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This Strange Engine - Man of a Thousand Faces
Additionally, this is a John Helmer lyric. The following information comes from the Princeton University Press [1949], who publish the book. Campbell, J: Hero with a Thousand Faces (Mythos Series): "Despite their infinite variety of incident, setting, and costume, the myths of the world offer only a limited number of responses to the riddle of life. In this best-selling volume, Joseph Campbell presents the composite hero. Through Campbell's eyes, we see Apollo, the Frog King of the fairy tale, Wotan, the Buddha, and numerous other protagonists of folklore and religion enacting simultaneously the various phases of their common story. "Campbell begins his interpretation of these timeless symbols by examining their relationship to those rediscovered in dreams by depth psychology. The psychological view is then compared with the words of such spiritual leaders as Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Lao-tse, and the "Old Men" of the Australian tribes. From behind a thousand faces, the single hero emerges, archetype of all myth." 'A little piece of me in every part I take' 'I hold the tape for a thousand races' 'A different point of view in every speech I
make' 'Cut me a piece of my divided soul' Here is a small extract: "The Phædrus, as the first dialogue of the central trilogy on the soul, deals with the "nature (phusis)" of the soul, as opposed to its behaviour (Republic) or destiny (Phædo). And indeed, nature is more akin to the lower part of the soul ; behaviour depends in the end on the choices of the middle part ; and destiny chiefly concerns the "immortal" part of the soul, the logos. But this doesn't mean that the Phædrus only deals with the lower part of the soul, the epithumiai, while the two other dialogues would deal each with another part. Quite the contrary : each one looks at the whole soul, only from its specific standpoint. "The noblest part of the soul is the logos. Logos is a Greek word loaded with multiple meanings. As a part of the soul, it stands for "reason". But it is the very same word that may also mean "speech" ! And so is it that logos-speech may be viewed as the "materialization" of logos-reason, its "visible" (or rather "audible", but in any event perceptible by the senses) dimension, the side of it that most relates to "nature", the "physical" world. This is the reason why a dialogue on the "nature" of the soul must deal with speech. "On the other hand, the part of the soul most closely related to "nature", to the visible world, is the epithumiai, the desires, passions, appetites, whose common driving force is the thirst for pleasure fuelled in each case by some sort of "love", eros. What a better topic then, to investigate the nature of the soul, than eros, and more precisely, logoi on eros, speeches on love that will find their justification, their rationale (another meaning of logos) in a speech on speeches, a logos on logoi ?!... "And indeed, starting from a written (that is, one step deeper in "matter") speech by a professional speech-writer (Lysias) who attempts to satisfy his erotic drive by denying love as the "matter" of his investigation, Socrates will develop three "speeches" that each climb one step higher in the soul. A first speech shows what love might mean to a soul limited to epithumiai. A second one brings about the choice of lifestyle a soul has to make between looking down toward the earth and looking up toward gods and "ideas", and it gives a vivid image of this situation by comparing the soul to a winged chariot whose charioteer has to deal with two quite different horses, one tractable and the other stubborn. The third "speech" is no longer a continuous speech, but a dialogue that gives the rules of a proper use of logos through the criticism of the earlier speeches and of masters of rhetoric of the time. "From the standpoint of setting, in order to deal with the nature of the soul, Plato moves Socrates (and us) out of the city in the middle of green nature and takes ample time to help us appreciate the scenery in one of his most "scenic" dialogues. And because nature is what is immediately available to our senses, he writes a direct dialogue which plunges us up front in a discussion between Socrates and Phædrus, and we get all the information about the surroundings -- quite a lot at that : time, place, scenery, weather, vegetation, ... - only from the logos of the two characters. And he tries to talk to all parts of our soul by masterfully mixing cunning, myth and poetry, vivid images and tight dialectic in a carefully built structure. " 'Cry me a river, call it rock and roll' 'Give me an attitude and watch me make it lie' 'Pass me a microphone-I need to testify' 'You see my face in the stones of the
