An Experiment in Scotch

I’ve been lis­ten­ing to Joseph Campbell’s The East­ern Way in the car and it reminds me of how much I love mythol­ogy, the sto­ries and anec­dotes that go along with myths, what their effects are on our cul­ture and way of life. The first tape is a com­par­i­son of the West­ern and East­ern mytho­log­i­cal struc­tures, specif­i­cally China and India in the East and Europe and the Lev­ant includ­ing Egypt in the West.

The two East­ern regions are marked by iso­la­tion and their mythol­ogy reflects that. There has been very lit­tle change, both mytho­log­i­cally and cul­tur­ally in India and China for thou­sands of years. The mythol­ogy of these regions are marked by idols and gods of things around them like plants and ani­mals spe­cific to their region. The West­ern two areas are marked by con­stant and often vio­lent change. Both Europe and the Lev­ant have been invaded, con­quered and split many times in many ways and this leads to a mythol­ogy that revolves around things that are every­where like the wind or the sun.

The gen­e­sis myths of the East are also dras­ti­cally dif­fer­ent from their coun­ter­parts in the West. In India, the gen­e­sis myth involves a sin­gle being that split into two, male and female. The female, always the coy one, changed into a cow while the male changed into a bull. Then the female became a mare, the male a horse. This con­tin­ued on to pop­u­late the world with ani­mals. The myths of the West involve an omnipo­tent god cre­at­ing mankind and then the ani­mals and then female com­pan­ion­ship. The dif­fer­ence here is strik­ing in that the East­ern myths come to gen­e­sis from within God, i.e. we are all part of God and he is within us. In the West­ern myths, God is sep­a­rate from man and a great deal far­ther down the mytho­log­i­cal ento­mol­ogy. Camp­bell argues that this is one of the great­est sources of psy­cho­log­i­cal dys­func­tion and it’s dif­fi­cult to argue with him when you con­sider our god tells us to be one way after hav­ing cre­ated us to act in an entirely dif­fer­ent manner.

I’m enjoy­ing the series so far and hope to con­tinue to expand on ideas that come out of it.