Jesus On My Mind: the Man & the Myth

 

Two recent blog articles got me to turn to Jesus, as I often do, to note the One Vehicle at work in the Jesus story of the Christ as well as the Siddhartha story of the Buddha.

THE MAN

The first was a Salon story by Andrei Codrescu under the headline “’Zealot’paints Jesus as a Nazarene Che Guevara” reviewing the newly published book by Reza Aslan titled ZEALOT: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

I’m not a fan of Codrescu’s style so I won’t go into what he writes except to say he uses his usual hodge-podge approach for contextualizing and politicizing which makes critique of his content as confusing as the content itself. Suffice it to say Codrescu hides good points within his self promoting use of superfluous points. Codrescu didn’t like Aslan’s Zealot, but he tell us little of the evidence he is relying on to come to this conclusion and he doesn’t reveal his own version of Jesus that provides a better portrait of the man.

 I haven’t read Aslan’s book, but if Codrescu’s one real examination of the book regarding the story of Caesar’s coin is accurate, then Codrescu is correct that Aslan has come to a conclusion that is based on inserting his own interpretations at the beginning of the analysis and not on the facts of the story.   However, neither Aslan nor Codrescu mention the most important point necessary if we are to have a serviceable historical picture of Jesus the man, and that is that Jesus was an Essene.

Here’s the man as I see him. There is nothing in the historical facts or the orthodox narrative to suggest that Jesus was ever a member of the Zealot party.  He could be called a “zealot” in the generic sense that Martin Luther King Jr. or Gandhi were zealots having great zeal for their mission.  By birth and family upbringing, Jesus ben Joseph was a member of the Essene community of Nazareth in the Mr. Carmel area. His cousin John, later known as “the Baptist”, was in the Southern Essene community associated with Qumran.

Jesus felt that the Essene teachings were the truest teachings of Judaism, but that the Essenes were too closed off and insulated from the mainstream of the two major sects of the Pharisees and Sadducees which had lost the true way. While accepting that the Essene teachings were the most true to the prophets and the Essene communities were the most “right with God” in their formation and activities, Jesus did not accept the isolationist and separatist social structure of those same Essene communities. Jesus’ mission was to bring tear down the divisions within Judaism and its three major sects, to bring it back to the truth centered on God and to show the Pharisees and Sadducees the error of their ways.

Jesus did not say "You must become Essenes" because he knew that was hopeless politically and socially, but he did teach what the Essenes held and believed, for example, as in the Sermon on the Mount and regarding the correct way to pray in private, and he said this is how to worship God. 

Some people hold that to have a picture of Jesus the man we can only use the Gospels, including Acts, of the Bible and we must take them at face value without going beyond the four corners of their pages.  From this position the objection is raised that since the Gospels were written in the format of Greek biography and history we cannot say that Jesus was an Essene because the Gospels do not identify him as Essene.

However, and it is not just sophistry to say it this way, the Gospels did not identify him as an Essene exactly because he was an Essene. There is no way to portray Jesus the man without going beyond the pages of the Gospels to the history of the times and of the Jewish people.  There were three sects at the time: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. The Gospels identified the Pharisees and Sadducees because they were the two major sects that Jesus was aiming his criticism at for failing God. The Gospels do not mention the Essenes because Jesus did not criticize the very sect that he grew up in and whose teachings were the foundation of his own teachings.

This is most important in perceiving his mission. Jesus was not on a mission against the Roman Empire, he was not on a mission to recover the lands of Judaism for the Jews, and he was not on a mission to teach the Gentiles anything at all.  His mission was to awaken the Jews to their own heritage and their own need to get right with God according to the prophets of their own scriptures.

So how do we know that Jesus was an Essene? Primarily by taking the description of Jesus in the Bible and comparing it to the historical records from outside the Bible. He learned the scriptures as a child as the Essenes taught their children; but the Pharisees and Sadducees did not teach their young children the sacred texts. This explains the story of the amazement of the men at the Sadducee synagogue when the young Jesus knew the scriptures so well, because none of their own children were taught scripture at that age. 

