Part 4 in the series, A Literary Search for Meaning by Karen Hughes
The growth of the modern seeker movement demonstrates a need for the kind of spiritual, philosophical and psychological connection with the world that, religious historian Mircea Eliade claims, ancient cultures once derived from their sacred mythologies (Eliade, Myth and Reality 143). The lack of such connection leaves humanity in a secular “wasteland”, devoid of meaning (Tacey, Spirituality Revolution 16). I am interested in how speculative fiction that draws on the collective mystical knowledge and mythic imagery of popular culture could offer the writer the tools to challenge reader perceptions and create new mythologies that might restore a sense of richness and wonder to the mundane world.
The modern expansion of speculative fiction began at the same time as Eliade and his contemporaries—psychoanalyst Carl Jung, literary theorist Northrop Frye, comparative mythographer Joseph Campbell, and other scholars across a range of disciplines—were promoting the “rehabilitation of myth”, reflecting an intellectual interest in more holistic modes of thinking as a reaction to the materialism and reductionism of the academy (Oziewicz, One Earth 102). In contrast with structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who broke myth into gross constituent units (431), or linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who writes in his Saturnian notebooks that meaning depends on how the “basic elements” of legend are combined (Starobinski 8), Eliade, Jung, Frye and Campbell took a more universalist approach, arguing that myth points to the underlying unity of, respectively, religion, our conscious minds, art and literature, and humanity itself (Oziewicz, One Earth 104). Despite the vast body of writings by these scholars and their successors, myth remains a complex concept with many differing approaches and no settled definition. The following definition offered by Marek Oziewicz, based on the work of Robert Segal, provides a useful starting point:
Myth is a story about something significant, usually set in the past, and involving psychologically human protagonists—humans, fantastic creatures, gods, or personified agents of the supernatural. As a story which expresses strong ontological and epistemological convictions, myth provides its adherents with a cognitive structure: it is held by them as important, constitutive and—literally, symbolically or in some other way—true to human experience (One Earth 94).
This definition is broad enough to encompass originary myths, such as the sacred myths with cosmological themes that were common in traditional societies (Honko 15) and the Classical atomistic myths that shaped many of the foundational beliefs of Western science (Midgley, Science and Poetry 23), as well as more contemporary narratives: the secular myths promoted by the “New Atheists”, for example, who spurn religious mythologies but are evangelical in the defence of their own creation stories (see Robbins and Rodkey); national myths such as the Anzac myth (Donoghue and Tranter) and the myth of the self-made American man (Heike 367); and those advanced by modern spiritual seekers, who are creating new mythologies from an eclectic range of traditions and beliefs.
According to Joseph Campbell, “The first function of a mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is” (Masks 4). Campbell argues that when traditional mythologies are questioned by modern science and detached from their cultures of origin, only fragments remain. These fragments endure as mythic images that point to transcendent reality (Mythic Image). In his definitive work on shamanism, Mircea Eliade offers a broad analysis of such images across cultures, concluding that the sacred “other” is the universal source of such imagery (Shamanism).
While Eliade has been criticised for being “mystical and romantic” rather than “rational and scientific” (Allen, “Eliade and History” 548, citing Altizer), and “many, if not most, specialists in anthropology, sociology and even history of religions have either ignored or quickly dismissed” his works for being anti-historical and displaying a “lack of consistency and coherency” (546), his supporters argue that this is a strength, claiming that a more subjective, phenomenological approach is necessary when dealing with “primordial religious experiences, such as those of ecstasy and mystical ascension” that are “metacultural and transhistorical” (554). Shamanism, considered by many scholars to be the oldest mystical tradition, is a belief system which spans many cultures and is being revived by modern spiritual seekers in the form of neoshamanism, a movement which uses mythic imagery and techniques from a range of cultures, usually for more individualistic purposes such as personal healing and self-discovery (Harner 176). Roger Walsh defines shamanism as “a family of traditions whose practitioners focus on voluntarily entering altered states of consciousness in which they experience themselves or their spirit(s) interacting with other entities, often by traveling to other realms, in order to serve their community” (16). This occurs with the assistance of various rituals, often involving drumming, dancing and the ingestion of various psychoactive substances, such as the ayahuasca plant from South America. Like the traditional Western or Eastern mystic, the role of the shaman is to experience alternative states of reality for the purpose of acquiring spiritual knowledge and bringing that knowledge back to their community.
