2016 Lecture 07 Maps of Meaning: Part I: Osiris, Set, Isis and Horus

So, I want to take another look at this figure to begin with. Now, one of the reasons that I began to think about these sorts of things is because I wanted to understand what it might mean to have a set of, let’s say, a set of values and beliefs (because those two things go together) that would… I guess part of the question was, is it possible to develop a system of beliefs that’s outside of the realm of ideology? You know, because one thing you might claim is that it’s all ideology. Any belief system is ideological. And if you develop a belief system that criticizes other belief systems it just means that you’ve developed a new ideological stance.

And there’s some… that’s a good argument, you know. I can think of a number of ways that it’s true. One of the things Nietzsche said in the late 1800s was that if you inhabited a belief system, even a religious system, and you lost faith in it, not only did you lose faith in that system, but you also potentially lost faith in systems themselves. And so, it was a meta-collapse, in a sense. Not only did you lose your belief, but you lost your belief in beliefs.

So you think of the set of all possible beliefs and then abandoning any hope of relying on those as valid sources of information. You know, so that’s one perspective, and it’s a powerful one, and Nietzsche believed that that was a certain pathway to nihilism, essentially, or perhaps to a reactionary totalitarianism, but it boils down to the same thing. I’ve been reading this book recently, the title of which I can’t remember, unfortunately. But I’ll tell it to you after class.

It’s a critique of certain lines of left-wing ideological thinking, including the existential thought of people like Jean-Paul Sartre and Foucault. And one of the most trenchant critiques of Sartre, because he believes that you have an absolute freedom, that you’re destined for freedom, that you’re doomed to it, in some sense.

And that part of your existential journey is to establish an authenticity that’s correct for you. But he doesn’t, he isn’t able really to give any description of what that should be grounded in. And the critic concludes that all Sartre can do is stand outside of any potential belief system and criticize it. And that that’s… there’s nothing in it for anyone as a consequence of that. It’s only destructive.

Now, it’s important to remember, with regards to Sartre, that he viewed other people, to some degree, like the common man, the bourgeoisie, we might say, as the embodiment of non-freedom, of inauthenticity, and also as a barrier to genuine authenticity. So he wasn’t willing to give any credence to the utility of normality. But I also think he wasn’t able to tolerate the consequences of his own thought because he was an avid supporter of the communist party, far after anyone with any reasonable moral sense would have stopped doing that.

So Sartre didn’t really denounce the communists until the end of the… beginning of the 70s, roughly speaking. He was never a card-carrying communist, but he was very left-leaning. And you know, by the 1970s, by the late 60s, by the early 70s, a lot of the evidence about what was going on in Soviet Russia had been in for 30 years. So there was really no excuse for not facing up to that, and trying to understand what it meant.

And you know, it would be bad enough if it was just the Soviet Union, but it wasn’t. The same sort of thing happened wherever those utopian presuppositions were put into place. And I suppose many of you don’t know this, but Pol Pot, who was the Cambodian dictator, was educated at the Sorbonne, and he wrote his thesis (I think it was his PhD thesis, although it might have been his Master’s thesis) on the Marxist doctrine that urban people were parasites on rural people.

So you know, there’s a theory that says that the general value is generated purely by labor, and much of that is rural labor, and the cities siphon off the excess productive power and are able to parasitize the countryside as a consequence of that. Which is a, you know, tremendously non-productive theory. But Pol Pot put it in practice, and so when he went back to Cambodia he chased everybody out of the cities and killed about six million people.

So, you know, you can read about that if you want. It’s a pretty appalling section of 20th century history. Especially when it was the case that he was educated in the West and had these presuppositions drummed into him. Well then there’s Foucault. Foucault, who I have no respect for, by the way… I’ve read a fair bit of Foucault, and I think everything he says is obvious.

So for example, he criticizes the idea of mental illness as a social construct. It’s like, well yeah, obviously. I mean, it’s not like psychiatrists and psychologists and mental health professionals, who are relatively well-informed, haven’t known about that since… for the last 60 years. I mean, it might be a revelation to people who don’t notice that psychiatry, for example, is something like a compromise between the patient’s biology and the social world.

You know, I mean, psychiatric ailments often have a biological tilt, but the way they manifest themselves in society is clearly conditioned in very intense ways by the particular conditions obtaining at the point that the person who has that biological predisposition exists. Even when it’s not pathological, it can be tilted one way or another by cultural norms.

And then, of course, when you’re dealing with issues like insurance payment, and treatment, and hospitalization, obviously you’re pulling in all sorts of systems that are by no means purely scientific. But I don’t find it a particularly useful critique. It’s obvious, as far as I’m concerned.

And, the other thing that Foucault did. I mean, I think this is the typical, especially the French intellectuals’, typical sleight of hand once Marxism became… you know, once you were no longer able to call yourself a committed Marxist because committed Marxism had led to unbelievable brutality, you know, on a scale that had never been experienced in the entire history of the planet, at least in terms of its reach and duration.

You didn’t get to call yourself a committed Marxist anymore, unless there were people (and you still see them) saying “well that wasn’t real Marxism,” which I think is a cop-out of staggering proportions. It usually means “well if I was the person running the country that wouldn’t have happened.” That’s the logic behind it… “they didn’t put the principles into practice properly.”

It’s like, yeah, well, lots of people put the damn principles into practice and the same thing happened everywhere. So at some point, you have to kind of wonder if there’s something wrong with the principles. Anyway, what Foucault did was take the Marxist presupposition that everything could be boiled down to economics and economic power and translate it into the idea that everything just translated into power, you know.

And that the reason that we have institutions is to include and to exclude and that the institutions always run for the benefit of those at the top. It’s like, well, yeah, that’s a little bit true, but it’s… a scientist would look at that and say, well probably… you know, power dynamics in a functioning economic and political system maybe account for 10% of the variance, something like that, maybe 15%.

It’s like, say you want to go to an Ivy League school. Well if your parents went to the school, you’re more likely to get in, but you’re not that much more likely to get in and you still have to be… you know, roughly speaking what happens is if you have a pretty decent high school GPA and you do very well on the SATs, and you have some other talents of some sort, because that’s also necessary, then they might pick you over someone else who’s roughly equally qualified if you have a familial history attendance at the school.

So obviously you get an advantage, but it’s not the kind of advantage that accounts for the entirety of how the system is structured. It’s an advantage. Well, you can say that’s not fair. It’s like, yeah, okay, fair enough. Most systems are certainly not 100% either fair or just, definitely not.

But, you know, instead of comparing them to utopia, you might compare them to another system, which is the only reasonable way to do it. It’s like, everything looks terrible when you compare it to the best thing you can possibly imagine. But the best thing you can possibly imagine is an empty fiction because it’s so devoid of detailed content that you can’t use it as a guide to reality.

Now, I mean, the idea that things could be better has its roots in, in some sense, a broad-scale utopian project, and I believe things could be better. But that doesn’t mean that when you’re doing an analysis of a complex system you get to compare it to an ideological utopia and then describe all the reasons that it’s bad. It’s not appropriate to do that. It’s too simplistic; you’re not going to do anything to actually address the problems that the system has if you take that approach.

