The World is Too Much With Us
Mythopoesis in Daniella Mooney's Golden Age Rising
By Donovan Greef

"Down below, the broad, roaring waves of the sea break against the deep foundation of the rock. But high above the mountain, the sea, and the peaks of rock, the eternal ornamentation blooms silently from the dark depths of the universe."

The German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, once wrote that the entire enterprise of philosophy can be seen as orbiting an attempt to answer four fundamental questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope for? What is a human being? He went on to say that the answers to the first three are all contained in the answer to the fourth: what is a human being? Ultimately, what a person can know, ought to do and hope for is determined in the final instance by whom and what a person is. As such, human history is in the surest sense a history of the innumerable questions of mankind, not only about the nature of reality and the gods, but of those questions humanity has asked about itself. With Golden Age Rising, Daniella Mooney actively prompts and directs this ancient interrogation of what it means to be human, to have consciousness, to be in and of the world and our relation to each other and nature and ourselves. “Whatever it is you’re trying to create”, says Mooney “should be an answer to a question. It’s important to ask relevant questions.” So it is, and so she does. In particular: What can, do and should we hold as divine or sacred? What is a symbol, a ritual, a myth? What is their value? What purpose do they serve? What is the numinous? What is transcendence? What is a human being? These are questions that stand in marked contrast with the modern, ‘neuroscientific’ mood of egocentric platitudes and analytical ennui, and resolutely so. Indeed, for Mooney the ‘relevant’ questions are decidedly not those being asked in the era of easy answers and for precisely that reason: they are not easy, perhaps not even definitively answerable. What they require is not bromidic navel-gazing, but something altogether more difficult: the courage of being open to the mysterious, to the guidance of visceral wisdom; the will to meaning, and the readiness to be swallowed by the abyss.
Golden Age Rising is in effect a kind of initiation, a ritual that leads, if only we were open to it, to a genuine awareness of our connection with nature, humanity and our own, deeper selves. The scope is certainly immense and the work surges with referential substance, but it is by no means opaque. It engages with the thinking of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Rudolph Otto, Friedrich Nietzsche, René Daumal and Mircea Eliade (to name but a few) and integrates myth, science, psychoanalysis, nature, the unconscious, the divine and the anthropic. It is concerned with connection, with the transcendent, “the ground of being” as Campbell called it, or as I will refer to it from here on out: the numinous. What it is not concerned with is abstract intellectualism and obscurity. Mooney is in complete control of her subject, has understood it fully and while not spelling in out, wants us to understand it too. She is that rare kind of artist, and Golden Age Rising, by extension, that rare work of art that does not underestimate the audience, does not point an indifferent and mocking finger, does not forgo craft in preference of concept, is simultaneously personal and universal, and has at its core something very meaningful to say.
The following discussion tries to paint, in very broad strokes, a view of some of the overreaching thoughts and ideas present in Mooney’s Golden Age Rising, with particular reference made to the work of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. This is by no means an exegesis; the aim is not to ascribe specific meaning or to propose intended meaning, but to extrapolate, through examination of the thematic content, a potential map to meaning. This discussion does not and could not ‘explain away’ the experience, nor is it a substitute for the experience itself. If anything, these observations are mere annotations in the margins of a master work that aims for nothing less than to link human nature with the nature of the cosmos, and suggesting, as I will discuss later, that this connection is absolutely vital for humanity to prevail.
The following discussion tries to paint, in very broad strokes, a view of some of the overreaching thoughts and ideas present in Mooney’s Golden Age Rising, with particular reference made to the work of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. This is by no means an exegesis; the aim is not to ascribe specific meaning or to propose intended meaning, but to extrapolate, through examination of the thematic content, a potential map to meaning. This discussion does not and could not ‘explain away’ the experience, nor is it a substitute for the experience itself. If anything, these observations are mere annotations in the margins of a master work that aims for nothing less than to link human nature with the nature of the cosmos, and suggesting, as I will discuss later, that this connection is absolutely vital for humanity to prevail.

