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jprusselldeketemoisant on Jordan Peterson's approach to understanding myths, I thought it might be helpful to give a "short" (comparatively) rundown of what he lays out in his book Maps of Meaning. This ought to help make sense of most of his lectures on Youtube and available as podcasts. You can find the post on my main blog here, but again, I've duplicated it below for convenience.As an aside, I'm not sure why there is so much space before/after the headers here, but I think it's something to do with copying html suitable for a regular website over into the dreamwidth editor, which also cares about line breaks.
Well, after the comments on my List of Germanish Books with Thoughts went rather long and ended up taking a lengthy detour into discussing Jordan Peterson's way of understanding myths, as laid out in his book Maps of Meaning and in loads of lectures sense, I reckoned it might be helpful to spell out that framework as clearly and straightforwardly as I might, because this is one area where I think Peterson is not at his strongest. So many of his lines of thinking and research are linked in his head and have implications for each other, he often fares far afield in a way that can be hard to follow, especially if you're new to his thinking.
That being said, I once told a friend that if you listen to enough of Peterson's lectures, in at least one of them, he will spell out his way of thinking about a key topic from the very most bedrock concepts up to the widest implications, and he'll make every step as firmly supported as he knows how. Unfortunately, in every other lecture, he will just refer back to the higher-level implications and how they relate to the topic at hand. His more recent books 12 Rules for Life, and presumably (I've yet to read it) Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, do a decent job of laying things out in an order that makes sense and builds on each other, but with a lot less of the depth than Maps of Meaning, which I found a bit disappointing. At any rate, if I might flatter myself a moment, I've long felt like my (rather boring) super power is to be able to listen to questions folks have about a topic an understand what it is they're actually confused by, and therefore what answer would help resolve their confusion. I wouldn't have thought this was much of a super power, but after years being on both sides of a classroom, sitting through corporate meetings, attending military trainings and debriefs, and so forth, I've found that it's really common for folks trying to explain things to get a question, and then answer something way different, often while missing the fairly easy distinction the questioner was actually looking for. And so I set out, modestly, to try to more clearly set out the thinking of someone who has made himself known worldwide and rather wealthy by explaining things.
We're Not Going to Talk About the Biological Grounding
Okay, so if you dig into Maps of Meaning, a decent chunk of the book will be dedicated to explaining some concepts about neurobiology and animal behavior that Peterson wants to use as the foundation for everything that follows. His goal in laying all of this out is to give as firm a material grounding as he can to all of the symbolic and narrative stuff he talks about later. This section is interesting, impressive, and with what little I know of the field, seems pretty comprehensively argued. That being said, if you are not coming at this from a skeptical standpoint, if you already believe stories and myths include important information about what it means to live and how to do so as well as you might, you can likely skip over this. So that's just what we're going to do here: I'll give the briefest of summaries so that you can decide if you're interested in digging in more, but from this point on, I'll assume that you're okay with the premise "the structures of meaning (symbols, narratives, and so forth) within stories and myths give meaningful insights into how the human mind works and how to live a meaningful, worthwhile life." If you don't agree with that premise, I humbly invite you to read my thoughts on finding meaning in life by following that last link.
The Very Short Rundown of the Biological Grounding
At least in vertebrates (and maybe even in invertebrates, hence Peterson's infamous thing with the Lobsters), animals seem to have two groundmost motivational systems: to move toward good things and away from bad things. Moving toward good things produces a bunch of feel-good reward chemicals, like dopamine, and moving away from bad things seems to relieve a bunch of feel-bad chemicals that cause anxiety and stress, like cortisol. This leads to a world full of known good and bad things, to which we more or less know how to react, but then an even wider world of the unknown, which holds vast amounts of both good and bad things. As such, we can react to "the unknown" with either the "moving toward good things" motivational system, or with "moving toward, not away from, bad things" anti-reward system. For beings with things like symbols and narratives (like us), we can somewhat choose how we conceptualize of the known and unknown in order to get more of what we want and less of what we don't - are we being forced out into the darkness full of monsters ready to eat us by harsh necessity? Or are we striding into a realm of possibility, ready to handle any obstacles along the way? The former will produce a lot of anxiety and little sense of reward/meaning, whereas the latter will feel full of reward/meaning with minimal anxiety.
Got it? Hooray, we just covered roughly the first 13 chapters out of 68 of Maps of Meaning (~84 pages of 469).
