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

So while you guys were gone, I went on Wikipedia and looked up Osiris, because when I did the research for this book it certainly wasn’t possible to get access to that kind of information instantaneously. And the stories that are laid out in there… there’s a thread that runs through the stories that are laid out there, that’s quite similar to the one I told you, but there are all sorts of details that are very radically different. And so, I don’t really know what to say about that.

And you know, part of the reason that people like Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung and… there was an original anthropologist, an armchair anthropologist, who wrote a book called The Golden Bough, whose name escapes me momentarily [it’s Sir James George Frazer], but it was one of the first attempts to do a cross-cultural categorization of mythology, and to look for underlying commonalities.

Now the problem is, you know I told you about Naomi Klein going down to Argentina and looking at the factory through her particular lens. The problem is that when you develop a lens and then you look at things through it, you may just see what that lens heightens, you know; and I think that’s a criticism that could be leveled against the sorts of things that I’m telling you about. You know, that I’ve cherry-picked certain stories and interpreted them in certain ways so that they fall coherently into a scheme of thought.

And so I’ll tell you some of the things that I do methodologically to protect myself against that, insofar as that’s possible. So there is this idea in psychology called the multimethod-multitrait method of construct validation, which is, you know, a god-awful agglomeration of jargon. But it actually means something. And it was the construction of two psychologists back in the late 1950s, Cronbach and Meehl, who were interested in what psychologists meant when they said something existed.

Like say, anger. Is that a real thing? Well, what do you mean, ‘thing’? What is it that you’re talking about? What is anger, exactly? I don’t mean as ‘anger,’ but as an idea. What sort of idea is the idea of anger or the idea of anxiety or the idea of sadness? Or the idea of self-esteem or self-competence or any of these things that psychologists talk about as if they’re realities.

Well, some realities are very tangible, right, and it’s somewhat easy to come to agreement about the contours of their existence, and the borders, but other things are way more difficult than that. And so their idea was that if something actually existed, you should be able to measure it multiple ways, using multiple techniques, and still get the same answer.

And so, your senses do that. You have five of them. And the reason you have five, apparently, is because evolution has determined that if you only had four you’d die more often. So it seems as if you have five separate sources of information that all lead to the same conclusion. You can be relatively certain that the conclusion’s that reached is real.

Well, the multimethod-multitrait method is an application of that idea to construct validation, which is like… you could think of anger as an idea, as a construct; it’s a terminological issue. You just define it as a construct, a psychological construct. How do you know if they’re real? Well the idea is it’s very complicated. You have to measure them in multiple ways.

All the ways you measure them have to give the same reading. Then you have to show that that idea is the same in certain ways as other ideas that it’s related to and different from other ideas that it’s not related. So let me give an example. There’s a construct: ‘neuroticism.’ And you might say, well there’s another construct: ‘depression.’

Well then you might say, “well are those separate or are they the same?” Well, that’s a tough one, because in many, many ways they’re the same. Are they different in any important ways? Well, the way you do that technically is you would measure neuroticism however you were going to measure it. Maybe I’d have you tell me how neurotic you were using a questionnaire, and then I’d have your friend tell me and maybe your parent, so we’ve got a pretty good triangulation on your neuroticism.

Then I have them do the same thing, all those people do the same thing with regards to your levels of depression and anxiety. Then I’d use both those measures to predict something else, like how well your life goes in terms of career over the next ten years. And if neuroticism predicted and depression predicted, so they were correlated, then I’d think well there’s some relationship.

Then I’d look at them at the same time. If I predict with neuroticism and then I add depression to the mix, does that give me more predictive power? It’s sort of like does A = C or does A + B = C? That’s all you’re asking in a regression equation, roughly speaking.

Well if A = C is just as good as A + B = C, especially if the two things are also correlated (depression/anxiety and neuroticism are going to be very highly correlated, like 0.7, something like that), you might say well those are the same things. Just because they have different names, it’s not helped.

And part of it is, it’s a pragmatic conceptualization of reality, it’s like, is this categorization structure good for something? Okay, so anyways, I’ll unpack all that and say, well part of my rules for determining whether these things were useful or not was to see if the ideas apply across multiple levels of analysis.

So that’s why I told you about the conceptual, so that’s sort of the cognitive psychology, and then the neuropsychological, so there’s some input of brain research. And then the narrative or mythological, and then the cross-cultural and think well those all stack up in a certain way so that if you look between all of them you can see a pattern.

And it seems to me increasingly unlikely that that pattern would be there across all of those levels at the same time. Now you could say well, you know that depends on how good you are at weaving a story. But at some point, encapsulating that many phenomena and weaving a coherent story out of them if such a thing doesn’t exist, it seems to me to become cognitively impossible. You just can’t do it unless there’s actually something there.

