TITLE:
Mutation of forms in Myths and technology.
Comparing the mutational imagery in Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” to the mutational imagery of Barbara Rauch.
Questions:
How could technology be used to create an imagery of change?
How could technology offer a new way of imagining identity and in which ways does it express human potential and desire?
Today because of the opportunities offered by technology, there seem to be countless possibilities of ‘becoming’. We have around us unlimited versions of ‘reality’. Nowadays, technology is used as an interface of collaboration between things formerly perceived as distant entities; boundaries are being crossed constantly. Dualities such as body and mind, real and fiction, appearance and matter, self and other, seem to collapse.
As an outcome, man is confronted with the revelation of a deeper complexity of things; the question of identity seems to be at the center of contemporary discourse.
I believe that a closer examination of the contemporary conditions and a simultaneous understanding of the mutational imagery that myths offer us will help us to come to terms with the complexity of things and offer us possible new ways of imagining identities. Mutations, as presented in myths, reveal a delight in the potency of change, a built- in dynamic in all living beings and a magic aspect of reality. Mutations can encourage evolution towards a direction where we are not going to think anymore about identity in terms of nationality, gender or age. Mutations transgress the borders and encourage us to embrace “otherness” in ourselves.
I chose to research two artworks coming from two totally distant eras: Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ and Barbara Rauch’s ‘E-motional degrees’. Both artworks present mutations of forms. I tried to examine in which ways the represented mutations throw light on ideas about identity in each era, and in which ways they reveal a personal vision of reality.
My final aim would be to explore possible ways for creating surfaces using technology, which would on one hand make use of the strong visual vocabulary of myths, and on the other, understand new media as a ‘new language’.
Key words: mutation, hybrids, metamorphosis, identity, otherness.
CONTENTS:
- Abstract
- ‘Identity’ as a crucial matter of contemporary discourse
- Mythology: images of god, metamorphosis, hybrids and identity
- Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights
- Barbara Rauch: ‘Close to the surface: digital presence, e-motional degrees’
- Bibliography
“Identity” as a crucial matter of contemporary discourse
We live in an era stimulated by the various outcomes of technology.
Telecommunications expand our cultural range of experiences, open new horizons for exchange between different cultures. New technologies provide ‘an arena for unexpected collisions and insights’ (Rauch B.,2005,preface). We now access a variety of platforms we can use in order to express ourselves and to communicate with others. We can gain insight of the thoughts and ideas of different people from different places in the world. As an outcome, our perception of “reality” as something stable and fixed is shifted into one which accepts the truth of the many versions of ‘reality’. New media open up new cross -cultural dynamics, become a platform of collaboration, break the feeling of distance and remoteness. As a result the established notion of ‘self and other’ is shifting.
Another outcome could be explained shortly as the fusion of reality with fiction in our consciousness, in a way that these two eventually seem to act inseparably; constantly feeding one another. Another kind of ‘reality’ seems to emerge: Our everyday lives are soaked in imaginary fictions offered to us by the culture of movies. We seem to store the fictional characters in our minds as if they are somehow insights of our personality, and their fictional actions and stories as if they are our own memories. Our fantasy is being constantly fed by those characters who then turn to affect us in real life, in the decisions we take, in the people we choose to communicate with. Person Ethel in his book ‘ The Force of Fantasy ‘uses the term ‘borrowed fantasy’ in order to explain that type of fantasy as one ‘culturally mediated fantasy which comes to us not just passively …but through our active exploration of cultural materials.’(Person E.,1996, p. ) According to Person ‘we gauge the culture’s range of alternatives and select those that suit us which then modify through our own creative synthesis’.(Person E.,1996, p. ) It seems that all those fictional characters we encounter in movies become little by little part of our ‘real’ world.