Peterson's Biggest Influences Here are Jung and Nietzsche
The next big thing to get out of the way before we talk about the framework itself is that Peterson is first and foremost a synthesizer. He'll be the first to admit that most of the ideas he shares are outgrowths and remixes of the thinking of folks he admires. He has a big ol' recommended reading list if you want to delve deeper into where his thinking is coming from.
The most important thing to know, though, is that Peterson's method of analyzing myth is about 80-90% Jung, with a good seasoning of Nietszche, and then finished out with his other influences. In other words, I mainly think of "Peterson's" analytical framework for myths as a very helpful introduction/guide to understanding myths from a Jungian standpoint. The framework below relies on Jung's concept of "archetypes", patterns of behavior, symbolism, and association that appear to be very deeply embedded in human brains and that show up in a variety of forms across many cultures and throughout time. For example, the father in the story of the Prodigal Son, Jupiter of Roman myth, and Mufasa from the Lion King all share characteristics of the "Father" archetype - they act in ways fathers often act, they symbolize things fathers tend to symbolize, and they are associated with things fathers tend to be associated with, and in all three case, those actions, symbols, and associations have a lot in common (controlled/protective aggression, warmth and indulgence to children, enforcer of rules, and so forth). Where I think Peterson is helpful is in giving an underlying conceptual framework for how the different archetypes interact with each other in a more systematic way than Jung was willing or able to do (more on the pros and cons of this in a second).
Nietzsche maybe does less to create the shape of the framework or the pieces within it, but his thinking and ethos underlie a lot of the application and interpretation of that framework. You might say that Peterson's whole project here, most of all the bit we skipped over so blithely above, with the biological grounding, is a thoroughly Nietzschean undertaking. Nietzsche rather forcibly pointed out "hey guys, if you don't really believe in God, why are you still doing the stuff he told you to? Maybe we should figure something else out instead." Peterson went "huh, but here we are, more than a century later, still doing that stuff - what's driving that? Even if we don't intellectually believe in God, is there something else going on?" So that's why it's helpful to have Nietzsche in mind, even if most of the book is far more directly influenced by Jung (who was, of course, himself influenced heavily by Nietzsche). To put it briefly, the thesis of the book might be something like "if God is dead, why do His stories keep shaping what we find meaningful?"
The Basic Framework is Order, Chaos, and the Mediator
A Quick Word about Abstraction
Alright, so here we are for the main event. First, a word about abstraction. This model is an example of an abstraction - you might even argue an abstraction of abstractions. What do I mean by abstraction? Here, at least, I mean a general label you generate to explain what several specific instances have in common. So, you read the Prodigal Son, you hear a few myths about Jupiter, and you watch the Lion King. You notice that the father figures in these stories have some things in common. You also think about all of the actual fathers you have known in your life - your own, your friends', your own experience with your children, and so forth. You notice that some of the things the story-fathers have in common are also shared, mostly, by these real-life fathers. At this point, you have dozens of specific data points, but if you want, you can take the things that all of them (or at least most of them) have in common and call that the "Father abstraction". No one of these individual fathers will 100% match this abstraction, but all of them will match at least a little, and all of them will match the Father abstraction more closely than, say, the Mother abstraction. So far, so good, right?
Well, what if what you're interested in is the difference between widowed fathers, and fathers married to natural mothers, and fathers married to step mothers? Now, the unifying "fatherness" between these three categories is maybe helpful, but much less so, because it hides the very distinction you want to pay attention to. Or, what if you're interested in the story of your own father, the actual, individual human being? All of his nuance and idiosyncracy. Well, now what he has in common with other fathers is almost useless, because you want to know precisely about what is unique to him - even if he still exhibits almost all of the traits of the "Father Abstraction".
I bring all this up to make clear something about Peterson's approach. There's a general rule with abstractions - the more widely they can be applied, the less accurately the represent any given instance of the abstraction. Let's think about maps. Imagine you have a military-style grid map that covers an area of roughly 500 square kilometers (10 x 5) with a 10 meter contour interval (there are topographical lines on the map showing changes of elevation of 10 meters). This is a fairly detailed map - you can successfully use it to find your way through the woods pretty well if the changes in elevation are distinct enough, or with the help of a compass. Now imagine we zoom out to a map that is roughly 5,000 square kilometers and shows changes in elevation at 100 meter intervals. This map covers a wider area, which is certainly useful, but you're going to have a much harder time working out if you're in this tiny draw or that one. The zoomed-out map tells you about more places, but it tells you less about all of those places than a more zoomed-in map would tell you about any one of them.
