New Mythologies

You didn't edit it sufficiently. What do you mean by "Buddhism unites believes..."? Perhaps you meant to say "Buddhism unites beliefs"?

Louis Farrakhan 1933-, American, mother immigrated from St. Kitts and Nevis. Well-educated and highly talented musician, poised to become America's preeminent calypso singer--a light-hearted, heavily syncopated style of pop music from Trinidad wildly popular in America in the 1950s. In 1955 he joined the Nation of Islam, a black American movement whose Islamic identity is highly controversial among mainstream Muslims. Its leader adhered to the Islamic fundamentalist tenet that music is immoral and demanded that all musicians in the movement cease playing. Farrakhan turned down a $25,000 per year contract (equivalent to $250,000 in today's money) and stayed with the movement. As a result, Jamaican-American Harry Belafonte became America's calypso superstar and the music became mistakenly associated with Jamaica. This inspired Jamaican musicians to invent reggae so they could have a national music of their own, so Farrakhan can be seen as the catalyst responsible for the birth of reggae, one of the most socially important musical genres of the late 20th Century. Farrakhan is now a leader of the "Black Muslim" movement. His many crassly racist statements, particularly anti-Semitic ones, have earned him derision and outright hatred outside the movement, e.g. "Hitler was a great man." He has attempted to clean up his image, including resuming his career as a violinist, specifically playing music of Mendelssohn, a Jewish convert to Christianity. He is highly controversial among Americans of all colors, and--with other notorious figures such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson--widely credited as a force holding back the integration of America, by going against its principles and establishing a distinct community based solely on skin color.

Casey Jones, 1863-1900, American. A locomotive engineer, he refused to jump from the cab of his steam locomotive when he realized that his passenger train was going to collide with a stopped freight train; he ordered his fireman to jump. With no automated controls, he held the brake lever and slowed the train down until it hit, sacrificing his life so that none of his passengers were killed. The collision had many causes, one of which was the fact that Jones was travelling at 70mph to make up for a schedule delay. A friend wrote a song about him that became quite popular; it is now an American folk song and Casey Jones is an American hero.

John Henry. A mythical American figure of the mid-19th Century, generally depicted as a black man, often a slave or former slave, possibly an amalgamation of several real men. John Henry used a hammer and brute force to break up rocks and build tunnels for the railroads that would ultimately turn America into the world's leading industrial nation. Railroads figure prominently in American folklore and many of our folk songs, such as "Casey Jones" and "John Henry" are about them. A mechanical hammer driven by steam power was invented at this time. John Henry supposedly entered a contest with a steam hammer, and as the legend goes he "died with my hammer in my hand" attempting to prove that a human could do better work than a machine.

Nelson Mandela, 1918-2003. Thembu people of South Africa. First democratically elected president of South Africa. During the era of apartheid (racial segregation), he was a follower of Gandhi and a leader of the movement to end minority white rule. However he did not refuse to use violence and spent 27 years in prison. As a real human being he was far from perfect and his life was marked by many controversies including a connection to "blood diamonds," but nonetheless he was awarded a Nobel Prize. After retiring in 1999 he became an AIDS activist in a country whose population is one of the world's hardest-hit, and he was also an outspoken critic of George Bush and the Iraq war. Although he had no connection to America he is a hero to many black Americans and probably to all Americans of left-liberal politics.

Malcolm X, 1925-1965, American. His Wikipedia entry begs for a cleanup, but speaking from memory I call him a popular and notorious figure in the Black Muslim movement during its peak of controversy and tumult in the early 1960s. It seemed to me that he was in the newspaper headlines almost every week. With a record of violence and other criminal activities, he had his own vision for a path out of America's racial inequities. In 1964 he broke with the Nation of Islam, made a pilgrimage to Mecca, and converted to mainstream Sunni Islam. He was assassinated upon his return to the USA.

My wife is a great fan of Joseph Campbell and read much of his work for her master's thesis, in which she took a Jungian approach to the novels of Gabriel García Márquez. We had the privilege of attending one of his speaking engagements before he died and that book is still on her desk.

An audience member asked him what the myth of our era was and he replied "money." This is true on two levels. Economics is today's predominant philosophy, replacing psychology which reigned for decades and had beat out science, which itself had slowly displaced religion. In addition, money itself can be regarded as mythical, since in a sense it is not real: it "exists" only because we all agree that it does.

Archetypes: motifs that exist in almost every society in almost every era. Stories, visual images, beliefs, fears. Elements of the "collective unconscious" that show up in our dreams and our literature.

Clearly they are a type of instinct, preprogrammed into our brains. A fatalist would say they're an accident of a genetic bottleneck, a coincidence of synapses that happened to be wired that way in Lucy or one of our common ancestors. Other scientists would say they are a relic of an era in which, for reasons we can't understand, they were survival traits, so that only the people who had them lived on to be our ancestors. Or you could say that they are spirits goddess breathes into us on our way down the birth canal. It doesn't matter, they're there and to us they're real.

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I would argue that Farrakan was an important influence on world culture. His decision to become an Islamic fundamentalist and foreswear music was responsible for the birth of reggae. Reggae has revived the role of music as social commentary, which rock and roll dropped after the 1960s.

Of course this is a historical accident that is not widely publicized. I didn't even know about it until I was researching his life for my post. And the Wikipedia article didn't even pick up on the connection to reggae. Few people outside the music business know that reggae was deliberately crafted by Bob Marley and his friends, in order to give Jamaica its own national music and stop being identified with calypso. It did not evolve naturally.

And this is all relevant to a discussion of religion, of course, because reggae was adopted as the music of the Rastafarians.

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