9 - Mythopoetic Carnival

Mythopoetic means myth making. A grand voyage is undertaken, a quest is begun, we set sails on the Showmanship and seek a mythic continent, a land of tales, and characters, manifestations of the Showman's Craft. We seek a firm foundation in the lowest of the low. Arguments are made that this low ground is the Carnival. In all unearthing of meaning there is some digging needed, things will get a little dirty, but when the discoveries are resonant and fertile enough to plant a mythopoetic seed then perhaps we can grow an entire mythology of Showmanship. A mythological underground for the Circus and the Carnival.
This theme of myth creation is so expansive it will follow us for the next few episodes.

A few Show notes:

Joseph Campbell - Hero with a thousand Faces. Influence on Star Wars (& others).
Imposter Syndrome.
Owen Barfield - Evolution of Consciousness and words as fossilised reflections of consciousness.
Mythopoeia - J. R. R. Tolkien
The Inklings.
Freemasonry's two histories
Midway
Chicago World Fair
Bikini Kill - Carnival
Ferris wheel 

Transcript

Mythopoetic Carnival

I believe a healthy, strong culture, or community must have its own mythology. If must, seems too strong a statement, I would at least say that since shared mythology benefits and strengthens identity, creates meaning, it can foster a deeper resonance by helping us discover and determine shared goals and potential, create a sense of belonging both to a community and by understanding your    place and role in a community, it can create a sense of belonging in the world. So if a share mythology can have these kinds of benefits I’d say mythology is a good thing. 

It has been and continues to be a tremendous source of inspiration for creation of art. Mythology is everywhere and portrayed in every branch of art; paintings, statues, frescos, temples, dance, performance art, opera, and every type of music. It’s also a heavy source of influence on things like Marvel movies, Cohen Brother’s O Brother Where Art Thou, Harry Potter and through the work of Joseph Campbell and his book “Hero with a Thousand Faces”, mythology was a huge influence on Star Wars. These movies and the art in general draws on the fertile, and royalty free, imagery of mythology greek, norse, biblical, world folklore and much, much more. 

With so many cultures and communities having their own legends, stories and myths, to draw on my question is: What if there existed a mythology of Showmanship? Perhaps it does? Perhaps all we have to do is look. Come with me, let’s raise the sails of our Showmanship and set course for the interior, for the heart of our Craft.

Why Mythopetics?

The word Mythopoetic comes from greek and means myth making. It’s about giving rise to myths, or about myth creation. The following mythopoetic explorations of the underground of our Craft seeks to discover possible foundations, a landscape and language fertile enough to plant our mythopoetic seeds in. If we can find that I believe we have found a worthwhile first step towards to our mythopoetic project.

Seeking a mythology is valuable for my own personal development but also as a creative venture valuable to the community of showfolk at large. For my personal angle, having a firm foundation makes me a more stable person. I know I am not unique among performers in, at least occasionally, experiencing the imposter syndrome, the persistent inability to believe that my success is deserved or that its been legitimately achieved as a result of my own efforts or skills. This kind of doubt creeps up on me from inside myself, but I also get it from outside. From our audiences and the world comes the frequently asked question: Is this your real job? The question crystallises that whatever we do when we perform does not appear to be something one could do for a job, which after all is a serious affair. The impression our art gives off is frivolous, it does not, at first glance, appear to have any serious purpose or value. 

A big part of the Way of the Showman is about answering that question, and finding serious purpose and value in our vocation. Who am I? Who is the Showman? What's my role in the world. Understanding this, on as broad a front as possible , can help  me feel justified in my vocation and ultimately in my existence. I think this is something all artists struggle with in the dark nights of the soul. The answers to these kinds of questions has, for thousands of years been sought and found in mythology.

In a more practical way I also think a deep fertile understanding of my role as a Showman will be reflected in my artistic creations and make me a deeper and stronger performer. I explored this idea through the language of alchemy in the Soul Spectacle (episode 6). You can express these kinds of ideas and images in a show title or speak about it in the script of your act, it can also be expressed abstractly in movement, dance, or displays of skills. Further I don’t think these ideas needs to be explicitly stated to be perceived by an audience. You are always conveying much more than you are saying. A mythological foundation is present in subtle ways like in your very presence on stage the firmness of your conviction and sureness of yourself in the world. I believe the audience experiences this as depth in you as a creator and performer and that this is a key differences between a Novice and a Master Showman.