The Numinous

Golden Age Rising, as I’ve already remarked, is primarily concerned with the notion of the numinous. It seems to me then that the best place to start is with a comprehensive definition of this word, numinous, derived from the Latin “numen” meaning “divine presence”. In the most literal sense, numen means “a nod of the head”, referring to the divine making its presence known as if by “nodding” in our direction. As the preeminent Greco-Roman scholar, Herbert Rose, explained, the word (numen) is a passive formation, thus referring not to the divinity that nods or even the nod itself, but to “that which is produced by nodding”, in other words, it refers to the expression of divine power, not the power itself. The divine presence is not personified and should therefore not be taken as a synonym for “god”. The term was popularised in the 1920s by the acclaimed scholar of comparative religion, Rudolf Otto, whose work had a profound influence on many eminent thinkers, including Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell.
I quote the following from Otto’s Das Heilige (The Idea of the Holy):

"This mental state [the numinous] is perfectly sui generis [of its own kind and order] and irreducible to any other; and therefore, like every absolutely primary and elementary datum, while it admits of being discussed, it cannot be strictly defined. There is only one way to help another to an understanding of it. He must be guided and led on by consideration and discussion of the matter through the ways of his own mind, until he reaches the point at which ‘the numinous’ in him perforce begins to stir, to start into life and into consciousness. We can cooperate in this process by bringing before his notice all that can be found in other regions of the mind, already known and familiar, to resemble, or again to afford some special contrast to, the particular experience we wish to elucidate. Then we must add: ‘This X of ours is not precisely this experience, but akin to this one and opposite to that other, cannot you now realize for yourself what it is?’ In other words our X cannot, strictly speaking, be taught; it can only be evoked, awakened in the mind, as everything that comes ‘of the spirit’ must be awakened."

Golden Age Rising offers, in essence, precisely the kind of cooperation and guidance Otto talks about, “led on by consideration and discussion,” that may lead to awakening in the mind an apprehension of the numinous. Mooney’s sculptures, their language being the invoked symbolism of the temple, of the unconscious and the atmosphere of myth, are in this sense catalysts of the numinous – and therein rests the secret of their force. One gets the feeling, moving among them, that these are perhaps not sculptures at all, but sacred objects that, though the participation of an initiate, acquire power through association; a power that does not reside in the symbol itself but in the reflection on meaning, and the participant’s relation to that meaning, by which access to the numinous may become possible. This, in short, is the power of myth. Which then begs the question: What is a myth?

Myth and Nature

A young woman had an experience while walking along the seashore, looking out over the waves. Her account of the experience is as follows:

"I watched the ocean for a long time, watched the waves so long that I felt the presence of gods. I understood Poseidon. The ocean felt alive to me. I realized why there had to be a figure to personify these forces. I understood why there has to exist a god of everything - trees, mountains, and so forth: a spirit of things that is present, but not present to be seen unless you create a special openness to it."