The Essenes lived communally without individual possessions being more than another’s, and this is why Jesus taught the disciples to not worry about where the next meal would come from because all they had to do was identify themselves in any community and they would be fed by the Essenes living there. As the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus wrote, “No one city is theirs, but they settle amply in each. ... For this reason they make trips without carrying any baggage at all.”  

The Essenes especially studied and revered the Book of Isaiah and Jesus was especially well versed in Isaiah.   The Essene community of Nazareth was among the most successful and important of the Essene communities throughout the land, and Jesus was from Nazareth.  One could go on, but it is clear that Jesus was an Essene.

Objection: Some people say that since we have no objective source regarding the details of Jesus' life and words, all attempts to create a "historical" Jesus are doomed to failure. Evangelical Christians have even said this as a reason to not look for the historical Jesus the man and to therefore only look to Christ the Savior portrayed in the Bible. They see the historical Jesus as a “a figment of your imagination” but somehow see no contradiction or aspect of imagination in the “fact” of Christ the Savior.

 

Creating a historical Jesus based on the best of the actual historical knowledge we have is not an endeavor "doomed to failure."  It is the essential enterprise of telling the story of history.  On the other hand, we need to bear in mind that the historical Jesus should be distinguished from the myth of the Christ. We can talk about the historical Jesus and we can talk about the myth of Christ. But we should not confuse or conflate the two.

 

THE MYTH

In this regard, the second blog article that caught my attention is from the website Pathos and confronts the question of myth verses history head on.  The blog is called “The White Hindu” from blogger Ambaa, and the post is titled “Krishna is a Myth; Jesus is aMyth”

I like this blog. Ambaa is sharing her spiritual journey in a very sweet and generous way. Ambaa notes that people often get upset if the stories of their religious founders and figures might be more mythical than literally and historically true. She says,

I don’t think it matters at all whether Jesus really lived or whether he really said what he said. I don’t care if it was Lau-tzu who said the things attributed to Lau-tzu. Someone said them and they have wisdom. It’s the message itself, the wisdom itself that matters to me, not what name you stick on it.

I don’t know if Krishna was a real person. I don’t know if he was more than one person whose lives got glomed together over the years. I don’t know if the stories are literally true but I do know that they are metaphorically true and that is far more important to me personally.

(Note for the sticklers, I think “Lau-tzu” is how they spell it in Scotland.)

This is a different view of the historical picture issue that takes the position that the picture of the historical man is not important at all and what we know of the myth is what is important.  In this view, the myth of the Christ is not taken as a fact, but man Jesus is taken as a myth. To me, it is still important to distinguish between the man and the myth, and that is why I use the names Jesus for the man and Christ for the myth.

What is a myth anyway? Today, many people think the word "myth" means "false." This is the materialistic bias of people misinformed by junk science, not real science. As the real scientist of psychology, Carl Jung, has taught us, myth is a psychological orienting principal or matrix of the mind, i.e, psyche.  Myth is good because we can't live as humans without myth. Without a myth, there can be no consciousness, because the consciousness would be too chaotic and disorganized for awareness to cohere into a coherent worldview. Jesus the man is now totally cloaked within Christ the myth. To have our own best-estimate opinion about the man does mean we have to take account of the myth.

Jesus the man and his historicity doesn’t directly inform us about Christ the myth. Personally, I follow the myth of Buddha and that works well for me. There are many points of contact and comparison between the myth of Buddha, the Awakened One, and the myth of Christ, the Anointed One. But that is another essay.

And while it can be a lot of fun, as well as educational, comparing our myths and how they orient and organize our psyches, but it can also be dangerous when someone doesn't understand that their myth is just a myth, that is, when they don't understand their very own worldview and sense of self within that worldview is based on myth not on something outside the realm of myth.  

Why is that? Because there is no consciousness outside of the matrix of the mind and therefore there is no worldview outside the matrix of a myth. There is no objective perspective outside of the psyche. The myth of objective science is not wrong because it is a myth; it is just that objectivity is also a myth within the mind's view of the world.

 

Objection: "Myth" means "story of beginnings" and there is no implication of history or fiction.

