The second-guessing and doubts are justified, because indeed, that can happen. For hobbyist levels of creative ambition, a steady paycheck job that you’re not too ambitious about, with free evenings and weekends, is a much better setup.But if you’re serious, and want to take your passion mission places, the indie life situation is definitely a far better environment for it, once you do the things necessary to make it work. It won’t happen magically.The making-it-work goes both ways. The passion mission has to inject soul into the money-making activity, and the money-making activity has to be artfully arranged around the core creative disciplines of the passion mission. Either both are sustainable long-term, or neither is.

Mephistophelean character was probably first represented in the figure of the wicked sorcerer Klingsor from the Grail Legend. He attempted to prevent Parsifal from achieving his destiny (to find the Grail) by tricks, wiles, and illusions. But the name “Parsifal” (or “Percival”) means “Pierces the Veil”. Klingsor is the proto-type of today’s “perception manager”. And it’s this that Gebser critiques as “sorceric”. He undoubtedly has Klingsor in mind. There is a similar figure in indigenous folklore called “Spider”, a wicked shaman who, jealous of the Sunboy, traps him, kills him, and dismembers him, and then throws him in a pot. But by the grace of the sun, he is restored and ascends to the Sun and to the light. Spider, of course, corresponds in meaning to what we would call “spin doctor” or “spinner” today.