And then, of course, pure utopian thinking is extraordinarily dangerous. Because if you think that your way of molding society into some ultimate state of perfection is headed towards some ultimate state of perfection, then you can justify absolutely anything you do right now, on the basis of the fact that things are going to improve so radically in the future.

And that means any of your behaviors are excused. The end is worth it. Well, if someone says that, you have to kind of wonder what they’re actually planning to do. Okay, so, well what’s the issue? The issue is that it’s… so the same critic, with regards to Foucault, said that well it’s basically the same thing, that Foucault criticized a variety of profound institutions.

Sexual institutions say, like marriage, and then institutions of power, like prisons, and institutions of mental health, like the whole institutional framework. He criticized them on the basis of power and exclusion. And you could do that and there’s some truth in it. But you know Foucault also made the presupposition, and the problem with that presupposition, that everything is about something else, is that it’s almost impossible to see how it can’t be applied to Foucault himself.

So you’d have to ask, if you were a student of Foucault, what power aims drove his attempt to analyze everything in terms of power? And I actually think with Foucault it’s pretty obvious. But it’s a game that never goes anywhere. Okay, so I thought about that a lot. It’s like, is there any system that you can develop that doesn’t have the negative consequences of systems in general? And then if that is possible, how and why might it be possible?

And this is partly why I’m talking to you about this particular diagram again. I think the reason, now I don’t know this, and you guys can think it through yourself. I mean, lots of people have talked to me about the content of this course and you know, they’ve said that it’s been very helpful for them when it comes to interpreting certain elements of their life. But some people have said, well it’s just another system.

And I don’t believe that. I think it’s a meta-system. And I don’t think the rules that apply to systems also apply to meta-systems. But you know, that could just be me. So you’re going to have to decide that for yourself. But I think the reason that I can make that claim, and that it’s a valid claim is because first of all, I don’t believe that it’s an intellectual system.

I don’t think it’s an attempt to reduce a complex set of phenomena to something that dispenses with important elements of their existence. So for example, let me give you an example of how that sort of thing happens. If you’re looking at the world through a biased lens, what it means is that you take non-random samples of the environmental data.

So I can give you a quick example of something I saw that I thought was very particular in that regard. I don’t think I’ve used this example before, but about ten years ago or thereabouts, Naomi Klein made this documentary about this factory down in South America. I believe it was in Argentina.

And this was just after all the foreign capital fled out of Argentina and the economy collapsed completely, which is something that happens to Argentina fairly regularly, by the way. And she went down there to this factory where there were working men and they had been building heavy machinery. And the working men had decided that they were going to… the factory had been padlocked and they had been locked out because things had come to a halt.

And they had decided that they were going to take a chainsaw to the factory gate and go in there and start making heavy machinery again. And you know, it was a very cool documentary as far as I was concerned. She went down there and she interviewed all these working guys and they talked about how their lives had been brought to a halt by the factory closure.

And obviously, it sucked that they were sitting around doing nothing and not being paid for doing anything when they could’ve been inside the factory building heavy machinery, which is what they wanted to do. So she went down there and laid out their story and it was very sympathetic to the workers and good, you know, fair enough, good.

But then she went and interviewed the guy who owned the factory and she didn’t ask him any real questions. What she did instead was caricaturize him, even a priori, you know, as sort of a fascist capitalist, sort of like the millionaire in Monopoly, and never tried to get beneath the superficial a priori categorization to find out what he actually thought.

And I was just waiting, I thought, well this is cool, what the hell does the factory owner have to say? It’s like, where did his money go, why does he think he has a right to the factory, like what are his conditions of ownership? Did he earn the money? Did he inherit it? It’s like, what does he think about the fact that Argentina’s economy has collapsed?

How does he feel about the fact that all these workers are out of work? What does he think about the fact that they opened up the factory again? Like, there’s a lot of interesting things to ask this guy. None of it, none of it happened. And so, to me what happened was that she was someone with neglect.

You know, she was looking at the world but she could only see half of everything. And the half she saw was probably perfectly justifiable, had its proper domain of application, but the half she missed, well, what about that part of the story? You’re going to reduce that to cliché and stereotype and expand up the rest of the story?

Well, the only reason you’d do that is if you didn’t want to find out what the hell was going on. If all you wanted to do was gather evidence that would support your initial theory. Now, I know perfectly well that there’s plenty of situations where workers, the conditions of workers are absolutely abysmal.

I mean, one of the books I’ve read that I think is a remarkable documentation of that is a book by George Orwell called ‘Road to Wigan Pier’, which is a study of the conditions that coal miners lived in in the 1930s in Britain. And you know, it’s bloody dismal. And the idea that they were exploited, well, that’s a tougher one, because the Industrial Revolution was very, very hard on people, and it was really, really hard on some people.

You know, particularly on some people. Whether that was because of exploitation or because of the existence of absolute poverty is not all that obvious. And you know… so it’s a complicated issue. Now, there are lots of times when workers were clearly exploited, but I think there are times as well when they weren’t.

Anyways, it’s a great book, and he does a lovely job of laying out a rationale for why the workers should be treated far better than they were treated, and you know, so fine, good, wonderful. There’s something to be said. But the thing is when you want to say something, you want to take an unbiased sample if you can, and so this is why I like this particular mode of conceptualization, and I think it’s… the reason I think it’s not an intellectual construction is because I think it emerges naturally out of the structure of mythology and narrative, and you can think this through yourself.

But as far as I’ve been able to tell, narratives present themselves in terms of archetypal characters. And the thing about a comprehensive narrative is it can’t leave out an archetypal character, or it fails. Now I can give you an example of this. So how many of you have seen Disney’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’? Okay, so many of you have. How many haven’t? Okay, so there’s a few that haven’t.

Well, the Disney movies, you know, they’re kind of standard childhood fare. You know, in Sleeping Beauty, what happens is the King and Queen give birth to a princess after trying for a substantial amount of time. And she arrives healthy and beautiful, and then they have a christening day and they invite everybody to it.

But they don’t invite Maleficent, who’s a dark witch, roughly speaking. You know, she’s Queen of the Underworld, for lack of a better word. She’s the negative element of femininity. And they don’t invite her to the party. And so she shows up anyways and says that because they didn’t invite her, their daughter’s going to die when she hits sixteen, which is roughly the age of let’s say, sexual maturation for a story of that sort.

Now there’s another little positive magic female in the story, who mitigates that death sentence to protracted sleep. Well the idea behind it, it’s a very, very interesting story, it’s an Oedipal story in a sense because what it says is that if your parents protect you too much from the dark side of life when you’re young, what will happen when you start on the road to maturity is you’ll be so naïve and so fragile that you’ll want to be unconscious instead of paying attention.

And that you’re going to have to be rescued from that state by something. And it could be a prince, which is how the story lays itself out, or it also could be the symbolically masculine and exploratory element of your own psyche. And the story’s ambivalent about whether it’s an external event or an internal event, it doesn’t really matter.

The things end up being the same. And so that’s actually what happens in this Sleeping Beauty story. You know, at the end, a prince, who’s also enslaved by this terrible negative feminine force, manages to escape, and Maleficent turns into a dragon and then he has to fight her, and then he goes and rescues the princess.

