Jung, Freud's prodigal student, complained that Freud emphasized the Oedipus Myth above all others, not realizing that the entire psychic world is the interplay of different myths, stories, and legends- infinite in number, concocted by the collective human imagination through eons of experience. Myths of childhood range from Attis to Narcissus, from Hippodamia to Mirope, and well beyond . . .the Oedipus myth is but one, and yet it is the one which has stuck with us.
Last night I was listening to a recorded lecture that the late Bob Solomon and his wife, Kathleen Higgins, were giving on the life of Nietzsche. It was the lecture on the notorious "God is Dead" theme in which the lecturers decry the lack of a "foundational myth" to replace the Christian myth, which is the one Nietzsche was referring to when he spoke of God as being dead.
I was struck by the way the lecturers described this quest as the search for a "foundational" myth. They are absolutely right that that is what the culture has been searching for for some time. But the idea itself rests on a fundamental assumption whose validity I would vigorously dispute: the modern Western bias towards Monotheism.
Monotheism, historically is not the norm. It is an aberration from the great religious traditions of mankind. The pretension that there is only one god, and with it one "foundational myth," is a fence we have wrapped ourselves in so tightly these past 4000 years that it seems almost impossible to get out of it.
And yet even in our supposed monotheism we pray to different aspects of the deity for salvation- Jehovah, Yahweh, Hashem, and others described different subtle aspects of the Hebrew God. Even the Holy Trinity and the recently assumed Virgin Mother (Congratulations, Mary) are differentiated, albeit grossly, mythic aspects of the supposedly one deity. So, as so many religious people display in everyday life, we are hypocrites- even foundationally. For while we feign to believe in one god, we in fact worship many.
And yet it is monotheism that has endured even into our 21st century. Perhaps it was Freud's ambition that latched onto this fact, or perhaps it was society that latched itself onto Freud, but the supposed ubiquity of the Oedipus Complex satisfies our modern craving for a monotheistic, "foundational myth."
Particularly for the secular educated who themselves hold the hilarious pretension of being immune from religion, the psychological mono-myth of Oedipus forms a sort of Rock of Gibraltar on which to hang their psychological theories while evading the complexity, turmoil, and irreducibility that accompanies a wholly more accurate and honest version of the psyche: the polytheistic.
The mono-myth of Oedipus has usurped the thousands of other childhood mythologems that comprise the human experience just as God-the-Father has usurped the thousands of Gods and Goddesses who have woven the story of mankind since time immemorial.
It is certainly very comforting for us to have such a strong protective father, whether in the guise of an inaccessible deity, or an equally ephemeral urge to kill our father and bed our mothers. Indeed these two parallel mono-myths share primarily the fact that lay persons rarely, if ever, experience them directly. We just have to take somebody's word for it. How convenient.
On the other hand, the multi-mythic outlook is as rich as can be, and can be experienced - indeed is always experienced - viscerally, personally, and primordially- three religious attitudes that are all but forbidden in a formalized, monotheistic setting. That these experiences happen whether we identify as monotheists or not, Oedipists or not, is the cause of much disturbance to the formalized religious structure. So there should be no wonder that over the past 2000 years especially, the monists have done their damndest to stamp out any diverging mythological threads and condemn them to the realm of "hell"- either figuratively by denunciation or physically by aggravated murder.
And yet the church didn't act alone. They extinguished polytheism by representing the interests of their constituents. After all, the Christian cult, by expurgating the notion of violence and embracing the notion of lamb-like surrender, left itself extremely vulnerable to aggression. The cthonic Roman culture of violence, out of which the original Christian sects arose, became the repressed shadow of a culture based on martyrdom and self-sacrifice.
The unconscious need, therefore, for manly protection and security grew exponentially. And what could be more secure than the mono-myth? The one sure truth in which one could take refuge.
Polytheism is sloppy. How do you know which God to pray to? How do you know (psychologically) that you are living out the Persephone Myth and not the Artemis Myth? How reassuring, then, to know you're either an Oedipus or an Electra, a Jock or a Cheerleader, as it were? This kind of Judeo-Christian-Freudian reassurance was absolutely necessary for a culture that consciously rejected militarism and the mortal protection it offered. (The Christan wars of aggression in subsequent centuries would be further evidence of the repressed violent side acting autonomously, but I find the protective violence of a fixed belief system to be a more compelling study.)
When one actively engages the polytheistic "lifestyle" things start to make a lot more sense. The "grid" into which we must force ourselves in mono-culture transforms into an ocean of connectivity. For some, this ocean remains terrifying, and the risk of drowning without proper flotation equipment is real. Fortunately, disciplines such as astrology and other mytho-temporal interface studies offer a sort of "Coast Guard for the Soul" and help us navigate our mythic waters with greater assurance. Jungian Psychology, I Ching, Tarot, and good old-fashioned Animism all offer compelling maps of the ocean's depths and can even lead one back to land, should one so desire.
Judging by the Solomon lectures, it seems as if Nietzsche with his reverence for the Greeks was very much on to this. But the unwillingness to break with the monotheistic ueber-paradigm hampered him from engaging fully in the mythic on a personal level. This great wash of different possibilities of human experience he believed were only available to the ancients but were somehow lost to himself. In fact Nietzsche's obsession with the Dionysian-Apollonian split reflects this. What he meant by this was essentially a monotheistic (Apollonian) - polytheistic (Dionysian) split, which is a false one created by the unconscious monotheistic bias. (It could also be described more simply as a masculine-feminine split with Apollo being the former, Dionysos, the latter. It is no coincidence that the great patriarchal religions are monotheistic.)
After all, polytheism *includes* the God of monotheism. There is no Apollo-Dionysos split in Pagan thought. The two are brothers, but they are also brothers with Aries, Hermes, Hephaestos, and countless others born to Zeus's concubines. Add to this Athena, Demeter, Hecate, and all the rest, and you have a vast psycho-mythic framework that is wholly compatible with itself and underpins fully the stories of our lives.
And taking us into the 21st century, in the post-Matrix era, I would have to add that we may no longer be in the age of discovering our mythic substructures but actually choosing them- or at minimum realizing that the myths we experience presently are myths we have already chosen. To wake up, therefore, while still in the dream is to choose consciously- to choose joy, suffering, endurance, exhaustion or whatever story catches our fancy.
Surely nothing could be more terrifying to the fundamentalist monists out there. But the gradual loosening of the death grip on mortal security has in fact been the stated intention of the Church teachings for 2000 years. Perhaps it took two millenia of pretense to arrive at a place where we can actually do what that god demanded of us- let go of our attachment to mortal protection and flow with the ever-unfolding stories that are our lives.
My intention in this piece was to undermine a bit the particular notion of Oedipus and its centrality in modern psychology, so I would like to say a few things about that (although I confess the detour may have been much more interesting than the destination may yet be!). We'll take them up in Part III.
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