Today, modern seekers undertake shamanic journeying for a variety of reasons, with many believing that their personal spiritual development contributes to the awakening of humanity and its consequent transition into higher states of consciousness. There is ongoing debate as to whether neoshamanism, which some scholars argue simplifies shamanic practices and removes them from their wider cultural context, is a form of cultural appropriation (Cuthbert and Grossman 21–22). One alternative view, reflecting Eliade’s approach, is that shamanism is a universal phenomenon and thus neoshamanism is simply a reconnection with ancient spiritual knowledge that the West has forgotten (see Noll; Winkelman).
Carl Jung positions mythic imagery within the vast “collective unconscious” of humanity, which he identifies as a stratum of reality that “does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn … universal … [and] more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals” (“Review”). Like Eliade and Campbell, Jung refers to such images or “statements” as being connected with a transcendent referent:
There is no doubt that there is something behind these images that transcends consciousness and operates in such a way that the statements do not vary limitlessly and chaotically, but clearly all relate to a few basic principles or archetypes. These, like the psyche itself or like matter, are unknowable as such. All we can do is construct models of them, which we know to be inadequate, a fact which is confirmed again and again by religious statements (Psychology and Religion 11: par. 555).
In my new novel, Gaba Gali, I drew on Jung’s theory of archetypes to convey the characters’ interaction with aspects of the unconscious. One example is Tess’s shamanic journeying and the mythic imagery that she encounters in an otherworld that could be seen as part of Jung’s archetypal shadow. The shadow is that part of the collective unconscious which contains aspects of society and the self, both positive and negative, that humanity has suppressed, including aggression, cowardice, anger and other drives and emotions that have been deemed undesirable or taboo. The shadow is also apparent on a personal level: “Everyone carries a shadow and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is” (Jung, Psychology and Religion 11: 131). Jung’s collective unconscious is useful when examining the wellspring of mythic universal archetypes and symbols, including those hidden in the shadow, that the writer of speculative fiction might use to evoke sensations of awe, wonder and dread. I drew on these theories to depict the otherworldly experiences of the three protagonists in my novel and their encounters with various archetypal figures(see Jung, Archetypes)—such as Branok, the spirit boy who appears to Kayla whenever she needs protection or support, Mah-druh, the wise woman who offers spiritual insight and guidance, and James Lugh and Harry Khan, disruptive characters who embody different incarnations of the rebel archetype.
Stanislav Grof uses Jung’s collective unconscious to explain the “transpersonal access to cross-cultural spiritual symbolism” that he discovered during his fifty years of consciousness research as a practising psychiatrist (Ferrer, Participation 186). Grof found that “traditional spiritual experiences, symbolism, and even ultimate principles can allegedly become available during special states of consciousness” (184). Grof’s subjects repeatedly reported “not only having access but also to understanding spiritual insights, esoteric symbols, mythological motifs, and cosmologies belonging to specific religious worlds even without prior exposure to them”. Jorge Ferrer suggests that Grof’s research points to “the emergence of a novel evolutionary potential of the human psyche consisting in the capability of accessing transcultural layers of the collective unconscious” that could reflect the “greater interconnectedness of human consciousness in our global times” (185). Joseph Campbell arrives at a similar conclusion in his book Myths to Live By, claiming that the mythic imagery experienced by Grof’s patients is evidence for the “opening of ego-consciousness” towards what Aldous Huxley calls “Mind at Large”, a state in which “each person is at each moment capable of … perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe” (Myths to Live By 263–64, citing Huxley). From the perspective of a writer looking to draw on the power of mythic imagery to open their reader’s mind, Grof’s work is extremely interesting.
At the same time, it is important to recognise that such universalist theories have been criticised where they purport to support generalised assumptions about specific cultures—see, for example, Robert Ellwood, who writes, “A tendency to think in generic terms of people, races … is undoubtably the profoundest flaw in mythological thinking” (x)—and that the perennial philosophy promoted by Huxley is highly contentious and continues to be “criticized and deconstructed” by modern scholars (Fernandez-Borsot 1).