And she wakes up and the kingdoms rejuvenate and everybody’s happy. It’s a classic, classic story. And it’s not… it’s funny because the Disney movie Frozen was put forward as a, in some sense as a feminist alternative to the classic fairy tales, but first of all you can’t do that, you can’t just generate up a fairy tale.

You know, there’s recent evidence that some of these fairy tales, the ones that the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen collected, are up to ten thousand years old. You can’t just come up with a counter-fairy tale. That’s just not how it works. And the way that a fairy tale is structured, it has nothing to do with the necessity for anyone to rely on anyone else for anything.

It’s a complex portrayal of the dynamic relationship between archetypal characters, and you know, it’s one form of the story. There’s lots of different forms of the story. But what I like about Sleeping Beauty, for example, and this is what’s nice about the real fairy tales, is that along with the positive there’s negative, and it’s real negative.

Like real fairy tales are terrifying. I don’t… who is it? Is it in Sleeping Beauty? Or Snow White? I don’t remember. In one of the famous Grimm fairy tales, one of the evil sisters ends up dancing in red-hot shoes till she dies. You know, it’s… they’re very, very violent and unsettling. And it’s because they have the quality of genuine folk tales.

But the reason for that is because they’re dealing with real things. Like the Hansel and Gretel’s story is a good example of that, right? Kids are abandoned out in the woods. They find something that’s too good to be true. Inside this thing that’s too good to be true is something that wants to fatten them up and devour them. It’s a rough story.

But what it’s doing… the stories have evolved to represent the fundamental dynamic elements of existence, if you conceptualize existence in terms of character. And the thing is you have to conceptualize existence in terms of character if you’re a person because what you do in existence is act out your character. So your character is an element of existence.

Now, you might say, well that doesn’t mean that society has a character. But actually, it does mean that. Because partly what happens… like if you’re socialized, say, into a culture. The culture exists in the same relationship to you, roughly speaking, as another person does.

So for example, if you put money in the bank, which is in principle a representation of your labor, what you’re doing is entering into a contract with the broader social world, which is one of promise, essentially, where the future society promises to return your value at a future date. So it’s a contractual relationship. And the reason that God the Father is a very common representation is because treating the ‘they’, in Heidegerrian terms, the others, in Heideggerian terms, as if they’re an embodied entity, actually works.

So it’s because it is an emergent property of all of the personalities that make it up. And so you’re interacting with that emergent personality all the time. You could even say, for example, that that’s the Freudian Id. It’s the thing that… the representation of that inside you is what makes you feel guilty when you transgress against certain moral rules.

And you might say, along with the radical existentialists, that that’s just arbitrary and that you can create your own values, but it’s not just arbitrary. Because it’s dependent on the consent of others, as well as on some internal harmony or disharmony. It’s not arbitrary. And you can’t just set that up by yourself. So these things are realities and they’re deep realities.

Now, this particular portrayal indicates a kind of balance. So the fundamental ground of reality is neither positive nor negative, it’s the ground out of which everything positive or negative emerges. So you might think of the fundamental ground of reality as that which exists prior to your encounter with it. And we have no idea what that is.

Now you can think about it as… people tend to think about what things are made of in atomic terms but it’s not a particularly comprehensive way of thinking about it. Because what exists beyond the realm of your comprehension is the patterned relationship between everything and everything.

And you can’t reduce it to any simple level of analysis because you miss all sorts of elements of it that are extraordinarily important if you do that. So you can’t do that, that’s not what experience is made out of, or what the grounded experience is made out of. And so it’s neutral in some sense.

Because it exists beyond your encounter with it. It’s the unknown as such. And the reason that that’s often represented in the form of a predatory lizard that has something to offer is precisely because of that. The absolute unknown has the capacity to tear you into pieces and burn you up, but it also has the possibility of rewarding you with everything you could possibly be rewarded with.

So it’s this strange juxtaposition of potential. I like to think about it as potential, you know, because people can get a grip on what potential means. There’s potential everywhere, whatever that is. You have potential, your parents tell you that all the time. What is that? Well, it’s the unrealized stuff of your being.

Now it’s a very strange concept, potential, because you can’t characterize it any way that you would characterize something that’s real. Because it’s not real, it’s potential. But you act like it’s real. You know, you’ll feel guilty that you’re not living up to your potential, you’re not manifesting your potential.

You want people to interact with you so that they allow you to demonstrate your potential. You act as if it’s a reality continually. You think as if it’s a reality continually. You ask if your relationship has potential, you know. But it’s a very, very strange substance, whatever this potential is. It’s unrealized possibility, essentially, but you regard it as something that’s fluid and something that can develop in all sorts of different directions, and something whose development you can shape.

Because otherwise why would you feel guilty, you know? It’s like, if you’re doing the wrong thing, you’re realizing some potential in the wrong way, and then you feel bad about that. It’s like, well, there’s some sense of intrinsic morality operating at the bottom of that. We’ve talked a lot about that. Some of that’s built in biologically, some of it is structured culturally, some of it is a consequence of you trying to organize your… this plethora of semi-beings that you are into some integrated manner.

Like it’s a very, very complicated thing. It’s not just arbitrary. Okay so that’s the very background, the dragon of chaos, positive and negative. And it’s the thing out of which everything springs. If you look at the Scandinavian world tree, for example, or world trees in general, you very frequently have a representation of a serpent that’s associated with them.

The reason that the… that potential is serpentine is extraordinarily complicated, but I think it’s partly because, say, snakes shed their own skin, so they can be reborn, so they’re a symbol of transformation. And then they’re sneaky and subtle and so they appear in places that you wouldn’t necessarily expect them to, and then they’re a terrible, terrible threat. In overcoming that threat, you also develop.

So not only are they a threat, but they’re the kind of threat that makes you become strong when you face it. And that’s partly why the snake is such an ambivalent figure in most mythology. Okay, so that’s complicated, but we’ll return to that later. And then out of that, you might say, emerges the unknown as you encounter it.

So there’s potential itself, and then the first layer of potential are the things that you encounter that you don’t understand. So I can give you an example of that. So let’s say you’re a three-year-old, or a two-year-old, that’s better, and you’re in the kitchen and a mouse runs across the room.

And so you track it because your eyes pick up the movement, and you track the thing. And then it’s an unexpected occurrence, so you don’t know what it signifies, right? So that’s the emergence of something tangibly unknown into your conceptual space. Now it’s not like you lack any knowledge of it. You can tell what its size is, and you can get some estimation of its speed.

And I think what you have to do when you think about whether or not something is unknown is you have to think about it in relationship to that hierarchy of perception that I keep throwing at you. You know, if something emerges… if you encounter an entity and you can map it at every single level of your value hierarchy, then it’s known.

You know how to interact with it at a micro-level, and you know what its implications are for every other level of your conceptual being. You know what its implications are for the future. Like you know exactly how to deal with that thing, it’s mapped at every single level. There’s other things that are only mapped at one level and not at others.

So maybe the mouse, we’ll say, for the child who’s never seen a mouse, it’s like… it shares some commonalities with objects that the child is familiar with. But there’s sufficient novelty so that it’s also contaminated with the unknown, and that makes the child, basically, semi-startled and alert.