And of course everything I tell you also is a simplification. It has to be. Because you could spend your whole life investigating any of the things we’re talking about, and so what I’m hoping is I’ve extracted out the central issues of these multiple levels of analysis and put together, each of them support all the others.

Anyways, who knows? You know, I don’t know, but so far so good. Okay, so this is a cool representation; I really like this one. This is called The Open Virgin. And it’s a 14th or 13th century sculpture, if I remember correctly. It’s made out of wood. And these things were actually… this isn’t the only one of them. They were a form of religious interpretation that had different exemplars. You could find different ones of them online.

This is brilliant, this bloody thing, as far as I’m concerned. So let me show you this figure again. So basically what you have here, in this figure, this is a world conception. And the world conception is roughly: there’s an individual, positive and negative; he or she is in a cultural sphere that’s positive or negative, that’s embedded in the world outside of culture, that’s positive and negative, and all of it comes from potential. That’s the idea.

Now, this map shows all of the positives and negatives in relationship to one another, and you see it’s not perfectly symmetrical and the reason for that is, as far as I can tell, the adversarial element of the individual is the thing that generates the tyrannical element of culture. And that’s the thing that gets in your way of establishing a creative relationship with what you don’t know.

Well, anyways. Here is a manifestation of that, I believe. And I like this manifestation because… like, it’s obviously Christian, but not exactly. It’s more mythological than Christian. And the reason for that, well, is quite obvious. So the superordinate figure is Mary, the feminine.

Now you think, well it’s amazing the person who carved this didn’t get burnt up at the Inquisition, because it’s a radical idea, but it’s just an indication of how the mythology can change the causal relationship between these different elements. So you have Mary there; she’s the ultimate in femininity, the ultimate feminine deity, but only the positive side.

And then within her, so it’s like Nature opens itself up, benevolent Nature opens itself up, and what you see inside is culture; that’s God the Father, holding the individual, and the individual in this case is the crucified Christ, which is a wonderful conceptualization as far as I’m concerned, because of course that is what life does to people; that’s why that’s such a powerful symbol.

It’s like, you know, Christ is the person who has to face the reality of his own death, voluntarily or involuntarily, who’s betrayed by his culture, betrayed by his friends; it’s sort of like he’s exposed to the most torturous elements of individual being. And simultaneously, at least in principle, transcends them.

Well, it’s like you bloody well better do that because otherwise, well what’s going to happen? You’re done if you don’t do that. And it’s even worse, it’s not only that you fail, that’s just the beginning of it. If you can’t transcend the tragedy of your being, then you get corrupted. I see this happening to people all the time.

So you know, if you’re suffering and you can’t cope with it, generally speaking what happens is that it embitters you. And once you get bitter, you get resentful, and once you get resentful, you look for revenge. And that can just get completely out of hand.

Now that’s a quick trip to the worst suburb of the Underworld, that’s for sure. So you know, it’s not only that if you don’t manage this transcendent act that you’re swamped by the tragedy of your life. You’re swamped by the tragedy of your life, and then that corrupts you, and then you start working to make everything even more tragic than it has to be.

And so I think that’s why in medieval Christian conceptualizations in particular, the idea of hell, the idea that you were destined to hell was worse than the idea of dying. And it’s a strange idea, you know, because you think (this is what the terror management theorists think too) is that “there’s nothing worse than the fear of death!” It’s like, that’s wrong. They don’t have the right imagination.

There are lots of things that are worse than the fear of death. I’m not trying to trivialize the fear of death, obviously, but I don’t think it’s very difficult to understand that there are some things that you would rather die than do. I mean I’m sure that I could get you guys to sit for fifteen minutes and say okay, list ten things that you would rather die than do. That’s easy. Especially if you’re a parent. You can think of those things in like no time flat.

Okay so that’s pretty interesting. So you’ve got the superordinate feminine figure here, which is not what you would expect from a Christian representation, right? You’d expect God to be on the outside, and then Mary and then Christ, in all likelihood, although that would also be a valid representation. Because you can think of the mother as something that’s protected by the culture.

And supporting the individual, because that’s basically what this representation shows. But then you see on the open sides, I really like this; I think it’s so cool, is that you’ve got all these people who aren’t archetypal figures; they’re in a little crowd. And they’re gazing at the central figure. And of course that’s exactly what’s happened in Christianity for two thousand years, right, insofar as it has spread, is that for two thousand years people have been looking at that image, which is the crucifixion, transfixed by it.

