Alright, I’ve been holding out on this blog with a compilation of Western marriage practices (having tried to organize these in MS Word in a doc accessible only to me does no service to public research, I finally realized).

When looking at most of the rituals and practices, archetypes and cliches we Westerners associate in our minds with a contemporary visualization and manifestation of the “Wedding,” a number of very simple images appear - white, flowers, feasts/parties/receptions, honeymoons, the Church, vows, bridal parades (with best men and bridesmaids), etc. - all things that paint a portrait of innocence, happiness, and eternal union. If you’re having a difficult time thinking of wedding imagery, take a peek at the opening stage direction of Big Love and you’ll see Mee describing a very elaborate installation for his vision of a set design drenched in what us Westerners like to incorporate into our marriage celebrations.
Interestingly enough, the majority of images and symbols dig their roots into the era of Medieval Christianity as fertilized by ancient pagan practices meant to ward off superstition and evil spirits. In researching wedding practices, I’ve found that the majority of timeless symbolic actions and gestures bound to Weddings were all originally intended to fend off inauspicious spirits that were thought to haunt every walk of life. By warding them off, we bless our brides and grooms with longlasting (and of course, fertile) unions.
Currently, I’m making my way through a fantastic place to start for any spelunking for research into the meaning of the traditional wedding: The Family in the Western World from the Black Death to the Industrial Age by Beatric Gottlieb (Oxford University Press, USA July 28, 1994). With a title as cheery as that, I knew I’d find some wonderful stuff buried in its pages.
While I make my way through this tome for information, I’ll give an outline of a number of traditions that are fairly easy to find definitions for on internet resources. A summary of Gottlieb’s research will show up in the coming weeks.

*More to come…post under way*

So, after spending more than a fair share of time figuring out the nooks and crannies of tumblr.com, I present to you now that small promise of mine made a few days ago: excerpts from The Power of Myth (Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, First Anchor Books Edition, July 1991) on what exactly marriage might be to us as humans - I’ve bolded a few things that should stand out.

Pgs 5-8

“CAMPBELL: Read Myths. They teach you that you can turn inward, and you begin to get the message of the symbols. Read other people’s myths, not those of your own religion, because you tend to interpret your own religion in terms of facts - but if you read the other ones, you begin to get the message. Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive. It tells you what the experience is. Marriage, for example. What is marriage? The myth tells us what it is. It’s the reunion of the separated duad. Originally you were one. You are now two in the world but the recognition of the spiritual identity is what marriage is. It’s different from a love affair. It has nothing to do with that. It’s another mythological plan of experience. When people get married because they think it’s a long-time love affair, they’ll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is recognition of a spiritual identity. If we live a proper life, if our minds are on the right qualities in regarding the person of the opposite sex, we will find our proper male or female counterpart. But if we are distracted by certain sensuous interests, we’ll marry the wrong person. By marrying the right person, we reconstruct the image of the incarnate God, and that’s what marriage is.

MOYERS: The right person? How does one choose the right person?

CAMPBELL: Your heart tells you. It ought to.

MOYERS: Your inner being.

CAMPBELL: That’s the mystery.

MOYERS: You recognize your other self.

CAMPBELL: Well, I don’t know, but there’s a flash that comes, and something in you that knows this is the one.

MOYERS: If marriage is this reunion of the self with the self, with the male or female grounding of ourselves, why is it that marriage is so precarious in our modern society?

CAMPBELL: Because it’s not regarded as a marriage. I would say that if the marriage isn’t a first priority in your life, you’re not married. The marriage means the two that are one, the two become on flesh. If the marriage lasts long enough, and if you are acquiescing constantly to it instead of to individual personal whim, you come to realize that that is true - the two really are one.

MOYERS: One not only biologically but spiritually.

CAMPBELL: Primarily spiritually. The biological is the distraction that may lead you to the wrong identification.

MOYERS: Then the necessary function of marriage, perpetuating ourselves in children, is not the primary one.

CAMPBELL: No, that’s really just the elementary aspect of marriage. There are two completely different stages of marriage. First is the youthful marriage following the wonderful impulse that nature has given us in the interplay of the sexes biologically in order to produce children. But there comes a time when the child graduates from the family and the couple is left. I’ve been amazed at the number of my friends who in their forties or fifties go apart. They have had a perfectly decent life together with the child, but they interpreted their union in terms of their relationship through the child. They did not interpret it in terms of their own personal relationship to each other.
Marriage is a relationship. When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you’re sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship. The Chinese image of the Tao, with the dark and light interacting - that’s the relationship of yang and yin, male and female, which is what marriage is. And that’s what you have become when you have married. You’re no longer this one alone; your identity is in a relationship. Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which the two have become one.