Now the child will immediately refer to an adult, and it’s a technical term, actually, they’ll look at the adult’s face because the adult broadcasts the motivational affective significance of that event. And so the child looks, references, and then reads off the face (and of course the speech and the bodily actions) exactly what that thing signifies.

And then if the person that they’re looking at jumps up on the table and screams, then that’s one sense of meaning, which is ‘God, this thing is magical, it’s only this big and look at what effect it has on, you know, my aunt (for the sake of argument), who’s you know, a pretty competent creature as far as I can tell, being two years old.’

And then if she just dismisses it, you know, her actions are going to determine the meaning of that phenomenon. So that’s how the transformation of the semi-known thing into the more-known thing occurs. It occurs almost always in a social context. You can explore things by yourself, but you rarely actually do that by yourself.

It’s almost always you plugged into a social apparatus, you know. So you might be doing the specific investigating, but the social apparatus is around you so that you can confer with it, and it also shapes the way that you’re going to interact with that specific thing. Okay, so the unknown, that’s generally… the unknown that you encounter, that’s generally characterized using feminine symbolism.

And I think the reason for that, there’s a bunch of reasons, and we talked about many of them. One reason is because females do the sexual selection in human beings, and so they act as the face of nature. Another reason is that you can think of new possibility always emerging out of the non-cultural background, in some sense.

So for example, let’s say that we send an expedition to Mars, and we’re gathering new information as a consequence. The reason we’re gathering new information is because we’ve gone out past the domain of our knowledge, in a sense, and we’re interacting with something new. And in that interaction, new information is generated.

Now you can say that it’s partly the act of the perceiver that’s generating the new information, and you can say that it’s partly the act of the culture. Because we sent robots to Mars, let’s say, which is very, very difficult. So the culture goes there but the individuals are observing, so the individuals are buttressed by the culture.

But they’re generating information because they’re somewhere truly new. And so the information… the unknown is a constant source of new information. So it’s a place that gives birth to new information. And so that’s another part of the reason that it seems to be symbolized in feminine form.

You know, I’m just taking this, in some sense, as an empirical fact. I’ve looked at… it looks like that’s how these stories work. And so I’ve been trying to puzzle out why exactly that would be the case. I also think it’s the case that we tend to look at the world from a social cognitive perspective.

We filter it through a social, cognitive, biological apparatus. And so we’re very likely to see things in character form, and characters have sexes, and so that’s going to happen. And then which, the attributes of femininity or the attributes of masculinity, that get used as symbolic reference in some sense, there’s an arbitrariness involved.

So for example, for the Egyptians… you know, usually have a sky god, but they had a sky goddess. Now, she usually represents the night sky, which is not exactly the same thing as the day sky, but you have to... it’s so tricky because you have to look at the relationships between the characters in order to decide what all of them mean, and that shifts a little bit from story to story.

So this is a, what would you say, it’s an approximation of the underlying structure, but there’s a fair bit of variation in it, just like there’s variance in stories. Well the feminine element has a destructive element and a creative aspect. And you can see that people characterize their environments in that way.

So for example, you can map on environmental beliefs onto this structure. You can say that the environmentalist portrays nature as positive, portrays culture as negative, and portrays the individual as negative. And the basic story is rampaging individual as member of rapacious culture invading the pristine landscape of beautiful Mother Nature.

Now the thing about that story is it’s true. The problem with that story is that it’s half true. So for example, one thing that’s interesting to conceptualize is that’s exactly the opposite of the frontier myth. Now the frontier myth was a story that was used extensively in Europe to drive immigration into the United States.

And it was used to some degree in Canada too. And so the story was the exact opposite. It’s the hero, so that would be the immigrant pioneer, bringing the benefits of order to a savage wilderness. Well that’s also true, but it’s so interesting that both of those things can be true, and they’re completely different from one another.

There’s no commonality at all between those two stories, except for the way that they use the characters. There’s a feminine character, a masculine character (that represents culture), and then there’s another character that represents the individual. And you could even see that, if you think about it historically, the US was founded in some sense on the frontier myth, and that was to one side.

And so by the time the 1960s came along, the early 1960s, it shifted to its opposite. And you need that because systems have to oscillate to some degree to remain stable across time. They can’t just be fixed in place. So they’re going to play back and forth through the archetypes in an attempt to keep them balanced because that’s what you’re trying to do, you’re trying to keep them balanced.

And so, you have the destructive and creative element of Mother Nature. You see that all the time in movies where the thing that the hero is striving against is the negative element of the unknown. How many of you have seen the movie ‘Alien’? Okay so that’s a pretty graphic representation of, well those aliens were more reptilian in form, so they’re almost like… they’re more at the dragon of chaos level of civilization, but they’re a terrible external force that’s threatening human culture and the individual.

It’s exactly the opposite story that’s played out in… what was the movie with all the blue creatures? Avatar, right. Avatar is exactly the opposite of that, where you know, the unknown nature is just nothing but sweetness and bliss. And the culture is portrayed as spearheaded by greedy and rapacious individuals who are basically manifestations of the military industrial complex.

The funny thing is that both made good stories. And that’s because… well, it’s because they have enough archetypal truth so that there are many situations that they’re relevant to. You know, sometimes Mother Nature is your best friend, and sometimes it’s your worst enemy. And so you could go down to the jungles of Peru, and you could talk to the people who live there, and you could find out what they know about medicinal plants in the jungle, and you could bring home things to cure disease.

Or you could just go down there and get lost in the jungle and then you’re dead. You know in some sense it’s the same jungle. And whether it’s positive or negative depends on what stance you take towards it and how you behave. And so the other thing that’s really interesting about mythology, and this is the lovely element of mythology, is that part of what it does is tell you how to take this incredibly complex landscape that’s positive and negative at the same time, at every level of analysis, and how to navigate through it so that the proper balance is maintained as far as the entire system is concerned.

So the culture has an orderly element, and that’s what protects us here, and it has a tyrannical element, and that’s what makes you treated like numbers at the University of Toronto. You know, you get both of those at exactly the same time. And then the archetypal individual has the same fundamental nature. Hero or villain.

And you know, those have archetypal roots because the ultimate hero is the ultimate, perfect person. And the ultimate villain is Satan himself, in whatever form he happens to take. It doesn’t take much knowledge of the structure before you can see it manifested all over, especially in movies that are particularly popular because they almost always have a central archetypal theme.

The Marvel superhero movies are a really good example of that. And if it’s complex literature, the archetypes are mixed to some degree. So you have a hero who’s not only a hero, you have a hero who has all sorts of flaws. And he’s in a culture, or she’s in a culture, that has positive elements and negative elements and they’re in a broader landscape that’s characterized by exactly the same thing.

So it’s nuanced. And the more sophisticated you get, the more you can tolerate that kind of nuance. And I think that’s also one of the things… that’s partly why literature is such a good antidote to ideology. Because the more sophisticated the literature becomes, the more complex, and fragmented in some sense, or differentiated, the more differentiated the archetypal landscape becomes.

