Yesterday I was sitting in a coffee shop and the conversation turned as it frequently does these days to what is going awry in our modern culture. 

  There’s no denying that young men and women are struggling today, and especially young men, who are withdrawing, turning away from the challenges of adulthood towards video games, internet bogs and swamps, and porn. The internet is abuzz with this kind of stuff, and words such as the ‘manosphere,’ ‘red pill’ awareness, and ‘MGTOW’ (Men Going Their Own Way) are everywhere. 

  Here at the Omphalos Cafe we have a deeper—or at least more poetic—take on the matter. 

  This morning, rereading for possibly the third or fourth time Joseph Campbell’s stupendously comprehensive volume, Primitive Mythology, I could not have put the matter in more succinct words: 

  “It is clear what is happening [in primitive puberty rites]. The imprints irreversibly established in infancy as energy-releasing signs are being reorganized, and through an extremely vivid, increasingly frightening and unforgettable series of controlled experiences are in the end to be so recomposed that the boy’s course will be directed forward into manhood: not to any merely open, uncommitted manhood, but specifically to a certain style of thought and feeling, impulse and action, comporting with the requirements of the local group.”—Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology

  Today those rites of passage Campbell is referring to, those cunningly designed ordeals that once drew the young boy across the threshold into adulthood have all been lost, dissolved by the corrosion of modernity. And what’s perhaps worse, the designers of those ordeals, the shamans and artists, have all but disappeared too. Their tradition has been devalued and has disintegrated and we have all lost because of it. 

  Instead of shamans directing the abundant energies of youth into functioning adulthood in a healthy community through deeply affecting rites of passage we have dispersed ‘toxic’ manhood and an over abundance of scientifically trained but poetically and mythically blind psychologists offering their bandaid ‘solutions’ and ‘therapies.’ 

  Without a deeper poetic understanding of the human psyche things will not change folks. And that will take time and the training of a new generation of shaman types, a new incarnation of ‘medicine man,’ ‘sorcerer,’ or ‘seer.’ 

  And make no mistake, this new shaman type will not come from school, for school can not teach what needs to be taught and what’s more school as constituted today would not admit a teacher who could teach what needs to be taught. 

  As all new and revitalizing messages and movements do, it will come from outside, from beyond the pale, from the wilderness if you will. Or perhaps simply the wilderness within.

  Who knows? 

  But it will come….

  For that is Life’s way,

  And Life is ALL there is.