Through new media, we also experience everyday the documentation, reproduction and alteration of the physical presence. We can gather fragments from the environment, and using distorting techniques we can fuse this digitalized fragment of reality with our imagination, with our own personal interpretation. Victor Burgin in his article ‘Physical space and Virtual Reality’, writes:
I can pull the Titanic from an art history book, or a postcard; I can put them all on the screen and I can act out that fantasy of ‘ realizing the reverie’, and in the process explore what is being represented by that reverie. (Burgin V., 1991,p.9)
We have started to realize the complexity of things and our notion of identity has started to emerge as one acquiring several depths and latent meanings in relation with each other. Technology has been further exploited as a tool of discovering the ‘self’ by artists who used screens as a projection of their inner fantasies, fears and desires. As quoted in Rauch, Levy describes:
the organism is turned inside out like a glove. The interior appears in the outside while remaining within. For the skin is also the boundary between the self and the external world. (Rauch B. 2005, p.69)
Screens become reflections of our complex psychological state, and another limit is blurred, the one between human and machines. In Rauch’s words: ‘…texture, skin and flesh are becoming the screen, the surface of the monitor.’(Rauch B.2005, p.70). Little by little another notion started to emerge: ‘ the idea of a computational form which made its own judgments about world, or even originated new behaviors’ (Simon Penny, 2010). This idea, Simon continues:
took the notion of interactivity to a new level, suggestive of the technophilic grail of machine creativity. This dream of technological life itself is a modernist motif, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Lawmower Man and all the cyborg and robot fiction in between…The idea of an aesthetically designed semi-autonomous creature.(Simon Penny, 2010)
He further describes these computational forms as ‘parabiologies’ implying that through the human interaction, they have their own complexity and metabolic processes similar to those that living organisms have.
To draw conclusions, there has been an exchange between machines and man: Human projected himself on the machines and all this imagery and social construction which was created is changing him in return .Man is believed to be called to adopt ways of inhabiting these new mental constructions and evolve towards such a direction. Haraway writes:
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material quality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation.
(HarawayD.,1991,p.150)
She continues further defining this boundary crossing as a state of ‘reproduction of self from the reflection of the other’.
There is always a transformation of self in these situations of boundary crossing.
As Barbara Rauch writes: ‘Change may come about when diverse ideas meet’ while in the chapter dedicated to the identity in Cyberspace she argues that:
In telematics art our telepresence is distributed throughout the Internet. We are both here and there, out of- body and re-embodied, dematerialized, and reconfigured at one and the same time. (Rauch, 2005, p.74)
She continues further describing these actions as ‘autopoiesis’. There is not only a loss of individuality that takes place, but an act of recreation of the self as well. As Rauch quotes Pepperell, she writes:
We should perceive this situation not as “the end of Man” but as the end of the “man- centered-ness”. That means it is against the belief of human superiority, which does not mean the extinction of the human gene. It is about respecting evolution, including awareness about how we live in the environment. (Rauch, 2005,p.74)
Man has to direct towards the annihilation of the human ego and of his need of identity in order to position himself in the world anew. He has to learn to evolve through mutual benefit with the surroundings, embrace the notion of ‘otherness’ in himself. Nowadays technology is used as an interface of collaboration between things formerly perceived as distant entities; (between the inner -outer world of an individual, or between two people, or between human and nature, or human and machine ) ; boundaries are being crossed constantly. Dualities such as body and mind, real and fiction, appearance and matter, self and other, seem to collapse. Lorelei Clark in the article ‘Making New Worlds collaborations and its potential for transformation’ suggests that now ‘identities are created through relationships and emotional exchanges with other people’; (Clark L.,2010, p.23)
something which quite resembles Donna Haraway’s urge to indulge into the pleasure in the confusion of boundaries.(Haraway D.,1991,p.154)
Haraway senses that :
A cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point. (Haraway D.,1991,p.154)
It seems that the only way to find our new identity is to dissolve into the world.
These days there is an ongoing question: how man will be able to position himself again in a world that is constantly shifting, in world that is constantly revealing its further hidden complexity? Lorelei Clark asks: ‘In these ever-changing world the breadth of knowledge and diversity of views is growing. What should we hold on to? What should we let go of?’ (Clark L.,2010,p.23).Caroline Walker Bynum’s argument seems to offer an answer: ‘What we need are metaphors and stories that will help us imagine a world in which we really change yet really remain the same thing’ (Bynum Walker C., 2001,p.187)
Mythology: images of god, metamorphosis, hybrids and identity
In every mythology and religion of human kind one can discover the same ancient need of man to position himself in a world which is always changing.
Joseph Campbell in his book ‘Hero with a thousand faces’ argues that there are the same ‘truths disguised for us under the figures of religion and mythology’ He states that ‘mythology is everywhere the same beneath its varieties of costume’ and that it represents nothing more than ‘the man’s eternal struggle for identity’(Campbell J.,1993, p.4).