In these strange time, with the loss of crowds due to the pandemic this mythopoetic project is even more pertinent. Having a deep mythology or even just being aware that there are depths to what we do can serve as ballast and keel for the Showmanship which recently has been lying dead in the water from a lack of wind, or floating rudderless from a lack of any true and meaningful course. A mythology is ballast weight offsetting the fleeting lightness of the Showmanship and give it, and its crew of Showfolk, a new stability, whilst as a keel it will keep our ship from being blown sideways, and keep us on course wherever we might be heading.

Making myths is Making Meaning.

Human beings are creators of meaning. Artists in particular are creators of meaning. What meaning is is huge question, my account is far from comprehensive. As far as I see, meaning is what gets you up in the morning. What drives you. The little flame of enthusiasm that powers you. 

Meaning is not just something that exists out in the world for us to discover, but also, its not just something which exists inside us which we then impress upon the world. Meaning is something which exists between us and the world. Its created in the interaction between the outer world and our inner world. It is found along the Midway, something I will get back to, for now just place a pin at the heart of the Midway.

The human brain is one of the most complex things in the universe. It is also the source of all the meaning in the universe. Since meaning is a human phenomenon. We can see dance where a dog or an anteater sees only meaningless movement. Each tiny gesture, synchronous or asynchronous movement in a gloriously intertwined dance of two people can expresses interpersonal relationships or, by crikey, it could be about humanity in the end of the sixties becoming the first species to travel to another planetary body. The possibilities for expression, meaning and interpretation are boundless. Meaning and the systems it is woven into spins out of our hearts and minds and connects us deeply to the world, its contents, and to each other. It helps guiding us to what’s important in the chaos of sensory perceptions and mental constructs.

Mythopoetic Mindset

Before I dive into the Mythopoetic Carnival, or myth creation as a project for our community of Circus, Carnival, and Showfolk, I want to share a few thoughts on myths. It might not be something you have spent much time thinking about. As it happens I have, I’m no expert but I am an ardent enthusiast. I spent the entire last year of school, grade 12, writing a thesis on Norse Mythology. …Picture… The question I asked was how these oddball, and sometimes even funny stories of birds farting mead, and Mighty Thor dressing up as a woman, could serve as the religious and philosophical underpinnings of life for my Norwegian ancestors. The answers were manyfold and will be explored in the following episodes. But one of the lessons learnt, was that a mythology can take practically any form and serve its purpose of meaning creation. Just because its funny or weird doesn’t make it any less deep or powerful.

I don’t use the word myth lightly. A myth to me is not just a story of a crazy red haired viking riding in a chariot pulled by goats waving a hammer and causing thunder, like in the ancestral mythic tales of the Mighty Thor. Myths were the foundational underpinnings for real lives lived in the real world. Not just a philosophical or decoupled religious abstraction, but a deeply felt and experienced participation. It was the way, in a pre scientific time, that mankind expressed their deepest thoughts. The myths were the background upon which the foreground of every day events and processes occurred and was understood. 

I don’t believe the people who created the myths did so by simply going:

“Hey man, you know what would be a cool explanation for thunder?”

“No.”

“Wanna hear it?”

“Yeah.”

“ Get this. A dude with a hammer is riding through the sky in a chariot pulled by goats.”

“Dude. Totally.”

I believe there’s a whole lot more to the creation of myths than just making shit up. For one I’m not sure our deep time ancestors ever saw them as metaphors. I think they might have experienced the world differently and that the imagery they used was the best and most straight forward way for them to express it. Let’s explore this idea some more.

On even a surface level it's hard to really imagine how different the world must have appeared back in the early viking times. Cities where almost non existent, they would be towns, villages, or even hamlets by our standards. There were hardly any roads to speak of. Also very few straight edges. These days we see the world around us as perfect flat surfaces at right angles to each other. Glass, steel, concrete, all human made and imbued by human thought to suit human form and purpose. For most of us this is the majority of reality. It seems like nature, or anything other than what’s made by humans for humans, is something far away and almost abstract. Its even a little difficult to find, and when you find it, it can seem pointless and unimportant. Begging for improvement. Looking at vast stretches of nature, as a modern human being, the mental leap is not great to think how the land could be improved, or could be made to benefit us or perhaps more pertinently could benefit me. The natural world is not present in cities. It is far away. It requires you taking time out of your everyday life to seek it out. It involves a trip, a journey away from the everyday. 

In the past, the vastness of nature, the enormous scope and scale of natural forces was everywhere, and the human made, the artificial, was rare pockets in the immensity of the natural world. The seasons passing, one changing into the next was not abstract. It was the be all and end all. The changing temperatures and the flowing of clouds, the waxing and waning of shadows from mountains spoke loudly. If you did not pay attention you might not survive the winter. 

