David Breeden is speaking all week about the psychological images that become embedded in talking about how the mind works..

Transcription:

Hello, I’m David Breeden, I’m the senior minister at First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically humanist congregation. And this is Coffee and wisdom. This week we’ve been looking at dancing in the chapel, perilous at an old literary trope that has taken on all kinds of meanings. As we have discovered, it all begins, at least in the English language and as far as we know, because there may be some lost French texts that preceded this, but it all begins in fourteen eighty five with Lamport Dorotka by Thomas Mallery. A Night in Prison in London and the title of one chapter, Chapter 15, is How Sir Lancelot Came into the Chapel Perilous and Gachet there of a dead corpse, a piece of cloth and a sword. And I did share early in the week how this is written. It’s very flat. Not a lot of excitement going on in the in the text, but that is where it all starts in the English language. Nowadays, however, through an odd but traceable as we’ve done this week, a series of events, the Chapel Palace has become a meme tied to the hero’s journey, conspiracy theories, the occult and neo shamanism, and to the point that someone nowadays can ask for a lecture. Is society itself now trapped in chapel perilous? One of the things that I should point out about Chapel Perilous is that it is like that because that’s the way romance languages work.The adjective is nearly always after the noun. So chapel peerless in contemporary English, it would be peerless chapel. But that just doesn’t sound as cool, does it? And so it retains the romance language construction there. I went through Joseph Campbell very quickly, a constructivist from the midnight twentieth century, the hero with a thousand faces. His book from the nineteen fifties is very famous and still used as a textbook for teaching plot, not for a specifically spiritual, actual spiritual journeys, but for the idea of how to construct a plot. Joseph Campbell says this in that book, The Journey of the Hero is about the courage to seek the depths, the image of creative rebirth, the eternal cycle of change within us, the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds in the original sense of the word to distant ideas. The spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity always the one shapeshifting, yet marvelously constant story that we find. So you see here that Campbell is conflating several ideas. The hero journey. But the hero journey, in his estimation any way, also is a spiritual journey. And this becomes part of the chapel. Perilous story, one of the works of art that comes directly out of the hero with a thousand faces.Joseph Campbell was a consultant on the film, was the original trilogy of the Star Wars cycle. And specifically, we can see this in the Planet Digable Sequence in which Luke goes down into a very, very scary cave, fights with Darth Vader and kills Darth Vader, only to find that he has decapitated himself in a single combat. That, of course, is very much part of the chapel. Perilous story that you had, that your real fears are what you create in your own mind. And so very it looks perhaps strange to people who don’t understand or haven’t read about the Chapel Palace motif, but it makes perfect sense for those who know how this works. I should mention the Dego about a cave snake, the plans for this down at the bottom. Right. It looks a lot like a medieval dragon. The only thing it’s lacking there and from medieval dragon illustrations is legs. So it’s it’s a dragon with that left,