In addition to his work in print Sansonese has discussed his theory of
mythopoesis (Gk., "story making") in a lengthy 1994 video interview with San Francisco psychologist Jeffrey Mishlove of the series
Thinking Allowed (PBS). Nigro Sansonese's mythology, elaborated in
The Body of Myth: Mythology, Shamanic Trance, and the Sacred Geography of the Body (1994), might be summarized as follows: Early myth-making (before, say, 5000 BC) among archaic peoples—especially but not exclusively
Indo-European speakers—may have originated in an
esoteric oral
cephelosophy or "skull wisdom" automatically imparted, primarily to young men at the age of puberty, in secret
initiation rituals, during which venerated ancestral skulls might have been displayed for purposes of illustrating the meaning of particular myths. Recent excavations at
Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey, the oldest known site of religious architecture in the world (c. 10,000 BC), have revealed that a skull cult may indeed have been centered there for nearly 2000 years. The aboriginal inspiration for myth, Sansonese argues, lay in heightened
awareness (see
proprioception) of certain internal bodily activities important in religiously oriented
meditation. The means of heightening proprioception are closely guarded meditative techniques orally communicated from teacher (
adept) to student, in particular but not exclusively, techniques associated with
respiration. Subject to numerous cultural contingencies, the techniques likely first appeared in history many thousands of years ago in the
trance-inducing practices of
shamans and became more systematized, refined, and elaborate over millennia. Because the activities attended to in many meditative traditions, for example, respiration and heart rate, are physiologically fundamental to
all human bodies everywhere, an explicit argument of the book is that a proprioceptive interpretation probably applies to
all mythologies that are sufficiently archaic in origin, which he defines as no later than approximately 800 BC. About a quarter of the book focuses on interpreting the biblical narratives of Judaism and Christianity. A myth, then, according to Sansonese is a veiled, culturally conditioned
description of a trance-inducing technique and resulting proprioceptions. Myths, therefore, on this view are (very) early attempts at articulating what, in 1945,
Aldous Huxley called
perennial philosophy, and are simultaneously
mystical and
practical in their origins. Much of the practical aim of a myth is instruction in what Sansonese calls "the art of dying," a narrative prefiguring of the literal experience of
somatic death, which is a matter of the practical mastery of a critical, unpredictable, and irreversible endocrinal event that he suggestively describes as a "
pituitary catastrophe," in the sense that the pituitary gland initiates it. In Nigro Sansonese's view, death is an event triggered by the
endocrine system. In sum, Nigro Sansonese defines an "authentic myth" as "an esoteric description of a heightened proprioception," meaning a verbal description, albeit a necessarily imperfect one, of a literal experience undergone by an adept while in a trance state, which, very critically,
must be distinguished from mere
symbolism or
metaphor. Understanding religious practice (praxis) eclipses understanding religious belief (dogma) in its importance for understanding both the origin and the meaning of a specific myth of sufficient antiquity (see also his lengthy discussion of the
Eleusinian Mysteries). In deep meditation, the region of the cranial sinciput, or forehead, is in emphasis, particularly the
glabella, a fissure between the brows esoterically described in myth, Sansonese claims, as a portal or entry such as the Scæan Gate into
Troy (see Book VI of
The Iliad and
passim) or the Hellespont on the way to
Colchis, mythic locale of the
Golden Fleece, to give just two of numerous examples cited. Another vivid illustration is the mythical figure
Sisyphus (,
Sísyphos), king of
Corinth, whose myths Sansonese explores in detail, and whose name, he suggests, is literally an onomatopoetic rendering of the sussurant sound ("siss phuss") the moving breath makes in the nostrils, the breath of course being an important object of meditative concentration (a
bija in
yoga). Repetitive inhalations–exhalations are described esoterically in the myth as an up–down motion of Sisyphus and a boulder on a hill. Various animals, particularly strenuous breathers such as horses, swine, and asses, describe respiration in myth. The descriptive principle is widely distributed geographically. For example, Jesus' entry into Jerusalem while riding on an ass' colt is a Semitic myth equivalent to Odysseus' entry into Troy inside a horse. As a compendium Sansonese provides five
axioms to guide the interpretation of archaic mythopoesis. A critical contention of the book is that myths are not so much
symbols natural to human ideation, as
Carl Jung proposed in 1933, as they are culture-specific, esoteric
descriptions of somatic activity proprioceived during exalted
trance states, for example, those attained through, but not limited to, yoga (see also
samyama and
pranayama). Nigro Sansonese's work also has relevance to the scientific study of
consciousness, specifically, by proposing that an implicit
epistemology—namely, a description of
knowledge that is in its nature, i.e., essentially,
a priori, also known as
consciousness—unavoidably orders the fundamental
laws of physics differentially, from the (macroscopically) perceived and proprioceived 17th-century
mechanics of
Isaac Newton to the indispensability of mathematics in the 20th-century
quantum mechanics of
Werner Heisenberg. That historical development is interpreted by Sansonese as one of successively elaborating a physics originally based on
empirical knowledge obtained via proprioception and
perception into a physics that is a
conformal map onto the
psychodynamics of
cognition. A succinct summary of that assertion would be "
Ontology is epistemology: Every state of
being is
ipso facto a state of
knowing." On such a view, quantum mechanics arguably might be said to be more "
meta-physics" than physics. Finally, Sansonese implies that the physics of the universe is fundamentally that of a particular and well-known harmonic oscillator known as a critically damped
tank circuit at or near
resonance (sometimes called an
LC circuit), providing as well a multi-dimensional "experience space" in which that hypothesis may be investigated mathematically. One conclusion might then be that a tank-circuit universe is probably a hologrammatic
Anti-de Sitter space. == References ==