The incident, relayed to the psychoanalyst Michael Vannoy-Addams by one of his patients, is contemporary; the experience, however, is as ancient as consciousness itself, indeed, the very birthplace of the gods. As Karl Popper says of the ancient Greeks, “when they saw the high waves of the seas they said: ‘Poseidon is angry’”. Rather than explain the sight scientifically in terms of friction between the air and the surface of the water, the Greeks personified (or deified) the ocean as “Poseidon”, god of the sea, whose temperament is expressed through the elemental forces: air and water; the wind and the waves.
In the first instance then, myths are animistic metaphors that arise from experience of the numinous through nature; they are personifications of natural phenomena (the sea, the moon, the seasons) weaved by ancient man into symbolic narratives about the workings of the cosmos. One such narrative pertinent to a discussion of Golden Age Rising is the myth of Demeter and Persephone.
The story goes as follows: Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, Greek goddess of agriculture and fertility, was out gathering flowers on the plains of Nysa when Hades, the god of death and the underworld, abducted her and forced her to become his queen. Heartbroken, Demeter scoured the earth looking for Persephone, and in her anguish caused the rain to cease and the rivers to dry up. The fields and forests withered and died, and the suffering people of earth were set to starve. Finally, having grown weary of the world’s wailing and Demeter’s pleas, Zeus gave in and allowed Persephone to leave the underworld, guided by Hecate, the old and wise, to be reunited with her mother at Eleusis. The rains returned and the earth became fertile and prosperous once more. This was the first spring.
Before her release however, spiteful Hades tricked Persephone into eating pomegranate seeds, knowing that anyone who ate or drank in the underworld was by the Fates’ decree obliged to remain there for all eternity. As a compromise, Persephone was compelled to return to the underworld for a portion of every year (one month for every seed she ate), during which time Demeter would miss her daughter, and in her sadness cause no rain to fall and the earth to grow cold and barren. When Persephone returned to the surface, Demeter was joyful once more, and resumed caring for the earth; and so the seasons were born.
The loss of Persephone is thus rendered as the equivalent of the annual Greek dry season, and the drought itself is explained as Demeter’s sorrowful search, just as spring is her joy at Persephone’s return. This is the first aspect of myth, the cosmological aspect. The second aspect is the psychological.

Myth and the Collective Unconscious

For Carl Jung mythological motifs are structural elements of the psyche. These motifs, according to Jung, appear in individuals who have no prior mythological knowledge. Such motifs, he says, have emerged in individuals to whom all knowledge of this kind was absolutely impossible. He infers that the occurrence of these mythological motifs is not an indirect derivation but an immediate, spontaneous, autonomous manifestation, “independent of tradition”. Jung concludes that “‘myth-forming’ structural elements must be present in the unconscious psyche”, that is to say, the unconscious is intrinsically mythopoeic, or myth-making. These structural elements that manifest as mythological motifs are what Jung calls the “archetypes of the collective unconscious”.
According to Jung, there are two dimensions to the unconscious, one personal, and the other collective. “The collective unconscious so far as we can say anything about it at all - appears,” Jung says, “to consist of mythological motifs.” We are not only individuals with our unconscious intentions related to a specific social environment. We are also representatives of the human race, and that universality is in us whether we know it or not. According to Jung “the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious”. I quote the following from his Psychological Types:

"The other part of the unconscious is what I call the impersonal or collective unconscious. As the name indicates, its contents are not personal but collective; that is, they do not belong to one individual alone but to a whole group of individuals, and generally to a whole nation, or even to the whole of mankind. These contents are not acquired during the individual’s lifetime but are products of innate forms and instincts. Although the child possesses no inborn ideas, it nevertheless has a highly developed brain which functions in a quite definite way. This brain is inherited from its ancestors; it is a deposit of the psychic functioning of the whole human race. The child therefore brings with it an organ ready to function in the same way that it has functioned throughout human history. In the brain the instincts are preformed, and so are the primordial images which have always been the basis of man’s thinking – the whole treasure-house of mythological motifs."

For Jung the living, conscious individual condition is merely a personal variation on one of the many collective themes of the eternal “human condition”. An experience, in the conscious world, of these collective mythological motifs or “archetypes” gives the individual a place and meaning in the span of the generations; the individual is liberated from isolation and restored to wholeness. The individual no longer exists in “not so splendid isolation” but in affinity with the collective. In short, from an archetypal perspective, a human existence is a “mythic” existence.
In this view then, the myth of Persephone and Demeter are linked to the Mother/Daughter archetypes. They are both projections of the unconscious’ “participation in the maternal psyche on the one hand, while on the other it reaches across to the daughter psyche”. As every mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother, every woman has the experience of extending backwards into her mother, and her mother’s mother and all the mothers before that, and forwards into her daughter, and the generations to follow. When these ties are consciously experienced, it arouses in women an understanding of life as a continuum, an interconnected existence, ever occurring and recurring, eternalised through the generations. She experiences the eternal in her temporary self, and comes to exist outside of time; in a sense, she becomes immortal. The experience is not limited to the individual, but leads to a symbolic resurrection of her ancestors. The finite individual becomes a conduit through which the generations of the past and future flow, limitless and always returning. Persephone’s rebirth is therefore not only symbolic of the seasonal cycle and the rejuvenation of nature, but also of the eternal life force that flows through all generations, begot as they beget.

