Inspired by a visit to Père-Lachaise cemetery and the grave of Jim Morrison:

  “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 

  Morrison, lead singer of the seminal sixties Dionysian rock band The Doors, who’s father was a very pillar of the US military industrial complex asserting itself following the Second World War, sought something different. It was a more or less valiant effort, that failed miserably in the end. 

  What’s more, he’s not alone. Far from it. In fact a majority of our Shaman/Artists crash and burn before attaining to Campbell’s rebirth, especially since the wildly hedonistic sixties and seventies. The journey is solitary and fraught with psycho-spiritual peril. And to gain success, notoriety, or fame on the way down—into the pit so to speak—is frequently fatal. 

  I was saving the above Campbell quote for a post on Ulysses. You see, there’s been a hundred years of diligent scholarship on Joyce’s misunderstood masterpiece… all by competent intellectuals who have in no way undergone the process of having “died and come back to life.” How are they possibly to comprehend that that is precisely what Joyce is describing in Ulysses, his own psycho-spiritual death and resurrection!

  Similarly, Henry Miller recounts his in his Rosy Crucifixion Trilogy (not exactly recommended reading.) Proust, Hesse, Thomas Mann too recounted their own archetypal journeys. All underwent the ordeal delineated in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces. 

  And all are beyond the scope, the range of experience, of those competently comforming multitudes that populate our universities to this day. 

  Hence the Omphalos Cafe. 

  A place of hope for the despairing.