Sign Up
Enter your name and email to receive updates on all Explorer Poet content
These words are not my own and I take no credit for them. I share them here as a resource for anyone seeking personal growth or as source material for their own creative expansion of the collective.
The deficient father is a staple of the fairytale, although he has rarely been as condemned as the stepmother has been … The tales also revealed that an absent father does not determine a daughter’s fate as she takes her own path away from him.
The lessons depicted in the stories [fairy tales] contain the age-old truths of complex psychological processes. They describe archetypal and basic patterns, larger than the individual arena yet applicable in different ways to each person and culture. Depicting transformation and growth they are vehicles for insight into our human tendencies, replicating patterns of the unconscious naturally occurring in conscious life. They also illustrate the brutal, destructive ego and power-driven aspects of the psyche. And they show us how to get through suffering while illustrating endless variations on the Psychological journey.
Fairy tales trace the natural and archetypal development of the psyche through their cultural and psychological images … Children are wise enough to know the truth in the fairytale …
We are confronted, at every new stage in the differentiation of consciousness to which civilization attains, with the task of finding a new interpretation appropriate to the stage, in order to connect the life of the past that still exists in us with the life of the present, which threatens to slip away from it.
What stops humanity from living in a world of justice and abundance are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the rules we have made up that now govern our cooperation, and the legacies of illusion and dishonesty that continue to blind us to our actual situation as a species.
Accept your myth and live it.
Though I was reluctant to be born, I was attracted by the music. I had plans. I was entrusted with carrying voices, songs, and stories to grow and release into the world, to be of assistance and inspiration. These were my responsibilities. l am not special. It is this way for everyone. We enter into a family story, and then other stories based on tribal clans, on tribal towns and nations, lands, countries, planetary systems, and universes. Yet we each have our own individual soul story to tend.
Your openness to mythos activates your Mediatrix and allows her to lead you safely through your personal unconscious to the pleroma, or collective unconscious, without losing your way.
Mythos is in marked contrast to the "I-it" language of separation and distance you use to reason about the world. In logos, God is outside you; in mythos, you experience God within. In logos, natural phenomena are separate from you and coincidences are causal. But in the world viewed through mythos, all things are connected and part of an indivisible whole.
[Myth] is a language of imagery, metaphor, and symbols. It is the stuff of dreams, fantasies, myths, and inner world experiences.... It is a language without which artistic creation would be unthinkable.
A story matrix connects all of us . . . In some story realms the baby is born and the next day he or she is a giant who kills monsters. Mine was not that kind of story. I am born of brave people and we were in need of warriors. My father and I had lost the way. I was born puny and female and Indian in lands that were stolen. Many of the people were forgetting the songs and stories. Yet others hid out and carried the fire of the songs and stories so we could continue the culture.
Viewed psychologically - as all myths are meant to be… A personal experience of powerlessness teaches you humility, prepares you for your initiation into higher consciousness, and motivates you to share your newly gained gifts with your community.
Myths, like religions, come from our attempts to describe the inner truths of the soul.
The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the co-operation between conscious and unconscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable – perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science.
On the contrary, the myth of the necessary incarnation of God - the essence of the Christian message - can then be understood as man’s creative confrontation with the opposites and their synthesis in the self, the wholeness of his personality.
… a myth is dead if it no longer lives and grows.
Cut off the intermediary world of mythic imaginations, and the mind falls prey to doctrinaire rigidities. On the other hand, too much traffic with these germs of myth is dangerous for weak and suggestible minds, for they are led to mistake vague intimation for substantial knowledge, and to hypostatize mere phantasms.
Only here, in life on earth, where the opposites clash together, can the general level of consciousness be raised. That seems to be man’s metaphysical task - which he cannot accomplish without “mythologizing”. Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition.
Myths are the earliest forms of science.
The more the critical reason dominates the more impoverished life becomes; but the more of the unconscious, and the more of myth we are capable of making conscious, the more of life we integrate.
My life as I lived it had often seemed to me like a story that has no beginning and no end.