Myth and the Metaphysical

There is yet another aspect to myth: The metaphysical, or as Joseph Campbell called it, the transcendent aspect. Many of Campbell’s key concepts are closely related to Jung, however, he distinguishes himself from the psychoanalysts by claiming that myth is not a spontaneous product of the unconscious but the themes and images of the unconscious reflected upon, interpreted and knowingly made into myth, for the participation of all. “The old teachers knew what they were saying” Campbell writes in his foreword to The Hero’s Journey. Myth, he says, should be seen as a collection of conscious and controlled statements that have been created “with the picture-language of the unconscious” in order to teach a metaphysical truth.
According to Campbell the creators knew that myth was only a picture-language. The masses may have believed that it was all true and that the symbols were referring to real deities, but the enlightened few who created the myths were conscious of its true point of reference: a metaphysical “ubiquitous force”, which he would later refer to as ‘the transcendent’. He writes:

"[A mythic image is] a metaphor, and the metaphor points to two ends: one is psychological – that’s why the dream is metaphoric; the other is metaphysical. Now, dream is metaphoric of the structures in the psyche, and your dream will correspond to the level of psychological realization that you are operating on. The metaphysical, on the other hand, points past all conceptualizations, all things, to the ultimate depth. When the two come together, when psyche and metaphysics meet, then you have a real myth."

For Campbell the prime function of mythology and rite is to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those forces that restrain it. He stresses that where dreams are spontaneously generated by the unconscious, myths have been consciously created by myth-makers. The figures in dreams and myths originate from the same unconscious wells of fantasy, but the creators of myth intentionally used the picture language of the unconscious to convey a metaphysical message. The language “has to be studied in order to be read”, writes Campbell “as it has been studied, clarified, and enriched by the poets, prophets, and visionaries through the ages”. According to Campbell, Homer, Dante, Zarathustra, Tai Tsung and the like were not “bad scientists making misstatements about the weather, or neurotics reading dreams into the stars, but masters of the human spirit teaching the wisdom of death and life”, with mythmotifs as their lexicon. As he writes in The Power of Myth:

"Myths put us in touch with a plane of reference that goes past your mind and into your very being, into your very gut. The ultimate mystery of being and nonbeing transcends all categories of knowledge and thought. Yet that which transcends all talk is the very essence of your own being, so you’re resting on it and you know it. The function of mythological symbols is to give you a sense of ‘Aha! Yes. I know what it is, it’s myself.’ This is what it’s all about, and then you feel a kind of centering, centering, centering all the time. And whatever you do can be discussed in relationship to this ground of truth. Though to talk about it as truth is a little bit deceptive because when we think of truth we think of something that can be conceptualized. It goes past that."

