Where are we going?

The future development of Mythico-Ritual axes more complex than those of Human Law (the one we are living in) seems to point to narratives of open identity for different social, individual and collective masks. The history of our myths is the general narrative of the emergence of social personae, their associations and conflicts, in growing circles of action that have given rise to new identity masks. On this journey, Humans cross thresholds of identity transformation, liminal moments in which old identity masks are left behind and replaced by new ones more harmonious with the vital experience of the present. These moments of paleopsychology have been reflected in traditional mythical narratives. A fascinating moment in our development occurred when we stopped sacrificing on the altars of the Gods in search of a more Universal and unified principle on which to base the Universe.

In a hymn from the Rigveda (I.170), the god Indra, lord of the storm, dialogues with the rishi Agastya, and reproaches him for his intention of going beyond him, of not considering him as the final exomorphic representation of the Universe: the Supramental Intellect. It is a reflection on the limits of the King-God narratives, and the symbolic need to construct increasingly more complex myths, in this case, those of Universal Law, in order to give meaning to the experience of the Universe. The hymn expresses deep epistemological content from the start. The God Indra speaks:

Why, O my brother Agastya, art thou my friend, yet settest thy thought beyond me? For well do I know how to us thou willest not to give thy mind. (Mandala I.170)

The text has different layers of interpretation. I am not going to analyze here the epistemological reason for Indra's reproach, but only to show the threshold that the seer Agastya crosses from the anthropological point of view. The steps towards a materialization of human life, a final grounding in the physical human experience, follow the path towards the monism of the Universal Law that will open up the way to philosophy first and then to science. Indra asks Agastya why does he want to beyond him, beyond the Old Pantheon that proved to be so fruitful. The social context is the power dispute between the priestly and warrior castes in the first Vedic period (beginning in India around 1500 BC), when royal power begins to establish itself. The old myths are insufficient to organize the new economic actions that the Aryans carry out in the Gangetic plain, for which a more universal principle is needed but mantaining the basic social structures in order to avoid chaos.

The pastoral myths of Indra in the Rigveda do not include agrarian rebirth, and only later, with the Upanishads, will an ethical theory of dharma and reincarnation be developed that unifies the moral and natural order. The emergence of Universal Law, which absorbs the myth of Indra and the storm gods into a more complex symbolic representation, as at the time the myths of the creator-king-god absorbed the emotional constructions of meaning elaborated in the narrative planes of the anima mundi, meant the emergence of a semantic reference on which new, more complex forms of mythical axes were based. However the turbulent threshold of change threatens to produce a collapse.

In the Hymn of the Rigveda, Agastya finally understands that he cannot dismiss the past as an error at a stroke and agrees to continue on the path of Swar, an intellect that balances the world of life experience on earth and the world of the unintelligible and unknown that represents the principle that exists beyond the Gods, Brahman.

Seen from our historical moment, it is a story of identity transformation that sheds light upon our own liminal time. We cannot forget what we have been, nor simply despise the errors and miseries of yesterday, without producing a nihilistic, schizoid and self-repressed person, confronted with life. This type of priestly social person or social mask has already been constructed by the great religions in the figure of the sinful debtor, and proved to be a neurotic mythopoetics. However a total rupture of identity entails a danger of psychological disintegration, at the individual and collective level.

The anima mundi, the gods, universal law, human law, any of these narratives can claim a preferential position within mythopoetic evolution. The totems that populate the animated forests or the prairies, the gods of any of the pantheons that have reigned over the great civilizations, the theorems of mathematics that mimicked the abstract way of being of something invisible, the human will to establish from the earth The conditions of life, with their irrepressible desire to awaken to their own identity, can claim for themselves, as they have, to constitute the greatest achievement of our checkered history. To do so, they have to subordinate or deny the other mythical planes through a narrative of domination directed towards other axes. But in doing so, in separating themselves from the mythopoetic process with absolute determination, they reduce themselves to being no more than a partial achievement. As an alternative we could try something not yet done: a myth of open identity, voluntarily settled in our liminal condition: we are the soul of the world, and the gods themselves - in our best ideals and our darkest nightmares of domination -, and we are the thought of a cosmic order, as well as the desire of the free anthropos who designs his existence with the traces of a human science and an art overflowing with life. The narrative of continuous rationality does not stop at the mythical plane of human law: it opens backwards to common life with other species, and forwards to the semantic emergence of increasingly complex vital scenarios. This continuous process was never up to us, if by us we understand the narrative we have constructed of homo sapiens. It does not seem risky to affirm that if we disappeared as a species, life would once again find paths towards intelligence. In any case, we can contribute with some verses to the poem that life writes about stellar magma, to this action whose blind movements end up generating self-contained fleeting identities, immersed in a deep nostalgia for the Unknown.