That "definition" of myth is itself characterized by its own myth. Myth is not just the story of beginnings, but the story of what is primary in our own living worldview, which must also mean now, and not just in some beginning to be found in the past. When myth comes in the packaging of time and space, then it often does wear the clothing of historicity in the "once upon a time" or "in the beginning" variety. But it is in the present that the myth is alive.  People who believe the myth of objectivity of materialist science view myth as a synonym of "fiction." People who are fundamentalists believe in their own myths as absolute history while saying that other people’s myths are make believe.  

Ambaa wrote: "For those who need their religion to be seen as the best one or the only “real” one in the world, being able to say that their saint or prophet actually lived while others did not must help them bolster their belief that it is real."

 

Objection: I think you're maybe being a little unfair; at least, I think that you're generalizing more than is accurate. Speaking as a Christian who believes Jesus for-real lived, I don't think that religious supremacy or exclusivity would primarily motivate most Christians who believe Jesus is a historical figure, though it might motivate most to greater or lesser degrees. Based on the conversations I've had, it seems most Christians are concerned that losing the historical Jesus would render the logic of salvation invalid...and most Christians are pretty serious about salvation. I assume the concern with salvation, or some similar mechanism which seems to depend on a particular event actually happening, would hold true for other historical religions (Judaism, Islam, etc.). That being said, historical religions tend to be monotheistic, so your suggested motivation probably is a real motivation, just not the only one. But I do know lots of Christians (or some, anyway) who aren't especially hung up on exclusivity (I hope I can include myself) and simultaneously affirm that Buddhism etc. has mythic wisdom and that Christianity has historical truth. And I also know Christians (a lot this time) who would largely agree with you regarding Genesis and other early Biblical books, that Adam and Eve or Abraham are mythical, not historical. That being said, for those who are triumphalistic in their religions, I think you are right that historical truth helps them feel superior. And I also agree with the general point of your post, that the wisdom winds up being more important, practically, than the history.

 

The objection seems to have difficulty seeing the distinction between Jesus the man and Christ the myth? Between Siddhartha Gautama the man and Buddha the myth? Between Arthur the man and the Once and Future King as the myth?

To me, the point of contact between the man (or woman) and the myth is exactly our own point of contact between life and death. The historical person (man or woman) had their own life and death, and it is the myth that informs us about our own life and death through the orienting images of the mythic life of the “historical” person.

In one sense, unless there is a person in history or historical legend upon whom the myth can be draped as a mantle, then the myth has no home within the world of life and death. So in this sense, there must be an incarnation of the myth to make it real. So yes, there can be no salvation or enlightenment unless there was a person who embodied that mythic story of salvation or enlightenment. The myth would be just fiction without the embodiment of the incarnation. But given the necessity of the myth to be embodied, it is still the core of misinterpretation to confuse the historicity of the person embodying the ahistorical myth with the myth itself.  

The incarnation makes the myth historical, but on its own ground, the myth itself is ahistorical and outside the strictures of the contextualizing myth of time and space. Otherwise the myth would be trapped in history and we ourselves would not be able to embody it in our own time with our own realization.

Objection: I like the argument that you have put forward, but without sun, there is no light, and if you look at these as a fact, then the sun really doesn't matter day to day, but in reality they go in hand in hand, and I think this is vital when it comes to faith, otherwise you will never take it seriously, and when you don't, it can't become part of you. I like Harry Potter but it's not part of my life.

Myths are myths, and that is why they are not real, or they may have been real, it's because of this word maybe, they are called myths, and when we have the word maybe involved, then there is no faith, and without faith I would be an atheist. It's not bad thing, but I would rather believe in something then nothing. Therefore what ever you believe in, then it matters whether anything is real or not and without that there is no point in the system.

By sitting in a fake aeroplane pretending you are going nowhere. And what is a point in that. Period.

Beyond the somewhat confused statement of the objection, which is the sun and which is the light? Is the historical person that the myth is hanging on the sun or the light? Is the myth the sun or the light?

Myths are most definitely real, because there is no "reality" without a myth of what is "real." Believing in something or believing in nothing are both the expressions of myth. "Faith" is a wide spectrum including hopeful supposition, belief, expectation, trust, confidence, and certainty. If we take something "seriously" then that is the evidence that myth is at work in our mind. It is our personal myth of reality that sorts things out as "this is really important" and “this is not important.” 

