Don’t Turn Your Face Away: The Myth of Exile and Return

Mythic Christ Podcast

We have lost something as a culture difficult to describe or even to feel. We have lost the language and the ritual container we need to even become conscious these ambiguous losses and the untended grief buried in the body, both individually and collectively. We might sense that Reality itself is on the line. Guy Debord in landmark work, The Society of the Spectacle, written in 1967, tracks the shift from the early stage industrial revolution when we exchanged a depth of “being” for an obsession with “having.” Exiling ourselves further as a collective from the real world. Now in the Anthropocene, marked by late stage capitalism, we are plunging further into existential exile, exchanging “having” for “appearing.” Catastrophic loss of meaning, hope, and connection. Debord explains, “the spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by an accumulation of images that serve to alienate us from a genuinely lived life.”

This episode is a teaser for the official launch of the Mythic Christ podcast in September 2022—featuring exploration of the Christ myth that has become domesticated, which is to say deanimated, disembodied, abstracted and universalized from local enfleshment in sacred place and the stories of place. Up until this modern industrial age, for many Earth-based peoples, place has always had a face. The original Hebrew creation myths express this idea that the Earth herself has a face and the divine-human face is itself the icon of creation. We will explore the poetic image of the face of the ground, as ultimately an invitation to return to an animacy that involves reawakening a mythic consciousness we need to forge a new path ahead in this age of ecocide. The “flesh” of bodies are living interfaces, apertures to “knowing and being known” open gateways of erotic touch, ecstatic feeling, emotive expression, imaginal depth, sentience, memory, and interiority that modern culture has been exiled from. The face represents the animacy of the cosmos and our own animate, emergent rootedness in this vast, sentient web of creation.

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