So they play Call of Duty and post shooting range clips on Instagram. The Warrior archetype is hibernating, and his acolytes are restless like dogs whose master has been gone too long.

There’s a rhythm to these things.

We could say that the gods take turns, age by age, in who will rule and who will rest. We could say the archetypes keep a dynamic balance, each exerting and exhausting their libido over time, before falling away to make room for the next set. We could say that each era is powered by a set of mythopoetic currents while others recharge to electrify the next era.

However we phrase it: it’s best to know which gods are awake.

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Encounter

It has been strongly suggested that, in studying thought, the atomising approach is the only truly scientific one and should take precedence over other methods. Accordingly, Richard Dawkins has suggested that the scientific approach to culture is to split it into standard units called memes — which are in some ways parallel to its atoms, in others to its genes — and to study their interactions.

That proposal is entirely understandable in view of the success of these methods in physical science. It is always natural to hope that a method that works in one area will help us in another. All the same, it is not obvious how this line of thought can help us in this quite different situation. The trouble is that thought and culture are not the sort of thing that can have distinct units. They do not have a granular structure for the same reason that ocean currents do not have one — namely, because they are not stuffs, but patterns.

- Mary Midgley, Myths We Live By

Reading Mary Midgley always leaves me with an ambient sense of her casual reasonableness.

A lesser thinker might’ve started by tearing down the idea of memes, mocking Dawkins and his allies for the endeavor, poking hole after hole in the project.

Instead, Midgley starts by sketching why the atomizing impulse is entirely understandable. Only then does she very simply, matter-of-factly point out that although driven by understandable impulses, the project is built on quicksand. It’s the wrong type of myth to be thinking with.

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Artifact

This week on twitter I saw this video of a conversation between Ram Dass and Terrence McKenna. They each take one side of a position on the embodiment of their message, Dass saying “my life is my message” and McKenna saying “my message is my message and don't look at my life because I'm a fallible human being.”

It’s an inspiring and humbling clip. Where I see myself right now is closer to McKenna, but trying to align myself more with Dass. My life doesn’t express the things that are important to me as well as I’d like it to. It feels incredibly audacious to aim for allowing my life to be my message, and it’s exactly that type of audacity I hope to move asymptotically closer and closer to—while also making room for the fact that yes, I am and will always be a fallible human being.

I would have loved to embed the clip here, but Twitter and Substack are still having their little spat, so a link will have to do. Go click it, check out the video. It might strike you as deeply as it struck me, or it might not. Either way, it won’t be a waste of 2 minutes.