 

If we want to know the context, shape, and texture of the myths that are at work in our own mind, then we simply have to describe what it is that we take to be “true,” “really true,” and “really important.”  And since consciousness works by polarity, we need to be aware of and describe the things we take to be “false” and “unimportant” to see how our myth casts its own shadow.

Archetypal Buddhism

Comment: I really found it interesting that after Buddha's awkening he didn't have that desire to save all beings. He had to be persueded by some diety to teach.

This is a great episode in the Buddha story. As I remember the story, it is not that "he didn't have that desire to save all beings," but that he had the desire yet didn't see how he could effectively communicate what he had experienced to anyone. He was at a standstill point of tension between the idealistic desire to save and the practical realities of how to proceed seeming insurmountable. Who of us does not experience this? His dilemma was that he directly perceived the timeless and wordless profound wisdom (prajna) and inherent intelligence (jnana), yet he felt that on the one hand he was incapable of putting them into words that could be understood by the people of his time, and on the other hand there would be no people who would be able to benefit from the words that he could formulate as opposed to just being made more confused by them.

The appearance of Indra, the "supreme diety" of this dimension, is the recognition of the archetypal truth that our motivation occurs only when an archetypal figure is constellated within mind. Without some kind of constellation (discrimination, differentiation) of an archetypal figure (i.e., a primary configuration of 4th shandha) there is no motivation for us to act. It is just as true to say that every one of our acts has as its motivating mental configuration one or another primary archetypal figure as its constellation or context. Without the primary archetypal figures of the 4th skandha there would be no fruition of consciousness as 5th skandha. The archetypal figures are the constellations in the firmament of our own mind which is the One Mind of No Mind.

In Buddhist terminology, every nirmanakaya Buddha has a samboghakaya Buddha as its intermediate progenitor and the dharmakaya Buddha as ultimate progenitor.

Consciousness depends on our personal complexes which in turn depend on our impersonal or collective archetypes. Self-consciousness is possible because the primary archetype of "god-self" formed in the nascent interaction of discrimination ("the 7th consciousness") where the ocean of concsiouness ("the 8th consciousness") is first stirred can become manifested in the derivitive ego-complex that organizes the reflectivity of consciousness (the 6th consciousness) in relation to the senses (the 1st thru 5th consciousnesses) into the experience of self-conciousness or self-awareness.  This  process develops over years so that sometime around age 6-8 we have a mostly developed self-consciousness based on the establishment of a self-image (ego complex) that is possible because of the "god-self" archetype having been constellated in mind.

“At World’s End” Really Means Something

The third installment of The Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End set in the mythic world of piracy is actually a great film about today's world, the war on terrorism, and the clash of mythologies currently going on throughout humanity. At World's End is a declaration in film art every bit as relevant today as Friedrich Nietzsche's "God is Dead" was over a century ago. In fact, At World's End in its heart is the continuation of that same discussion about the slow end of that old world God mythology and the yet to be born new mythology of the post-modern post-materialist world.

Yet, many of today's reviewers are beyond their film depths as they can only wade into the shallow waters with such comments as, "incoherent," "storytelling mishmash," "without logic," "disorienting," and "unfathomable." Even reviewers like Staci Layne Wilson from About.com who, to her credit, recognize the film is "really more about the end of an era" don't seem to know which era. By in large the reviewers fail entirely to see that At World's End succeeds, and does so wonderfully, in presenting the disorienting incoherence of today's world by the film's great coherence and orientation within the symbolic language of art.

I’m amazed at the entire industry of film critics who almost entirely review films as if they don’t mean anything. Being in the generation where I could be the younger brother of Bob Dylan or Keith Richards, I suppose there is some ability to see the reason for it. I recall those comedic media interviews with Dylan when he was drowned in the projections of an age, and he was barraged by questions about what his songs meant. He would volley with the reporters like Rosencrantz to their Gilderstern returning questions with questions and quips, or he’d just flatly deny that his songs meant anything at all, “They’re just songs, man.”