The most influential version of perennialism today is that of the Traditionist School, beginning with René Guénon, which maintains that the core of all mystical experience is “timeless and universal”, despite widely varying historical and cultural interpretations (Ferrer, Participation 182). Building on this theory, Ferrer suggests that Grof’s research might also support a more pluralist participatory view of spirituality—a “soft perennialism”, in which “no pregiven ultimate reality exists” and “different spiritual ultimates can be enacted through intentional or spontaneous co-creative participation in an undetermined mystery or generative force of life or reality” (195). In Ferrer’s view, it is entirely possible that we play a role in the physical creation of our respective gods, together with any afterlife that they (and we) might inhabit. In Gaba Gali, Jordy considers this idea as he attempts to come to terms with death:
I read somewhere that third-dimensional reality is one ocean with many shores. Humanity, as a collective, creates different versions of the afterlife and each version is as real as the next. Patti gets her Hindu kingdom. Nan gets stuck in purgatory for as long as it takes her to feel suitably punished. Grandpa gets a pine coffin and a pile of black dirt. The Baptists get their Protestant heaven with its pearly gates and streets of gold. The Buddhists have their emptiness, the void, nirvana. And so it goes. We all create our own endings. We all go where we believe we will go.
Northrop Frye, best known for developing a systematic framework for literary criticism in which myth plays a central role, attributes an equally humanist approach to the poet William Blake, noting that in Blake’s philosophy “nothing is real beyond the imaginative patterns men make of reality, and hence there are exactly as many kinds of reality as there are men” (Frye, Fearful 19). In relation to Blake’s claim that “all religions are one”, Frye writes that “the material world provides a universal language of images and … each man’s imagination speaks that language with his own accent” (28). Although Frye’s use of masculine pronouns is clearly outdated, his work generally refers to humanity as a whole and therefore his comments should be regarded as relating to all genders for the purposes of this discussion.
In writing Gaba Gali, I examined how myth might be used to create a specific effect using the techniques and tropes of various subgenres of speculative fiction, particularly mythic fantasy and philosophical science fiction, and how the writer might use these techniques to develop new mythologies in their work. Frye is praised as the “first mythologist to establish a precise phenomenological connection between embodied existence and mythic consciousness” (Gill 40) and his myth theories provide a useful lens through which to view the rise of new mythologies in modern Western literature. In his influential essay “Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths”, Frye defines myth as “an abstract or purely literary world of fictional and thematic design, unaffected by canons of plausible adaptation to familiar experience” (Anatomy 136) and he claims that if we “stand back” from any form of literature, like we might do with a visual work of art, we can see the underlying archetypal organisation and mythopoeic designs (140). According to Frye, “What human societies do first is to make up stories” (Myth and Metaphor 88). These stories form “large unified structures, or mythologies, which cover all aspects of a society’s vision of its situation and destiny”. As a civilisation develops, its literature “inherits the fictional and metaphorical patterns of mythology” and in any given literary period “the conventions of literature are enclosed within a total mythological structure, which may not be explicitly known to anyone, but is nevertheless present as a shaping principle” (Writings 94). Frye offers as an example the evolution in Western literature from biblical mythology, with an external god and compulsory belief system, to eighteenth-century Romantic mythology, with an emphasis on creativity, the imagination and human evolution (Denham, Critical Method 181). The prevailing mythological structure shapes the imagination of Frye’s ideal reader, who begins by confronting a text from within an ordinary perspective or from “the reasoning and sensational ego” (Frye et al., Harper 255) and ends with an “imaginative ‘way of reading literature, where, in Jungian terms, not the conscious ego, but the superconscious individual directs’” (Russell 122, citing Frye). Like Jung’s collective unconscious, the underlying mythological structure of the literature offers the reader a vast and timeless source of intuitive knowledge, conveyed in metaphor and symbol, with the capacity to open the reader to a transformation from the limited ego to the fully integrated self (Russell 125).
I explored the transition from old mythology to new in Gaba Gali by using the different perceptions of the characters, together with various aspects of the plot and setting, to demonstrate how a shift in the underlying mythological structure might alter how the characters experience their world. One example is the replacement of institutionalised religion with more subjective personal spiritualities. The references to traditional religion in my novel—for example, Patti’s Hindu funeral, Mah-druh’s previous life as an Irish Catholic, and Nan’s devotion to the church—illustrate both the fading and the adaptation of traditional religion in Australia and provide a contrast with the more eclectic spiritual paths that lead many of the characters towards a new worldview. This shift in perception becomes particularly apparent in the last section of the novel, where Anjali tells Tess that she can’t give up her religion: “I don’t know who I am without it”. By contrast, Tess has apparently relinquished any dogma associated with her yogic journey and embraced the disintegration of her ego, the final stage on the path to self-realisation. The two women follow similar Hindu traditions, but it is Tess’s surrender to the deeper, more personal spiritual teachings—instead of clinging to the formal rules and rituals as Anjali does in the end—that allows her to physically transition to an alternative reality based on new myths of multidimensional existence and unlimited human creativity.
