Shakespeare, the Goddess, and Modernity (2012)
A collection that brings together virtually all of the published shorter critical work of John O’Meara, gathered from over 30 years of production.
“profoundly philosophical ... a most significant contribution to the ongoing discussion of Shakespeare’s values.” {Charles Forker, author of Fancy’s Images: Contexts, Settings, and Perspectives in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, 1996}
“John O’Meara’s work is the perfect supplement to [Ted] Hughes’s “Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being”, shedding further illumination into those areas where Hughes’s penetrating lens finally appears to dim … [O’Meara’s work] shines utterly clear light on the path of understanding we may re-win with regard to myth, forcing the reader to face the incredible starkness of the prospect we face—and the lack of options—ever closing in—and also giving the reader the necessary clues to follow, particularly Barfield, Shakespeare and Rudolf Steiner.” {Richard Ramsbotham, author of Who Wrote Bacon? William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and James I, 2004}
[Downloadable at https://independent.academia.edu/JohnOMeara5 and Google Books]
[Also available at a university library near you.]
On THE NEW School of the Imagination (2007)—reprinted in modified form in Shakespeare, the Goddess, and Modernity (2012)
[From the author: “This long essay on literary tradition could just as profitably be approached as the next piece to read after a full perusal of my book On Nature and the Goddess [see the page for this book above], or, alternatively, as the next piece after a perusal of another of my books, Tragical Historical [see the page for this book below: “More on Shakespeare etc”]. This essay on Steiner’s Plays represents a certain end-point in my work, but a new beginning otherwise for our understanding of the future of literary culture.”]
“I have never seen Steiner’s Mystery Plays spoken of so relevantly … There we have our modern ‘debacle’, or whatever we wish to call it, and there O’Meara appears and writes so pertinently of Steiner’s direct address to the situation in his plays.” {Richard Ramsbotham}
[Also available at a university library near you.]
[Additional Remarks from the Author in 2023]
A committed reader of my work who, after perusing my late essays recently collected in Tragical Historical, will be going on, as I proposed, to a study of Steiner’s Mystery Plays will be turning in the first instance to my essay on these Plays as this appears in modified form in Shakespeare, the Goddess, and Modernity. Venturing on from there to the complete text of this essay, independently available as an e-book, this reader will be able to fill out the context of Steiner’s Plays still more. The reader I have in mind I might describe as “the literary-artistic-scholarly-spiritual-philosophical reader”; such a reader should be fully capable of grasping how the many structural elements of Steiner’s presentation fall together to create a tightly unified picture of a spiritual culture in process of moving past and beyond the final impasse Western culture reached with the coming of the modern age, as I have evoke this in Tragical.[1]
Even so, it may be necessary to emphasize here that the context of Steiner’s Plays concerns the special case of a culture that has emerged for our time as an archetypal event, pointing an achievement that is historically unique or what the Plays insist is only possible at a special “turning point in time” such as our own latter age at last represents. Such an archetypal achievement (which is still in the making) is what has made possible all new valid inroads into the spiritual world today, with their concomitant release of fresh creative powers for a new work of civilization. These inroads will take innumerable forms, depending on the unique characteristics of each individual and each individual group who are given up to the discipline and practice of such a spiritual and cultural renaissance. Nevertheless, all such inroads will have borne, in the end, an inherent relationship to this one, archetypal event of our time (which is more or less synonymous with the emergence of the Anthroposophical Movement, which took place in Steiner’s day.) With Steiner’s Plays we are given, indeed, an indispensable measure of the fundamental spirit in which all valid inroads into the spiritual world will have to be conducted today, all of which will in time be coming together to build up a new, more genuinely grounded civilization, one become absolutely necessary for our spiritual survival in the future. For more on the process by which one actually breaks through into spiritual worlds, with specific reference to historical antecedents that anticipate developments in our time, see my Remembering Shakespeare (notably the second half ) and The Thinking Spirit. See also The Way of Novalis.
JOM
[1] See also my early monograph, The Modern Debacle, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2007.