Symbols and Myth-Making in Modernity: Deep Culture in Art and Action

By Tatiana Tiaynen-Qadir and Ali Qadir

Why do people queue up and break the bank to watch fantasy movies? Why do some fictional characters and mythical creatures strangely arrest our mind and senses? Why do some images and tales affect us so deeply? From mystical heroic journeys to uncanny images and invincible goddesses, ‘Symbols and Myth-Making in Modernity’ investigates the metaphoric power of symbols in human imagination today and in the past. The book traces how ever-present symbols in cultures and rituals across the world, as well as in masterpieces of Renaissance, Sufi poetry and Finnish ‘Kalevala’ myths, erupt in popular culture today, including in cinema, books, visual art, music and politics. The authors develop a phenomenological theory of deep culture that nourishes human perception of reality through multivalent symbols and myths, in which art and rituals occur as liminal spaces of symbol-making. Drawing on examples from the Hobbit and Avengers, street art, politics, and work of acclaimed modern artists, the book describes how deep culture can be seen as a symbolic map of modern mythology. Dismantling literalism and disturbing our view of the world, at each step the book unpacks how symbols play out in the modern world and the work they do in transforming the self.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781785272837

Book preview

Symbols and Myth-making in Modernity

Symbols and Myth-making in Modernity

Deep Culture in Art and Action

Tatiana Tiaynen-Qadir and Ali Qadir

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2023

by ANTHEM PRESS

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Copyright © Tatiana Tiaynen-Qadir and Ali Qadir 2023

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-2-813 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-2-810 (Hbk)

Cover Image: Image of Pallas Athene by Gustav Klimt (1898), Wien Museum.

This title is also available as an e-book.

TO OUR MOTHERS

For their unconditional love, support, and inspiration

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

1.Introduction: Culture Is Deep

Myth and Modernity: Toward a Deeper View of Culture

Popular/Culture

Mything the World and the Self

Action!: Ritual and Art

Symbol

Statement

Method

Structure of the Book

2.Complex Transformations of the Self: The Hero as a Symbol

Revisiting Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Brains, brawn, and break-up: Odysseus’s transformative return

Psyche and the journey of the soul

Modern Masks: Vogler’s Journey

Star Wars: Rey and her (incomplete) journey

Transformation, Complexity, and Gender: Heroes Ancient and Modern

Discussion: Living the Hero

3.The Uncanny: Monsters, Blood, and Other 3: A.M. Horrors

Introduction to the Self

The Uncanny

Shake Us to Wake Us

Here there be monsters

Ghosts and demons: Please allow me to introduce myself

Threatening aliens and artificial intelligence

The Uncanny in Myth: Death, Dismemberment, and Rebirth

Blood and Wine: The Uncanny in Ritual

Blood and wine in Eastern Orthodox Christianity

Wine and blood in qawwali music

Discussion: Disquiet in the Cultural Operating System

4.The Feminine: Citadel of Metaphors

The Symbolic Feminine

Polarity

Birthing and containing

Containing and devouring

Modern expressions

Many Shades of Gray

Old witch

Young witch and Sophia

Medusa

Singularity versus Multiplicity

Artemis: goddess of modernity

Demeter and Persephone

The Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean

Discussion: The Symbolic Feminine in Deep Culture

5.It’s culture all the way down

Introduction

Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue: The Symbolic Dimension

Fish

Chalice

Toward imaginal dialogue

The Veil: Politics, Poetics, and Play of Religious Symbols

Mona Lisa

Mary

Play: Facing the veil

Conclusion

Mythical truths

Deep culture

Culture All the Way …

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the product of many years of work by us and we have accumulated many debts along the journey. It was inspired in part by our students, who passionately engaged with the Deep Culture frame in our course Symbols that move us at Tampere University, Finland in Spring 2018, showing us the many directions this theory can take in analyzing self and society. We are grateful to them and to our doctoral supervisor, renowned anthropologist, late Ulla Vuorela, who taught us to think of the discipline broadly and to not fear linking the world together.