Well why? Well, you know, for reasons that we don’t understand. When everybody woke up in the late 1800s and said, “why were we looking at that for the last two thousand years?” the first answer was “well we really don’t have the foggiest idea.” It was just one of the things that we did, roughly speaking. It encapsulated people within the belief system.

So that’s another good example, anyway, of how this archetypal imagery can manifest itself, say spontaneously, in the imagination of an artist. And the thing is, that’s a sacred image. And it is an actuality, that’s what it is. What it shows is, well there’s a superordinate, transcendent, natural order that has a beneficial element that we associate with femininity, and inside that there’s a supportive culture that’s properly nested if things are organised properly.

And it’s both of those things that provide support for the suffering individuals. It’s like yeah, that’s pretty much got it. Now that doesn’t exhaust the meaning of this particular representation; there’s a lot more to it than that, but just that is not so bad.

And then, you know, I can show you a more negative representation; I think I’ve shown you this before. Like this would be a representation of the negative element of the feminine. And so you have Kali here, and Kali is the goddess to whom you make sacrifices, and hopefully if you make the right sacrifices, then Kali turns into her positive counterpart.

And you know, you think, well that’s a… what… how does sacrifice affect your relationship with the gods? Well first of all there’s no gods, and second of all, well then what the hell are you doing with the sacrifices? But it’s pretty straightforward. We’ve already talked about this at length. You do make sacrifices all the time.

And what that means is that you act as if you can have a relationship with being. You assume that if you withhold certain things from yourself now, that you will improve your relationship, both with nature and with culture. And I already told you guys that as far as I was concerned that was the most stunning cognitive discovery of mankind. It’s the discovery of the future. And it’s the discovery of the relationship between the present and the future.

You know, it’s such an amazing idea, that you can alter your behaviour now, and it’ll pay off in a year. God, that’s not obvious. It’s certainly not… animals don’t think that way. You know, some of them act that way, like bees and so on, but that’s just built right into their behaviour, as far as we can tell.

So anyway, so there’s Kali. And you know, she’s a spider. She’s in a web of fire. The fire is outside a web that’s made out of skulls. She’s got weapons in her hand, her hair is on fire. She’s got a headdress of skulls. I mean, if you ever saw something like that it would traumatise you so badly you wouldn’t be able to get out of your house for like five years. That’s exactly what it is.

That’s what it is. It’s a representation of all of that that would traumatize you if you encountered it. And you know, it’s an attempt to encapsulate that as an image, and what you could say, in some sense, is that the people who developed this image were attempting to conceptualize the class of all terrifying things.

And once you get the class of all terrifying things conceptualized, you could come up with the class of all useful responses. And that would be something like the proper way to behave, and sacrifice is an integral element of that. It’s like yeah, absolutely. Absolutely dead on.

Unless you don’t believe that sacrifice works, in which case, what the hell are you doing here? I mean, you know, you act out your belief. And it’s a firm belief. And you would also say that if things fell apart so badly that sacrifice no longer paid off, your life would basically become intolerable.

Because it would mean that you would have abandoned all sense of control over the outcomes of your actions. Well you can’t live like that, you’d just die of stress. Well and as I said, she was pregnant; she’s given birth to this unfortunate character, who she’s devouring intestines first. Like it’s a rough image. It’s an image of the destructive element of nature.

And so that’s the negative side of the feminine, we might say. There’s a positive representation. This is a Greek representation. That’s Diana, or Artemis. I’m hoping I’m remembering this properly. She’s multi-breasted. This circle around her head is undoubtedly a representation of her cosmic nature.

So it’s like a halo but the halo is basically a planetary body like the Sun… a cosmic body like the Sun or the Moon behind the head of the divine individual with all of that power shining forward. So it’s an attempt to use… you know, if you look up at the Moon or you look up at the Sun, there’s an element that’s characterised by awe.

You can’t help but feel that, at least its beauty and power, and sometimes it’s overwhelming. Well, you take the representation of the personality and you throw the representation of these cosmic powers behind it, and it’s an attempt to represent transcendent value. It’s very intelligent. It’s brilliant, in fact.

And so partly what you’re trying to do as you conduct your life is you’re trying to get all of these archetypal forces in proper balance. And I suppose in some sense to get them tilted towards the good, if that’s possible. I mean, that’s what this representation in some sense, you might say… [looks for picture]… yeah, you might say well if you got everything ordered properly, this is what being would be like.

Still pretty rough, given that the crucifix is at its centre. Now I don’t know, you know, if you think about it from a purely technical perspective, roughly speaking, each of these archetypes is split into positive and negative. You might say, well, that’s just how it is. There is no way that you can interact with all of them so that the whole system tilts towards the positive, you know.

