(Written Thur 8/28/14)

As I boot up my computer to read the Petroleum article, my NYTimes  home page  pops up bearing not one, but two articles on petroleum.   The first, has a photo of a happy Texas couple filling up for an economical “day-cation” due to record low gas prices - the result of  South Texas Eagle Ford shale fracking. The second article features a  photo of Shell’s Arctic Challenger along with the announcement that Royal Dutch Shell has submitted a new plan for oil exploration  in the Alaskan Artic.    

I, like the happy couple, will probably fill up my car with gas tomorrow too, but with a bit more consciousness.    And though articles related to petroleum may appear every day in the news, today they made more of an impact on my psyche & created an interesting preamble to the reading.    

Thinking about the mythology of petroleum was both fascinating & horrifying.   This quote from the reading particularly struck me:

Oil has also raised a modernized mythology of the subterranean smoking and flaming to the planet surface. Our current state of global crisis looks to a mythological eye like the Underworld is eradicating the upperworld.

Is this in some way our culture’s denial of the underworld, of the descent into the unconscious where a real transformation could occur if we were willing to undergo the rigors of initiation?