Back in the early 70’s, I taught a seminar entitled something like, “The Value of Pop Culture for Depth Psychology.” What I tried to examine was the question of what depth psychology could learn from Pop Culture. This I contrasted with the idea of interpreting and explaining and otherwise understanding Pop Culture using depth psychological methods.

My main idea stemmed from my valuing the creative arts as sources of new and developing mythologies that would become new dominants in the contemporary culture.

At the time, I focused on three figures: David Bowie, Leonard Cohen and Laurie Anderson. Each was early in their career. Each seemed to me to have tap-roots in the deeper regions of the psyche and were each in their own way story tellers of what they found there.

It’s now 40 years later, and each of these figures have been icons in their genres for decades. On Sunday, January 10th, David Bowie died at 69.

It set me to remembering how in that early seminar we worked with his first major album: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. It was the story of the end of the world because it had run out of natural resources and how aliens were coming who were “black hole” jumpers from universe to universe. It was a musical version of welcoming the Coming Guest that Jung described in his 1960 letter to Herbert Read.

I talked about this story as a “new” myth. I talked about how the mythic potential of the psyche did not stop with Greek myths, but is always creating the stories of new myths both in our individual psyche and in the collective psyche.

As I listened again to Ziggy, I felt the deep loss of David Bowie and eager to get his last album released on his birthday, just two days before his death: Blackstar.