Mythic Art

"Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world." –Joseph Campbell

The day after I saw a fabulous performance of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale — although, to be honest, just about any performance would have been "fabulous" to me since I had never seen Shakespeare performed onstage before — was the feast day of St. Wenceslaus, King of Bohemia. If you know the play, then you know that the King of Bohemia is an important character in that play. If you know Shakespeare, then you know that nothing in Shakespeare is coincidental, so I wondered if the play had any connection to the old English Christmas carol Good King Wenceslaus.

Thanks to Google, I found this extremely interesting article on the influence of the English holiday cycle on Shakespeare’s plays. But I’ve also learned that if you surf the host site when Google points you to extremely interesting articles, you can oftentimes find extremely interesting sites. This is not always true. I still remember my consternation when I found that the only online host I could find for the introduction to Dr. Ludwig Ott’s classic Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma was a rabidly radical traditionalist site that seriously proposed that John Paul the Great was a murderer. (The site is so repugnant that you’ll have to Google for it yourself if you’re really that interested in reading its ramblings.  If you want to find the Introduction to Ott’s book, just Google "Introduction Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma Ludwig Ott" for that link alone.)

In any case, the host for the Shakespeare article was much more interesting. It is called The Endicott Studio and is a kind of online gallery for mythic art. The art it hosts is from various disciplines: fiction, poetry, articles, and artwork. It’s a secular site and the secularism shows, but it is interesting. It’s worth a visit.

THE ENDICOTT STUDIO