TV Tropes tends to work down to some pretty granular "abstractions" - some of the entries may only cover a handful of specific instances, but they analyze what those have in common in a lot of detail. Peterson, on the other hand, zooms way out to try to arrive at the six(ish) archetypes that explain every story ever told. This insight struck me when I was thinking about why I was so irritated by this condescending review of Peterson and specifically Maps of Meaning from Current Affairs. Setting aside the other unfair things this article does, what's relevant to this post is that it makes fun of the diagrams in Maps of Meaning for being so simplistic as to be meaningless. I would argue, instead, they are at the high end of abstraction in order to apply as widely as possible. The good news is that the framework these diagrams represent can be applied to almost any story. The bad news is that without familiarity with a broad set of instances to which that framework applies, it doesn't do much to help you. Imagine that you had never reflected much about the symbolic role of "fathers" in stories or the kinds of roles "fathers" tend to play in real life. Now, imagine someone says to you "okay, so what we're looking at here is clearly an instance of the Father archetype" - if you haven't ever connected the specific instances you've encountered to that abstraction, it's not going to do you much good at all. I think that's part of why Maps of Meaning (and Peterson's lectures) is so sprawling - he sees the abstraction linking many instances, but he realizes that not everyone he's speaking to does, so he's desperately trying to cram a wide survey of specifics into your mind so that the generality abstracted from them will mean something to you.
Order, Chaos, and the Mediator
Based on the biological grounding that we so blithely skipped over above, Peterson argues that our perception of the world, at a very fundamental level, is sorted into stuff that we treat as pretty much settled (Order), stuff that hasn't been explored and could be anything (Chaos), and how we feel about those things, right now, and in general (the Mediator). Order is symbolically masculine (if your hackles are hackling, see the aside below), Chaos is symbolically feminine, and the Mediator is almost neuter, as what's most important about the Mediator is usually being the child of a symbolically masculine and symbolically feminine force. That being said, our history being what it is, most stories have been about dudes, so the Mediator is usually depicted as a guy, with some flavoring of symbolic masculinity. The other important thing to keep in mind is that both Order and Chaos tend to be "static" until the Mediator interacts with them. Even if there's a lot of "change" within Chaos, it's not significant change - it's "sound and fury, signifying nothing". Think of a pot of water boiling - lots of movement, no real change. Until you put the pasta in!
A Quick Aside on Gender
Okay, I know gender is a hot topic these days, so I want to make a few things clear about the very simplified presentation here:
- The symbolic "masculine" and "feminine" here described are not one-to-one with our biological sex, or even the gender we identify with. Everyone has both masculine and feminine elements within them, and folks like Jung and Peterson argue that to be a fully-developed, healthy person, you need to be comfortable with both, and integrate both wholly into your personality. Whether "masculine" symbolic traits have some fundamental link to male biological sex, and if so, to what degree, is not really important to the functioning of this framework, so if it helps, treat it as wholly arbitrary (see 2 below)
- What characteristics get considered "masculine" or "feminine" in this framework are largely derived from looking at lots and lots of myths and seeing what kind of characters are depicted as male and which as feminine. There are a few challenges here: a. the corpus of myths drawn on is almost entirely from the Mediterranean and Europe, from Ancient Egypt through early modern times, and so the myths of other cultures around the world might consistently assign different traits to masculine or feminine archetypes, b. even within the cultures ancestral to the modern West, what gets considered "masculine" and "feminine" has some variation - for example, the Egyptians had a Father Earth and Mother Sky, and to the Germanic folks, the Sun was a beautiful lady and the Moon a macho man. All of which is to say, we're talking in broad brushstrokes here, but ones that are the most useful for understanding the myths and stories of the Ancient Near East, Mediterranean, and Europe through the Early Modern period.
The Good Side and the Bad Side of the Three Basic Categories
Each of the three basic categories (Order, Chaos, and Mediator) has a good side and a bad side. These bring us back to our basic motivational systems that we briefly summarized in the Biological Grounding above (you see why he went to the trouble to make sure you believed him on that stuff?) The good side of each symbol represents what about it draws us toward it and rewards us if we do indeed go there - Good Order provides helpful predictability, Good Chaos provides new possibilities, and the Good Mediator allows for these things to be balanced dynamically, adjusted as needed. The bad side, then, reflects what about these categories causes anxiety if you can't get away with it - Bad Order is controlling and stifling, Bad Chaos is wild and unpredictable, the Bad Mediator is too absorbed in him/herself to balance the others and makes things worse. Putting this Good/Bad valence together with the three basic categories gives us six main archetypes, which Peterson argues represent a fairly complete, coherent view of how the world works and how to find meaning within it.
