Barry and Maya Spector

Barry and Maya SpectorBarry and Maya SpectorBarry and Maya Spector

Barry and Maya Spector

Barry and Maya SpectorBarry and Maya SpectorBarry and Maya Spector
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    • Maya's Writing
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      • Grief Rituals
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  • Home
  • About
  • Maya's Writing
  • Barry's Writing
  • Ritual
    • SoulCollage®
    • Rumi's Caravan
    • Grief Rituals
    • Oral Traditions Salons
    • Men's Work
  • Events / Contact
  • Media

Barry's Writing

  

My writing and teaching look at cultural and political events from the perspectives of mythology, archetypal psychology and indigenous wisdom traditions. I offer big, provocative ideas written in plain English. My intention is to inspire you to think beyond conventional political, economic, historical, religious and even psychological analysis. I want you to think mythologically. 


What does this mean? It means to constantly interrogate our assumptions about self and society by looking at the narratives — the mythologies — that we take for granted. Sometimes we find that those narratives point us toward deeper, archetypal themes that we need to pursue in order to know ourselves. Other times we will discover that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves — or about others — no longer serve us and simply reinforce our sense of innocence.


I want to invite readers to get comfortable inhabiting the space between the polar opposites. One is the possibility of who we might become as we tell the new stories struggling to be born. The other is who we are now as a culture, and how are leaders embody our old, toxic stories. But only by dropping our default mode of naiveté, idealization and innocence and unblinkingly acknowledging the depths of the darkness can we open ourselves to the possibilities of real transformation.

An Introduction: Why Study Mythology?

Why Mythology (pdf)

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Winner of the 2011 PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award 


Conventional political, economic, sociological, 

religious and psychological explanations 

can no longer make sense of the madness 

we encounter on a daily basis. 


We need a new — or very old — way of thinking. 

We need a broader perspective that mythology offers us. 


You can order the book for $22.00 plus $3.00/shipping from Amazon or through Paypal.

Foreward

When political, economic and religious leaders no longer offer any solutions to the massive crises that confront us, it’s time to re-imagine who we are as individuals and as a nation. Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence shows how America regularly re-enacts old patterns that cause us to subvert our goals, miss the deeper meaning in events and, perhaps, fail to prevent our headlong slide into cultural collapse. But by looking at our history, politics and popular culture through the lenses of Greek mythology, indigenous wisdom and archetypal psychology, Barry Spector discovers new hope in very old ways of thinking.


To the Greeks, Dionysus was the god of paradox and extremes, of passion and masks, of ecstatic joy and vengeance, of tragic drama and of madness. But that was long ago. Or was it? After two millennia of Christianity and five hundred years of scientific rationalism, Dionysus and his modern substitutes persist in our imagination as images of “the Other.” He is everything that America has cast into the shadows: woman, race, nature and the body.


European settlers brought a legacy of puritanical intolerance to the New World. They developed literature, theology and political rhetoric that gradually coalesced into a mythology of divinely inspired new beginnings, heroic destiny and good intentions – the myth of American innocence. However, these stories covered over a legacy of racism and violent imperialism. Fear of the dark, Dionysian strangers at our doors – first Indians, then witches, then slaves and their descendants, then communists – both stimulated our anxieties and held them in check. Nearly four hundred years later, these mythic narratives have not lost their hold upon us. Now the fear of terrorism helps to define us as “not them.”


The Other provides a unique window into American history, and especially our current political madness. This irrepressible aspect of both soul and society may re-emerge at any moment, bringing either mass chaos or longed-for healing. The choice is up to us, because Dionysus is part of us.

Madness at the Gates of the City should appeal to anyone interested in myth, Classics, history, progressive politics or psychology. It will provide much new insight for people searching for new ways to understand how we behave in the world and what we might become.


-- Robert A. Johnson,  author of He, She, We, Ecstasy,  Transformation, Owning Your Own Shadow and Inner Work

Blurbs for the Book

  • Spector’s book is a strikingly imaginative rumination on our society...while we have had many critiques of contemporary America, his is unique in the way it draws upon the Greek gods to examine our present deities of war and greed...truly an original work.
 


 Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States


  • Our world lives, loves, suffers and triumphs by myth, often unseen and unconsidered. In the tradition of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, Barry Spector makes myths come alive; he helps us in the desperately important task of re-imagining our way.  


Jack Kornfield, 

author of A Path With Heart 


  • In this disturbing and evocative book, Barry Spector offers us a trenchant commentary on the ignorance, pathos and shadows residing in the American addiction to innocence. This is a work that should be read by anyone who wants to make a difference. 


Jean Houston, author of A Mythic Life, The Possible Human and The Hero and the Goddess

Barry Spector has opened a sealed door to a hidden world in the dungeons of Americana, where the god Dionysus dwells. But Dionysus doesn’t wait below patiently: he escapes every day, in music, in dance, in drama, frenzy and myth, sawing through cold brick and the fevered forefront of consciousness. Madness at the Gates of the City explores that underworld of national repression and exhumes ancient gods of the Western psyche that were once thought dead and gone to promote the healing balms of balance against the dystopian present of militarism, consumerism, racism and empire. Spector imagines a New America, one at peace with itself, its real self, not its imagined self. 


Mumia Abu-Jamal, author of Jailhouse Lawyers and Live from Death Row

Madness at the Gates of the City is at once an indictment of America’s obsession with innocence and a treatise on tragedy and myth. Provocative and challenging, it echoes with penetrating ideas and mythic nuances. 


 Michael Meade, author of The World Behind the World; The Water of Life: Initiation and the Tempering of the Soul; and Fate and Destiny



Barry Spector’s Madness At The Gates Of The City explores how Euripides’ Bacchae, written to warn his late 5th century Athenian compatriots of the internal destructive forces threatening their beloved city, might help us look more honestly at the false innocence that sustains our illusions about the American dream and prevents our acknowledging its dark underside. Yet, the book ends with a beautifully voiced “story that could be true”: we could lift these repressive blinders, we could learn to hear and heed an archetypal cry for initiation into a way of being in the world that honors the life-giving energies the Greeks called by the name Dionysos. 


Christine Downing, past president of the American Academy of Religion, author of The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine

Other Writings

-- Published Articles

  

Dionysus, Revenge and the Woman Behind the Burkha


Myth, Memory and the National Mall


Sacrifice of the Children in Pan’s Labyrinth


The Mythological Roots of American Libertarianism, in Uncivil Liberties: Deconstructing Libertarianism, by the Praxis Peace Institute: https://praxispeace.org/book

-- Subscribe to my Blog: www.madnessatthegates.wordpress.com


— A Dark Salvation

— A Death and an Apology

— A Few Thoughts on the Petreus Affair

— A Mythologist Looks at the 2016 Election

— A Mythologist Looks at the 2020 Election

-- A Mythologist Looks at the 2024 Election

— A Poem for the Losers

— A Tale of Two Families

— A Vacation in Chaos

— A Truce for Christmas

— Academic Gatekeepers

— Affirmative Action for Whites

— All Shook Up: The American Dionysus

-- American Dualities

— American Exceptionalism 

— America is Coming to Help! 

— American Witch-hunt

— An Anniversary to Ponder

— An Epiphany Story

— An Indigenous Perspective on the Welfare State

— Between the Worlds

— Black Swans and White Vultures

— Blaming the Victim

— Breathing Together: QAnon and New Age Thinking

— Creative Etymology

— Cultural Appropriation?

— Death, Where is Thy Sting? 

— Deconstructing a Gatekeeper

— Did the South Win the Civil War?

— Didn’t He Ramble? A New Orleans Jazz Funeral

— Dionysus Looks at Mental Illness

— Do Black Lives Really Matter?