The world was a whole lot less busy. There was no advertising, few pictures, there was no constant chatter on radios, no music in the background unless someone, a person, an artist, was playing or singing, there were no recordings, and writing was a kind of magic transmission of meaning, only understood by the very few initiated into its secrets. There were no books, no tv, no internet, no phone, no electricity. 

It was a dark time. When night came, it was dark. Light came from fire and around each fire was a circle of light, you sat within this circle with your back against the dark, but always with one ear on the vast darkness behind you, and an eye on the darkness on the other side of the fire. Just on the other side of the light the dark stretched out as far ahead as it stretched behind. Darkness all the way back to - birth, and all the way ahead - to death. In times like this, with the vast, bright, un-light-polluted skies exploding with the brilliant pin pricks of stars above, darkness was the all encompassing primal state. Darkness held everything, all shapes, beings, mountains, even the flame of light burning before you. What was illuminated was tiny. Your whole town was like the pin prick of a single star in the vast expanse of all enveloping dark.

  It’s in these times the myths of the Norse Mythology came into being. I further imagine it possible that human beings of these times experienced the world differently. That their consciousness was not identical to ours. Of late, I have been reading the thoughts of Owen Barfield which express the idea that human consciousness has evolved. The idea is basically that in much the same way as a child’s consciousness gives them a different experience of the world, ancient humans also quite literally experienced the world differently. Barfield finds evidence of this many places, but as a philologist, he finds it in the changing meaning of words over time. As he sees it words are imbued with a kind of soul, which is their meaning. Each word is a tiny creation reflecting the consciousness of its creator.

"The full meanings of words are flashing, iridescent shapes like flames — ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness beneath them." 

Owen Barfield

From Poetic Diction

It lies outside the scope of this essay to go much further into this intriguing idea of the changes in meanings of words over time as artefacts of the way people experienced the world, of words as a kind of fossils of consciousness. This is all just to say that as I see it, the mental scope of myth creation is not a frivolous affair, and that the imagery of myths were a true reflection of how the world appeared to the myth creators.

 If the image of a pearl appears in a myth it’s not just about a pretty and valuable treasure. The image was expressed not just because of the surfaces of the image, but contains all the aspect of what a pearl is. A pearl is a very particular kind of treasure. Itss  created through the constant pain and irritation of an oyster. A grain of sand, an irritant, a disruptor of comfort triggers a process in a placid blob of flesh hiding inside its hard shell. Eventually it becomes a precious treasure, but only to a completely different kind of being. A species the oyster most likely does not even know exists, let alone understand in any meaningful way. All this and so much more come into play if, in a myth or legend, a pearl is found, or lost by a princess, god, or a little girl on an ocean going canoe. 

Each image, each persona, and each story in a myth is almost infinitely deep. It was chosen for this depth through a much closer participatory experience of the world, a time when humankind experienced the world in a more pictorial way. Each image resonated and was chosen, and told and retold for exactly this deep resonance. No doubt the myths were also shaped and reshaped in the telling and retelling, always deepening and expanding in their interconnected web of meaning. 

Much like life and reality itself, if you think you know all there is to know about a magnolia tree it’s only because you haven’t been paying close enough attention. The Dunning Kruger effect, the cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task tends to overestimate their ability, makes fools of us all, yours truly included. There is always depth to be found, more interconnectedness and meaning to connect to and discover. This is the Way.

Mythopoeia

As a tiny digression, Mythopoeia is also a narrative genre in modern literature and film where a fictional or artificial mythology is created by a writer. This use of the word traces back to the writer J. R. R. Tolkien and his poem mythopoeia. I also would say that if someone mentions an artificial mythology, complete with maps and even invented language, a lot of people would think of Tolkien. To add to the connections to us here, Tolkien was a close personal friend of Owen Barfield, the evolution of consciousness guy. They were part of a literary group in Oxford, England, called the Inklings which also included Charles Williams the poet and occult master, and C. S. Lewis of Narnia, the Lion Witch and the Wardrobe fame. That’s a circle of friends I’d liked to be invited into.

The tradition of invented deep history is also a big part of new religious movements, what is commonly, if slightly derogatorily, called cults. Almost all new religions, like Mormonism, and Scientology, even though they are relatively new creations, trace their histories and genealogies back into deep prehistory. So us showfolk are in good company on these explorations and myth creation.