The Good King and the Tyrant - Order, Good and Bad
If you've grown up playing D&D like me, and even more so if you've delved into the Poul Anderson and Michael Moorcock fiction that inspired its alignment system, you're likely used to thinking of Order as "basically good". Peterson argues this is only half-right. Civilization and society are heavily associated with Order, especially it's good side. The good side of Order is represented by the Good or Just King. Laws basically uphold what is right, good, competent people usually do better than wicked ones, if you need help, there are folks to turn to who can give it, if you have something you need to do, someone can tell you how to do it.
On the other hand, too much Order, or the wrong sort, or even Order that used to be helpful, but now no longer applies, can all become the bad side of Order, the Tyrant. Laws catch you in a tangled web that makes it impossible to do anything without breaking one of them, folks advance more for knowing which boxes to check and what forms to fill out than from competence, if you need help, only properly licensed, authorized, and monitored officials can help you, and if you have something you need to do, you damn well better do it the way everyone else does, or else. If you have ever navigated an automated customer service menu to try to handle a straightforward request, only to have every choice you try take you back to the same (wrong) answer (or even worse, this happened with a live human slavishly following a script), then you know what Bad Order can look like.
The Kind Mother and the Devouring Beast - Chaos, Good and Bad
Again, we're facing a bit of bias from the language we use, as we tend to default to "Chaos is bad". The good side of Chaos, the "Kind Mother" archetype, we might instead call "possibility," or "fertility," or even "creativity". The idea is that the only place new things can come from is the unknown, the not-fully-organized, thus, the Chaotic. Good Chaos is also receptive in the good sense - it welcomes you, it responds to your exploration of it, it reveals knowledge and treasures when you ask politely.
The bad side of Chaos, the Devouring Beast/Mother, is everything bad about the unknown, the unorganized, the untamed. Beasts in the wilderness, dragons in caves, child-eating witches in gingerbread houses, all of these are manifestations of Bad Chaos. But then, so is the criminal, the outlaw, the raider. Bad Chaos is also receptive in the bad sense - it envelops you, it gives you somewhere to get lost in, it reveals how little you truly know and how insecure your treasures are.
Interestingly, the earth (as in, the ground) plays both of these roles. The earth is where the plants we eat grow out of, where the animals we eat roam, and it holds the water we drink. On the other hand, it's also where forests full of lions, tigers, and bears grow, where outlaws and invaders lurk, and where our bones disappear into when we die. The sea can also play both roles (fish come from it, but you can drown in it).
The Hero and the Villain - The Mediator, Good and Bad
Standing between Order and Chaos (whether Good, Bad, or Both) is the individual, the Mediator. This person stands for each of us as we read the story - he makes choices that we can reflect on, undergoes trials that we can sympathize with, and teaches us lessons about achieving goals (or failing to tragically). The Good Mediator is the Hero - an individual who shows wisdom, compassion, generosity, bravery, or any other noble qualities. The Hero recognizes and values the gifts of Good Order and Good Chaos, and bravely confronts the depredations of Bad Order and Bad Chaos. Maybe most importantly, the Hero balances Order and Chaos appropriately - if things have become too rigid, he brings in the rejuvenation of Chaos, if things have become too wild, he brings in the steadying of Order.
The Bad Mediator is then, of course, the Villain, the flip side of the same coin. There's a reason for the stereotype of "we're not so different, you and I. . ." - in a good story, the Hero and the Villain do have much in common. Both face an uncertain world full of risks and rewards, both see the interaction of Order and Chaos in their world and try to take some action to put it more to their liking, and both serve to remind us, the reader/listener, what people are like. In many old stories, they are literally brothers. Where the hero displays noble qualities, though, the villain shows some or all of the ignoble: folly, cruelty, selfishness, cowardice, and more. Where the Hero finds balance, the Villain is more likely to tilt things further out of whack, or to swing the pendulum too far the other way. Often, the villain sees only the bad side of one, the other, or both of Order and Chaos. At his worst, the Villain believes that Being itself is wrong and should be undone, the ultimate nihilism.