In myths, man always tried to understand changes as occurring in nature, the cyclical as well as the linear events around him. Time was represented in most religions of the human kind as a deity. Marie –Louise von Franz in her book ‘Time, Rhythm and repose’ mentions several examples:
…The Greeks identified time with the divine river Oceanos, which surrounded the earth in a circle and which also encompassed the universe in the form of a circular stream or a tail-eating serpent with the Zodiac in its back. It was also called Chronos(Time)and later identified with Kronos. ( Franz M., 1978, p.5)
She continues saying that Oceanos- Chronos was a ‘generative substance’, ‘the creator and destroyer of everything’.
In Egypt the god of time was Ra:
…Every hour of the day and night this supreme deity changed his shape: he rose, for instance, as a scarab, and descended in the underworld as a crocodile; in the moment of his resurrection after midnight he assumed the shape of a double lion…”(Franz M., 1978, p.6)
In China time is associated with the Yang principle, which ‘denotes the movement of heaven which is unending’ (Franz M., 1978, p.7) while in Aztec civilization the supreme deity Omoteotl created four other gods:
the red placed in the east, the black one, who lives in the north; the white one in the west; and the blue one in the south. To these four gods belong certain plants, animals and qualitatively different years. In the middle dwells the god of fire..(Franz M., 1978, p.8)
But despite this subdivision there was no single authority between all these gods; all were contributing equally to what seems to be a universal law, the law of change: ‘At one time east and positive forces dominate, at another the north and austerity; today we live in good times, tomorrow perhaps in unfavourable days’(Franz M.,1978, p.8). In ancient religions, ‘opposite’ elements do not appear as contradictory but as supplementary:
the forces always take effect as pairs of opposites. Thunder …awakens the seeds of the old year. Its opposite, the wind, dissolves the rigidity of the winter ice. The rain moistens the seeds…while its opposite, the sun, provides the necessary warmth…(Wilhelm R. in ‘Within the Primal Arrangement’ as quoted in Franz M., 1978, p.12)
This pairing of opposites or of dissimilar elements is apparent in all tales of mythology and religion. In all these metamorphic tales, bodies have unstable shape and change to different forms:
…the classes of forms that exist are porous and morph into one another: animal, vegetable, mineral fuse and mold; higher and lower- rocks, flowers, trees, every variety of beast and fowl as well as human beings – are transformed one into the other(Warner M.,2002, p.3).
Myth provides us with figures sharing more than one nature, figures half human half animal, centaurus, minotaurs, mermaids, werewolves. In short, provides us with hybrids. Caroline Walker also mentions hybrids offered by Christian religion such as Christ sharing at the same time the nature of God and human, and Christ’s mother Mary, sharing the nature of mother and virgin.
Caroline Walker in her book, makes the distinction between Hybrids and metamorphosis: ‘They express different ontological visions…Hybrid is a double being…metamorphosis is about the process’.(Walker C.,2001, p.30)
This vocabulary that man created in order to understand nature and outer events, is a construction of his own mind. Gods and monsters are mere symbols, projections of the uncontrollable forces, which inhabit his own mind.
Joseph Campbell writes:
Through the wonder tales - which pretend to describe the lives of the legendary heroes, the powers of the divinities of nature, the spirits of the dead- symbolic expressions is given to the unconscious fears, desires and tensions that underlie the conscious patterns of human behavior. Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography; history and cosmology(Campbell J., 1993, p.256).
Marie- Louise von Franz goes through different religions of human kind and concludes that what was hidden beneath them was human’s perception of a cosmic continuum, which differentiates in itself certain images or structures. This continuum also alternates between states of fulfillment and its opposite. Jung, as quoted in Marie- Louise von Franz, showed that this temporal rhythm occurs also as movements of the human’s psyche: ‘…all extreme psychological states tend to tip over into their opposite: goodness into evil, happiness into unhappiness, exaggerated spirituality into surrender to instincts, etc..’ Marina Warner in her book :’Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds’ seems to share the same opinion as she expresses: ‘…Types and processes of metamorphosis that were described in the tradition,…throw light on changing ideas about persons and personhood’(Warner M., 2002, p.2).
