Ensouled Machines
By rosslaird on June 22, 2004 - 9:01am
Joseph Campbell once speculated about the emergence of new mythologies in our age. He believed that the classic fables, dependent as they were upon images and stages not yet influenced by individual psychology, would be augmented by the evolving myths of individuation. In Creative Mythology, Campbell says:
The known myths cannot endure. The known God cannot endure. Whereas formerly, for generations, life so held to established norms that the lifetime of a deity could be reckoned in millenniums, today all norms are in flux, so that the individual is thrown, willy-nilly, back upon himself, into the inward sphere of his own becoming, his forest adventurous without way or path, to come through his own integrity in experience to his own intelligible Castle of the Grail — integrity and courage, in experience, in love, in loyalty, and in act. And to this end the guiding myths can no longer be of any ethnic norms. No sooner learned, these are outdated, out of place, washed away. There are today no horizons, no mythogenetic zones. Or rather, the mythogenetic zone is the individual heart.
We may now make our own tales, forge them from our own consciousness, uninherited, and stand upon these narratives as the ancients stood upon the shoulders of gods. As you may know, mythologies are among my most favorite subjects (er, I wrote a book about them).
Campbell’s first example of a new myth was 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which a computer becomes human and a human becomes a universal entity. 2001 is one of the few narratives that is as good in the film version (by Stanley Kubrick) as on the page (by Arthur C. Clarke). If you haven’t seen the film or read the book, you don’t know when the modern age really began.
2001’s HAL 9000 computer, famous for saying “I’m sorry Dave, but I can’t do that
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