14 Oct DEATH OF A MYTH

The first myths were passed orally, from generation to generation, and visually, painted onto cave walls. Prehistoric myths conveyed essential ancestral guidance for surviving hunter-gatherer lifestyles that followed the seasonal migrations of animal herds and wild vegetal food sources. Fascination with life’s processes of birth, death, and reincarnation – the Great Mysteries – developed into primary mythic themes. These stories then grew into macroscopic cosmologies, ways of seeing the world in the heavens and the place of humankind in Earth’s ecosystems. As peoples became rooted in agrarian settlements myths evolved in changing human–nature relationships. Religion and religious dogma encoded into myth followed.

To this day stories continue to unite social groups and mythologies carry commonly held beliefs, values, and traditions. Mythology’s function is unification and the modern world has largely become globalized through the pervasive mythology of the dominant paradigm of colonial capitalism.

We are all, consciously or unconsciously, held within the invisible matrices of the mythology of our local world. Arising relationally within particular contexts,“[a] myth is alive when it shows a way of life, a lifestyle, a structure of daily living. A myth has become a fossil when it is no longer a way of life that satisfies.” In these times of accelerated climate change, refugee displacements from war and natural disasters, and the return of fascism, human and natural environments are changing faster than our fossilized cultural myths. How much can a myth be stretched before it tears? What happens when a myth becomes dysfunctional, decays, dies? What does it mean to fall or be forced out of predominant cultural narratives? Socio-politically, when a unifying worldview shatters, divergent ideologies vie for power though populism.

“The fragile and delicate balance of physical ecological systems is paralleled by the need for the same kind of balance in the psychological system – an ecology of the inner life. Thus, a living myth relates us both to the environment and to the psyche.” Amid our current cultural chaos and myth collapse crisis, where do we turn to find new culture-creating myths, ones developed in functional, reciprocal relationship with a now predictably unpredictable climate? “[T]he sustaining myths of culture come from what were once personal myths.”

Personally – psychologically – the process of differentiating and individuating from the dominant cultural mythos spurs the generative process of developing a personal myth. “What is expressed as myth in a culture is expressed as an attitude in an individual…Individuals in new circumstances need new attitudes.”

When falling out of a collective myth the world shrinks and stretches. The world as we knew it is undone but the world of the senses expands. There is an opportunity – a necessity – to become increasingly aware of one’s subjective experience and then study psyche’s process of meaning-making. What is this new, nascent world without a myth and where do I belong in it? “Every advance in culture is, psychologically speaking, an extension of consciousness…Therefore an advance always begins with individuation, that is to say with the individual, conscious of [their] isolation, cutting a new path through hitherto untrodden territory.” (C.G. Jung)

New stories and new ways of adaptation are needed in Earth’s human-altered environments of the Anthropocene. Personal myths that develop in the process of individuation from culture open up new ways of life. These new lifeways, applied, are also worldings, ways of making a new world, from the inside out.

Catherine Brooks, 2022

Reference: D. Stephenson Bond, 1993, Living Myth

Photo: Buzludzha, Bulgaria