Campbell believes we can penetrate this plane of reference by using active imagination, in other words, through symbols and ritual. A symbol, firstly, is “a sign that points past itself to a ground of meaning and being that is one with the consciousness of the beholder”. What we learn in myth is about ourselves as part of the being of the world. Campbell frequently stated that to read a myth correctly one must make it “transparent to the transcendent”. If a symbol impedes transcendence by stopping at itself, it turns you into a worshipper and hasn’t opened you the mystery of your own being.
A ritual is the enactment of a myth, and through the enactment it brings to mind the fundamental implications of the act that you are engaged in. Ritual is an occasion to comprehend and reflect on what we’re doing so that we can participate in the energy of life. “That”, says Campbell “is what rituals are for; you do things with intention, and not just in the animal way, ravenously, without knowing what you’re doing”.
Myth then, properly understood, refers not only to natural phenomena and the dynamics of the psyche but to a transcendent dimension as well, being simultaneously a projection of the collective unconscious and a mirror in which the individual can see themselves reflected. The symbols found in myths stem from the unconscious; the meaning of myth, however, is not psychological at all but metaphysical. Furthermore, myths have this metaphysical meaning because the mythmakers created the myths consciously with this metaphysical meaning in mind. They are vitalised through ritual and symbolism, tools for establishing a connection between the physical and the numinous, and do not hold any power themselves. The connection, the access to meaning, becomes blocked when the images are insisted upon as final terms in themselves. The landscape of the myth is the landscape of the human spirit. The first function of a living mythology is to guide the imagination beyond the brink of resistance to the seat of energy within the soul; to awaken and maintain awe, humility and respect in recognition of the ultimate mystery, from which, as it says in the Upanishads, “words turn back”.

Initiation and Transcendence

At the beginning of spring every year, the ancient Greek cult of Demeter and Persephone held initiation ceremonies, called the Eleusinian Mysteries. The ceremony represented the myth of the abduction of Persephone in a cycle with three phases: the “descent”, the “search” and the “ascent”, with the main focus being the “ascent” of Persephone and the reunion with her mother at Eleusis. The enactment of the myth through symbolic ritual is intended to lead to transcendence, the meaning of which is defined by Campbell as “that which goes beyond all concepts and conceptualisation, or that which lies beyond all conceptualisation”. Our life is the experience of transcendent energies; we don’t know where our lives come from, but we can experience them. This experience is what the Eleusian Mysteries were all about: after going deep within one’s own unconscious, the neophyte is able to break through to a realisation that he or she contains a divine spark – is able, in other words, to experience the numinous.
For Campbell this ritual is a magnification of the universal formula represented in rites of passage, a formula he called “the hero’s journey” and which he shows to be a common theme found in all mythologies throughout history: A hero ventures forth from the world of everyday life into the territory of supernatural wonder; he encounters fantastic forces and a victory with a particular personal inflection is won. The hero returns from this mysterious adventure with new powers and wisdom, which he is able to use for the good of his fellow man. Campbell labels these three stages ‘Separation’, ‘Initiation’ and ‘Return’. He based this three-way structure on Arnold van Gennep’s theory about rites of passage. In most rites of passage, according to van Gennep, the novice is separated from his community (separation stage); undergoes a series of tests or ordeals with an aim to transform him (transition stage); and is brought back to his or her everyday surroundings, reborn (incorporation stage).
For Campbell, the true reference of the hero motif is exactly such a process. That’s why the events of the journey are bizarre and unreal; they represent psychological not physical triumphs. “The passage”, he writes “may be over ground, incidentally; but fundamentally it is inward – into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified and made available for the transfiguration of the world”.
There are unmistakable parallels between Campbell’s idea of the transcendent hero and Jung’s concept of individuation, the point at which a person’s psyche is no longer differentiated, but becomes an integrated whole. Incidentally, Jung also wrote about individuation as a process of “turning inward” and also identified three stages to the process: the containment/nurturance (or maternal) stage; the adapting/adjusting (or paternal) stage; and finally the centering/integrating (or individual) stage; the point at which we are in direct experience of the “unus munus” or “one world”. For Jung this is not merely an abstract metaphysical realm, but something one can experience. It not only constitutes the evolutionary history of human consciousness (what Jung sometimes referred to as the two-million-year-old human being within us) but lies at the heart of all spiritual intimations as to the essential oneness of life: the unus mundus, the satori experience of Buddhism or Mushahada in Sufism, there are many others. Jung characterises this kind of experience as a mystical experience, and calls the outlook that such an experience leads to “the sacred view”. “At this supreme point”, he writes “physical science, psychology and theology all coalesce”.

