wizard-beast shamans go back more than fifty thousand years.
An obscure Scottish definition of myth reveals yet another layer of meaning: “to mark, to notice, to measure,” and “the marrow of a bone.” Out of the heather and highlands comes a helpful suggestion that myths are the stories that mark us deeply, notice the sacred dimensions, measure the depths of our souls, and cut to the marrow with their slicing images of the never-ending struggle between life and death.
In these associative ways of approaching the essence of myth, we begin to see its beauty and its power. While science revels in explaining how the world works, myth and poetry explain why. Its stories and images about creation, origins, animal powers, quests, death, and rebirth are attempts to give a sense of the movements of the soul's experience of the world. This is why myths are lies that tell the truth, unreal stories that “signify the inner meaning of life,” in Alan Watts' memorable phrase. Or as Elie Wiesel writes of Hasidic legends, “Some things happen that are not true, some don't happen that are.”
What the deterioration of the word myth—implying delusion, falsehood, or a farrago of nonsense—reveals is the ironic truth that many of our myths are lies in the sense that they no longer reveal the inward significance of things that happen in our lives. As religion journalist Don Lattin has written, “Myths are stories, and we find meaning in our lives through the stories we tell. Myths are not true or untrue—they're living or dead.”
In fact, the modern world is full of living mythology. There is a wonder-cabinet of curiosities, stories, images, icons, and presences. In the past few months alone I've noted in the pages of the New York Times references to the American Myth of Progress; myths of love and romance in the movies; the myth of killer sharks; the mythic aspirations of George Lucas’ Star Wars trilogy; the twisted myth of Frankenstein as mad gene-splicing scientist; the mythmaking machine of political campaigns; the crippling effects of family myths; the legendary outsider status of Marlon Brando and the Olympian influence of Wall Street insiders; the fabled genius of Leonardo da Vinci and the legendary curse on the Boston Red Sox; and a much-ballyhooed story of the pre-Christian nomadic discoveries of dinosaur bones in Asia centuries before Christ that inspired the headline, “Monster Myths Born of Fossils?” and, just the other day, “Evolution: Myth or Fact?”
Despite the brash claims of scientific materialists and religious moralists, myth still suffuses and enlivens everyday life. We've hardly banished or “progressed” past it. We've simply renamed the stories, both good and bad, the way the names of Hindu gods have changed through the centuries, though their powers remained intact, or the way ballplayers come and go from our favorite teams, while the team uniforms remain the same. The urge to go back to the beginning to understand ourselves, then tell the tale, thereby mythologizing our life and times, is irrepressible.
In this uncanny way it is thrilling to me to notice the way a few of the old stories I grew up on keep reappearing in modern guise in movie theaters, the sports pages, art galleries, or science magazines, often recalling William James’ whirligigging line, “There goes the same thing I saw again before.”
With the old telltale shiver of recognition, I recall a night back in the late 1980s when I found myself in an old café on Place Contrescarpe in Paris, reading an essay by Albert Camus. One line made my eyes sting with bittersweet recognition. “A man's work,” he wrote, “is nothing but the slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.”
This work is a series of ruminations on those stories and images that first opened my heart and continue to open it again and again each time I encounter myths that renew my faith in the mystery dimension of the world. Similarly, I hope these musings will inspire you to find the guiding images that first opened your own heart.
Stories That Make Life Endurable
By the time I took my first seminar, in 1979, with my future friend and mentor, the mythologist Joseph Campbell, I had long been under the spell of myth. My subsequent work with him gave me the courage of my convictions that the old stories are indeed alive, even “once and future,” as the English fabulist T. H. White regarded King Arthur. For centuries there has been a strong folk belief that Arthur never really died. Instead, he lives on in a remote cave in the mountains of Wales, waiting for the right moment to return and redeem the land. The Once and Future King is both a memorable book title about the medieval model for courage and chivalry and a wonderful description of the timeless power of mythic tales and mythic imagination.
Out of the galaxy of myths to choose from, the ones I explore in this book are the ones I know in oak, as Montaigne carved, the ones that haunt me. In these essays I explore myth in the way I've encountered it in the street, on the road, inside books, through dreams, by way of vigorous conversation, and presented in a montage style that blends story, anecdote, poetry, freeze frame, and musical segue.
The chapters that comprise this book emerge out of thirty years of reading myths and traveling the world over in search of their origins, as if drawn to them by magnetic forces. Their topics range from a meditation on myths about the riddle of time to the creative struggle, contemplations on the soul-guiding influence of mentors to reflections on the ancient lore about travel, a rhapsody on the theme of mythic cities, and, finally, a reverie on the mythic pull of sports.
Unfolding within each essay are many other themes recurring in myth—origins, time, play, place, rhythm, gods and heroes, love and death—discussed as eternal metaphors for the invisible webwork of these mighty forces, symbolic stories for the sacred energies that forge our fate and destiny.
The old storytellers knew this. They knew that every life is mythic, and that each of our myths, our sacred secret stories, is the outpouring of deep longing for meaning, which by some still unknown form of alchemy confers purpose to our lives. To those who go beyond appearances and seek the truth of their lives, everything is a symbol, everything a story, everything mythic, and the discovery of these things, back at the beginning, is an uncanny kind of coming home. This is the deep urge to seek out the living meaning of myth.
For psychologist Carl Jung, meaning was the secret opening into the realm of myth. According to his assistant, Aniela Jaffé, Jung believed that every attempt at meaning was a myth, in the original sense of the term: a sacred story explaining an entire world.
But can the currently accepted authorities on the way world works—science, media, technology—satisfy the human need for meaning?
I asked just this of the psychologist Rollo May at his home in Tiburon, California, the last time I saw him, shortly before his death in the spring of 1991. With a sadness in his voice that startled me, he said that for him the sign of the times was what he called the “nothingness,” the lack of meaning in their lives that drove so many of his clients into therapy. He described this as “the cry for myth,” the cry for a pattern. That cri de coeur, he determined, wasn't for the rose-hued glasses of nostalgia or escapism into romanticizing the past, but the cry for meaning, which he believed is the heart of true myth. Isn't there anywhere in modern life where people can glean that depth of meaning? I asked him.
“Great drama in theater, books or even movies,” he replied. “Works like Hamlet and MacBeth, The Great Gatsby or Waiting for Godot speak straight to the heart of people and we retain them in our memory as myth.” He looked out over San Francisco Bay to the city that shimmered in the fog like Frank L. Baum's Emerald City, and talked about loneliness as being the absurd price we are paying for the “myth of progress.”
“I've come to reluctantly believe Nietzsche was right,” he told me. “Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. As a matter of fact, after fifty years of practicing psychoanalysis I'm convinced that people go into therapy
