“And yet even then [Paleolithic Age] there was an allowance made for a certain type of deviant, the visionary, the shaman: the one who had died and come back to life, the one who had met and talked with spirit powers, the one whose great dreams and vivid hallucinations told effectively of forces deeper and more essential than the normally visible surface of things. And it was, in fact, from the insights of just these strangely gifted ones that the myths and rites of the primitive communities were in largest part derived.”—Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology

  I’ve been saving that quote for a video I intend on making but haven’t gotten around to. The thing about YouTube is that any Tom, Dick, or Harry are free to watch and worse, comment. With a blog by virtue of it having to be read a great many lazy or unqualified nincompoops are barred access so to speak from entering the Cafe. 

  You see, we need these ‘deviant’ types today, the ‘visionary, the shaman: the one who had died and come back to life.’ They are the balance bringers to a community, the bestowers of meaning and purpose in community for the people. 

  And they are amongst us here in our cities. In bud at least. 

  The problem and even tragedy for us is that there are no schools or mentorship programs for these ‘deviant’ odd balls. 

  What’s more, the priests of religion and learning will have nothing to do with them. The fixed and static world of seminary and school is imperilled by the shaman’s song. For the shaman sings of a new relationship with ourselves and the world about. 

  “Would you put new wine in old skins?” Asked the fella statued above. And the priests had him crucified. It is an old pattern. 

  I have been saving the above quote for yet another Omphalos Cafe video on James Joyce’s Ulysses. There’s been a hundred years of priestly academic scholarship on what I’ve called Joyce’s monumental and monumentally misunderstood classic. 

  But what is really going on is that Joyce is recounting how he, in his alter ego Stephen Dedalus, underwent PRECISELY the ordeal and shamanic death and resurrection describe by Campbell in the above quote. 

  The shaman spoke in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. 

  And the priests laid claim to it and for a hundred years have completely killed it, as they are wont to do. 

  And the funny thing is that eternal pattern of vital shamanic creative act and sterile priestly cooption of the message plays all the way through Joyce’s final published work, Finnegans Wake. 

  Maybe Joyce’s “great dreams and vivid hallucinations told effectively of forces deeper and more essential than the normally visible surface of things.”