We also thank our colleagues and partners who enthusiastically supported our research pursuit, especially Dr Essi Ikonen, Dr Frederique Apffel-Marglin, and Dr Ruth Illman, with each of whom we collaborated on intercultural dialogue and research. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this book and to those who commented on our earlier publications and presentations, including at the 2016 International Symposium Art Approaching Science and Religion in Turku and EASR Relocating Religion Conference in Helsinki, as well as the Suomi-100: Faiths and Beliefs in Finland seminar in Helsinki in 2017. Dr Qadir received generous support from the Academy of Finland (2016–2019) that partly enabled his work on this book. Dr Tiaynen-Qadir’s work builds on two projects supported by the Academy of Finland and Kone Foundation at the University of Turku (PI Suvi Salmenniemi) between 2014 and 2017. We also received valuable comments on this work at the Center for the Study of Religion & Society at University of Victoria, BC in 2018.

We humbly recognize that this book rests on the rich contributions and research of past and present scholars whom we abundantly refer to in the book, notably, Corbin, Jung, and post-Jungians such as Hillman and Ahmed. The latter’s work has been very important to us in introducing post-Jungian thought in a global and critical perspective. We also thank our interlocutors, those who spoke to us directly in the present and those whose stories came to us from ancient and recent pasts. Above all, we greatly value the support and care we received from our transnational family, spanning cultures, continents, and myths, particularly our parents and children.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: CULTURE IS DEEP

Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme of things not found within recorded time.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Since 2002, 48 of the 50 biggest box-office worldwide openings of any movies have been fantasy films. Hollywood blockbusters based on comic book characters (Marvel Avengers or DC Justice League), fantasy novels (like Harry Potter or Twilight), screenplay adaptations (like Star Wars or Pirates of the Caribbean), or fantasy cartoons (like Beauty and the Beast) have grossed more money by far on opening weekends than any other genre (WeekendRecords 2021). All in all, these movies have grossed over US$20 billion. Of course, the numbers are skewed by Western and Anglophone countries where people have higher disposable incomes and films are screened in cinemas, but the popularity extends worldwide, including out of the box office. In the same period, only one fantasy movie won the Academy Award for best picture, and only four have even been nominated out of 141 (Oscar Awards Databases). Why do people queue up for such movies that are hardly realistic and rarely critically acclaimed? Why do some fictional characters and their stories strangely arrest our mind and affect us so deeply? The sheer extent of this phenomenon begs for an explanation.

In this book, we propose that such movies speak to—and build upon—a way of imagining the world that is common to humans and that compensates for certain gaps in modern life or amplifies dominant perceptions. We see such movies as examples of modern myths in popular culture that fulfill a similar role to the one played by myths enacted in earlier times. The ancients told legends and acted out plays and rituals while we watch movies and read novels. J. R. R. Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings influenced generations of readers, filmmakers, and now a gaming culture, strived consciously for mythopoeia, myth-making (J. R. R. Tolkien, Humphrey, and C. Tolkien 2000; Tarnas 2019). Successful films, like successful myths […] stir us to renewed action, emotion and thought (Plate 2003, 7–8). Indeed, films and fiction are not the only examples. Myths are fundamentally symbolic, and from that symbolic perspective much of modern culture can be seen as myth-making. This includes, for instance, contemporary religious expressions and political drama or even the history that, in the words of anthropologist Victor Turner, repeats the deep myths of culture (Turner 1974, 122). In this introduction, we lead up to describing out theory of deep culture as a way to analyze and unpack the myths of modernity. We first describe what we mean by modernity and how we use the term myth. We then move on to the crucial concept of popular culture, in which myths emerge and are expressed. This leads to our discussion on the nature of myths and their truths for selves and society. But myths are not just passive tales, watched or read by barely interested audiences; they are active narratives that help participants make sense of the world around them. As such, they are embedded in ritualized action, an anthropological notion that we discuss in the following section. All of this comes together in the pivotal concept of symbol, which we unpack and use to describe our theory of deep culture. The chapter concludes with a brief description of the rest of the book.

Myth and Modernity: Toward a Deeper View of Culture

Scholars of comparative mythology, anthropology, literary, religious, and Jungian studies have illustrated the widespread prevalence of mythemes, archetypal motifs, and symbols across historical and contemporary cultures (Baring and Cashford 1991; Campbell [1949] 2004; Eliade 1963; Ford 1999; Frentz and Rushing 2002; Hillman 1998; Raglan [1936] 1990; Rank [1909] 1990). This prevalence entices readers and viewers to ask why that myth endures across time, or what that symbol is doing there and why it is shared across human history. The very presence of these myths and symbols, the commonality in the work they do on viewers, and their ability to tell what cannot be said in a logical manner or depict what cannot be said in any other way, suggests interconnectedness and intertwining of cultures and human experiences.

