Beyonce and the Power of Myth
From the womb of fairy tale and myth, mediating magic and pop culture, Queen Beyonce’s visual album Black is King is a masterpiece of image, movement, soul.
Rather than the panoply of visual ecstasy rendered in the film, an ambrosia of colors, designs, and motifs from the African diaspora, or the vibrant folk to contemporary music from the Motherland, or even how she, yet again, celebrates Black beauty, history, excellence, and cultural traditions, my short riff will improvise on the poetry and layers of mythic meaning of the work. As a pop icon, creative dynamo, and undisputed leader in the entertainment industry, Beyonce fulfills an ancestral imperative to affirm and celebrate her heritage, inspiring millions of people of all backgrounds.
The Relevance of Myth, The Prevalence of Ritual
Some people, dazzled by the achievements of science in the modern age, cast a suspicious eye on the mythic as a relic of a bygone past, best left behind. What they fail to understand is that what Albert Murray called the mythosphere is an aspect of human consciousness, our search for meaning through story and patterns. No matter the time or stage of human development, the mythic dimension of life centers on perennial human questions and themes: Who are you? Where do you come from? Where are you going?
Consider these questions being asked on the level of the individual, of groups of people, of nations, and even of humanity as a whole. This is why the mythic shouldn’t be confined to a blue or amber “traditional” stage in some or the other vertical rendering of adult development. The mythosphere, similar to Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere, transcends and includes the stages of adult development, not vice-versa.
. . . there is the physical atmosphere of planet Earth which is said to extend some six hundred miles out into space in all directions and consists of the troposphere in which we live, and beyond which is the stratosphere, beyond which are the mesosphere, the ionosphere, and exosphere.
The mythosphere is that nonphysical but no less actual and indispensable dimension of the troposphere in which and in terms of which human consciousness exists . . .
—Albert Murray
In a similar way that Romare Bearden transcended genre by evoking ceremonial and ritual resonances in the scenes and events of his paintings and collages, Beyonce leaps over the boundaries of linear narrative in Black is King, achieving an integral synthesis of sensibility and style operatic and epic in aspiration and actuality. And in a similar virtuous-stack-of-black-innovation style like jazz vocalese—a lyric and poetic innovation on the base of an improvisational innovation (for instance, King Pleasure’s 1952 vocalese rendering, written by Eddie Jefferson, of James Moody’s 1949 classic solo on the 1935 tune, “I’m in the Mood for Love”)—Queen Bey innovated a visual masterpiece atop of her own recording from the re-make of Disney’s The Lion King, which itself riffs on archetypal fairy tale and mythic motifs from time immemorial.
The King: A Journey of the Soul
Bless the body Born celestial Beautiful and dark matter Black is the color of my true love’s skin Coils in hair, catching centuries of prayers Through smoke
These first words to the film open the way, in-forming, poetically, the images we see before and after its articulation. We bow, with our head and torso facing the earth, to the poet Warsan Shire, for the ancestral transmission which flowed in and through. The Disney poster for the film is a moment in which the soul of the young black protagonist of the film enters the atmosphere of planet earth, on his way to the mother and father/queen and king to enable his involutionary birth.
The young man can be interpreted as a composite of Heru (the Greeks called him “Horus”), the son of Ausar (Osiris) and Auset (Isis), and of Siddhartha, who became the realized one, the Buddha. As Heru, the Simba-lic hero of the ancient story of Kemet (Egypt), he avenges his father’s death at the hands of his uncle Set, who in this re-telling is aptly called Scar. But before he can rise to his own maturity as a man-who-would-be-a-king, he must leave from the “palace” of his royal origins, venture into the world of materiality, pleasure, commerce, as did Siddhartha in the Herman Hesse classic.
As Simba dreams by the river, under a tree, engaging with his possible futures and the lessons of the past, words of poetic insight beckon:
You are welcome to come home to yourself/Let black be synonymous with glory . . .
I’ll be the root, you be the tree
Step in your essence, know that you’re excellent
Ancestors, the great masters of celestial lore
Look at the stars/Lead or be led astray/Follow your light or lose it
Who are you?
Too far go we down the spiral
No true king ever dies . . . Our ancestors hold us from within our own bodies
Before Simba can understand the wisdom born and bred within, he must wrestle with the paradox of good and evil. He must wrestle with this condition of the West because he—like his relatives and ancestors in the diaspora—went from “taking a swim in the Nile to being deep in de-nial, deep in denial.”
The black and white pieces of a chessboard represent duality, the forces of good and evil, as Jay Z makes a guest star appearance.
All of this is what you need to make a move
Understand that good and evil often appear together
Nothing is complete on its own
There’s an ongoing exchange between dark and light
What we call good and what we call evil
The king is representative of you, is representative of the soul
It’s not always a battle, it’s a conversation
You are the king and the king is you
The King and Queen: A Marriage of Earth and Heaven
Lest some get it twisted by presuming that this is a traditional male heroic narrative, you should know good and well Beyonce ain’t havin’ that. She celebrates not only the king but the queen, not only the couple, but the nuclear family, and not just that, the extended family and community too.
Simba’s wrestling with good and evil, with dark and light, isn’t the only basis of his growth and evolution. If he’s the Sun and the Sky, he needs her, the Moon and the Earth. Simba connects with a female childhood friend and marries, in a beautiful ceremonial reenactment. But as he rides a horse, underneath a swerving, spiral parking lot, with his beautiful bride, he seems troubled. He still needs to go all the way back home, become submerged in the waters of life to achieve the circle of life, re-take his inheritance, in fulfillment of his ancestral imperative.
Again, words of poetry reveal the real deal:
It would be a much better world for all of us
If kings and queens realized that sharing spaces, sharing ideas, sharing values, sharing strengths, sharing weaknesses, balancing each other out. There is the way our ancestors did things. And that is the African way
The royalty is there in you for you to be a blessing to others
For you to leave a legacy that others can look to and find hope, find strength, and find healing as well
Closing Words of Poieses
After Simba reclaims his kingly inheritance, these words of wisdom speak to us all:
Salutations to the survivors of the world
The elders are tired
To God we belong, to God we return
You find yourself in a room with all the people you’ve lost
And dance with joy as pure as your father’s face
When the wind kissed the trees
They sing melodies
And the ancestors returned smiling
Divine archetype
Predecessor of light
You, who were formed by the hear of the galaxy
Who was dusted with a star
Who has the universe in your eyes
Whose blood keep the scores of your blessings and trials