Various other myths are incorporated and examined over the course of the novel. One of the main settings in the first part is a dystopian residential facility called Xīncūn, meaning “new village”, which is owned by a Chinese rare-earths mining company. The mythological structure defining this facility and its residents is the “myth of progress”, a scientific faith based on the presuppositions that the rational brain is the only source of knowledge, that science can and should control nature, and that technology is necessary for human evolution (Rushdoony 4). At Xīncūn, this has developed into “‘Scientific Triumphalism”, in which science completely displaces theology, philosophy, and everything else as the sole arbiter for understanding our existence” and ethics and objectivity are dismissed by vain scientists who are “unable to put science in proper perspective” (Clemens). The residents of Xīncūn accept the overreach of their profit-driven corporate employer into their personal lives and comply with the increasingly harsh restrictions on their freedom because they have been conditioned by the prevailing myth of progress. Max Weber might argue that this represents the obvious consequence of prioritising scientific rationality over all else, thereby allowing materialistic and consumerist secular values to inform meaning-making in cultural life (Weber 72).
This is contrasted later in the novel with an alternative mythology that I developed and explored through the characters’ discussions about quantum physics and emerging cosmological theories. This new mythology acknowledges the influence of the observer on experiments and hypotheses, questions whether truth can be limited to intellectual understanding, and leaves room for more metaphysical conceptions of reality. In short, it suggests a more creative and less blinkered approach to science, an approach that I have found useful as a writer attempting to understand and employ the themes of philosophical science fiction. In constructing this new mythology, I examined the work of a range of scientific authors, including James Lovelock and Hugh Everett, whose ideas I will discuss in later articles.
While this new scientific mythology avoids the dogma of scientific triumphalism and offers a more creative approach than standard Western science, it too has its limits. One example of how intuitive knowledge eludes even the most radical scientific thinking is the question of taste, explored by Italian philosopher George Agamben in his 2017 work, Taste. Agamben argues that the more science progresses in trying to prove its hypotheses, the greater the quantity of “knowledge that is not known” (51). Like love, such knowledge could be defined as “knowledge that judges correctly and grasps the truth without being able to justify itself” (11). It is not possible to fully acquire the “knowledge that is not known”, at least not from our current paradigm. We cannot experience it with our physical senses, we struggle to capture it with our language, and we will never attain it through logic and reason (52).
Another example is the “knowledge that is not known” expressed through art. Frye writes that visionary artists have long used the tools of symbol, metaphor and myth to open minds and offer their audience a glimpse of this knowledge, to the extent that Blake describes art as a “social religion” with the potential to bring imaginative expansion to ordinary people (Frye, Fearful 28). I explored this concept in Gaba Gali by drawing on symbol, metaphor and myth to describe the fifth-dimensional planet Terra, home to a society based on a mythological structure in which there is no absolute truth, no concrete perception, and no dualistic other. Instead, the unlimited creativity and responsibility of humanity creates a fluid world defined by free will, choice and infinite possibility. The knowledge that is not known, acquired through various mystical experiences and by crossing to a mythical otherworld, enables my three protagonists to experience and understand their new reality.
In experimenting with alternative mythologies, I turned to the large body of material allegedly trance-channelled from extradimensional beings by a variety of ordinary people. Trance-channelling is not a mystic experience under the definitions explored earlier, but it does offer the seeker spiritual knowledge, albeit through an intermediary. The practice of trance-channelling reaches back to Western esoteric tradition, where followers used symbolism, myth and messages from various entities to uncover secret knowledge (Faivre 12). This practice continues today, and now extends to the channelling of extraterrestrial entities from multiple dimensions.
Famous channels, such as Jane Roberts (Seth), J. Z. Knight (Ramtha), and Darryl Anka (Bashar), describe their channelled entity as a multidimensional being with a distinct personality, “beyond our present ideas of personhood” (Roberts, Early Sessions 128). Such an entity is an “energy personality essence”, a “definite personification of a multi-world or multi-reality consciousness” (132). These channellings all convey similar concepts: our essential nature is spiritual; consciousness creates form; our health and wellbeing are advanced by seeking guidance from within; altered perceptions, such as those achieved through trance states, provide access to multidimensional reality (Tart, ch. 2). While orthodox psychology might dispute these concepts, they are analogous to the theories of Eliade, Jung and Joseph Campbell, and to the clinical research of transpersonal psychotherapists such as Grof and Ferrer.