But surely, the modern reader protests, myth is fiction, opposed to facts as in the common phrase myth vs. reality. That is, indeed, a popular way of thinking, but it is a limited and historically rather recent way of talking about myth. For much of human history, myth was as much a part of reality as agricultural techniques, carpentry, fashion, or mathematics. As much scholarship in myth studies has shown, myths are better expressed as realities speaking to different aspects of human existence than the physical and biological facts one often associates with truth (Ahmed 2002a; Bly and Woodman 1998; Boccassini 2018; Cobb 1992; Downing 1994; Eliade 1963; Hillman 1983; Hollis 2000; Jackson 2016; Jung 1968; Neumann [1955] 1974; Raglan 1990). Myths carry a multitude of emotions, possibilities, senses, and interpretations, and relate to the meaning and hence making of culture, society, and self (Campbell 2004; Eliade 1963; Jung 1968; Miller 2014; Turner 1974). Myths express the reality within us and surrounding us in the language of symbols, metaphors, images, and stories. For the famous myth theoretician Mircea Eliade, myth is living as it supplies models for human behavior and, by that very fact, gives meaning and value to life (1963, 2). Such literature points out that people make sense of the complexity of reality around them by means of mythical imageries and channel some very basic elements of the human condition into popular culture.

Now, the domain of meaning-making and understanding the human condition for living a better life are principal domains of psychology. It is not surprising, then, that psychologists have actively turned to the analysis of classical myths and their eruption in modern times. Most notable among these is the depth psychologist Carl Jung, once heir apparent to the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and later his bitterest intellectual enemy (Safran et al. 2019). Jung, founder of analytical psychology, devoted his life to collecting myths from around the world as keys to reading the human soul (in ancient Greek, psyche) and used their lessons in his successful therapies and analyses (Dehing and Dehing 1992; Galipeau 2013; Olson 2019). Among his many contributions to thinking about myths and their shared lessons across human cultures is the concept of collective unconscious, by which he differentiated Freud’s idea about the unconscious into individual and shared components. Following in his footsteps, post-Jungians have productively combined Jungian psychology with studies of ancient myths (Campbell 2004; Kerenyi [1951] 2008) for individual analysis (Andrews 2016; Bolen 2014; Hillman 1983; Neumann 1974). Some scholarship has concentrated on fairy tales and legends (Bly and Woodman 1998; von Franz 1997), modern art (Cheetham 2015; Hollis 2000), modern cinema (Frentz and Rushing 2002; Merritt et al. 2018), and modern culture (Boccassini 2018). However, much of this research predates modern cultural expressions or has not fully explored contemporary myths in popular culture or, more importantly, has not collected the mythical elements in those expressions into a larger whole. Furthermore, there are few studies exploring political or social phenomena of the kind that are defining the modern world. In sum, while earlier literature is theoretically groundbreaking and empirically breathtaking, more study is needed on making it consistent and relevant. As such, previous scholarship has limits in its utility for students of modern popular culture per se beyond specific disciplines like literary criticism or screenwriting. If we want to probe cultural and political phenomena and the interlinkages between various types of cultural expressions, we need to move past these disciplinary limitations.

Specifically, while much scholarship continues to speak to the importance of this broader notion of myths and to identify the mythical elements in this or that aspect of culture, more attention needs to be paid to what that expression is doing, or the role it plays in making of the self and society. Our purpose in this book is to unpack what such modern myths are speaking to and what they are compensating for or affirming. Myths have always been situated within a system of meaning—or a mytho-logia—and we highlight features of the mythology within which modern myths function. In other words, we want to begin mapping the mythology of modernity, while tracing their origins in ancient art and rites.

But, what is modernity? The French term moderne became prolific during the European Enlightenment to emphasize recent and up-to-date as opposed to the ancient, classic models of anything in the past. Moderns celebrated new knowledge, new thinking, new science, and a New World surpassing the ancient civilizations. For historians, this shift in consciousness signifies the modern era of industrial, scientific, and Atlantic revolutions, colonialism, and the perceived divide between science and religion (Harrison 2015; Strayer 2011). The universe was no longer a sacred canopy held up by divine forces, but rather a dark cloak thrown over the scientific machinery that could be described in precise language of concepts. French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault approaches modernity as a self-reflexive discourse that relies on breaking away from tradition, customs, and religion toward beliefs in individualism, freedom, equality, social, scientific and technological progress, rationality and reason, capitalism and market economy, urbanization, industrialization, nation state, and representative democracies (Foucault 1995; Lincoln 1999). Perceiving such assumptions as natural and self-evident brushes aside the fact that modernity itself is a discourse, a myth that has forgotten it is one (Asad 2003; Hillman 1983; Lincoln 1999). And this is how we approach modernity as a discourse (or a regime of truth in the Foucauldian terminology), within which certain social aspects and cultural expressions make sense. For instance, one such discourse defining modernity is that of reality being radically reducible to physical processes, by virtue of which all nonphysical processes become fanciful or imaginary and conflated with mythical (see Corbin 1964).