So when someone tells you a story, whatever the story happens to be, one of the things you can do when you know the substructures, is you can say ‘okay, yeah, but where are the missing pieces? Where are they going?’ Because if they’re not included then they’re generally projected onto something. Because they’re there, you can’t get away from them, they’re there.

How does the person account for them? Alright, so now I want to tell you another story. So we talked about the Mesopotamian creation myth last week, and now I want to tell you about the Egyptian myth of sovereignty. And so, the first thing I should do is say that all of the stories that I’m talking to you about have all sorts of variance.

And so, the Egyptian story that I’m going to describe lasted for thousands and thousands of years, and so it isn’t like there was only one variation of it, there’s all sorts of variations of it, and I’m only going to tell you one of them. And that’s a limitation, but that’s just how it is for the time being.

So I’m not saying that this is the only version of this story. But it’s a version, and it’s the one I’m most familiar with, and so I can talk about it, hopefully with some utility. And it’s a great story. When I finally figured out what it meant… it’s so cool, with some of these stories if you crack them, and you’re able to see what they mean, they’re absolutely overwhelming.

They’re so bloody brilliant, it’s no wonder that people regard them as revelatory, you know, of divine origin, because they have such power that it’s almost impossible to imagine how that could’ve got there. Now, I provide you with the Darwinian explanation of how that got there, right, because the stories are representations of social contracts and behavioral tendencies that have evolved over thousands and thousands of years.

Because of that, the representation, the story’s going to have way more information in it than a typical story might. But I still can understand how these things burst upon people with the force of revelation. One of the things that’s quite interesting too, if you look at cultures historically, is that you usually find that the revelation of the story… it’s like the energy source on which the culture feeds.

So the story comes first, it has this tremendous dynamic energy. The culture basically uses that energy to propel itself through time, you know, to give itself conviction and force. And then at some point the story exhausts itself, and that would be equivalent, in some sense, I suppose, to Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of God. And this has happened many times.

Alright, so there are four main characters in the Egyptian story. There’s Osiris, Isis, Set, and Horus. Now, Osiris, we’ll start with Osiris, but you could start with any of the characters, because one of the things that’s quite interesting about mythology is that the myths don’t make any distinction between the causal priority of these characters.

Any of them can be regarded as fundamental. So the hero is the person who separates the world parents for example, and brings being into existence. But you can also say, well it’s Tiamat, which is more how the Mesopotamian creation myth is tilted, or you can say you can’t make sense out of anything unless you have a cultural lens through which you’re looking.

Like there has to be some pre-existent structure before information can be generated in any manner. So you’re always stuck with this problem, that in order for something to exist you need a substrate, you need an interpretive substructure, and you need an interpreter. And you can’t say that one of those things precedes the other. They all have to be there at the same time.

You could say from a Darwinian perspective, they all emerged and complexified in unison as time progressed. It doesn’t explain how the origin originated, however. Okay, so you’ve got Osiris. Now Osiris is the founder of the Egyptian state. And so, you know, before people wrote things down, you have to kind of try to understand how it was that they remembered things.

Their memory was more like an amalgam, or a gist. So we already know that if you tell the story of your actions yesterday that it doesn’t take you 16 hours to tell the story. Hopefully it takes you like five minutes. And why that is is not obvious, but part of the reason is, for whatever underlying reasons, you know what parts of the story are relevant to other people and what parts aren’t.

So basically what you’re going to do is try not to tell them things they already know. Because that would just be pointless. And in order to do that you more or less have to know what they know and what they don’t know. And you have to more or less stay on the edge of that. But you can do that. Well, I might ask you, well what did you do over the last three months, or I could say what have you done for the last couple of years?

And in each case, you’re going to collapse that into some representation. Now imagine that the problem you’re trying to solve is ‘what did your culture try to do for the last five thousand years?’ Well imagine that there are… the culture in part is being continually informed by the individuals that compose it.

And there’re going to be different individuals of different stature who discover things of different importance. And we often know some people like that. We know of Thomas Edison, for example, and we can name actual people. But that’s in part because we write things down and have records of them. You can imagine though that you’re trying to represent your history in a way that you can remember.

You’re going to tell stories about people who have done interesting things because that’s what you even when you tell a story about yourself. So imagine you tell one story about someone who did something interesting and then you tell another story about someone else who did something interesting, and so forth. And that’s continually going on, let’s say, in a tribal or archaic culture.

So then what you get is a set of stories about people doing interesting things. Well, it’s easy for that to shift into the ancestors doing interesting things. And then it’s easy for that to shift into the ancestor doing wonderful things. And that’s basically what happens, is that you get the emergence of the culture story, which is something like a small set of cultural heroes who have done all the things that are worth doing.

And what you’re doing is imitating them. And you know, this is… you know, your empirical memory of events only lasts about a hundred years. Because there isn’t anyone old enough to remember anything past that. And so what has to happen is that everything that happened before that has to be collapsed into some form that’s memorable, so that it can be brought forward and taught, and that’s the function of these stories.

These stories actually… it’s almost as if the story has abandoned everything that hasn’t stuck in people’s memories. And so all that’s left is the most significant… is the most significance. Because otherwise why would people bother with it? They wouldn’t tell the story, they wouldn’t be gripped by it.

Okay, so Osiris, he’s one of these figures. You could think… if you allowed people to tell stories of George Washington, say, and Abe Lincoln, and all the semi-mythologized founders of the United States, if you allowed people, in the absence of textbooks and writing, to tell stories about those men for the next thousand years, maybe what you’d get out of that is an origin story of the mythic founder of the state.

And that seems to be what’s happened in the Egyptian case with Osiris. Now he’s a god, but he’s got human characteristics. And so he’s also granted the status of something that’s eternal. Okay, now here’s the story of Osiris, roughly speaking. He’s kind of old now, and he’s a little bit blind, but he’s blind in a specific way.

And the way that he’s specifically blind is that he’s wilfully blind. Now if you’re wilfully blind about… the Egyptians say this straightforwardly, and I’ll tell you why they believe this. If you’re wilfully blind there’s things that you could know that you take pains not to know. And wilful blindness, under English common law, can be grounds for criminal conviction.

So for example, if you run a company and you think that your treasurer is cooking the books but it’s working to your favour, and you decide ‘well, I just won’t look’, and then later it comes out, you could say ‘well I didn’t know’, and the people who are prosecuting would say ‘yeah but you could have known and you took a conscious choice not to know, so you’re culpable.’

And I think that’s actually the best model of Freudian repression, in a sense. It isn’t exactly repression, it is failure to make the effort to know something that you could know. Now, sometimes you… look, sometimes something terrible happens to you and you just can’t understand it. But sometimes something terrible is happening and you refuse to think about it.

And because you refuse to think about it you really don’t know what it is. And you might say, ‘well I can’t be culpable then because I don’t know what it is’, but you could have known, so you’re culpable. So it’s voluntary ignorance. And that’s the problem with Osiris. He was a great guy when he was young, he was a hero. He founded the Egyptian state.

But you know he’s not everything he could be anymore. He’s gotten anachronistic and outdated and wilfully blind, which is even worse. Now there’s an idea here. It’s such a bloody brilliant idea, it’s mindboggling. So Osiris is the state manifested in personified form, and that’s reasonable because the state is like a person.