— Driving Dixie Down

— Evolution of a Song

— False Equivalencies

— Funny Guys, Fake News and Gatekeepers

— Gingrich and His Masks

— Grading the President

— Grief and Remembrance in Greece

— Hands up, Don’t Shoot: The Sacrifice of American Dionysus

— How — and Why — to Start A War

— How to Lead a Grief Ritual

— Initiation Weekend

— John F. Kennedy and America’s Obsession with Innocence

— Kind of a Circle

— Looking at Lincoln

— Male Initiation and the Mother in Greek Myth

— March Madness: The Attack on Libya

— Mexico’s Mother Goddess

— Military Madness

— Myth, Memory and the National Mall

— Normalizing Trump

— Obama and the Myth of Innocence

— Obama’s Tears

— Obama’s War On Syria

— Odyssey in Southeastern Mexico, 1989

— Old White Men: Historians as the Gatekeepers of American Myth

— On the Tenth Anniversary of 9-11

— Paying Attention

— Porn

— Privilege

— Protest, Grief and Memory in Mexico

— Reality Show Initiations

— Redeeming the World

— Sacrilicious!

— Shock and Awe

— Some Thoughts on the Royal Wedding

— Stories We Tell Ourselves About Barack Obama

— Thank You For Your Service

— The Background to Our Day of the Dead Ritual

— The Banality of Evil

— The Bin Laden Side Show

— The Civil Rights Movement in American Myth

— The Con Man: An American Archetype

— The Dancing Ground at the End of the World

— The Dionysian Moment. Trump Lets the Dogs Out

— The End of the World

— The Face of the Empire

— The Family Curse

— The Flag and the Hummer — How We Display Ourselves

— The Greatest Generation

— The Hero Must Die

— The Innocent American is the Violent American

— The Iran Nuclear Deal

— The Joys (and Curious Political Implications) of Reciting Poetry

— The Mystery in the Message

— The Myth of Immigration

— The Myth of Israeli Innocence

— The Myth of the Good War

— The Mythic Foundations of Libertarianism

— The Mythic Sources of White Rage

— The Other is You; Maybe Even More You than You are

— The Outside Agitator

— The Parable of the Chickens

— The Paranoid Imagination

— The Predator

— The Presidential Dilemma

— The Prince of Flowers

— The Race Card

— The Ritual of the Presidential Debates

— The Royal Wedding

— The Sandy Hook Murders, Innocence and Race in America

— The Secret of Their Appeal

— The Singing Policeman

— The Sixth Gate of Grief

— The Spell of the Mother

— The True Story of the Unconscious Emissary

— The Two Great Myths of the 20th Century

— The Weeping Woman

— To Sacrifice Everything: A Hidden Life

— Uncivil Liberties

– Veterans' Day -- Or "Sacrifice of the Children Day"?

— We are the Ones We Fear

— We Contain Multitudes

— We Like to Watch

— Well, Don’t You Know? 

— What If We Allowed That To Happen?

— What will the New Myths Be?

— Who is an American?

— Why Are Americans So Freaking Crazy?

— Zero Dark Thirty is a CIA Recruitment Film

Five Books on American Innocence

https://shepherd.com/best-books/american-addiction-to-innocence


The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: and Other Writings

By Max Weber, Peter Baehr + 1 more ⌄


This country was settled primarily by Puritan extremists who imprinted their deep distrust of the body’s needs onto future generations. The Calvinist obsession with sin and predestination led to a uniquely American situation. As wealth became a sign of grace, poverty indicated moral failure.

Weber’s classic book describes the process in which a perspective that began in renunciation was transformed into the drive to work incessantly in the pursuit of worldly success and, eventually, conspicuous consumption. As the strictly religious fervor dissipated over time, the competitive quest for efficiency, productivity, wealth, and the self-validation they symbolized remained and became our most fundamental value.

What others would later call the “American Dream” endures because, like no other myth, it promises fulfillment both in this world and the next. This helped me understand our obsession with individualism and why America ignores or mistreats many of its children simply because their parents are poor.


The American Monomyth

By Robert Jewett, John Shelton Lawrence


My introduction to world mythology was Joseph Campbell, who described a nearly universal narrative – or monomyth – in which a young man (such as Christ, Percival, or the Buddha) ventures from his land, defeats opponents or temptations and returns with a critical gift for his people.