One understands that the artist is not always in the best position to perceive their own muse or what it is saying. Many artists are like trance mediums channeling their art through creative genius they themselves don’t know how to describe. Thus questions about what a piece of art means can be embarrassing because the artist him/herself doesn’t know what it means any more than anybody else. After the work is created, the artist can stand as much in awe of the work as anyone. In order to avoid the embarrassment of frank talk about the art when the artist’s ego doesn’t really have the answer to “what is the meaning/” many artists merely mumble incoherent dodges, such as that unique form of the “artist’s self-statement” in which the artist uses a vernacular so arcane and arty that it is just another smoke screen, but one that sounds like they are somehow explaining their work.

Then of course there are artists, like Andy Warhol, who deliberately played hide and seek with their meaning, being moved by a muse of a different sort. These artists are not channeling the muse, there are possessed by it and it becomes embedded in their own identity as they identify with it. But they too then have to play with the world of meaning otherwise they become mere fabricators rather than artists. Though their meaning is clear to them, as deep or as shallow as it is, if they just said it plainly the muse’s work would lose its charm and glamour in the world.

But whether or not the artist knows the meaning of the art, the muse does; and it is for the experiencer of the art to see, listen to, and touch the muse communicating through the art itself in order to discover its meaning. In this sense art speaks for itself.

But to look at film reviews today one would be hard to find a critic willing to step up to the plate and try to hit the ball of meaning in a film. There are infinite comments on the technical aspects of film, on the lighting, the directing, the acting, the amount of sex and violence, and even whether the plot turns are “understandable,” but none of that has to do with the meaning of the film. Films present the pantheon of our archetypal psychological foundations and are the living mythology of our times. It is because the living mythology stirs up the mind that many prefer to stick with the dead mythology to be found in old books and doctrines. But the life of films is the same life that our ancestors 20,000 years ago experienced sitting in the darkness of the cave around the campfire watching the light play with the dancing shadows on the screens of our minds.

Films have meaning, and it is the singular task of the film reviewer to open the discussion of that meaning in the social context. Reviewers do a disservice to their art when they think that they can or should allow the art viewer to look for meaning, or not, as they wish, as a private affair. Especially with film because of its impact in society and the enormous resources and revenues that it generates, film demonstrates its mythic hold on the awareness of a people and their society. To simply advise about the level of violence or sex in a film, to remark that the plot was hard to follow, to say that the acting was exceptionally good, to applaud innovative directing, all these are secondary values to discerning the essential meaning of a film by asking what is this film saying? Why does it exist at this time and place in our society? What is this mythology telling us about ourselves?

Virtually every film critic working today fails at this central purpose of film criticism. They function as mere fan reviews stating whether they liked a movie or not. Just reaching for technical reasons to like or not like a film doesn’t change the core quality of the review as nothing more than a film fan comment. Many fans do better at that type of review. To say that they earn their money by providing parents with enough information to know whether their children are old enough to see a film is a compete abdication of the central purpose of film reviewer: to help the viewer discover the meaning of the art, discover what the muse is saying. If the reviewer remains just a fan, enthralled by the glamour of what is portrayed on the silver screen, or mesmerized by the flickering shadows, then the reviewer has taken on the reviewer’s role whose purpose is to bring out the fecundity of film, but remains a eunuch in the attempt. By this form of self-castration the film reviewer has lost touch both with themselves and with the living muse in the film.

The Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End is a perfect example of this phenomenon. Many if not most reviewers gave the film’s first two installments above average marks, but they did so for the acting, the action, the cinematography, the special effects, the costumes, etc., not for the meaning. Of course, it was a trilogy, so one can’t blame them for not comprehending the meaning at first, but they may be faulted for not discussing where the meaning was going, for not indicating what initial portents of a fuller meaning were to be found. Of course I haven’t seem them all, but of the reviews I have seen not a one could not see past the “eye candy.”