Keeping that in view, we need to better understand the contours of the discourse known as modernity beyond an absolute and triumphant idea of modern. Departing from a purely political or historical mapping of the discourse of modernity, in this book, we enter this debate with a psychocultural framework. From this perspective, we map not the breadth and width of modernity as a discourse—how far it ranges and how long ago it can be traced—but rather its depth. Modern expressions in popular culture of all kinds, then, should be seen not as surface level but as carrying a dimension of depth, a depth that can be best described in the language of myth. To map that dimension of culture, the book develops a theory of deep culture. The link between culture’s surface and depth is the crucial concept of symbol, uniting cultures. We emphasize a strong and always-present connection of symbols with everyday life, for instance, in popular culture. That is, deep culture refers to a depth dimension that is intimately connected with the obvious and evident cultural representations all around us. In this book, we extend this ground to theorize the cultural patterns that sustain, build on, or even misrecognize this symbolic dimension of life.

This framework, described below in Statement, is primarily applicable for analyzing individual and cultural phenomena (understood broadly) in symbolic terms of how they play out in the modern world and self. While the most obvious cultural representations are those that the modern mind brushes aside as mere fiction, such as popular movies, similar representations are evident in religious, political, and other social life.

The main focus of this book, therefore, is to apply the deep culture theory to make sense of ancient symbols and myths and see how they erupt in popular culture, art, religion, and politics today. This book brings together the insights from anthropology of ritual and art and material religion combined with post-Jungian scholarship but in a way that they apply to contemporary cultural reality. The book also fills a gap in existing scholarship by recognizing historical continuities and discontinuities, as well as the truly transnational nature of our modern life. On the one hand, a key theme in the book is to relate modern myths and symbols—such as those in popular cinema—to long-standing mythical themes, such as the hero’s journey, the eruption of the uncanny, and the symbolic feminine. On the other hand, the book maps out how those symbolic mythemes have been distorted in our period of modernity and what implications that has for cultural analysis and social progress (cf. Ahmed 1994, 2011, for two of the few such analyses). At the same time, the book illustrates that many of these symbolic mythemes are more widely shared across individual cultures than many recognize. What makes our time especially important is that never before in human history have so many participated so actively in a culture and society that spans so much of the globe. Of course, this does not mean that everywhere things are the same or the same films are viewed everywhere, but rather that cultural variations appear on the same grounds and ways of seeing the world (Alasuutari and Qadir 2019).

The scope of this book is to map out common cultural grounds as expressed in myth. As such, this book makes an interdisciplinary statement on the symbolic dimension of our contemporary culture that spans more of the world than any single culture has spanned previously. Dismantling literalism and disturbing our view of the world, at each step, the book will unpack how people relate to the world through symbols and myths, and how they play out in the modern world. From ancient mystery rites through masterpieces of Renaissance to modern cinema, contemporary religion, and political action, the book will unpack the symbols and myths that move us today and the work they do in transforming the self and society. At the same time, deep culture is helpful in pointing to ruptures—where modern myths stumble—thereby leading to new analyses of destructive ideologies (Lincoln 1999), emerging societal crises, and identifying new potential solutions.

We have written this book as an exploration. We want, above all, to convey to you our excitement about thinking of culture and cultural expressions in this way that connects past to present, symbols to society, and art to action. The theory of deep culture provides the ingredients to do this in a systematic way that leads to insights into our times that may otherwise be obscured. As such, the book should serve as a platform to launch further contemplation, investigation, study, observation, and pedagogy. Our experience in sharing this material in university classrooms shows that it can lead to fascinating new instances of co-creation and new directions. The analytical instances we detail are new and important in themselves but also offer a way to think about similar cultural expressions. We invite you, as participants and students of the culture of our time, to explore the world in this way and to contribute