America, however, inverted this myth in profoundly important ways. In our story, repeated over three centuries in thousands of sermons, novels, movies, television, and video games, an innocent and racially pure community is threatened by evil (usually non-white).

When democratic institutions fail to suppress the threat, a selfless superhero arrives – from elsewhere – to defeat the villains and restore the community to harmony. Then, however, disdaining the feminine values of community and relationship, this hero disappears (often into the West).

I realized that he is the model for both our ideas of distant fathering as well as our unshakable belief in American exceptionalism, a nation divinely ordained to save the world, often by utilizing extreme violence.


Rituals Of Blood: The Consequences Of Slavery In Two American Centuries

By Orlando Patterson


This Black sociologist demands that we take a deep look into the religious basis of American racism.

Of 5,000 cases of lynching reported between 1880 and 1930, at least 40% functioned as actual human sacrifices, very large communal rituals that identified certain individuals as the source of the community’s problems and eliminated them. The sacrifice created a compact between the people and their deities, expiating their sins and reinforcing their values.

"The victim mediated between the sacred and the profane...the burning cross distilled it all: sacrificed Negro joined by the torch with sacrificed Christ, burnt together and discarded...” Well into the 20th century, “The cross – Christianity’s central symbol of Christ’s sacrificial death – became identified with the crucifixion of the Negro.” Forced to carry all the projections of the white unconscious, the Black man became the American Dionysus.

Patterson observes that in recent generations the stereotype of America’s internal “Other” has expanded to include aspects of which white America is now nervously envious. This ultimate Dionysian symbol crosses boundaries and dissolves them. “The Afro-American male body – as superathlete, as irresistible entertainer...as sexual outlaw, as gangster.”


Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Totem Rituals and the American Flag

By Carolyn Marvin, David W. Ingle


This is the scariest book I have ever read. The authors, a communications professor and a psychologist (and veteran), argue that nationalism is the most powerful religion in the United States.

The doctrine that provides the central experience of Christian faith is the sacrifice of an irreplaceable son by an all-powerful father whose will it was that the son should die violently. In the modern world, and especially in America, nationalism has taken on and replicated this mythic function.

What keeps the group together and makes us feel unified is not the sacrifice of the enemy but the sacrifice of the very best of our own. Through successful sacrifice (when enough of our young men are killed), internal hostilities are discharged and the group is re-unified. Sacrifice restores the authority of the nation/god and reconsolidates the group.

This is why we die for the flag, commit our children to do so, and when society seems to be collapsing, why we thrill to the possibility of another war. Then the cycle begins again.

Explore this book 


Shadow Dancing in the USA

By Michael Ventura


This journalist, screenwriter, and novelist is well-versed in psychology, mythology, history, and musicology. His essay in this book, Hear That Long Snake Moan, is the single best piece of non-fiction I have ever read, and it inspired me to write my book.

Our disease – the Western divorce of consciousness from flesh – appears as consumerism, environmental degradation, fundamentalism, perpetual war, genocide, and racism. Yet, mysteriously, it may be possible that the terrible uprooting and enslavement of some fifty million black people over three centuries actually initiated a great healing process.

For all its sorrows, the twentieth century saw periods when Dionysian madness seized the Apollonian mind in its flight from the body and brought it back to Earth. African-American music fundamentally altered America and began the slow process of cleaning out the festering wounds underlying puritanism, nationalism, and materialism. We have a long way to go, but Ventura has charted the territory. One, two, three, four, let’s dance!

Audio

Barry is interviewed by Bonnie Bright of the Depth Psychology Alliance

Barry is interviewed by Caroline Casey, KPFA

Barry is interviewed by Debbie Mandel

Barry is interviewed by David Swanson

Barry and Maya are interviewed by Carolyn Baker (video)

Recommended Readings

A Mythology of Bullets

Blood Sacrifice and the Nation

Chomsky: A Propaganda Model

Chomsky: What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream?

Hear That Long Snake Moan

The Mystery of Goya’s Saturn

The Origins of War in Child Abuse

This Aint About Us: Whites Must Eradicate White Supremacy

Tim Wise

White Fragility


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