The person of the state is manifested in the body of laws, and you guys all imitate that body of laws, and that’s what basically makes you citizens of the state. So that’s what makes you citizens of the state. You can all get along because all of you are imitating the same thing, and what you’re imitating is the central body of custom and law that makes up the state.

And that’s why you can predict each other. So that makes you a good citizen. Now the problem with being a good citizen is that sometimes if you’re a good citizen you’re a bad person. That’s a big problem. So for example, the better you were at being a Nazi, in all likelihood, the worse a person you were.

And so that’s a very useful observation, because one of the things it shows is that even though it’s necessary for you to imitate the central personality of the state, sometimes the central personality of the state can be pathological. And the Egyptians, who had established quite a lengthy state (as opposed, say, to the Mesopotamians… the Egyptians had been existing in a complex state apparatus for a very long period of time), they started to encounter problems that were intrinsic to the state.

Now you remember, in the Mesopotamian creation myth, the primary danger was Tiamat. You know, you make a lot of racket, you kill Apsu, that’s order, Tiamat comes flooding back and takes you out. Well you can imagine that that would be the primary story of people in a civilization that was somewhat fragile. They’re a hell of a lot more worried about being invaded by the next, you know, round of barbarians or having their crops fail or being flooded out or something like that than they are concerned about whether or not the whole state apparatus has become corrupt and is going to collapse.

Now they’re partly concerned about that because remember Marduk, the emperor, is supposed to be being a good Marduk and keeping an eye on everything. But the myth, the mythic structure only talks about Apsu a tiny little bit, it basically says ‘don’t kill Tiamat’s consort or you’ll make her angry’.

The Egyptians take that a lot farther. They look at Osiris and they say ‘well he was… there was something really good about him. Without him we wouldn’t even have our state, so we bloody well better be happy about that because the state is better than no state’. You know, you could say pathological order is better than absolute chaos. Now you can have an argument about that but… whatever, it’s, you know, it depends on how pathological the order, obviously.

But it isn’t that untrammeled chaos is a good solution. I think that you can, and I’m only using this as an example… you know, the Americans, and us as well, went into Iraq to take out a person who was clearly a dictator. And who had… who was a pretty bad guy and who had really bad sons. And his heroes were people like Stalin and Hitler.

Well, they took him out. Well then what? Well, then all hell broke loose. You know, because the theory was, you take out the bad guy at the top and all the good guys at the bottom get together and instantly they have a good government. It’s like, that isn’t what happened at all, what happened was the whole state degenerated into chaos.

And partly out of that chaos came ISIS, and it’s not self-evident that ISIS is preferable to Hussein. At least Hussein educated all the women, and he was relatively secular, all things considered. So I’m not making a case for Hussein, my point is that, you know, you have to be careful when you disrupt order, even when it’s pathological because God only knows what’s going to spring forth.

And that doesn’t mean that you should never try to overcome pathological order, but it does mean that you should be very, very careful when you do so. You know, you have to do a micro-analysis in some sense to make sure that you know what the hell you’re doing. Alright, so anyway, Osiris, he’s a good guy man, he established the state, he was a great guy, he was a hero, he, you know, made order out of chaos, and that’s where you live, so great.

But he’s a little old, a little out of date, and he’s wilfully blind, and that’s so smart because I think what the Egyptians did is encapsulate in narrative form the primary danger of all human institutions. There are two of them. And Eliade talks about this a lot with regards to flood mythology. So here’s an example. There are flood myths all over the world, and there may have even been a flood.

There’s pretty good archeological evidence for that, that there was a great flood about 13,000 years ago when a bunch of comets hit the Earth and melted the North American ice shield, but we won’t get into that. But it doesn’t really matter because the mythological sub-structure of the story still has the same meaning regardless of its historical reality.

So in the Biblical story of the flood, basically what happens is that humanity is created, then they degenerate rapidly. And they get so degenerate, which is sort of like the elder Gods getting out of hand in the Mesopotamian story, that God thinks, ‘oh to hell with all of you, you’re a big mistake, I’m just going to wipe you out’.

But he finds one good guy, that’s Noah, and out of Noah, who’s like another Adam, in some sense, the world of human beings is regenerated. But the idea is that corrupt people get washed away. And Eliade talks about the flood myth all over the world, Mircea Eliade, and he says that generally speaking there are two reasons why the deities flood the planet.

And one is the system is old and out-dated, and the second is that people are corrupt. And then if you get the two things working together, you get a system that’s out of date that becomes pathological faster because people are corrupt. And so I think that you can use the flood in New Orleans as a good example of that.

Because on the one hand, you can say, well it was a hurricane. So that’s a natural disaster. But on the other hand, you could say, well people knew the damn dykes were too weak, and they didn’t do anything about it, you know, they were only built for a hundred-year storm. And Louisiana is corrupt beyond belief, I mean, for a democratic state, it’s not corrupt compared to most states, but it’s really corrupt compared to most democratic states,

and if you dump money into Louisiana it just goes into people’s pockets anyway and the infrastructure doesn’t get fixed up. So then you might ask yourself, well was the flood a consequence of a natural disaster or the blindness of the culture? Well, you can never tell which of those are true. If you freeze to death in the winter is it because it’s cold or because you’re stupid? You know, there’s no difference between those two things.

So if you get wiped out, it’s because nature comes after you and because your culture isn’t sufficient to protect. And so you can’t separate those two things. Okay, so… now the other case that the Egyptians are making, and this is quite cool, is that if you take a system that’s doing just fine, and you just leave it alone long enough, it becomes dysfunctional.

And there are a bunch of reasons for that. I mean, you know, you can imagine that you take your laptop, and it’s in perfect working order, and you put it in the closet for twenty years, and you take it out, what do you have? Well, it’ll still turn on. Do you have a laptop? Well no, by then it won’t even work, it won’t be able to communicate with the internet, there won’t be any peripherals that could plug into it, the software would be so outdated that you wouldn’t even know how to use it.

Like it’s a brick, basically. And so the point is that, and you can really see this with electronic equipment, a perfectly functional thing, maintained in stasis, of its own accord becomes dysfunctional. And so what that means is that you have to run around like a mad hyena just keeping your things working.

Now, of course, you know that because how much time do you spend in a month updating your electronics? You know, it’s just a treadmill of updates. I think part of the reason they haven’t contributed to overall productivity is because people take all the time they used to waste typing things out on paper trying to keep their efficient electronics actually working.

And you know, learning all the things you have to learn and re-learning them. There’s this scene in Alice in Wonderland. So Alice is in the Underworld, right? And she meets the Red Queen down there. So that’s Mother Nature. And she’s always running around going ‘off with their heads! Off with their heads!’ in an arbitrary way, which is of course what the Red Queen does.

And at one point she tells Alice, which is such a… it’s such a remarkably deep line, she says to Alice ‘in my Kingdom you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in the same place.’ And that’s exactly right. So you can think, the environment that you’re trying to adapt to is a dynamic concatenation of patterns and it’s transforming across time.