Myths which day has forgotten continue to be told by night, and powerful figures which consciousness has reduced to banality and ridiculous triviality are recognized again by poets and prophetically revived; therefore they can also be recognized “in changed form” by the thoughtful person.
The story of a life begins somewhere, at some particular point we happen to remember; and even then it was already highly complex. We do not know how life is going to turn out. Therefore the story has no beginning, and the end can only be vaguely hinted at.
Whether or not the stories are true is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth.
What we are to our inward vision, and what man appears to be sub specie aeternitatis, can only be expressed by way of myth. Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science.
Myths go back to the primitive storyteller and his dreams, to men moved by the stirring of their fantasies. These people were not very different from those whom later generations have called poets or philosophers. Primitive story tellers did not concern themselves with the origin of their fantasies; it was very much later that people began to wonder where a story originated. Yet, centuries ago, in what we now call "ancient" Greece, men's minds were advanced enough to surmise that the tales of the gods were nothing but archaic and exaggerated traditions of long-buried kings or chieftains. Men already took the view that the myth was too improbable to mean what it said. They therefore tried to reduce it to a generally understandable form.
It is commonly assumed that on some given occasion in prehistoric times, the basic mythological ideas were "invented" by a clever old philosopher or prophet, and ever afterward "believed" by a credulous and uncritical people. It is said that stories told by a power-seeking priesthood are not "true," but merely "wishful thinking." But the very word "invent" is derived from the Latin invenire, and means to "find" and hence to find something by "seeking" it. In the latter case the word itself hints at some foreknowledge of what you are going to find.
… human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.
The imagination is the faculty that produces religion and mythology.
Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it.
Myth is about the unknown; it is about that for which initially we have no words.
Correctly understood, mythology puts us in the correct spiritual or psychological posture for right action, in this world or the next.
The myths gave explicit shape and form to a reality that people sensed intuitively. They told them how the gods behaved, not out of idle curiosity or because these tales were entertaining, but to enable men and women to imitate these powerful beings and experience divinity themselves.
A myth was an event which, in some sense, had happened once, but which also happened all the time. Because of our strictly chronological view of history, we have no word for such an occurrence, but mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence, helping us to get beyond the chaotic flux of random events, and glimpse the core of reality.
Like poetry and music, mythology should awaken us to rapture, even in the face of death and the despair we may feel at the prospect of annihilation. If a myth ceases to do that, it has died and outlived its usefulness.
Like a novel, an opera or a ballet, myth is make-believe; it is a game that transfigures our fragmented, tragic world, and helps us to glimpse new possibilities by asking 'what if?' — a question which has also provoked some of our most important discoveries in philosophy, science and technology.
Mythology will only transform us if we follow its directives. A myth is essentially a guide; it tells us what we must do in order to live more richly. If we do not apply it to our own situation and make the myth a reality in our own lives, it will remain as incomprehensible and remote as the rules of a board game, which often seem confusing and boring until we start to play.
There is never a single, orthodox version of a myth. As our circumstances change, we need to tell our stories differently in order to bring out their timeless truth.
…the purpose of a myth was to make people more fully conscious of the spiritual dimension that surrounded them on all sides and was a natural part of life.
If a myth does not enable people to participate in the sacred in some way, it becomes remote and fades from their consciousness.
… mythology will not succeed if it concentrates on the super-natural; it will only remain vital if it is primarily concerned with humanity.
A myth does not impart factual information, but is primarily a guide to behavior. Its truth will only be revealed if it is put into practice - ritually or ethically. If it is perused as though it were a purely intellectual hypothesis, it becomes remote and incredible.
Myths about flight and ascent have appeared in all cultures, expressing a universal desire for transcendence and liberation from the constraints of the human condition. These myths should not be read literally. When we read of Jesus ascending to heaven, we are not meant to imagine him whirling through the stratosphere. When the Prophet Muhammad flies from Mecca to Jerusalem and then climbs up a ladder to the Divine Throne, we are to understand that he has broken through to a new level of spiritual attainment. When the Prophet Elijah ascends to heaven in a fiery chariot, he has left the frailty of the human condition behind, and passed away into the sacred realm that lies beyond our earthly experience.