A Couple of Examples, to Make this Clear
Alright, so, like I said, the trouble with abstractions is that if you don't have specific instances to link them to, they can be so vague as to be unhelpful. So let's go through a couple of examples.
Story/Mythic Example
One of Peterson's favorite examples, and a film I've come to appreciate more thanks to his exegesis of it, is The Lion King. If you somehow haven't seen it, I suppose I should warn you that here be spoilers. Simba is obviously the Hero, the Good Mediator figure. Mufasa is obviously the Good King/Kind Father, and thus the positive side of Order. Scar kind of plays double duty as the Bad Mediator (Villain), as well as embodying the Tyrant, Bad Order. Nala somewhat takes on the role of Good Chaos by being one hell of a surprise to Simba when she finds him, and starting him on his path back to Pride Rock. And the hyenas are then Bad Chaos (though interestingly, put to work on behalf of Bad Order). The landscape also takes on some of these roles. The Elephant Graveyard, the barren desert that Simba first escapes to, the Pride Lands when they've been screwed up under Scar's rule, all of these are Bad Chaos. The Pride Lands at the beginning and end of the story and the lush paradise Timon and Pumba take Simba to are places of Good Chaos. You can also see how the different archetypes manifest in the same character at different times - young Simba is brave and loyal (Good Mediaor), but full of himself and a bit foolish (Bad Mediator). Teenage Simba is kind and protective of his friends (Good Mediator), but he's deeply afraid and avoids responsibility (Bad Mediator). Adult Simba acknowledges his responsibility and admits what he has done wrong to try to save his people (Good Mediator), but lets himself fall for Scar's manipulations (Bad Mediator). He also shows alternation between how much Chaos and how much Order he represents, and whether it's good or bad. As a rambunctious, rule-breaking child, he embodies Bad(ish) Chaos, but as the one who brings the rains back, Good Chaos. In his desire to boss people around and have his ego flattered ("I Just Can't Wait to Be King!"), he shows Bad Order, but by deposing the Tyrant and restoring just rule to the Pride Lands, he shows Good Order.
So, you can see how the application of these archetypes in different ways, and the interplay between them, can lead to a fairly rich and nuanced set of insights into a story.
"Real Life" example
Okay, stories are well and good, but if you're not yet convinced that understanding stories better will help us understand ourselves and how to live our lives better, then an example of how to apply these archetypes to a story like the one above won't do much for you. So, let me run through how we could use these to think about situations in our lives.
Let's say you're stuck in a job that makes you miserable. The economy sucks and you're worried about finding another job (Bad Chaos). Your boss is a micromanaging jerk who takes credit for anything good the team does, and passes blame for anything bad (Bad Order). But even worse, the team is a mess - there are no standard procedures to follow, no one knows who is responsible for what, and your boss is constantly dropping surprise last-minute assignments on you (Bad Chaos). You've gotten to the point where you try to avoid as much responsibility as you can and lie about how much work you're doing (Bad Mediator), because trying to do better has just gotten you burned in the past. Your only relief is to spend your weekends either playing video games for hours on end or getting hammered - or both (Bad Mediator).
One day, you've had enough, and you decide you're going to put your life back on a track that suits you better (Good Mediator). You realize that one reason you feel stuck is that you don't have the skills you need to get a job somewhere else, so you sign up for a course (Good Mediator). Through the course, you meet some folks who are also looking for work, and you start to hear about opportunities you'd never considered (Good Chaos). You decide that you're going to create a habit of applying to 5 new jobs a week until you find a new one (Good Order). Once you land the new job, you politely, but firmly, tell your boss that you're leaving and it's because this place is terrible (Good Mediator), and you have a very candid exit interview with HR, hoping that maybe the company can be a little better to work for, even if you're gone (Good Order). As you get ready for your first day on the new job, you're a little nervous, but mostly you're excited, because now you know that if it doesn't work out, you can always find something else (Good Chaos).
Alright, so that wasn't the most detailed or interesting scenario, but hopefully it gives some idea of how these ideas can play out in your life. More importantly, once you've learned to think that way, you can start analyzing situations in your life through this lens - where do you feel stifled (Bad Order)? Where do you feel overwhelmed by uncertainty (Bad Chaos)? Where do you act like a jerk (Bad Mediator)? Where do you help others out (Good Mediator)? Where do you have helpful routines (Good Order)? Where do you feel excited about unexplored possibilities (Good Chaos)?