In all these creatures, either turning from one shape to another, either sharing more than one nature the same time, we find as Caroline Walker writes: ’at hand images to think that do not force us to choose between mind and body, inner and outer, biology and society, essence and agency…’(Walker C.,2001, p.187)
Gods and mythic stories are symbols with an everlasting power to awaken our mind. Their true role is to reinforce the idea that there is a sort of same “truth” in all-living organisms. Myths remind to the contemporary man that all beings are strongly interconnected. Joseph Campbell writes: ‘Myth is but the penultimate; the ultimate is openness- that void, or being, beyond the categories- into which the mind must plunge alone and be dissolved’(Campbell J.,1993,p.258). Joseph Campbell believes that myth could serve the society as a unification factor: ‘...The differentiations of sex, age and occupation are not essential to our character, but mere costumes which we were for a time on the stage of the world’ (Campbell J.,1993, p.385).
Myth can act as a bridge between two worlds mistaken as separate, as a bridge of communication between the conscious and unconscious zones. It offers us the possibility for ‘a wonderful reconstruction of the bolder, cleaner, more spacious, and fully human life- that is the lure, the promise and terror of the disturbing night visitants from the mythological realm that we carry within’(Campbell J., 1993, p.8). Myths and wonder tales, reveal nature as supernatural; there are small interventions into the material physical world, subverting his ‘logical’ rules of change. Marina Warner writes:
Transformations bring about a surprise…The breaking of rules of natural law and verisimilitude creates the fictional world with its own laws…There is an intrinsic pleasure to enter that world, inhabit it, move inside it.(Warner M.,2002, p.18)
Caroline Walker seems to agree as she also mentions that hybrids and metamorphosis:
…can be understood both to destabilize and reveal the world…they can be ways of suggesting that the reality they image is what the world really is; in this sense, they are revelations.( Walker C.,2001,p.29)
While she continues arguing about the essentiality of the terror and wonder that these images provoke : ’Every view of things that is not wonderful is false’(Walker C., 2001,p.75). Whenever astonishment is provoked, it is because another option of the known world is made known.
In metamorphic tales there is always some kind of existing hidden potential, a built-in dynamic into beings, which is revealed as a change of shape. Marina Warner writes: ’Souls inhabit everything, and human passions, erupting at moments of crisis, often transmute the very nature of nature.’(Warner M.,2002, p.4), while she continues expressing that Ovid’s metamorphic tales describe ‘a universe that is unceasingly progenitive, multiple and fluid…’(Warner M.,2002, p.5). Myths help people to direct themselves towards change; through its tales change appears to be a universal law: something old gives its place to something new. Myths, help us to get over the fear of change, the fear that something can become something else. Metamorphic tales, help us accept our multiple facets; help us embrace them. Accepting the otherness inside us will help us to finally break the boundaries between outside- different and home- self.
Today there is a need for limits. We have around us unlimited possibilities to choose from, our community is the planet; some times it seems that we do not know towards which direction to move. Myths and tales remind us of the archetype of the circle. Joseph Campbell gives several names for this imaginary center: ‘ …the invisible source, …the center of the symbolic circle of the universe… the immovable Spot of the Buddha legend around which the world may be said to revolve’ (Campbell J., 1993, p.41). Caroline Walker, describes a notion of change that ‘despite the physical and spiritual transformation, something still remains the same.’ We could say that myth, in the whole body of our human history, acts as our center. And Walker’s urge is not to annihilate the past but to convert, add clothing on it:
We read Dante, Ovid, Carter, Brothers Grimm, Marie de France, not in order to understand the tradition, but in order to understand- through the tradition and its artful refigurings - ourselves. (Walker C., 2001,p.188)
While we get on to the future, we should embrace also our past, cause we are hybrids of present and past, self and other.
At this point I feel it necessary to juxtapose a classical painting of 15th century and one contemporary artwork using digital techniques.
I chose Hieronymus Bosch: ’Garden of Earthly Delights’, and Barbara Rauch’s artwork from the exhibition: ’Close to the surface: digital presence, e- motional degrees’ .
Both artworks describe changes of forms, and a process of metamorphosis.
The notion of change itself changes. The different perception of change portrays the dynamics of the different eras. When these are presented together will reveal us the vision of two different yet still the same, worlds.
Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights”
The painting is a triptych, it consists of four separate scenes: the left interior scene depicting Adam, Eve and God, the central interior panel depicting the earthly delights while the right interior panel is depicting hell. The fourth scene is the one consisting of the exterior panel depicting the globe in colors between black and white.
Hieronymus Bosch Garden of Earthly Delights Left, central, and right panel(Dixon L.,2003, fig.137,150,172).