Parthenon' "When the Parthenon was built between 447BC and 432BC, three sets of sculptures, the metopes, the frieze and the pediments, were created to adorn it. Of these, the metopes and the frieze were part of the structure of the Parthenon itself. They were not carved first and then put in place, high up on the Parthenon, but were carved on the sides of the Parthenon itself after it had been constructed. "The metopes were individual sculptures in high relief. There were 92 metopes, 32 on each side and 14 at each end and each metope was separated from its neighbours by a simple architectural decoration called a triglyph, The metopes were placed around the building, above the outside row of columns and showed various mythical battles. The north side showed scenes from the Trojan war; the south side showed a battle between the Greeks and the Centaurs - part man, part horse; the east side showed the Olympian gods fighting giants and the west side showed a battle between Greeks and Amazons. "The frieze, 160 metres long, was placed above the inner row of columns, so it was not so prominently displayed. It is one long, continuous sculpture in low relief, showing the procession to the temple at the Panathenaic festival. "At either end of the temple, in the large triangular space, the pediment statues in the round were placed. These were designed to fill the space so that those at the highest point of the triangle are enormous. The pediment sculptures have been so badly damaged that we only know what they represent because of the writings of the Greek writer and traveller Pausanias, who was active around 150 AD. According to him, the sculptures in the east pediment represent the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus and the sculptures in the west pediment represent the struggle between Athena and Poseidon for the land of Attica. "The real glory of the temple, however, was housed inside. The statue of the goddess Athena was about 40 feet (12 metres) high, and gold and ivory was used to decorate it. This statue was damaged by fire as early as 200BC and it is thought that a new statue replaced it in 165-160BC. Unlike the Parthenon Marbles, the statue did not survive antiquity. "Not all of the Parthenon Marbles, however, survive down to the present day. There were originally 115 panels in the frieze. Of these, ninety-four still exist, either intact or broken. Thirty six are in Athens, fifty-six are in the British Museum and one is in the Louvre. Of the original ninety-two metopes, thirty-nine are in Athens and fifteen are in London. Seventeen pedimental statues, including a caryatid and a column from the Erechtheion are also in the British Museum. So the Parthenon Marbles are almost equally divided -- half in London and half in Athens. "It is precisely because the surviving sculptures are to be found in two countries 1500 miles apart that the Greek government has requested the return of the Parthenon Marbles from the British Museum so that they can be reunited in one collection, in a museum to be built at the foot of the Acropolis Hill on which the remains of the Parthenon temple stand." What this article fails to mention is that the reason the marbles were taken to Britain is that in the 30s (?)Lord Elgin found that the marbles were being stolen, broken or otherwise damaged through lack of care, and that the Greek authorities were being negligent in their care and took them away. The British examples are often called the Elgin Marbles. There is an on-going battle between the British and Greek governments to get the Marbles returned. 'You hear my song in the babble of Babylon'
'I'm the man of a thousand riches' 'Be my guest at the feast of Satyricon' Satyrs were the servant of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine - he is a version of the Greek Dionysus. 'You spend the money that my logo's printed
on' 'I stole a fire but it burned up much too
soon' 'I took a leap and I landed on the moon' '...it looks like CNN' 'Speak to a woman with a fatal charm of a
snake' 'And when I talk to God I know he'll
understand'
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Introduction:
In an interview with Ed Sciaky from
WMMR, 93.3 in Philadelphia, Steve Hogarth said:
"This was based on a book called Hero of a
Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell who is America's foremost knowledge
on mysticism and psychology. And it's quite a heavy book which attempts to
link Freud and his thoughts and Jung and his philosophies with tribalism,
rights of passage. He's really talking about man's need to function on a
tribal or mystical level and how that's a psychological need as well as a
spiritual need. That song takes in conspiracy theory, masonry, secret
society, all the way from the Holy Grail in the Knights Templar to some of
the conspiracy theories that still go around in the modern age. And the need
in all cultures in all parts of the world and at different times to worship
similar symbols and how similar Gods keep on turning up. So it's quite a
heavy book. It addresses heroism really, and the need for a hero in every
culture in society. That's what that one's about."