Some Shortcomings of Peterson's Way, as I See Them
Having spent all these words laying out why I think Peterson's framework is helpful, you might (rightly) guess that I'm a big fan. Even still, no framework is foolproof, and this one is no exception. For me, the biggest challenge in using this framework is the level of abstraction discussed above - the fact that it can be applied to any story means that it's missing some of the nuance that it might be helpful to highlight. One example: Jung identified the archetype of the Magician/Wise Old Man, and Campbell noticed how very common that figure was in the "Hero's Journey" mythic storyline. Where does the Magician fit in here? Well, he's kinda-sorta Good Chaos, because he deals with the unknown, but he's also kinda-sorta Good Order, because he often provides wisdom and guidance to the young hero, and he's kinda-sorta the mediator because he helps the hero understand and deal with balancing Order and Chaos. The point is, having a "Magician" archetype you can talk about is often helpful, and it doesn't fit as neatly into the higher-level abstraction of Peterson's framework.
Perhaps more fundamentally, let's return to the Nietzschean motivation for this whole project in the first place, which we summarized (and somewhat oversimplified) as "if God is dead, why do His stories keep shaping what we find meaningful?" This is making a few pretty big assumptions, though: what about the wide swaths of the world that get by just fine with other bases for their morality? What about folks who still have active, meaningful spiritual experiences and don't feel like (the) God(s) is (are) dead at all? In these cases, I think Peterson's analysis still has much to offer, but his need to ground out this analysis in materialistic explanations compatible with a scientific understanding sometimes bleeds through.
With These Thoughts, Hopefully You Can More Readily Engage with Peterson's Work
So, here we are. Peterson's framework is fairly high-level, fairly abstract, but because of this, it's pretty versatile. It's a bit like a Swiss Army Knife of story/myth interpretation - in the long run, you might get far more out of a myth or story through other ways of looking into it deeply, but this gives you a handy starting place, especially for those stories that otherwise seem opaque. Is there a female character? Maybe she represent Chaos, Good, Bad, or mixed. Can the main character's actions be interpreted as balancing Order and Chaos? What about representatives of Order - are they acting more just and protecting, or more tyrannical and controlling? I like to think of this method as a kind of prybar for getting into the underlying meaning of a story - it might not help you fully unpack it, but it can almost always help you get started.
no subject
Date: 2023-03-06 03:51 am (UTC)"deketemoisant" - You keep using that name; I don't think it means whom you think it means.
"And so I set out, modestly, to try to more clearly set out the thinking of someone who has made himself known worldwide and rather wealthy by explaining things." - Nice! How Scott-Alexander-influenced do you think that was?
"our perception of the world, at a very fundamental level, is sorted into stuff that we treat as pretty much settled (Order), stuff that hasn't been explored and could be anything (Chaos)" - I do wonder about who that "we" is - I think there are explainable reasons for the East Asia to relatively resemble Europe, but I wonder that the quote may be less true for many other peoples (including Indians despite them all being linguistically Indo-European or Indo-European-influenced nowadays: see "nondualism" (I do know it was far from universal in India, but it's been long substantial)).
"That being said, our history being what it is, most stories have been about dudes, so the Mediator is usually depicted as a guy, with some flavoring of symbolic masculinity." - The *only* father/mother/daughter trinity I can recall is the Etruscan/Capitoline Triad - do you remember any other?
"folks like Jung and Peterson argue that to be a fully-developed, healthy person, you need to be comfortable with both, and integrate both wholly into your personality." - BTW, do you recall a good writing/speech by JBP about how he integrated whatever femininity he did?
"the Moon a macho man." - I was aware of Máni being male, but do you say he was depicted as unusually masculine? If so, I have no idea about that!
"in a good story, the Hero and the Villain do have much in common." - More so if the protagonist isn't morally perfect (as must have been the case at least in the actual facts), and the antagonist is more "irreconciliably opposed" than "evil" (as does happen in great myth); in the best cases, there may even be basis for reasonable disagreement over whether the protagonist was actually on the better side. Also, "who's wrong", as the War Nerd likes to say, can change a lot depending on where you start telling (sure, more relevant for history than myth, but I think there's myth that actually shows some of that - Iliad/Mahabharata/Shahnameh?).
"And the hyenas are then Bad Chaos (though interestingly, put to work on behalf of Bad Order)." - If one accepts the comment I made at https://jprussell.dreamwidth.org/2951.html about the ancient European worldview being about Order productively controlling Chaos, it's no surprise - and Good Order would be good *because* it controls (Good?) Chaos. (Hm, perhaps one could talk about splitting a singular Chaos to destroy (to the extent possible!) the Bad and absorb the Good?)
