20130808

Joseph Campbell about modern societal culture

In the United States there is even a pathos of inverted emphasis: the goal not to grow old, but to remain young; not to mature away from Mother, but to cleave to her. And so, while husbands are worshipping at their boyhood shrines, being the lawyers, merchants or masterminds their parents wanted them to be, their wives, even after fourteen years of marriage and two fine children produced and raised, are still on the search for love - which can come to them only from the centaurs, sileni, satyrs, and other concupiscent incubi of the rout of Pan, either as in ther second of the above recited dreams, or as the in our popular, vanilla-frosted temples of the venereal goddess, under the make-up of the latest heroes of the screen.
Joseph Campbell - The hero with a thousand faces (1949)

I think that Campbell, who stylised this short sentence in his prologue of the explanation given about the mono-myth he uncovered in his comparative mythology-study, has trod on more than a fleeting point here. What he speaks about is one of the most concise statements of the current culture of western civilization and the development of the younger generation in power since the past 60 years.

I have come to theorize the absence of rituals as Campbell puts it to be one of the reasons for the overwrought emphasis in our current streams of philosophical and modern cultural context, which might even be damnable considering its content.

However, the idea of rituals helping to move along from the childhood to manhood or comparatively the same for females as the pathing from girls to women is one primarily either culturally or historically dictated by necessity or religious emphasis, like the roman-catholic communion, the protestant confirmation, the east german Jugendweihe or the aboriginal circumcision as signs of breaking into the new community as a reborn individual.

As such, removed from these, even if its importance is a given, should such rituals be reintroduced or can their effect be imitated with other scenarios?

Considering I have only started reading his book though, I may have missed societal development that already did so or dismissed these claims in these past few years. I will confer my findings at later dates.

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