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Chapter 5 - It’s Culture all the Way Down

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2023

Ali Qadir
Affiliation:
Tampere University of Technology, Finland
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Summary

The two worlds, the divine and the human, can be pictured only as distinct from each other—different as life and death, as day and night […]. Nevertheless—and here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol—the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know.

—Campbell (2004, 201)

From the imaginal these themes enter awareness Ghalib, the whisper of your pen is the sound of an angel

—Mirza Ghalib (d. 1869, India, Urdu poet)

Introduction

Everybody is a symbol, everything is a symbol, every action is a symbol.

At some level, symbols are universal because everything we describe is a narrative and, as such, ipso facto, follows the structure of a myth. Even if we only describe it to ourselves, and even if that description is not a conscious narrative but what we term perception it is, after all, structured as a narrative. Archetypal impulses inform that structure of perception, as they inform all mythical narratives. This means that the framework of deep culture can be usefully applied not just to all manner of explicitly “fictional” narratives, but indeed to all narratives even if they are a different sort of “fiction” that is not recognized as such. Among these are narratives of politics, religion, and everyday life. In this chapter, we discuss how the framework of deep culture can be used to identify archetypal impulses in descriptions of these cultural domains beyond fictionalized myths.

First, though, as we pointed out in the introduction, we have taken a different view of “myth” than is common in ordinary parlance or even in much social research. People tend to see myth as a “false,” constructed discourse and so something that is opposed to the truth, as in “myth vs. reality.” Such views tend to stop at the literary or aesthetic value of myths. Indeed, from this perspective, when myths are employed in the “real” world, they are either seen as puerile—such as obviously nonfactual cosmic origins of humanity—or as downright destructive, for example, the “Aryan myth” of nationhood promoted by Nazis during the Second World War (Lincoln 1999).

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Chapter
Information
Symbols and Myth-Making in Modernity
Deep Culture in Modern Art and Action
, pp. 109 - 142
Publisher: Anthem Press
Print publication year: 2022

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