First Trio

Comments: Follow-up

            This trio of papers from the Journal of Literary Semantics completes the initial form of mythic algebra as a unitary system. The second trio, from Semiotica, will show various applications of mythic algebra. Before introducing the Semiotica trio, I’d like to pursue some ideas closer to the JLS trio.

            Many literary topics were broached, such as the varieties of ‘figures of text’ in the third paper. Some of the modeled literary concepts also have social uses, like Jungian archetypes. Such variety in the same mythic algebra notation lends support to the claim that all social science constructs are somewhat arbitrary, valid as far as they go perhaps, but only going just so far. For example, the notion of the Hero as analyzed by Campbell and Jung, et al, may have more variation than the theory of archetypes reveals.

            In a 2008 article under my science fiction fan name of M.L. Fringe, I presented a critique of the hero cycle. This article ignores all of the mythic algebra ideas of mythic spacetime, to focus on the aftermath, when all of the action happens back in the real world. Mythic algebra does not enter into the article, showing how limited its relevance can be.

Westercon 57 Notes: The Crime and the Glory of Joseph Campbell

by M.L. Fringe

When Joseph Campbell’s PBS-TV series The Power of Myth debuted in 1988, I was converted to it as much as anyone else. I’d been listening to his lectures on radio for a year by then, so I knew to catch the TV show. Like so many alienated middle class middlebrows, I was filled with the evangelistic fervor that HERE was the crucial insight to bring world peace. Once we told all the religious that they really believed the same thing because religion is a metaphor, then war and hatred would end. It took Native Americans to indirectly convince me of the naivety, 16 years later.

You see, the theme of the 2004 Phoenix Westercon, Conkopelli, was southwest mythology. Kokopelli, the Indian trickster, was a good choice of mascot for Westercon 57, because I could not find any Indians who wanted to participate in the convention. As one of their scholars gently explained to me, Kokopelli, Coyote, et al are not quaint myths to Indians. They are part of their living religion. If you catch a 20-year anniversary broadcast of The Power of Myth, you may notice that there are no Indians in the PBS-TV series, just Bill Moyers talking to Campbell.

The interviews were often on Skywalker Ranch, and praising the Star Wars movies.   Another TV show has a testimonial from George Lucas on how Campbell’s book The Hero With a Thousand Faces guided his Star Wars storytelling. Campbell was famous and influential before Moyers made him more so with PBS-TV. Many knew of his three-stage analysis of the hero cycle: separation-initiation-return to society with a benefit to save it.

What’s wrong with that cycle? What’s wrong is that it’s only one half of the hero’s cycle represented as the complete cycle. If Campbell had written of the full hero cycle, he might never have become as rich and famous as he did.  The full cycle is depressing, and has been told by schoolteachers ever since Greek was translated into English. It includes words like hamartia, hubris, and nemesis. These are the second half of the cycle, the downside when the hero gets too big for his britches and becomes a villain. Hamartia is the fatal character flaw once the hero has done his job and saved society. It leads to hubris, a conceited pride that he should lord it over society or flaunt the rule of the gods. This results in his opponent, nemesis, arising to cut him down to size. If he’s lucky, he survives as a mere commoner, back where he began long ago.

Visually, the cycle looks like this:

Campbell ignored this, as if it wasn't part of the hero’s story. Glossing in his book, he noted “But a deterioration may take place in the character of the representative of the father…The upholding idea of the community is lost. Force is all that binds it. The emperor becomes the tyrant ogre (Herod-Nimrod), the usurper from whom the world is now to be saved.” (Part 2, chap. 3.5) One may apologize for this and claim that the bigger cycle is for the “tragic” hero, not all heroes. But literature teachers bore us with the full cycle of the hero’s tale, and the price those teachers pay is humble obscurity.

We may be less inclined to want to read such complete stories, too, but they are commonly taught in school. Examples include Prometheus (who gave man fire), Oedipus (the incestuous king), and in movies: Darth Vader (George Lucas knows). Apply such interpretations to any religion’s figure of your choice. Just don’t expect to convert any true believers. I’ve learned that much, for I remember Westercon 57.

No new mythic algebra results from this article. If I had used it, the only new uses would have been to show the breakthrough of a nemesis into the real world: M(p,s,t)/M(p)R(s,t) or maybe the banishment of the hero to a mythic land of punishment, a crossover of R(p,s,t)/R(p)M(s,t).

A more clearly dangling thread from the last JLS paper was the mechanism of metaphor, which I kept after until it resolved into part of the first Semiotica paper. The most pressing inspiration for that paper was a new area of application: the semiotic sign. I almost put a final section in the last JLS paper, on how the mythic algebra lineup could be divided into the three kinds of sign: icon, index, and symbol. The treatment would have been too short, and more research on that beckoned.

In the ensuing five years, the question of logic worked into the same paper. It had been implicated in earlier researches, but was the vaguest of dangling threads. Once semiotics was directly addressed, logic became more relevant.

The second Semiotica paper finally addressed the claim that mythic algebra was an ur-mathematics that could develop into mathematics proper. This was more than a dangling thread, as was the topic of association itself, covered in the last paper. While the Semiotica trio makes new uses of mythic algebra to tie up loose ends from the JLS trio, the second trio itself raises some new issues. These will be addressed after, in the epilog.