There can be no ascent to the highest heaven without a prior descent into the depths of the earth. There can be no new life without death.
It is highly significant that these myths and rituals of ascension go back to the earliest period of human history. It means that one of the essential yearnings of humanity is the desire to get 'above' the human state. As soon as human beings had completed the evolutionary process, they found that a longing for transcendence was built into their condition.
The first great flowering of mythology, therefore, came into being at a time when homo sapiens became homo necans, 'man the killer', and found it very difficult to accept the conditions of his existence in a violent world. Mythology often springs from profound anxiety about essentially practical problems, which cannot be assuaged by purely logical arguments.
Where myth looks back to the imaginary world of the sacred archetype or to a lost paradise, logos forges ahead, constantly trying to discover something new, to refine old insights, create startling inventions, and achieve a greater control over the environment.
From the very beginning, therefore, homo sapiens understood instinctively that myth and logos had separate jobs to do. He used logos to develop new weaponry, and myth, with its accompanying rituals, to reconcile himself to the tragic facts of life that threatened to overwhelm him, and prevent him from acting effectively.
A myth is not a story that can be recited in a profane or trivial setting. Because it imparts sacred knowledge, it is always recounted in a ritualised setting that sets it apart from ordinary profane experience, and can only be understood in the solemn context of spiritual and psychological transformation.Mythology is the discourse we need in extremity. We have to be prepared to allow a myth to change us forever.
Unless it is encountered as part of a process of regeneration, of death and rebirth, mythology makes no sense.
The myth tells us what we have to do if we want to become a fully human person.
Indeed, every day we are forced to die to the self we have already achieved… myths and rituals of passage helped people to accept their mortality, to pass on to the next stage, and to have the courage to change and grow.
The myth and its accompanying rituals were a reminder that often things had to get worse before they could get better, and that survival and creativity required a dedicated struggle.
Myth and cultic practice are equal partners, both help to convey a sense of the sacred, and usually do so together, but sometimes ritual takes first place.
… the history of religion shows that, once a myth ceases to give people intimations of transcendence, it becomes abhorrent.
Myth does not question itself; it demands a degree of self-identification.
… unless a historical event is mythologised, it cannot become a source of religious inspiration. A myth, it will be recalled, is an event that — in some sense — happened once, but which also happens all the time.
A myth cannot be correctly understood without a transformative ritual, which brings it into the lives and hearts of generations of worshippers.
All the stories about the prophets — Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses or Jesus – are ayat, 'parables, similitudes', because we can only speak about the divine in terms of signs and symbols.
We may be more sophisticated in material ways, but we have not advanced spiritually beyond the Axial Age: because of our suppression of mythos we may even have regressed.
The myth of the hero was not intended to provide us with icons to admire, but was designed to tap into the vein of heroism within ourselves. Myth must lead to imitation or participation, not passive contemplation.
We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realise the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a 'resource'.
In the myth of the Holy Grail, the wasteland is a place where people live inauthentic lives, blindly following the norms of their society without the conviction that comes from deeper understanding.
We have seen that a myth could never be approached in a purely profane setting. It was only comprehensible in a liturgical context that set it apart from everyday life; it must be experienced as part of a process of personal transformation.
Mythology, we have seen, is an art form. Any powerful work of art invades our being, and changes it forever. The British critic George Steiner claims that art, like certain kinds of religious and metaphysical experience, is the most “ingressive", transformative summons available to human experiencing’. It is an intrusive, invasive indiscretion that ‘queries the last privacies of our existence’; an Annunciation that ‘breaks into the small house of our cautionary being, so that 'it is no longer habitable in quite the same way as it was before'. It is a transcendent encounter that tells us, in effect: 'change your life’.
Enter your name and email to receive updates on all Explorer Poet content