Mandorla Rising

A scholar, master storyteller, ritualist, musician, author, teacher, visual artist and survivor of polio, mythsinger Daniel Deardorff (1952-2019) dedicated his work to creating experiences within which we meet ourselves, not as defined by society, but as we truly are. His book, The Other Within: the Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture and Psyche is an initiatory journey to the roots of human identity and imagination. Following pathways of deep scholarship through a storyteller’s winding forest, Deardorff offers us a map to healing twenty-first century wounds within both self and society. He invites us to make a ‘creative descent into the perilous and powerful circumstance of “otherness,”’ and uses kaleidoscopic, holographic tales and images to help us recognize and extricate ourselves from the tyrannies of commodity cultures. That is, cultures, which ‘suppress myth, cast out the deviant, codify hierarchies of supremacy and support avoidance of self-definition except by what we are not: “what is other is not me.”’ (Daniel Deardorff, Author’s Statement to his Publisher, 2008).

From the book’s opening words – ‘Denial is contagious and facts are an addictive substitute for truth’ (The Other Within, 2009, p. xv) – Deardorff bids us to deeply encounter the exiled parts of ourselves and to courageously come to know and embrace the power of myth as ‘medicine’ and guide. In less than two hundred pages, he weaves ancient wisdom and teachings from one hundred thinkers and poets of diverse cultures and historic contexts with his own life experience to show us how brokenness and defects can reveal a treasury of lost and forgotten arts. Here, we discover, there are blessings of outsider-hood and insights to be gained as we recognize the abundant contributions to culture made by the marginalized and the outcast. ‘By embracing the Other Within,’ Deardorff writes, we can retrieve ‘the hidden yet implicate Mythic Reality, which is—as it has always been—the wisdom and “medicine” necessary for the renewal and revitalization of our individual and cultural lives.’ (Op.. cit, 2008).

The Other Within was originally published by White Cloud Press in 2004, with a second edition published by Heaven & Earth Publishing, LLC and North Atlantic books in 2009. In 2022, the 70th year anniversary of Deardorff’s birth, Inner Traditions International and Bear & Company will publish a new third edition. The 3rd edition will retain the first edition’s introduction by poet Robert Bly and the full index, glossary, and additional sections by Deardorff from the second edition. In addition, it will include an afterward by mythologist Martin Shaw, an additional foreword by Alchemy of Stones author Robert Simmons and words from songwriter-poet Judith-Kate Friedman, all of whom collaborated extensively with Deardorff. InnerTraditions.com