The Mythology of the West

America is now the Wasteland that T.S. Elliott wrote so famously about in 1925. At that point he was talking about Europe (He had no sense that America even had a chance). Elliot thought, and had good reason, with folk like Picasso, Yeats, and Pound, that the INDIVIDUAL….

would reassert himself as the hero. The key contribution of the West, which is written in the DNA of the pagan religions of Europe, is that the individual (a metaphor for creativity) and not the group is the hero.

In the East the individual is less than nothing. In the Levant, the same. The Group is the hero. The “People” as they say in the Leviticus. In Pre-Christian Europe a far different animal emerges. It’s the cult of the individual. The cult of the Hero.

But I suspect even in America the soul is currently being and will have been taken out of the individual and in its place due to inability to resist the six temptations (Buddha: Pleasure, Pain, Duty…Christ: Wealth, Power, and Fame)….

And some rough beast a gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born. And probably in the wake of the industrial age already is. We’re underwater and don’t even know it. We can’t breath and don’t even know it. Some part of us knows something’s wrong…

But we are vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.