Yet when the third installment, At World’s End, arrived, reviewers still didn’t get the meaning. Reviewer Richard Roeper is a good example. He comments, “If Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. Could see the ridiculously entertaining action sequences they’d drop their swords in amazement. The sets, the costumes, the stunts, the special effects are beyond what anyone could have dreamed about during the golden age of the pirate movie.” He goes on to add that he found this to be the funniest film of the trilogy, but he also found it to be a “long, convoluted and intermittently inexplicable pirate epic. But it’s definitely worth seeing for the jaw dropping action, the doses of irreverent humor, and of course for the star power.” Roeper gives not a word to the meaning of the film.

The guest reviewer on Ebert & Roeper that night was David Edelstein, film critic for New York Magazine, who is even worse. Edelstein gives it a thumbs down saying “all those people from those old movies would go, ‘Oh my god, these people can’t tell a story.’ Now of course I understood it all....NOT!” Edelstein admits that neither he nor his 9 year old knew what was going on. By this admission Edelstein shows he has no business critiquing films other than on the basis of childish fan commentary.

The collection of reviewer comments at Rotten Tomatoes shows the complete lack of the reviewers’ recognition of meaning. Rob Vaux of Flipside Magazine dares to say “Betrayal, unfortunately, is the most apt word for At World's End. Betrayal of purpose, and of promise, and of the grand, glorious finale that everyone wanted so dearly to see.” However, it is Mr. Vaux who betrays his profession by being illiterate in the language of imagery.

Peter Travers of Rolling Stone is another reviewer who is lost to meaning and blames it on the movie maker’s “incoherence” instead of on his own inability to search for meaning and understand the language of mythology and image. Travers goes so far at to say “Producer Jerry Bruckheimer does deserve a shout out: It takes a kind of genius to sucker audiences into repeatedly buying the same party tricks.” Travers review is a proverbial demonstration of the deaf and blind claiming there is nothing to see or hear.

Roeper agrees with Edelstein (and Travers) that the film “is kind of a mess” and there were times that he had “no idea why some of these people who now seemed to be good guys, and they used to be bad guys, or which evil British India Trading soldier guy is a good guy or a bad guy, but I mean really, if you’re going to the Pirates Trilogy for story, that’s insane. It’s all about the action and the excitement and the relationship. And I think on those counts it delivers.”

In my view it is Roeper who is ignorant if not "insane" to be going to movies for their visceral entertainment only. He is more of a ghost than any of the characters in the Pirates trilogy. Both Roeper and Edelstein completely miss the coherent story within, as well as the meaning of, At World’s End. A fan interview on the Jimmy Kimmel Live show got closer to the truth of this film by asking, “What is going on with all these gang banger pirates being made into the funny good guys?”

At World’s End portrays today’s reality in a meaningful way. It does so in two ways, in a horizontal dimension of social political reality and in a vertical dimension of the psychological and spiritual realities. Horizontally, it is essentially about the phony war on terrorism and the current environment that the attitude towards “terrorism” creates and reflects. It is probably because no one today looks at meaning in films that this film was able to be made and to get made by the Disney Corporation. The “bad guys”.in this film are the transnational corporations protected by the Imperial power. The “good guys” are the people fighting the corporation called pirates or terrorists, and the independents who fall in with them. That Roeper and Edelstein had trouble following who was a “good guy” or a “bad guy” at any particular moment is not a negative, it is merely an accurate reflection of the machinations that go on in real life, for example, when one year Osama bin Laden is the USA protege against a common foe and the next year he becomes evil incarnate.

At World’s End is a film that depicts today’s politics which are clearly at wit’s end when one looks at them with an eye to following any threads of integrity among the political players of today. The Bush administration is accurately portrayed through Lord Beckett’s deceit and use of torture. The opening scene of people being marched to the gallows should have been the tip off that something mythological is going on here. Yet, when a boy is hanged, some moralistic reviewers were repulsed and couldn’t sustain any interest in the film thereafter. But moral indignation of the killing of that boy is exactly the point of the film’s muse. Rather than be repulsed at the film makers for putting the scene into the reel story, a reviewer needs to ask why are we not repulsed by such child killings in real life, where we easily accept the killing of children once we label them “terrorists” or “killers”? Such is the hypocrisy of reviewers who are blind to the living meaning of film.

