19 Oct NAKED & MYTHLESS

“Culture is its own limitation. Culture represents a particular adaptation, a particular level of psychological maturity. What happens when the capacity of the individual to expand the framework exceeds the cultural capacity? The two come into conflict. Where the individual potential for development exceeds the cultural limit the need for new meaning erupts.” (D. Stephenson Bond, 1993, Living Myth, p. 66)

When breaking out of the framework of a dominant paradigm and its cultural myths, one might find themselves free falling through the gap between old and yet-formed worlds. In the overgrown weeds at the fringes of civilization we could discover a refuge where we can disrobe from the costumes of culture and divest from its symbols and structures of power. Through individuation – differentiating from the master narratives of our world – we begin to truly grow up – to sober up – and (re)claim intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual sovereignty from systems of oppression (external and internalized). In this fissure of liminality, beyond what has been, and before what is yet to become, the libido (intensity for life) turns inward, we enter the wilderness of the psyche where the soul dwells and makes its own myths.

If you find yourself plunging from the split between myths, it is advisable to immerse oneself in the embodied stories of Nature. Thriving forests, deserts, and waterways team with life, and each being, held within its specific habitat, surrenders to the organicity of their particular organism. Kneel at the stream of living water, slough off the markings of culture, and become animal, again.

Without the scripts and codes of culture running our experience, we find ourselves in a space of unpredictable activity with mysterious collaborators. Naked and mythless, the conscious mind yields to the unconscious. As emergent phenomena increases, and the psyche’s capacity for interpretation deepens and complexifies, imaginal and phenomenal worlds sync up, sparking transitional states. Subjective experience merges with archetypal unconscious, forging a new symbol. The symbol, image suffused with personal meaning, is the matrix of a new myth.

Catherine Brooks, 2022

Painting: Hylas and the Nymphs (1896) by John William Waterhouse