History & Legend

The Showman of the Way belongs to two worlds. One is the world of history and the other of myth or legend. Its an outer and an inner world each with its own kind of history. This dual history, apart from being part of new religions is also alive and well in an organisation like the Freemasons, where there are two parallel histories of how the fraternity came into being. 

Historically the first Masonic Grand Lodge of London and Westminster, later known as the Grand Lodge of England, was founded on the 24th of June 1717, when four existing lodges met for a joint dinner. Their legendary or mythological history on the other hand goes much further back. It traces its origins to the master builders of the sacred Temple of Solomon in the old testament, and the building of the great cathedrals. These are two different kinds of history alive in the hearts and minds of Freemasons, speaking to different kinds of their imagination. Both expressing their own kinds of truths, understood and kept in mind side by side each enriching the other in the initiatory and quest for moral development as Free and Accepted Masons.

I believe the arts and Craft of Showmanship is a fundamental, if not, the fundamental human activity. What we do as Showmen we do because it has been resonant with humans for thousands of years. The circus arts, the carnival arts, and the kind of material worked with and presented by showmen ultimately arises from deep within ourselves. Presenting acts, rituals, and participatory symbolic gatherings for Others is a uniquely human pursuit, thus one hundred percent artificial, as the Illuminated Showman’s Manifesto which I read in the Soul Spectacle episode reminds us. Our Craft is connected to deep human longings, and needs, yet our Craft is artificial.  

Artificial is often used as a bad word these days, wrongfully vilified in my opinion. “It’s not natural,” people say of inventions like penicillin, vaccines, or the automobile. Whilst all it really means is that something has been created by human beings for human beings. 

Humans are natural creatures and the wing of a jumbo jet is an example of something created by human beings. I think we absolutely can understand the wing as a natural creation. It was shaped by humans to fit the real world around us. Once the perfect shape was found for the wing, that allowed air to be passed at speed around it, the wing could easily hold our weight. We made the wing, but the shape of it, or the potential for it existed in the world. Birds evolved their own variation of wings. Speaking of birds is there really that much difference in a human creating a wing and a bird creating a nest. Is the nest also artificial or unnatural like the human created wing?

Be that as it may with the birds, nests and wings, the Craft of the Showman is no more or less artificial than the Craft of the Free and Accepted Mason, masonry. Both are if not uniquely human activities, since birds both put on great displays of dance and also build nests, most notably, perhaps, the Australian Bowerbird, yet there is a great deal of distance in development and complexity from a bird’s bower and Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona. What I am saying here is that even though the Legendary history of Masonry is in a sense invented, or extrapolated in a mythopoetic way, the benefits for the ceremonial and ritual experiences of its initiations are very much real for the Masons. 

Since a bird making its nest for birds is part of the natural behaviour of birds I don’t think its a stretch to say that a human creating something for other humans is part of a humans natural behaviour. Making things up, inventing things and processes is natural behaviour for human beings. Creating a mythology, an essentially artificial activity, could be said to be part of natural human behaviour.

Plumbing the Depths both Inner and Outer

I like to explore different paths and ways of mythopoetic development, but for our time here I will be aiming mainly in on one general direction, the depth psychology angle. Depth psychology is many things to many people, but for our use here it is about that which lies beneath the surface of things. Our inner geography, what the popular imagination calls the unconscious, of which Carl Jung is a proponent. The other focus is imagination, something we spoke of more in-depth in the second, "Welcome to the New World” episode. The imagination is the source of stories, the place of mythology and where we can find kindling for our inspiration and participatory enthusiasm. Imagination is the wellspring of the great works of art and literature, and our own illustrious Craft.

Human beings share the outer world with the animals, plants and ecosystems. Our inner world is solely the domain of human beings. The Showman inhabits both, in different ways. In one he juggles his knives and balances on his hands, in the other, the world between, not completely made up, yet not real in the normal sense of the word, the Showman exists as something more than just a person performing his tricks on a market square. This is the realm of the archetypes. Archetypes are examples of persons, or processes so typical and all pervasive it has become something more. Something innate inside us all, like a kind of instinct. Something inside ourselves that allows us to recognise patterns and processes in the world.

Carl Jung thought of archetypes as a primitive mental image of such importance that it has become part of our phyche, forming our collective unconscious. Jung’s ideas are vast and multifaceted, but whether these images lies inherently buried deep in our psyche, or they are platonic ideas, like an independent, possibly even more real reality, or they are concepts and ideas which seep into us in our early preconscious states as infants and children through culture, is still debated, but for now it’s enough to acknowledge that the jester, magician, and trickster all finds their place amongst the archetypes together with the great mother, father, child, devil, god, and hero. The representatives of our Craft are well represented in the archetypal underground.