But I don’t think that’s true. I think you can get them lined up so that things tilt towards the positive. And I think you can detect when that happens, because those are the periods in your life where you feel that you’re richly enough engaged in what you’re doing and life is meaningful enough, so that the rest of it, the substructure that makes it necessary, is worth it.

It’s worthwhile, you know, that the negative exists is okay given the way that things are structured. Now I think that whether or not that’s true is in some sense the eternal question of mankind. Can you organise your life so that it’s good?

Well, it seems like you can certainly allow your life to degenerate so that it’s terrible. That seems indisputable, right, and there does seem to be an element of choice in that, although, you know, something terrible can happen to you that you have no choice of or control over. But it certainly seems that you could do any number of stupid and blind things that make everything worse. I think that’s common experience.

And I also think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who wouldn’t say that there were things they did consciously and willingly, that were of their own choice, that they didn’t have to do, that made things worse. So we seem to have some sense of our moral agency. And we seem automatically to accept some responsibility for the outcomes of our actions.

And so partly what that means is that we do believe that we can make things better or worse. And I suppose in some way that means that we believe we can tap the whole archetypal structure of being into the positive. Well, I would say if you drill down to the bottom of existentialism, in some sense, that’s the question that the existentialists pose, you know.

Is there a manner of conducting your life such that it becomes… it’s not merely acceptable, it’s more than that. You’d say yes, this is how it should be. What we’re going to do now, although we’re not going to do it today, is we’re going to start talking about other representations of this sub-structure from other religious traditions.

And we’re going to also talk about ways that you might relate to these figures. Because one question might be, well you’re part of your culture, and it’s got an orderly element, and a protective element, and a tyrannical element. Okay so what should you do about that?

You know, should you… the tyrannical element is real and it’s corrupt and blind, and so to the degree that you identify with that, when you’re tyrannical and corrupt and blind, but by the same token you’re the fortunate beneficiary of tens of thousands of years of cultural and technological evolution and effort. And it seems to me that, you know, you should be at least appropriately grateful for that.

And so then you’re in a real position, because you have to be grateful and happy for the thing that tyrannises and controls you. Well, okay, that’s not an easy thing to figure out, because those things seem to conflict. So what exactly should your relationship to culture be?

Well, I think there are myths that describe that quite directly. And they take into account the corruption. It’s not a whitewash. It’s like yes of course this thing is dead and blind and corrupt. Obviously.

And you know, it’s foolishness and wilfulness… it’s ignorance and wilful blindness that make it that way, as well as things merely getting old and falling apart. So the fact that there’s some malevolence at the bottom of it is also true. Should you flee from that? Well, that isn’t what the myths say.

They say what you’re supposed to do is, just like Pinocchio, you’re supposed to go to the bottom of the ocean, to the most monstrous possible part, and rescue your father. That’s what you have to do before you become an individual. And I can’t see how that can’t be right.

In fact, I think that’s what you’re doing in university, if you’re actually getting a university education. What you’re here to do is sift through the dead remnants of the past and pull up what’s vital, that’s so sophisticated and complex that there’s no way that you’d be able to think it up for yourself.

But you know, it requires you as the discriminating agent. You know, if you read someone like Nietzsche or you read someone like Freud, there’s lots to throw away. It isn’t what you throw away though; it’s what you keep that matters.

And to be a discriminating reader means that you get rid of the dead matter and you keep the gold. And you build yourself up a storehouse of gold, and then you can live in the world. And people often ask, what’s the purpose of getting a degree in the humanities?

Well the answer to that is that if you’re properly trained in the humanities, you know how to live. Now that’s the same as having a job, and you need to have a job. But you know, knowing how to live is a more important thing than having a job, even though having a job is an important thing.

And the reason for that is that if you don’t know how to live then things fall apart. And that’s not good. And they can really fall apart, you know, and part of the reason I think that this became so much of an obsession for me is that I believe that we don’t have a lottery of… we are narrowing… we’ve become so powerful that the consequence of our blindness is reaching uncontrollable proportions.

If you’re weak and stupid, well you know, there’s only so much damage you can do. But we’re not weak, not at all. We have unbelievable power at our disposal now, and a lot of weird things are going to come down the pipes in the next ten years. The more people that have their act together, the better.

Because then things will be tilted towards everything lining up in a positive direction rather than being tilted in the other direction. And that’s important. And I think people can make a very powerful individual contribution to that, wherever you happen to be.

You know, all of these myths always say the same thing. They say that the future of the world depends on individual choice. And I think that’s literally true. So then you might think, well you better put yourself in a position where you make wise choices, because if you don’t… we’ve already seen what happens.

We got a taste in the 20th century. So, if you want some more of that, you could certainly have it.