Sacred Objects

Golden Age Rising, collectively and in each of the individual seven works, is a view from the supreme point, where indeed, everything coalesces. Mooney’s work is not representational, that is to say, these are not reenactments of traditional myths, or depictions of Jungian archetypes or simply symbolic objects that “stand for” something else. The sculptures are themselves very real things, born out of a very real journey, that nod in the direction of the transcendent. As I said in the beginning, if one means to grasp them in full, it would make more sense to regard them not as sculptures only, but as sacred objects, as creations at once indicating and belonging to the realm of the numinous. There is no one point of entry, for Mooney is engaged on every level: mythological, cosmological, psychological, scientific and spiritual.
For example, if we regard The Road to Eleusis with Demeter and Persephone with the requisite openness, we find that it speaks to everything discussed so far, and even more beyond: What looks like three speleothems are in fact wooden carvings made to look like crystal cave formations, down to the minutest detail. Everything’s there: The “three” (whether we read them as “Demeter, Persephone and Hades”, or “Descent, Search and Ascent” or the three levels of consciousness, “Conscious, Preconscious and Unconscious” or as Campbell’s journey to the transcendent passing through the phases of “Separation, Initiation and Return” or the phases of individuation, or the seasons or cyclical feminine time) – are three. Their context is simultaneously the material world of caves (quite literally an underworld) and trees (generally growing on the surface, reaching for the sky) as well as the metaphorical world of “above” and “below”, “conscious” and “unconscious”. The natural world becomes a reflection of the psychological and spiritual dimensions, and The Road to Eleusis becomes the journey to the transcendent that leads through the “innermost cave” of the soul.
In Mount Analogue (in C) we see at first a reference to Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing’ by René Daumal. The implications of the literary reference are multiple and well worth investigating. On the one hand it is referring to the numinous revealing itself to those who seek it, on the other it is a literal and ingenious transmutation of forms, of light into sound; as well as being a form of archeoastronomy, an ancient way of symbolically investigating or representing the movements of the solar system. As the sun strikes the quartz crystal, the light is refracted into the various colours of the electromagnetic spectrum. Sensors positioned around the crystal modulate the various light waves into sound waves, and the sound alters as the crystal’s relation to the sun changes through the course of the day. There are many ancient examples of using the shifting position of the sun in this way, like the Abu Simbel temples in Nubia for example. The ancient Egyptian architects positioned the doorway to the temple in such a way that only (and exactly) on two culturally meaningful days during the year, the rays of the sun would penetrate the temple and illuminate the sculptures on the back wall, except for the statue of Ptah, the god of the Underworld, who always remained in the dark.
We see a similar link with celestial movement and symmetry in Spring Equinox, 21st September, where the balance between night and day is rendered in a kind of geometric petroform that also resembles a yantra and the Eye of Providence, usually associated with Freemasonry. The Masonic link is again echoed in And So Be It, which is a rendering of ‘and so mote it be’, the common ritual phrase used in Masonic rites, and also the literal meaning of ‘Amen’. Symmetry in nature is referenced throughout Golden Age Rising, as with Fool’s Gold, for example. It is a literal amplification of the natural condition of pyrite, a sulfide mineral that manifests, by virtue of its molecular structure, as a conglomerate of geometrically perfect cubes. Or as in Porcelain Catenary Arch with Yogi De Beer, which demonstrates the parabolaresembling “perfect curve” created by gravity when a chain is suspended between two poles of equal length. An inverted catenary arch, as the one Mooney has created in Golden Age Rising, is so structurally sound that it requires no external support or stabilising force, as is majestically demonstrated, for example, by the Gateway Arch in St. Louis in the United States. We see this “fearful symmetry” referenced again in Seven Sermons to the Dead, with one of the small sculptures containing a logarithmic spiral, often called the golden spiral and closely related to the golden ratio, which is found everywhere in nature, including the shells of mollusks and the seed clusters of sunflowers.
Numeric symbols are to be found throughout Golden Age Rising as well, most prominently the number seven, the most symbolic number of all, found all over the world in nearly all religions and mythologies. To name but a few: in Genesis it takes God seven days to create the universe; the Buddha is said to have taken seven steps when he was born; there are seven chakras and the classical model of the solar system held seven bodies, including the sun and the moon. There are seven sculptures in Mooney’s collection and one of them is called Seven Sermons to the Dead, which is itself a reference to an obscure record of Jung’s early discoveries and meditations, and a monumentally interesting work in its own right.
Carefully considered and consciously crafted mythologems abound in Golden Age Rising. I have briefly referred to a few of them, but I encourage every participant (for such we become when engaging with Mooney’s work) to investigate for themselves the layers upon layers of content, references and meaning. It is a marvelous and rewarding adventure that one soon discovers leads ever onward, ever outward; for its landscape is that of the universe, the mythopoeic wells of the unconscious and the human spirit, and as such it is boundless.