Mary Ann Johanson, the flick filosopher, is one of the few film reviewers who actually perceives the horizontal dimension saying, "It’s Guantanamo Bay in the Caribbean as At World’s End opens." Johanson also recognizes that the Great Mickey Trading Company, Disney, has "cast itself as villain." Ironically, Disney gets the last laugh of taking millions to the bank with a film that portrays it as the bad guy. Fortunately for Disney, since most reviewers are so adverse to meaning, most film reviews havn't mentioned this aspect with anything approaching the insight of Johanson. But I suspect that this view of corporations is clear to many more of the audiences (if not the reviewers) than Disney would prefer.

The vertical dimension needs to be seen and appreciated as well. Today we hear about the war on terrorism as a “clash of civilizations”, yet Joseph Campbell was more accurate in stating that the clash is about the current mythologies that have become outdated attempting to prevent the emergence of a new mythology as much as their clash with each other. We are at the world's end and the world that is ending is the dominance of the current mythology. The mythologies of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam warring with each other in the Middle East are all three faces of a patriarchal Father War God who had conquered the power of the matriarchal nature Goddess of the geographical areas of their conquest. The fundamentalists of these religions seek the abortion of the birth of a new pluralistic mythology as much as they are in conflict with each other. This confusion is also accurately portrayed in the film by the shifting allegiances between all the parties trying to get an advantage for themselves. It is unfortunate that the meaning of this realistic degree of shifting complexity goes unnoticed and actually is used against the film by reviewers like Roeper and Edelstein.

At World’s End shows this underlying conflict between the Corporate Imperial power and the Pirates’ power (as well as the conflicts between the Pirates themselves) and the independents represented by Will Turner and Elizabeth Swan, all as being within the larger context of the current mythology that has succeeded because of the repression of an even older mythology has been captured and kept trapped in human form by today’s Father-God mythology. At World’s End doesn’t say let’s continue to worship the Father-God and His ways which leads to this corporate greed. At World’s End says in order to find our way in this new world and way of things, it is time to release the female Goddess from her entrapment in human form. This is the essential meaning of the film.

It is not that people should return to Goddess worship, but that, in order for a new balance to be gained and for a new mythology to be discovered, the older mythology must be reclaimed and released back into our nature. In other words, to find the new mythology of the new world, we have to recognize all the archetypal forces within our mind and heart and not keep one archetype in bondage and service to another. This fixation of the archetypes in patriarchal moralism is a core component of fascism in whatever guise it takes, the dictatorship of Transnational Corporatism or the factional petty powers of Piracy (e.g., Christians, Jews, and Muslims).

The other dimension of archetypal fixation in the film is the capture of Davy Jones’s heart which puts him and his ship The Flying Dutchman under the control of the Imperial Corporation. This is an interesting point. This shows how materialism (the East India Co.) gains control of the spiritual life, by the corruption of the spiritual life when the spiritual life betrays itself and acts to entrap the feminine. Calypso, the sea Goddess, was captured because of the betrayal by Davy Jones who had at one time been her lover (i.e., devotee) when Jones told the Pirate Lords how to trap her in human form. This portrays how spirituality (including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) has trapped the feminine archetypes in their mundane forms and elevated only the Father to chief spiritual status, but it is this process of entrapment of the feminine by these forms of spirituality that leads to the entrapment of spirituality itself by materialism.

Every so often a film comes along that uses the language of mythology to reflect accurately upon the social, psychological, and mythological issues of the day. The muse speaking through At World’s End has done just this. It is an important film series that, contrary to Roeper, does tell the story of our time. Going to the cinema for the action, the excitement, and the relationships as Roeper and most reviewers do only trivializes film and the life portrayed in film. Whether or not one sees the meaning of At World’s End as I have described it, and there is much more to the films imagery than I have discussed here, the important point for awareness and our society is that we ask what is the meaning of the film, and come to some consummation about that in our own minds. To simply say that art, and films in particular, have no meaning is to demean art and turn it into mere decoration. That is turning live art into ghost art. Bringing the life back into art by appreciation of its living mythology is going to the world’s end and rescuing Jack Sparrow from Davy Jones’ locker. And what a wonderful adventure that is.