The three images of the triptych visualize numerous transformations and strange hybrid forms. In all the panels weird creatures appear: sirens, half human -half serpent figures riding giant birds, sea creatures, demons. There also appear huge egg-shape vessels. In the central panel people are involved in strange actions with giant fruits, some of them wear them as hats, others are eating them. The picture on the right images the torture in hell, where strange giant instruments and everyday objects are used to torment human figures; while a giant birdlike demon is eating and excreting others.
The painting has been exposed to a variety of interpretations and different readings: some wanted to see in it the eternal punishment of people who have been formerly indulged without limit into the pleasures of the earth; others preferred to focus into its alchemy metaphors while others associated it with a heretical group called Adamite world. Laurida Dixon in her book dedicated to Bosch, strongly associates this painting with alchemical processes while denying any interpretation that has to do with the damnation of people for their sins. According to her, people in Bosch’s Garden ‘seem more like children at play’.(Dixon L.,2003, p.277). She reads the central panel as a suggestion of ‘a future Eden, where there is no illness, sin or other imperfection- the result of the alchemist’s success…’ (Dixon L.,2003, p.277) Dixon’s definition is that the whole triptych, including the forth scene of the exterior panel; represents an alchemical allegory: in the left interior panel, (of the joining of Adam and Eve) she reads the ‘step of alchemy when the ingredients are brought together for mixing’ ; in the central panel, she reads the ‘slow cooking and bringing together of the ingredients into an undifferentiated mulchy mass’, while in the hell scene the substances are ‘killed’ in order to be resurrected into the fourth scene of the exterior panel. According to Dixon the four scenes depict the perpetual circuit of birth, life, death and rebirth as inherent into the world. (Dixon L., 2003, p.233)
Hieronymus Bosch Garden of Earthly Delights
Exterior panel(Dixon L,2003, fig.181)
I believe that this resistance of a single interpretation, is what makes the painting even more appealing. Peter S. Beagle, one of those who read it as a moralizing attempt, writes: ‘The dazzling colors and joyous appearances are meant to trap the viewer in his or her own desires, just as it has trapped those who dwell therein.’(Beagle P.,1982, p.83) As we explore the painting, we explore the poetic mixing of different species and opposites; the marrying of flower, animal and human forms, while our mind is free to make its own personal associations. In contrast to Beagle’s interpretation as a ‘trap’, we could consider it as a boundary transgression and as freedom.
It recalls the ‘Temple of Fame’ that jurgis Baltrusaitis mentions in his book ‘Aberrations’ :
…whose four facades each different in architectural style but equal in beauty, represented the four parts of the universe: the west façade with Greek orders, the north façade, Gothic, the east, the Orient from Assyria to China, and the south façade, covered with hieroglyphics and Egyptian obelisks.’ (Baltrusaitis J.,1989, p.143)
It is a ‘garden which encloses the world’, an Eden, a new image of the world open to personal interpretations; a garden which we can stare with primitive delight.
Barbara Rauch:’Close to the surface: digital presence, e-motional degrees’
Barbara Rauch has been involved in a two year research under the subject :’The Personalized Surface within Digital Printmaking Art’, together with professor Paul Goldwell. The research focused on the way digital surfaces could be ‘personalized’; that means reflect the artist’s needs and desires.
In Barbara Rauch’s exhibition: ’E-motional degrees’ the viewers were confronted with the strange hybrid head of a face of a man turning into an animal, as a 3D animation projected on the wall of the gallery.
Rauch B. 3D virtual emotions( Rauch B.,2008b)
Rauch B. 3D virtual emotions( Rauch B.,2008b)
When Rauch speaks of her intentions, she says: ‘I think of my work as narrative and is often centred around consciousness studies, a search for realities other than the reality that is out there.’ (Rauch B.,2007,p.1 ). She was influenced from evolution theories of Charles Darwin (1872) and the notions that suggest strong conformity and resemblance between animals and human beings, based on the empirical observations of the commonality among their facial expressions.