"He also shows alternation between how much Chaos and how much Order he represents" - Seems a basic requirement of a Good Mediator, no?
"Magician/Wise Old Man" - At least the latter seems to often be a former Good Mediator - in some stories, he's explicitly a former [something similar to the protgonist] with some clear reason why he can't do what the protagonist can despite having done something fairly similar in the past. (I may need to read more about Krishna, who IIRC is an example with plenty of stories at both stages - of course all those stories weren't originally about a single entity!)
no subject
Date: 2023-03-06 05:00 am (UTC)Fair enough - this was at least as much for me sorting out how to process things as it was to a helpful guide to others.
2) "deketemoisant" - You keep using that name; I don't think it means whom you think it means.
D'oh! Yeah, I see the vowel I got wrong there. My apologies.
3) "And so I set out, modestly, to try to more clearly set out the thinking of someone who has made himself known worldwide and rather wealthy by explaining things." - Nice! How Scott-Alexander-influenced do you think that was?
Heh, a lot to very?
4) "our perception of the world, at a very fundamental level, is sorted into stuff that we treat as pretty much settled (Order), stuff that hasn't been explored and could be anything (Chaos)" - I do wonder about who that "we" is - I think there are explainable reasons for the East Asia to relatively resemble Europe, but I wonder that the quote may be less true for many other peoples (including Indians despite them all being linguistically Indo-European or Indo-European-influenced nowadays: see "nondualism" (I do know it was far from universal in India, but it's been long substantial)).
Peterson tries to link this to some pretty fundamental neuroscience, but unsurprisingly, the experiments extablishing that neuroscience are all with Europeans or American undergrads. So yeah, it's really hard to tell how much is culturally determined, and how much not.
5) "That being said, our history being what it is, most stories have been about dudes, so the Mediator is usually depicted as a guy, with some flavoring of symbolic masculinity." - The *only* father/mother/daughter trinity I can recall is the Etruscan/Capitoline Triad - do you remember any other?
I can't think of any others. There are some other examples of female characters playing a big part in myth (most myths about Freyja, Idhunna, to some degree Athena, and maybe some others), but I think it's non-controversial to point out that most stories for most cultures have been about men, and the stories about women have been more "supplemental".
6) "folks like Jung and Peterson argue that to be a fully-developed, healthy person, you need to be comfortable with both, and integrate both wholly into your personality." - BTW, do you recall a good writing/speech by JBP about how he integrated whatever femininity he did?
Unfortunately, no, I don't have a specific speech to cite. He talks in more than one place about the imporance of integrating the Anima, but I can't think of anywhere specific where he describes his Anima.
7) "the Moon a macho man." - I was aware of Máni being male, but do you say he was depicted as unusually masculine? If so, I have no idea about that!
Not "unusually" masculine, more just "all the stuff this culture assumes about a man".
8) "in a good story, the Hero and the Villain do have much in common." - More so if the protagonist isn't morally perfect (as must have been the case at least in the actual facts), and the antagonist is more "irreconciliably opposed" than "evil" (as does happen in great myth); in the best cases, there may even be basis for reasonable disagreement over whether the protagonist was actually on the better side. Also, "who's wrong", as the War Nerd likes to say, can change a lot depending on where you start telling (sure, more relevant for history than myth, but I think there's myth that actually shows some of that - Iliad/Mahabharata/Shahnameh?).
Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of Indo-European myth is actually weirdly supportive of the idea of nuance in both what goes right and what goes wrong.
9) "And the hyenas are then Bad Chaos (though interestingly, put to work on behalf of Bad Order)." - If one accepts the comment I made at https://jprussell.dreamwidth.org/2951.html about the ancient European worldview being about Order productively controlling Chaos, it's no surprise - and Good Order would be good *because* it controls (Good?) Chaos. (Hm, perhaps one could talk about splitting a singular Chaos to destroy (to the extent possible!) the Bad and absorb the Good?)
Yeah, interesting. The thought that "controlled Chaos" is most likely good, if put to the right ends, is an interesting one.
10) "He also shows alternation between how much Chaos and how much Order he represents" - Seems a basic requirement of a Good Mediator, no?
Yeah, almost by definition - getting the balance right, which varies by situation.