The Fall and Rise of the Golden Age

There is an auspicious, almost prophetic quality to Golden Age Rising, evoked at the outset by the sense of promise contained in its title. On one level one could see it as referring to the Satya Yuga and the great cycles, to Arcadia, the Messianic Age, to heaven on earth and all the other projections of a world in harmony, but as we know, Mooney is not concerned with symbolic projections in themselves, but with that which lies beyond the symbols, that transcendent dimension of meaning which the symbols are merely pointing at. In this sense is Golden Age Rising is speaking to what Mircea Eliade called “eternal return”, the idea that myths and rituals and reflection on their meaning, can bring one back to the sacred, can put one in communion with the holy other, and that the whole world longs for this reconnection, however much the contrary is insisted upon. As he writes in Ordeal by Labyrith: “The crises of modern man are to a large extent religious ones, insofar as they are an awakening of his awareness to an absence of meaning.”
The implication is that we have lost our connection with nature, with the ground of being and the sacred. That it may well be that the very high incidence of neuroticism in modern man follows from the decline of effective spiritual aid, which is not what modern consumerism or religion offers. We have willfully resected the spiritual from our worldview and our sense of self, and have been looking for it ever since.
“Do what he will,” writes Eliade “[the profane man] is an inheritor. He cannot utterly abolish his past, since he himself is a product of his past. He forms himself by a series of denials and refusals, but he continues to be haunted by the realities that he has refused and denied. To acquire a world of his own, he has desacralised the world in which his ancestors lived; but to do so he has been obliged to adopt an earlier type of behavior, and that behavior is still emotionally present in him, in one form or another, ready to be reactualised in his deepest being.”
Nietzsche too warned of an onset of nihilism and the oppressive terror of a world without meaning that he saw following the spiritual death of man; famously expressed in the generally misunderstood phrase: “God is dead”. In The Birth of Tragedy he cautions that without any direct understanding of myth, we are doomed to roam the spiritual wasteland in search of ourselves. Conceptual abstractions like morality and history are all that will remain to us, and they are incapable of providing fulfillment. Myth, Nietzsche says, gives us a sense of wonder and a fullness of life that modern culture lacks, and he urges a return to our deeper selves, which are inextricably entwined with myth and art. The true joy of life, the transcendent life of the spirit, is the bliss of existing in connection with the ground of being and the spontaneous magic of the living world.
Golden Age Rising is, in the end, about exactly that: connection. Connection between the artwork and the observer, the observer and the artist, the artist and her collaborators, but more importantly, it is an urgent call for connecting with our deeper selves, with nature, with the wells of myth and meaning and the spiritual and mysterious dimensions of our existence, for as Wordsworth wrote:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.