The Midway

The inner world warrants another mode of exploration than the outer. It also produces a different kind of knowledge, from which it is possible to derive wisdom. As we mentioned earlier, meaning is something which exists in the meeting of our inner and outer geographies. It is the world between, the Midway. 

In America Midway is another name for Carnival, what the British calls a Fair Ground. The term Midway came from the Chicago world fair or the Great Colombian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. It boasted the world’s first Ferris wheel, and the seductive sensation Little Egypt belly danced and sparked fires of enthusiasm and desire in the carnival patrons. All this was on display along the Midway Pleasance which led to the more respectable representation of human progress in the Women’s Building and then to the so called White City.

The Midway was a grand mix of fakes, hokum, and the genuinely educational. We’ll touch on the somewhat dubious nature of this edification in a bit. The impact of the Chicago world fair was so great that from then on the word midway became a more trendy word for carnival. Perhaps in a similar way to how today Cirque has a whole different ring in the public imagination than Circus. Thus, via the way between, the Midway, we arrive at the Carnival. 

Lowest of the low

As you can feel my stream of ideas and links is taking us towards the Carnival as a phenomenon. Why is our mythopoetic explorations leading towards this rag tag collection of rides, shows and attractions? In the popular imagination, and arguably also in the real world, carnivals are the lowest kind of dis plays of the arts and Craft of the Showman. It is a strange mix of people with the most diverse sets of skills or no skills at all, but for selling lottery tickets or running a shooting gallery. From movies and novels we know it’s the first place the police goes to when seeking runaways and any general wanted delinquents. This dark side is supremely well captured by the all girl punk band Bikini Kill in their song called Carnival.

“this is a song about the seedy underbelly of the carnival

The part that only the kids know about

this is a song about 16 year old girls giving head to

carnies for free rides and hits of pot

I wanna go. I wanna go

I wanna go to the carnival

But it costs 16 dollars yeah

I wanna go to the carnival

But I know it costs 16 dollars now

Round, round, round....

…I’ll win that Mötley Crew mirror

if it fucking kills me…”

The poetry of punk, direct, aggressive, and right to the dark heart of the matter. Perhaps it is not so surprising that in searching for foundations we have to dig deep. Digging implies dirt. We are unearthing the underground. The lowest of the low is not so far fetched as a foundation. If you find any firm ground in the lowest of the low, it could be bedrock. Any erection, cultural or architectural needs a firm foundation, the need for building your house on solid ground is advocated in both biblical mythology as well as in the fable of the three little pigs.

Bikini Kill’s Carnival is a place feared by every decent church going parent, but it attracts youth and the common people like moths to a flame. In the example of the Chicago World Fair, the midway apparently was the most popular attraction with two and a quarter million admissions. A further one and a half million of those hitched a ride on the brand new vertical rotating carousel of the Ferris wheel which was invented by George Washington Ferris. It attracted not just the riff riff and the working class, but the rich and fancy as well. The Carnival is alluring for the greater panoply of humanity. 

As a slight digression its worth noting that the carnival aspect, the Midway, of the Chicago Fair was only added later. The first director of the Midway had created “authentic villages” that were supposed to provide visitors glimpses of "primitive" cultures, in contrast with the “civilization" of the fairs “serious exhibits”. It was a push towards garnering enthusiasm for the relatively new scientific discipline of anthropology. The thinking of the time was reflecting a, in hindsight, wrongful hierarchical interpretation of a rise from barbarism, to savagery, to primitivism and all the way up to civilisation, which was represented by the glorious White City with all its incredible technological developments like electric light and automobiles. This fair really displayed the dawn of a new technological word. You could literally walk the ladder of progress and praise yourself lucky to be part of the culmination of civilisation. 

When the original midway director’s lessons in anthropology and human development failed to capture the excitement of the Crowds, a new director was quickly hired and soon a carnival of gargantuan proportions appeared. With it the very first appearance of one of the most iconic carnival attractions of all time, the Ferris Wheel. Visitors might have stopped at the different savage villages, where the Javanese village seems to have been outstanding, but the main attraction, as far as most visitors to the Midway was concerned, was not the anthropological insights, but the carnival entertainment. For the enjoyment and unbridled good times, few things can compete and connect like a good carnival. Excited by these exciting carnival displays the Crowds would endure a lecture on Edison’s latest invention or Nikola Tesla’s grand electrical displays, or the finer details of savage pygmy culture.