11) "Magician/Wise Old Man" - At least the latter seems to often be a former Good Mediator - in some stories, he's explicitly a former [something similar to the protgonist] with some clear reason why he can't do what the protagonist can despite having done something fairly similar in the past. (I may need to read more about Krishna, who IIRC is an example with plenty of stories at both stages - of course all those stories weren't originally about a single entity!)
That's an interesting thought, and one that makes a lot of sense - the reason you'd know what guidance to give is that you've been there!
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Date: 2023-03-09 04:04 am (UTC)"I think a lot of Indo-European myth is actually weirdly supportive of the idea of nuance in both what goes right and what goes wrong." - I certainly tend to think the same, but a bit of me wonders: "Compared to what?", as the only non-Indo-European mythologies I consider myself significantly above rank ignorance regarding are the Abrahamic ones.
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Date: 2023-03-09 05:47 pm (UTC)I think it's awfully hard to infer all but broad strokes about a culture from only its myths, because I think it's overly narrow to interpret myths as "this is a model of how we actually want society to be, at it's best." I think myths often (always?) most embody those things that a culture *can't* articulate and often doesn't even wholly enact. Now, if you have myth, and language, and archaeology, and best of all, actual history, you can start to find the common threads and make some judgments.
All of which is to say, it would not surprise me if the Etruscans gave women more/different status than other contemporary cultures, but I don't know enough off the top of my head to say confidently. Some indicators that come to mind, all of which are based on the assumption "since the Romans were heavily influenced by the Etruscans, these things might be Etruscan in origin": a) Roman women, at least of the Patricians, had a lot of legal protections and even more informal (but respected) social power, despite a very Greek-like requirement that every woman of any age always be "in the care of" some man, b) the Romans seem to have had a more tender and romantic view of sex between men and women than the Greeks did - romantic love poetry, artistic depictions of sex where the partners are actually looking at each other, touching faces, kissing, and so forth, versus the Greek depictions that tend to look more like Patrick Batemen checking himself out in the mirror, and c) there were at least some priestesshoods and associated festivals that were treated with utmost solemnity for a very long time, see the scandal when Clodius supposedly snuck in to try to seduce Caesar's wife (of course, that one brings with it the counter-example that Caesar divorced her for even the suspicion, but hey).
8. I certainly tend to think the same, but a bit of me wonders: "Compared to what?", as the only non-Indo-European mythologies I consider myself significantly above rank ignorance regarding are the Abrahamic ones.
Hmmm, fair point, when I said "weirdly", I might have subconsciously meant "compared to the very us vs them myths of the Magian world". I'm also fairly light on non-Indo-European myth, though I'd like to remedy that. Maybe nuance about morality is the norm and lack thereof is the weird exception?
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Date: 2023-03-18 12:48 am (UTC)The evidence on Etruscans I heard about is supposedly from archaeology about them, but I don't know details; I still need to check those differences between depictions of sex, and, who'da thunk, romance! (Then again, it's called "ROMANce", isn't it?)
"Maybe nuance about morality is the norm and lack thereof is the weird exception?" - based on not-much knowledge, it appears to me that later Zoroastrian (don't know about early) and Abrahamic cultures tend to be rigidly moralizing, Indo-European myths tend to more moral nuance, and a lot of other myth seems light on morality to me?
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Date: 2023-03-18 05:08 am (UTC)Fair enough!
The evidence on Etruscans I heard about is supposedly from archaeology about them, but I don't know details; I still need to check those differences between depictions of sex, and, who'da thunk, romance! (Then again, it's called "ROMANce", isn't it?)
Yeah, I don't have great evidence here, either. My college Latin teacher gave a not-for-credit lecture or two about how Etruscan architecture was picked up by Romans and then copied by folks copying the Romans. She walked us around our campus and pointed out things like "see tha triple arch motif? That's Etruscan." Unfortunately, I did't take very good notes, and I can't remember her name to see if she published anything on the subject. The material on sex/Romance came from another class, a survey on Roman technology and culture, and again, I can't remember the fellow's name, and it's not listed on my transcript.
based on not-much knowledge, it appears to me that later Zoroastrian (don't know about early) and Abrahamic cultures tend to be rigidly moralizing, Indo-European myths tend to more moral nuance, and a lot of other myth seems light on morality to me?
Yeah, the whole "rigid moralizing" thing might have been especially characteristic of Magian civilization/religions, but I'm not sure on non-Indo-European, non-Abrahamic myths, as I don't know them in as much detail.