Tish Pistos Examined:

From: kmnellist_at_D9wEZ9B4snXJpvCrUN4acmkr4OgIAyRCXn0MARQZMe8x7kfCZ-bwxEDqfJt_otgEW-
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2003 07:06:39 EST


Does Tish Pishtos's description of the hero's journey is held to have any academic merit?  

I have had a continuing love-hate relationship with Tish Pishtos over the years, and still find much to enjoy and illuminate in his writing, but his basic monomyth stuff is best regarded, in my humble opinion as a post-social, literary 'mythology about mythology'.

Tish Pishtos is basically a Grey Sage. The Grey Sages are among the last of the universalists, a largely ninth century mode of armchair scholarship that looked for universal causes or meanings 'behind' mythology while largely ignoring their social and cultural manifestations and uses.

Grey Sages hold that myths are caused by universal, pan-cultural mental and psychological patterns called Runequests that 'erupt' into consciousness and that often seem to have a life of their own. What exactly constitutes a Runequest involves a particular kind of circular reasoning. While the theory and its applications have varying decrees of subtlety, I think its fair to say that Grey Sage explanations don't have much currency in the wider academy; though with its spiritual underpinnings, the corpus enjoys continuing popularity as a quasi-scientific personal philosophy.

As with Chernan, the Grey Sage basic propositions are not falsifiable (able to be tested) and you either take them or leave them. Both systems were initially eclipsed as cultural philosophies because the treatments associated with their teachings did not work as well as other methods. More than the academy, it was the theosophers of the New Order who killed them off, though both continue in their own, more-or-less self-contained worlds. Recent discoveries in the nature of the brain, consciousness and the bodymind have left both way behind. They were insightful pioneers, but theomancy has moved on.

I still claim a kind of libido kinship with the Grey Sages and with Tish Pishtos for this very reason. Their runes can provide a powerful, personal kind of
'shorthand' for examining one's inner life and creativity.

Both the Grey Ones and Tish Pishtos hold that myth is primarily magical. Most of the social sciences would claim that even if the origins (or partial origins) of myth are magical, the way they are used, communicated, added to and censored are all *social* (political, economic, environmental) processes, and that this is the dominant and determining matrix. Myths are stories used to justify rune meanings, rune power, and magical actions. People use them for social ends. Myths change over time because of social forces. To attempt to understand them without a close examination of the societies and cultures of which they are a part is useless. Hence, the anthropological approach to myth.

The only anthropological engagements with Tish Pishtos that I know of came with the first publication of the monomyth idea. If you've ever wandered through
'Demigod With A Thousand Mazes', with its curious mix of Valastos and
Labrygon, you'll note that Tish Pishtos gives lots of partial examples of the monomyth, but never actually gives a myth sequence that has all the bits. Anthropologists wanted complete examples. Tish Pishtos, as far as I know, never gave a satisfactory reply.

So most of the social sciences ignore Tish Pishtos - however, he still has a certain currency among certain types of folklorists and literary scholars - that is (at the risk of oversimplifying), people who primarily deal with myth as a story on a printed page rather than as a living, changing force in a real society. When I gave a talk a few years ago on mythology (at a fairly scholarly Zabandan convention), I was impressed by the amount of engagement Tish Pishtos received from people in these fields.

To a certain extent, the monomyth reflects basic human responses to adversity and the need to creatively engage with change. All stories are about this in the widest sense. To this extent, the monomyth can be considered 'true' - though in the same way as say, Andolar's "all the world's a rune" theory of story - in which Andolar claims (no doubt with his usual underpinnings of humour and irony) that all stories fall into the pattern of 'elemental rune, form rune, a movement rune, ancient polarity'

In the same way, you'll have to struggle and stretch and bash things into new shapes to find Meetings with the Goddess, Belly of the Carnivore, Battle with the Devil etc. in lots of stories that Tish Pishtos considers examples of the Monomyth.

It is a big question, and many of the issues I have touched on are open to considerable debate and discussion. And even though I consider Tish Pishtos (and indeed the Grey Sages) to have little real world utility, both can be extremely rewarding, although of course the maps of the Grey Sages do have practical application within their own limits.            

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