Most, if not all of the varieties of expressions of the Showman’s Craft are Lowbrow. Circus is also a “lowbrow” art form. By lowbrow I mean popular entertainment, for the people, the general public. It is unhindered by complex language, or abstract forms and disciplines that the audience must know to appreciate it. The manipulations of a juggler or tightrope walker, are intuitively, or viscerally appreciated. Visceral literally means gut experiences, as opposed to an intellectual experience. Our Craft’s currency is just, feel it in your gut excitement and good times. The directness of what a Showman presents in a circus, carnival, or anywhere else, makes it a popular entertainment. It’s for the people. The Crowd and their experience, their feelings and desires, are a very important part of the equation. The Very core!

A big part of the current circus industry, perhaps in particular the part of it which brands itself as “contemporary circus,” aims to lift circus out of the lowbrow, popular entertainment, and into the arena of fine art. I am very excited about aspects of this, I am always interested in any kind of art that punches upwards. This essay is not the time to fully go into whether our Craft is lowbrow or high art. But circus is, at its root popular entertainment. Yet, I have found, in the circus tradition that the Carnival is situated on a lower rung of the ladder of cultural development, another reason why the Carnival beckons in this search for foundations.

People say the Carnival panders to the lowest common denominators in humanity, but you could also say that the reason each particular attraction has become a carnival staple is exactly because, over time, it has proven to be something human beings enjoy. The rides, the sweet and salty fat-fried-foods, the games of chance, the girl shows and the carnival high divers performing leaps of death from super tall, flimsy, platforms into shallow pools of water, have become staple attractions of carnivals from Chicago, via London to Timbuktu, exactly because people are attracted to them. IT speaks to them directly.

In this way each attraction, game of chance, gambling, fortune telling, and dancing girl display, can be seen as the desires, interests and wants of human beings - made real. It’s a representation of something that comes from inside you which you now can interact with in the real world. A physical manifestation of something inner. Its a created, realised image, an idea made flesh. 

In this I see a link to the early pictorial myth creation of our early vikings. In their myths they connected their inner realities to the outer reality via pictorial creations. Odin the knowledge and wisdom seeking god who sacrificed one of his eyes to be able to see a different kind of knowledge, he got stabbed with a spear and hung from, Yggdrasil, the world tree for nine days, upon where he discovered language. This is a mythological strange loop where the picture-truth of the God king Odin goes through a sacrifice, and looses one eye, one way of seeing the world for a new one, through language, through the runes which was for the ancient Norse folk, their first written language. It’s the birth of a new way of interacting, and understanding the world, and also with each other. Writing, language, born from a mythopoetic wisdom seeker.

Coming back to the mythopoetic creation of a carnival attraction, in the not too distant past an attraction is presented by a Showman. He has an idea, he has a feeling that the feelings elicited by this idea made real will trigger feelings of interest and elation in others. Sometimes attractions turns out not to be attractive, just like there no doubt were gods of mythology which never made it far. A boring god, or one that went out of fashion. If the idea made real of the carnival attraction captures the popular imagination, like George Washington Ferris’ Wheel, becomes part of the cultural landscape. Very much like the myths which resonated became part of the spiritual landscape of a people. 

The Ferris wheel caught the attention and thus was spread around the world. It was recreated, each showman with the skills and enough faith in the attraction ripped off the idea and presented their own version of it at another carnival. Its reminiscent of how each preacher reading from the same book can get and maintain a congregation exactly because the congregation appreciates his particular way of telling the tales. 

A Ferris Wheel proprietor has an attraction where the preacher has the bible. The Ride is something which the people wants when they see or hear of it.  Each proprietor’s Ferris Wheel is subtly different. The source of excitement is different on different Ferris Wheels. Riding some wheels the enjoyment comes from the beauty and grand scale of the thing, like with the London Eye, for others, the more low end of the range, the excitement might come from the fear that every creak of the rusty spokes holding your dangling basket might be a sign that the whole crappy structure is collapsing. In the same way each preacher, each teller of the mythic tales is different, and their choice of tales and tellings can herald the sweet good news or the eschatological ends of every thing, by rain of fire and pandemic pestilence.

So ends part one of the Mythopoetic Carnival.

Hold onto these thoughts. We will look further into the deeper, archetypal powers and origins of Carnival attractions next week, in part two of our Mythopoetic explorations of the Carnival.