Jurgis Baltrusaitis in his book ‘Aberrations’ speaks about the ‘fables of the beast nascent in man’ as another reflection of reality inherent in their form: ‘…everything has logic…and (is) marked by mythological and historical erudiction.’(Baltrusaitis J.,1989, p.xi) According to Baltrusaitis any existing form possess ‘an undeniable faculty for transfiguration.’(Baltrusaitis J.,1989,p.xi) and Barbara seems to share his opinion when she ‘suggests the virtual model to be intergrated in a larger idea of realities that exist in parallel…’ (Rauch B.,2008b,p.3)
Rauch used 3D scanners to scan a stuffed fox and a human face with seven different emotional expressions, and while working in this large database she created the form of a human-animal head. The strange creature, constitutes of layers of information, being derived from both animal’s and human’s worlds.
Paul Coldwell, when talking about ‘the Personalized surface’ project, he makes the distinction between the process of the creation of an image while working in conventional means, and the process while working in computer programmes:
Computer graphic programmes are predicated on the concept of layers, whereby the artist can built up an image, separating each layer of imagery. Whilst in conventional processes, the layering that occurs is physical, resulting in layers of ink, colours created through overlay, and in overriding texture.(Coldwell, P., s.d.a)
The artist becomes the one manipulating the degrees of alteration of information through the computer’s interface. As such, Barbara’s strange hybrids, are a result of a flow of information she stimulated and then negotiated through the computer programmes. For Barbara ‘the image must be extended to encompass the entire process by which information is made perceivable through embodied experience.’(Rauch B.,2008a, p.6)
The two artworks (Bosch’s Garden and Rauch’s animation) share something in common although their mutational imagery was born in two distant eras. It cannot be accidental that Bosch’s society had just experienced the revelation of an Other World, while todays society, in which Rauch framed her hybrid creature, is also experiencing new challenges offered by technology.
Marina Warner in Fantastic Metamorphosis and other Worlds, researches:
…if the transformations Bosch limns in this work can allow glimpses of deeper transformations taking place on earth, in the society of his day…one that offered startling challenges to ideas of identity and psychological continuity(Warner M.,2002 p.43)
The two artworks are trying to incorporate the ‘Old’ and the ‘New’ world, and also reflect how this notion of ‘otherness’ has been differentiated in each era; while remained always strongly associated with parallel historical or technological revelations.
According to Warner, it is not accidental that the innocence and bliss of the central panel of ‘the Garden of Earthly Delights’ is depicted through ‘processes of metamorphosis, which belong in Nature’s autonomous ecology, not to human scientific intervention…unlike the depiction of hell on the night.’(Warner M.,2002, p.59). In Bosch’s Paradise nature prevails transmitting to the participants and to their practices a state of harmony and perfection while in Bosch’s hell, human intervention is associated with the loss of self.
It seems that almost the same agony lies beneath the ongoing fears about the contemporary technological development. Paul Coldwell in his writing ‘Between the Digital and Physical’ states that when something moves from the physical to the digital world, is always accompanied with a sort of loss on emotional level.(Coldwell, P.,s.d.b)
Objects turn to become homogenized in the cold surface of the computer.
So how could it be possible to create surfaces using technology, which remain personal and reflect the moves of the psyche of the artist? The research project: ‘Personalized Surface’ of Barbara Rauch and Paul Coldwell attempts to throw light on this crucial matter of contemporary discourse.
I personally believe that in order to avoid the ‘loss of self’ caused by the homogenizing cold surface of the computer, we should make use of the strong visual symbolic vocabulary that myths offer us. This symbolic vocabulary has all the power to evoke human hidden fears, desires and potentials, as it was born from individual’s unconscious effort of ordering. Myth offer as ‘archetypes’: principles as ‘the hearth in the home’, ‘the hub of the wheel of the earth’, ‘the womb of the Universal Mother’ or the labyrinth in which someone gets lost in order to find himself reborn (Campbell J., 1993, p.42).
These images awaken the unconscious realm inside us. It is exactly in this unconscious realm that ‘all the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are, all the magic of childhood…all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization…’(Campbell J., 1993,p. 17).
Campbell’s urge consists in ‘ a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world…to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within.’( Campbell J., 1993, p.42).
After all, ‘to evolve is to be constantly updating our conceptualizations of the world until it ultimately includes all of the interrelationships that make up who we really are, our interconnectedness with the whole universe’.(Harris,1990 as quoted in Clark L.,2010, p.22).
As a conclusion, a reworking on the cultural material of the past together with the understanding of the new dimensions that new media open to us will help us towards such a direction; will help us integrate our unconscious realm in our everyday lives and as such, reveal all the great psychological powers and hidden potentialities.
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