Not completely unpredictably, but certainly not predictably. And so that means if you build a structure that’s adapted to it, that structure has to change and flow in keeping with the change and flow of the underlying environment or it gets outdated. You know, it gets obsolescent.

And so all you have to do is sit there and do nothing and you become obsolescent. And so that’s the problem with Osiris being old. He was a good guy when he was young, but he’s old now, and the old solutions don’t solve the new problems. And you could call that an Egyptian existential statement.

All of you have a culture. It’s old. It doesn’t apply. Or it doesn’t apply well. And so what are you going to do with it? Are you going to throw the whole thing out? Well we know what happens, the Mesopotamians already told us what happens if you do that. It’s like, Tiamat comes flooding back and all hell breaks loose, so you can’t throw everything away, but it doesn’t work very well, so it’s up to you to figure out how to fix it.

Okay so… but now Osiris has got another problem. So you might say… well let’s say you’ve got an old computer (this, by the way [points to computer], in case you haven’t noticed, is a very old computer), and if you keep tapping on it, and upgrading it a little bit, you could keep it more or less up-to-date.

At some point you’re going to throw the whole damn thing away. But you could do incremental changes to it on a continual basis, and the thing will more or less stay functional. You could think about those incremental changes as partial revolutions, right? Remember that hierarchy.

Now and then you have to change the operating system. That sucks because that means everything operating underneath virtually has to change. But more often you’re doing a tweak here and a tweak there, at lower, more specific levels, and if you tweak enough then the probability that the whole thing is going to collapse and you’ll have to do a clean install is quite low.

Well the same thing applies to the state, logically enough. This is the state. If you think that your laptop isn’t the state then you’re not thinking about your laptop properly. It’s the state. And it’s going to be more and more the state as we progress over the next twenty years.

So you know that if you’re aware and you keep the updates up and you stay awake that you can keep the thing functioning. At some point it’s going to get anachronistic, it’s better to just replace it, which is also by the way what’s going to happen to all of you, right?

And it’s a decision that evolution, in some sense, and biology has made, that at some point trying to keep you updated is so bloody complicated that you might as well get rid of the whole thing and let something new occur, and I’m really dead serious about this because death evolved.

You know, you have elements in you that are three and a half billion years old. Not everything dies. And some creatures are functionally immortal. But not us. And the reason is, well at some point we’re too old to be updated, and so that’s the end of that. Seems to happen about over a hundred year period.

Anyways, now imagine you just ignore your computer completely. You don’t update the thing at all. Well, it’s going to get anachronistic of its own accord, but if you refuse to engage in those operations that would keep it updated, it’s going to get anachronistic a lot faster. And that’s what happens to Osiris, they say the same thing.

It’s like, he’s old, and that’s part of the problem, he’s past his prime. But the worst part of the problem is that he’s wilfully blind. He won’t take action even though he knows it’s necessary. And so he gets out of date and pathological faster than necessary.

Now when you hear in the flood stories that God is angry about the sins of men, and that’s why He washes everything away, it’s the same idea. Now the word ‘sin’ comes from the Greek word hamartia, and hamartia is an archery term. And to sin means not to hit the centre of the target.

And so basically the idea in the flood stories is that if enough people aren’t aiming at the target, or hitting the centre, then things are going to get so corrupt and unstable that everything is going to get washed away. And that’s right, it’s exactly, perfectly accurate. Which is very, very cool. It’s remarkable that that’s the case.

Okay, so now Osiris (because this is a myth) has an evil brother. Now that’s a pretty common occurrence. If you look at The Lion King (which is very much the Egyptian creation myth, by the way), the Lion King… what’s the old guy’s name? The old lion. Mufasa. He has a brother, right? What’s his brother? Scar!

And what’s the problem with Scar? He’s scarred. Right, so you know, he says he’s from the bottom of the gene pool. And you know, he’s been in second place all his life, and he’s very, very intelligent. He worships his own intelligence. He regards himself as a higher form of intellect, which is a very common characteristic of the evil brother in mythology, and there’s a reason for that.

And he’s scarred because life has scarred him. And he’s bitter and resentful and he wants to bring down the order and he wants to kill the son of the king. I mean, he’s a bad guy. Now the problem is that Mufasa underestimates him, and that’s exactly what happens to Osiris. So Osiris has this brother, Set, or Seth.

And I have a sneaking suspicion that our word ‘set’, for setting Sun is from that word, although I don’t know that for sure. But sounds are generally… sounds in language remain stable across a very long period of time, and set was definitely, from the Egyptian perspective, the enemy of the Sun. You know, that’s part of the Egyptian cosmology.

And the Sun is associated with illumination and brightness and daytime consciousness and clear apprehension and vision, and all those things. And of course night is opposed to that, unconsciousness and blindness and danger, and all of those things. So anyways, Set, he’s pretending to be Osiris’s loving brother, but he’s not.

He’s plotting to overthrow him first chance he gets. And so he’s just sitting in the background, feeding him bad advice, waiting for him to get weak enough so that he can strike. Now the name Set is taken by the Egyptian Coptics and turned into Satan. So Set is the precursor of the Christian Satan.

So the reason I’m telling you that is so that you can see how these ideas, these archetypal ideas of corruption and evil are extraordinarily ancient, and they’re part of the process whereby people are trying to figure out what the right way is to act and what the wrong way is to act, and what the right way is to set up institutions and what the wrong way is to set up institutions.

So it’s a very, very long process. And it’s not something that someone just sat around and thought up. It’s way, way deeper than that. So anyways, Osiris is being, you know, getting weaker and being blind, and one day Set thinks ‘alright, time for action’, so he takes his brother and he chops him up into little pieces.

Now, Osiris is a god, so you’re not going to kill him, but you can make it very difficult for him to get his act together. So basically what happens is Osiris falls apart. Now think about that. You fall apart. People say that. The relationship fell apart. I fell apart. Things fall apart. What does that mean?

Well it means that a thing is usually a complex unity of multiple sub-entities, and sometimes what holds them together, the superordinate structure, collapses, and all that’s left are the things. Because you know, when you fall apart, you don’t completely fall apart. You know, you’re still alive. What’s happened is that the unity of your psychological structure has been fragmented.

And that’s a trip to the underworld, man. So you’re going to be unhappy. I broke up with my partner and then I fell apart. Well everyone knows what that means. Okay, so that’s what happens to Osiris. Things fall apart. So then Set, being a sneaky sort of character, takes all of Osiris’s pieces and he puts them all over Egypt.

He hides them here and there so that Osiris is going to have a hell of a time recollecting himself and getting his act together and coming back. And so, things fall apart. Now the same thing happens in The Lion King, obviously, because Scar kills Mufasa. So fine, then Set rules. That’s not a good day for the Egyptians.

Remember what happens in The Lion King when Scar rules? The environment becomes completely devastated because they overhunt, right? So you get total environmental devastation. It’s all black and burnt. And, you know, nothing is functioning properly. And remember after Simba comes back to set things right, it starts to rain and everything comes back to life.

Well, it’s another indication of the idea that you really can’t separate the environment from the culture, you know, they’re in a dynamic system of interaction. Anyway, Osiris, things have fallen apart. Well Osiris has a wife, he has to, he’s King of Order.