MOYERS: So marriage is utterly incompatible with the idea of doing one’s own thing.

CAMPBELL: It’s not simply one’s own thing, you see. It is, in a sense, doing one’s own thing, but the one isn’t just you, it’s the two together as one. And that’s a purely mythological image signifying the sacrifice of the visible entry for a transcendent good. This si something that becomes beautifully realized in the second stage of marriage, what I call the alchemical stage, of the two experiencing that they are one. If they are still living as they were in the primary stage of marriage, they will go apart when their children leave. Daddy will fall in love with some little nubile girl and run off, and Mother will be left with an empty house and heart, and will have to work it out on her own, in her own way.

MOYERS: That’s because we don’t understand the two levels of marriage.

CAMPBELL: You don’t make a commitment.

MOYERS: We presume to - we make a commitment for better or for worse.

CAMPBELL: That’s the remnant of a ritual.

MOYERS: And the ritual has lost its force. The ritual that once conveyed an inner reality is now merely form. And that’s true in the rituals of society and in the personal rituals of marriage and religion.

CAMPBELL: How many people before marriage receive spiritual instruction as to what the marriage means? You can stand up in front of a judge and in ten minutes get married. The marriage ceremony in India lasts three days. That couple is glued.

MOYERS: You’re saying that marriage is not just a social arrangement, it’s a spiritual exercise.

CAMPBELL: It’s primarily a spiritual exercise, and the society is supposed to help us have the realization. Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in service of society, you have a monster state, and that’s what is threatening the world at this minute.”

Pg 58

“CAMPBELL: The ultimate word in our English language for that which is transecendent is God. But then you have a concept, don’t you see? You think of God as the father. Now, in religions where the god or creator is the mother, the whole world is her body. There is nowhere else. The male god is usually somewhere else. But male and female are two aspects of one principle. The division of life into sexes was a late division. Biologically, the amoeba isn’t male and female. The early cells are just cells. They divide and become two by asexual reproduction. I don’t know at what levels sexuality comes in, but it’s late. That’s why it’s absurd to speak of God as of either this sex or that sex. The divine power is antecendent to sexual separation.

MOYERS: But isn’t the only way a human being can try to grope with this immense idea to assign it a language that he or she understands? God, he, God, she-

CAMPBELL: Yes, but you don’t understand it if you think it is a he or a she. The he or a she is a springboard to spring you into the transcendent, and transcendent means to “transcend,” to go past duality. Everything in the field of time and space is dual. The incarnation appears either as male or as female, and each of us is the incarnation of God. You’re born in only one aspect of your actual metaphysical duality, you might say. This is represented in the mystery religions, where an individual goes through a series of initiations opening him out inside into a deeper and deeper depth of himself, and there ome a moment when he realizes that he is both mortal and immortal, both male and female.”

(And this following one is just a fun description of a Bushmen ritual that relies heavily on a demonstration of the sexes)

Pgs 107-8

“MOYERS: And ecstasy is a part of it.

CAMPBELL: It is.

MOYERS: The trance dance, for example, in the Bushmen society.

CAMPBELL: Now, there’s a fantastic exampls of something. The Bushmen live in a desert world. It’s a very hard life, a life of great, great tension. The male and female sexes are, in a disciplined way, separate. Only in the dance do the two come together. And they come together this way. The women sit in a circle or in a little group and beat their thighs, setting a pace for the men dancing around them. The women are the center around which the men dance. And they control the dance and what goes on with the men through their own singing and beating of the thighs.

MOYERS: What’s the significance, that the woman is controlling the dance?

CAMPBELL: Well, the woman is life, and the man is the servant of life. That’s the basic ideas in these things. During the course of the circling, which they do all night long, one of the men will suddenly pass out. He experiences what we might call a possession. But it is described as a flash, a kind of thunderbolt or lightning bolt, which passes from the pelvic area right up the spine into the head.”

