by Dave Ward Pink Floyd performing in 1967 1967. Lights strobe relentlessly between electric blue and utter blackness. The scents of incense, sweat and smoke mingle strongly. But most of all the aural assault is inescapable: bashing, throbbing rhythm so tuneful that it becomes tuneless and incomprehensible. A crowd dances wildly on the floor below the stage. Just above, a dark-eyed, beautiful young man on stage holds a guitar. He stares intently at the frets, tweaking and slapping the strings, occasionally sliding a silver Zippo lighter on the strings. Beside him stands a lanky bassist with long, sweeping hair and a frightening stare behind his magenta round-lensed glasses. The bassist is pressing the bass strings directly against the pickups of his instrument, producing an otherwordly musical blip. A little toward the back stands a gentle-looking, angular-faced keyboardist with long hair. The keyboard player half smiles to himself as he coolly stabs out almost random-sounding chords and blocks of noiseful notes, occasionally throwing in just fragments of a melody. Behind them all, a dark, round-faced young drummer hunches behind his kit, an intense look in his eyes as he pounds out abstract–but not complex–rhythms. The noise is thick, overwhelming, and incredible. Pink Floyd are performing "Interstellar Overdrive" while the lights strobe disconcertingly and the audience writhes. "It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation," wrote Joseph Campbell in the first major modern treatise on mythology, his 1949 book The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Pink Floyd have proven to be excellent–although almost always unintentional–myth makers throughout their better than thirty years of music. From the psychologically transformative concerts in the London Underground to the vast arenas of The Division Bell, their live concerts have had profoundly mythic impacts on fans. And from Syd Barrett's metaphoric journey past Neptune and Titan to the reflective musings on a world of magnets and miracles, the lyrics of Pink Floyd have explored, whether knowingly or not, the human subconscious and preconscious in ways pop music seldom can achieve. Unfortunately, the very term "mythology" conjures up negative images to many. Dusty books. Absurd, childish tales of pagan gods. Daft morality plays for children. Misleading, groundless bunk. Mythology couldn't be further from that. "Mythology opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech, beyond words, in short, to what we call transcendence," Campbell said in The Hero's Journey. In general, mythology is anything which, whether factually "true" or not, says something that is true to the human heart, and/or which references something that transcends our experience as mortals. Given such a definition, how could Pink Floyd fail as mythmakers? They don't; in fact, they succeed wildly. The Cave Ritual Let's return to that 1967 concert in the London Underground. The stroble lights flicker madly, disconcerting everybody in the room. The noise is a thick, dark blanket of disconnected melodies, echoing and repeating, gradually changing to new ones, the rhythm a persistant and unusual pounding steady four beats to the measure. It's an assault on the senses of a kind that had never been seen before. How does a boy become a man? How does a girl become a woman? Ideally, there is an event sometime during adolescence which shocks your psyche and awakens the adult man or woman, somehow increasing your awareness along the way. Changes come about by suffering and gaining wisdom from that experience, so this event is almost always frightening and painful. Various cultures throughout history have had their own ways of leading boys and girls to adulthood. The methods of frightening and awakening the adult varied widely from culture to culture, and seem brutal by today's standards, but the rituals were powerful parts of each society, and they successfully made men of boys and women of girls for thousands of years. One popular example centers on a Cro Magnon cave in the French Pyrenees. Upon approaching puberty, boys would be taken to the cave and made to crawl into the small entrance. The entrance to the cave has a long, extremely narrow passage. It can only be crawled through, and after only a short distance there is no light left whatsoever. The tight space, the utter blackness, and the complete inability to tell where you are or where you are going is psychologically overwhelming; many boys must have completely panicked during the journey through this passageway. The "Sorcerer of Trois Frères" At the end of the passageway, there is an enormous room with hundreds of ancient cave drawings of animals on every wall. Immediately in front of you upon exiting is a large drawing, both beautiful and terrifying. The drawing depicts some sort of mythic animal master who has a lion's body, elk's antlers, the eyes of an owl, human legs, and the reproductive organs of a cat. Passing through the passage way, experiencing such incredible claustrophobia and fear, and then emerging to be received by Cro Magnon priests dressed like the great painting of the antlered "Dancing Sorcerer" must have been a central event in the lives of boys, and surely must have ultimately been a critical signpost to guide Cro Magnon boys into manhood. Jump forward in time, again to 1967, the London Underground. This pounding visual and aural experience, including the other sensations that accompanied the events, were something the modern world had hardly seen. It was a new incarnation of the cave ritual, and now the high priests were four young men of Cambridge. Did they know they were creating an event that functioned much like the ancient rituals that had once guided adolescents into adulthood? Almost certainly not. The human subconscious instinctively knows what you need, and tends to lead you there. These four young men–Syd Barrett, Roger Waters, Richard Wright and Nick Mason–just made sounds they enjoyed. By Waters' own admission, they weren't good musicians. But most likely, neither were most of the Native Americans, Australian Aborigines or Scandanavian Saami who beat the drums and sang the songs which once guided children to adulthood. What matters is not so much whether we are aware of where we are going, or how we get there–nor even whether we acknowledge that we're on our way–but only that we do get there somehow. Bibliography: The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Campbell, Joseph; Princeton University Press, 1949 The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell On His Life and Work, Cousineau, Phil; Harper & Row, 1990 Dave Ward is editor of The Steel Breeze Pink Floyd news service, and is also an avid student of mythology and rituals. He manages an intimate mythology discussion forum, Living Myth, which myth enthusiasts are welcome to join.