Well, we’re missing someone, we’re missing the Queen of Chaos, we’re missing the Queen of the Underworld. That’s Isis. Now Isis was a long-lasting goddess. There have been goddess religions forever. There’s an idea among misinformed feminist anthropologists that the original religious structures were feminine, earth-goddess type religions, and then they were replaced by patriarchal religions.

And there’s no historical evidence for that. And the best work I know on that is actually through the Jungians… Jung and Eric Neumann. Because what they figured out… they’re kind of on the same track, thinking about the same idea, that there seems to be a shift between matriarchal values to patriarchal values, and that that was a historical shift.

But what they actually found out instead was that’s a shift in mythological idea. It’s not a historical reality. And it’s useful as a mythological idea but you shouldn’t project it backwards onto time and make it a historical reality.

Anyways, Isis, she’s been Queen of the Underworld forever. Now of course, when order collapses, chaos reappears, and that’s what happens. Isis pops up out of the Underworld and her husband’s missing and she’s not very happy about that. So she wanders all over Egypt looking for his phallus.

And so… now that’s an interesting idea because it touches on the biology of innovation, in some sense. So you’ve heard of the notion of a seminal idea. Well, that’s a mythologically informed metaphor. And so the idea is that, in biological reproduction, semen falls on fertile ground, and out of that something emerges.

Well, there’s a tight analogue between that and what happens in the Egyptian myth with regards to sexuality. Now, Jung and Freud had a big argument about this, eh, because Freud thought that you could reduce everything to sexuality. And Jung said no no, what you don’t understand is that sexuality itself is often used as a symbol for something even more profound.

And they didn’t agree on that, and that’s part of why they went their separate ways. Freud was very much unwilling to believe that religion could be anything other than a set of defensive and repressive beliefs and practices designed to protect you from death anxiety. That was basically his hypothesis.

And it’s wrong. I mean, there is that element, of course, because you can use dogma to protect yourself against all sorts of things. But you can’t reduce a whole damn thing to that. You have got to watch people of any type, that are intellectuals, who will tell you that everything can be reduced to one cause.

You know, it’s like a misplaced monotheism. Lots of people do that. For Marx it’s economics or class warfare, for Freud it’s sexuality (although he also considers aggression), for Foucault it’s power. You know, it’s like no, it’s not that simple. You can make a good story out of those motivations because they’re powerful motivations, and they do affect everything, but that doesn’t mean they cause everything uni-dimensionally.

Okay, so anyways, Isis pops up, Queen of the Underworld, Set takes control, chaos emerges from the Underworld, Isis wanders around, she finds Osiris’s phallus, and she makes herself pregnant. Well, so what does that mean? Well, it means a lot of things. One thing it means is that if a great system falls apart, the parts still have life.

And, you know, you could think about that. People often talk about the stability (to the degree that it’s stable)… part of the stability of capitalism is its creative destruction. Capitalism allows great enterprises to collapse and disperse. But they don’t break down into sub-atomic particles, right?

They collapse but the pieces they collapse into still have life, some of them more than others. And then if something collapses, sometimes part of the thing that collapsed has enough life to build something new out of the pieces. That’s the same thing that happens to you when you undergo a radical, revolutionary transformation in your character.

You might even feel like you’re dying. And in some sense, the organizing principles by which you lived are dying. That’s what’s taking you out. And it’s painful. Those things are alive. It’s no trivial matter to be taken apart. But you know, you hope that you get taken apart, you can find some new information down there in the chaos, and that’s your union with Isis, roughly speaking.

And out of that union of information from the chaos and the parts of you that are left, you could come springing back. And everyone hopes that, and often it’s the case. You know, one of the lessons you can derive from Egyptian mythology is bloody well stay awake.

And make the little corrections when you need to. Don’t be wilfully blind because if you’re wilfully blind you’re going to store up chaos because you’re not keeping it at bay. And then one day when you’re weak it’s just going to take you out. And that happens. That happens to people all the time. They let things around them degenerate back into chaos.

And then one day they’re weak, and something else comes along to hit them, and they’re done. They can’t get up. It’s too heavy and too hard a hit. And so then they’re down in the Underworld and they stay there. The general rule is if you’re going to go to the Underworld, it’s better to go on purpose and for short voyages.

And that’s the idea behind voluntary exposure, right? Find out what you don’t want to look at. It’s easy enough to do that because you’re going to see yourself avoiding it. Then figure out how you can approach it and order some of it, in as big chunks as you can manage.

And you can do that all the time. Stay awake. Because then you keep your infrastructure properly maintained, and the probability that you will tolerate a powerful blow is much, much higher. It’s not certain. That’s the other thing about myths. They tell you the best way to negotiate through life, but they never tell you that that will work. They just tell you that that’s your best bet.

And so yeah, maybe that’s enough. It might be enough. Okay, anyways, so Isis finds Osiris’s phallus and gets pregnant. And then back to the Underworld she goes. And she goes through her pregnancy and gives birth to Horus.

Now that’s a pretty common story, right? That’s the long-lost rightful king. You know, in King Arthur, for example, Arthur has to be taken away from the castle to be raised, basically in isolation. It’s a very, very common story. And the reason… the same thing happens to Harry Potter, right?

Harry Potter is stuck with these Dursleys and they just… they’re like every resentful child’s image of their parents. Maybe it’s more like every resentful 13-year-old’s image of their parents. And you know, the truth of the matter is that you are kind of stuck off in the normative wastelands of your culture.

You have your specific parents, they’re not archetypal representatives of reality, they’re your parents. They’re nature and culture, but in finite and flawed human form. And what that means in part is you are raised outside the domain of your culture. It’s old, it isn’t working very well, and it’s not transmitted very well to you.

So you grow up outside of it, you’re alienated from it. That’s that existential alienation, but people have always felt alienated from their damn culture because it’s old, and it’s sort of blind. And there you are young and dynamic and full of life, and all it’s telling you is you can do this and you can’t do that.

And then you know, lying to you about some things, and doing a pretty nasty job of others. So you’re outside it, you’re alienated from it. And that’s what happens to Horus. He’s outside, in the Underworld. That’s where he gets born. And so that’s worth thinking about too.

Anyways, he grows up. Now Horus is an interesting sort of character. So you’ve all seen the image of the Egyptian eye, right? Everyone knows that image. Even now, which is pretty cool. So it’s got an eyebrow and it’s got an eye in the middle and then it’s got the iris, and usually the pupil is so big that it covers the whole iris.

And there’s a variety of reasons for that, but one of the reasons is that it symbolizes interest and attention. So when you’re interested in something, your pupil grows. And so Horus’s pupil is really big, and he’s checking things out like mad. So Horus is the eye, and he’s also a falcon.

And you might say, well why is he a falcon? And the answer to that is falcons are birds of prey, and they can really see. So that’s another amplification of the idea of the eye. Now falcons fly up above everything, even above the pyramids. And they can see wherever they want to see, and so Horus is the thing that flies up above the structures of mankind, in some sense, and can see them panoramically.

So he’s not encapsulated in any particular pyramid, he’s the thing that’s above all pyramids and looking and providing you with an overview. And I