So, alright, we obviously have a couple things to address here, as well as a number of things to take away from just these excerpts on the topic marriage and the interaction of the sexes.
While the first section posted irks me every time I read over it (indeed, a number of things about Campbell’s voice and consideration of lifetsyle choices throughout the entire book get under my skin easily), I remind myself as I plough through his theory that he speaks in terms of the mythological and traditions running from that conduit. With that in mind, we must remember that his conversations on marriage arise from myths used to teach the value of ritual and the act, and those myths rarely introduce marriage as a union between anything other than man and woman. If we go back over this section, it’s easy to pick up that humans developed marriage as a union between male and female because they are, in the ancient mind, the two biological halves of a whole spiritual being separated by life. Many times over through the book, Campbell brings up the observation that mythology is all about opposites - good and evil, male and female, etc. -and these are the stories that we have to turn to in order to learn from the experience of our ancient ancestors. Certainly, I do not believe that Campbell is speaking out against Gay Marriage rights, but is emphasizing the spiritual importance of entering into a union with the counterpart with whom one feels s/he experiences wholeness of being (but of course this is my assumption - I don’t mean to put words in man’s mouth, so to speak).

But addressing the ideas put forth by only these excerpts (please, please, PLEASE read this entire book if you’re interested at all in art - we artists are the modern-day mythmakers, and in order to create, we must first understand. This book is the perfect entryway to that concept), I feel that Big Love has quite a few things to take away from here.

-Woman = Life, Man = Servant to life
-When marriage is sought after as a love affair, it fails (Constantine and Oed suffer as a result of their childish exploits for ownership driven by blinding passion)
-When marriage is entered for spiritual meaning, it thrives (What we can begin to say of Lydia & Nikos - Nikos as the man who seeks a meaning in his union, unlike his brothers.)
-Man and woman are of the same being, the same duality. With that in mind, can we look at the idea of how men and women share common problems (Constantine’s monologue, anyone?)

Here’s a little promise of mine as this blog gets under way.
I’ve got a number of excerpts from Joseph Campbell’s (w. Bill Moyers) The Power of Myth to share on the topic of the spiritual existence and purpose of marriage.
I’ll discuss the quotes in depth as I dig through the book to find them (this will be one of my numerous times through the book - there’s something new every time I open it up!), but for now I can say they’ve got an very enlightening take on the idea of marriage as union and the role it served for humans as a function of mythological/ritual practice.
It’s refreshing to run across a quip or two when the dark clouds cynicism cast over Academia break apart for a moment - this time I’m talking about Campbell’s take on marriage as something other than death, suffering, slavery, the end, etc. blah blah blah.
While it is all that, I’m sure, his explanation of its purpose in the grand scheme of humanity is a bit more…alive? I get ahead of myself, mea culpa.

Also, in the upcoming days, I’ll be working on a compilation of symbols and practices associated with wedding ceremonies in an attempt to latch myself onto a few pieces of concrete imagery before I continue to float away all conceptually.

I’ll post on the idea of arranged marriages and what the story is on those in the world today (in our post-modern soup of a new generation re-defining the mess of a  world the Baby Boomer’s have begun to let fall on our laps).

Speaking of, I can guarantee a broad spectrum of politics, literary theory, current events and mythology to peek through the internet at you from this blog over the upcoming months. I’ll just keep posting until I’m scolded for the nature of my own research and evaluation. Once that happens, I’ll probably post even more often as a direct result of my problems with authority. Feel free to ask me about those later.

For now, check here for a multimedia jump into the world of Greek Theater (comandeered by a confrontation with Big Love)
I’ll do my best to arrange by title here, so it’s easier to find specific topics inside the smattering of research.

Nur Du - This is really just a few clips of the piece as intro’d on a French newscast, but it’s also one that really caught my attention. Just check out 2:30 min of amazing/ridiculous/comical movement.
There’s a humor in some of her work that weaves its way into a number of Mee’s movement directions.

A few more Bausch vids

Cafe Muller - the first video. One that Lisa brought my attention to. Really fascinating…hypnotic.

Charles Mee is a big fan of the work of Pina Bausch (or so I hear), and his writing certainly reflects just that. Especially looking at his Big Love as an example, we see a saturation of aesthetically experimental and expressionist demands made via stage directions that scream out the song of Bausch’s work. Check out Le Sacre Du Printemps and take in the -dare I say Marxist- power dynamics of one v. the company that’s masked in a precept of the overwhelming beauty that accompanies Spring wherever it goes.

*Le Sacre du Printemps = The rite (something along the line of being sacred, anyhoo) of Spring

**My french is a little rusty…studied for 5 yrs, but bear with me by correcting any of my blaring mistakes, please!