Many modern seekers, bolstered by popular and sometimes controversial spiritual teachers with large social media followings, such as Elizabeth Peru and David Icke, are becoming interested in the concept of “fifth-dimensional” ascension, a belief system which reflects the alternative mythologies advanced by these channelled entities. The idea that humanity is on the verge of a massive spiritual awakening has been popular at least since the rise of the New Age movement in the late 1960s and appears to be gathering momentum. In my novel, the mythological structure underlying the ascension of the protagonists to fifth-dimensional Terra is a complete departure from the biblical model, with its the compulsory belief in and obedience to a higher authority, in preference for a more Romantic model of human sovereignty and personal freedom that could be described in the same terms as Blake’s “apocalyptic humanism” (Frye, Fearful 188). According to this new mythology, which I created after examining the work of numerous channels including those discussed above, humanity is an aspect of the creator and thus each person is a creative force, wholly responsible for their individual and collective reality. The self-actualisation of enough individuals enables the entire human collective to evolve to what Blake might call a “single, unified redeemed humanity” (Frye, Fearful 188).
Gaba Gali is mythopoeic fiction and thus the factual truth of the narrative is less important than its effect. The point is not that such alternative mythologies are real, but that they could be, and most readers of speculative fiction will understand this. As Partridge notes, however, there are readers who might regard works of speculative fiction as a factual resource: “As truth purposely cloaked in fictional form, popular culture is understood to convey rejected but fundamentally accurate knowledge” (Re-Enchantment 1: 136). Charlotte Ward and David Voas argue that the current political climate, combined with the rise of alternative spiritualities, provides the impetus for a melding of spirituality and conspiracism, through “a rapidly growing web movement expressing an ideology fueled by political disillusionment and the popularity of alternative worldviews” (103). They have labelled the movement “conspirituality”, a word invented by a Canadian hip hop group and apparently derived from the term “conspiracy theorists”. Despite arguments that this melding of beliefs is novel, surprising, and owes its strength to the rise of internet communities, it is possible to trace conspirituality back to Western esoterism and the occult networks and subversive societies, such as the Rosicrucians and the Gnostics, which disseminated “stigmatized knowledge” (Asprem and Dyrendal). Adherents of the movement believe that malevolent forces (including reptilian extraterrestrials, Satan-worshipping global elites, and Saturnian AI)are acting to prevent the embodied transcendence of humanity from the current paradigm, a dualistic and limited third-dimensional reality, to a more holistic fifth-dimensional reality (Robertson 144). Based on this definition, conspirituality would obviously exclude conspiracy theories with no spiritual component, such as the belief that Elvis is still alive or that Paul McCartney was decapitated in a car accident in 1966, even though such theories could be said to have mythical dimensions and might even form part of the Western occulture, depending on the meanings they are given (Raab et al.). While I only touched on conspirituality in my novel—for example, Jordy’s concerns about China Pacific, James Lugh’s views on the company medical trials and Harry’s comments about the breakdown of Western society—it is an interesting aspect of the modern spiritual milieu.
Even without the extremes of conspirituality, speculative fiction appears to be having a direct influence on the creation and dissemination of new myths in Western culture. Partridge argues that popular literature, particularly speculative fiction that explores alternative spiritual themes, is “in some significant sense, contributing to the construction of new sacralized plausibility structures and worldviews” (Re-Enchantment 1: 141). He offers various works of classic mythopoeic fantasy to support his argument, including Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954–55) and Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series (1983–2015), as well as works of science fiction, such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1986) and Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), noting that such works are “socially, psychologically, and spiritually consequential” (139). In the current spiritual climate, writers who follow in these footsteps and share their imaginative vision with readers hungry for alternative perspectives could well be instrumental in challenging existing belief systems, promoting a more ubiquitous sense of the sacred, and offering their audience a glimpse of the mysterious knowledge that is not known. Further, if there is “an undetermined mystery or generative force of life” (Ferrer, Participation 195) that interacts with the human imagination to shape the world, it follows that by introducing alternative mythologies that encourage a more creative worldview, such writers might play a role in not only altering a reader’s perceptions of reality, but in altering that reality itself.
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