Restoring the Wisdom of Myth to Culture & Community
A Response to Rituals for Lover Earth by Charles Eisenstein
Last November the Living Myth group had a discussion of Charles Eisenstein's article http://www.realitysandwich.com/rituals_lover_earth#comment-52075
On revisiting my response I realize that what I had written might be pertinent to the whole consortium. So in the hopes of feeding the fire I post my response here exactly as written on on Nov. 2, 2009.
The idea that ritual flows from “belief” supposes that any human actions undertaken according to what one accepts to be real must be “ritual”—writing a check in the belief that the bank will honor it, going to the grocery store in the belief that one will find food, doing a job in the belief that one will be compensated, buying a car in the belief that one’s status will be elevated, all these would be contemporary rituals. From a strictly behavioral viewpoint this makes perfect sense—any action can become ritualized behavior; always using a particular pen to write a check is a ritualized behavior. So one can speculate that modern rituals have more “meaning” because they are predicated on what we agree is “real.”
The problem with this view is something like the problem of body without soul, society without culture, or myth without mythos (thank you Heather!). Ritual without connecting to the sacred is made up of what Berman calls “secondary” or “substitute satisfactions.” For hundreds of thousands of years human beings have practiced rituals which brought them into relationship with Awe and Mystery. This means that at the center of the ritual process one crossed a kind of bridge, or made a passage into a wider world-view; here, one temporarily enters an unbounded condition in which transformation is possible—not guaranteed, but possible. This extra-ordinary condition is what Felicitas D. Goodman called “the altered state of consciousness,” and in her words “Ritual without the shift to the altered state of consciousness is simply not possible.” This quality of sacred ritual is described by Eliade as: “imitating divine gestures or certain episodes of the sacred drama of the cosmos… its content is archaic and refers to sacraments—that is, to acts which presuppose an absolute reality, a reality which is extrahuman.
Signing a contract can certainly be a significant, even solemn occasion, but I wonder how often does it imitate a “divine gesture”? how often does it bring us into relation with an extrahuman reality? Sacred rites are about relationship, in them we dance toward something mysterious and awe-ful.
Making the “shift” of consciousness, crossing the bridge, or making passage removes us from ordinary to extra-ordinary time and thought. The symbols and images that inhabit such junctures speak to us, as Sean Kane recounts: “Beyond this point is a zone where ordinary human thinking cannot go. You must make a shift to another kind of thinking."
The opening of Charles Eisenstein’s article entitled “Rituals for Lover Earth,” describes a modern surgery in terms of a shamanic rite. It is a clever trick when he pulls the curtain to reveal the modern surgery room, but (and this is a big but) I have personally been the subject of such so-called rituals repeatedly throughout my childhood, and I can say from experience that the “medicine man” in the modern surgery was not interested in the care of my soul. To the modern medicine men who experimented on me the human body was simply a machine that needed to be repaired or remodeled. In Eisenstein’s depiction again we have a behaviorist describing the requisite disinfecting of the surgeons hands as a purification rite. But when we really attempt to do a purification rite are we not seeking to reach something deeper than what mere soap can reach? I am unconvinced that the surgery qualifies as a transformative ritual. So how does Eisenstein define ritual:
I would like to offer a different conception of ritual that illuminates its continuing ubiquity in today's world, and that suggests a means to deploy ritual as an agent of transformation. Let's play with this definition: a ritual is a prescribed sequence of symbolic actions that draws meaning and power from a "story of the world". In turn, it reinforces and affirms that story.
I completely agree with this definition and I also completely disagree. Why? Because it is only half of a definition. The missing half is the story creation is telling about us. That is to say, there are stories and then there are stories. Of course, story is a given—all human thought, perception, and consciousness itself is made of story—that is the way we think. There are one-sided stories that exploit and there are the multivalent stories we call myths that are generative. In my experience myth and ritual are equal partners in the cultural project of mythopoeic expression—each one gives rise to the other.
Look at it another way. In David Bohm’s work on the “implicate order” he contrasts the implicate with the explicate. In Bohm’s idea the totality of reality is unknowable, that is, it can never be “explained” therefore any given explanation of reality will be incomplete. In this understanding we can see that the modern stories which Eisenstein cites—writing a check, signing a contract, affixing a stamp, waiting in line, voting, filling out a form, writing a report, issuing a grade, affixing a label, signing off on a proposal, asking permission, showing a passport, etc.—are all explications and therefore incomplete stories. We live incomplete stories and pretend they are whole by stuffing the gap with substitute satisfactions. Such substitutes are socially accepted answers; it always feels safer and more comfortable to “live the answers” but Rilke said “it is better to live the questions.” In such uncomfortable uncertainty—the bridge or shift—transformation can occur.
What we must seek, then, are stories to live that are made more of questions than of answers. Such a story will be paradoxical, multivalent, and able to embody and hold contrary meanings, it won’t really explain anything, rather, it will disclose reality by implication. I am convinced that this kind of multivalent implication, or mythic disclosure, presents what Berman calls a “primary satisfaction of wholeness.” When we can’t get primary satisfactions we enter into the civilized conspiracy to suppress primary satisfactions and so we turn to substitute satisfactions, i.e., stories that ultimately do not satisfy the soul. Another compelling description of the substitute satisfaction is Derrick Jensen’s idea of the “toxic mimic”:
Toxic mimics take a very real, necessary, creative, life-affirming, and most of all relational urge and turn it—pervert it—until it does not further any mutual relationships at all but instead superficial relationships based on domination and control. Toxic mimics can cause people to forget those original relational urges, to forget mutuality is possible, to forget depth is possible, to eventually believe control is natural and desirable.
Or as Caroline Casey puts it “For want of a mythology, we have its toxic mimic, the soap opera of celebrity culture. A mythology invites us to be active participants. Celebrity culture … engenders passivity and cultivates nothing but envy. The point is that human beings are always living a “story of the world,” but whether people forget or disbelieve the old whole-hearted stories does that really mean they lose power and become fake? Now back to Eisenstein:
Nearly all of the sweat lodge ceremonies I have been to were replete with fake rituals. Even if they scrupulously followed the prescribed procedures of the native tradition from which they originated, what was once authentic had become fake. That is because we did not truly believe the Story of the World in which the rituals were once embedded.
Following this logic if we stop believing in the gods they will disappear, die, or worse, become fake. I feel that Eisenstein is carrying a huge counter-intention, and this causes me to mistrust his conclusions. The hopeful thing that Eisenstein has hold of is that these substitute stories and rituals are dying and that humanity is transitioning into a new story.
I think that in his hope for a new story Eisenstein has confused the modern one-sided story with the primal wholehearted story. While his hope is temptingly attractive I suspect it is one more version of the utopian fantasy dressed up in different clothes; the story of infinite progress and the break-through into an age of wonders is apparently alive and well. For my part I am prepared to work in the great project of culture which is myth-making, although I know I will not see the new myths in my lifetime, I am content in the effort to play my part in weaving a tapestry that is beyond my comprehension.
For many years I have crazily devoted myself to forgotten, disbelieved, laughable, ridiculous stories. These stories have been pushed to the edges of society, into the alleys and gutters, the ghettos and asylums, ah but they have not lost power at all; gratefully, I recall the words of another madman, Hölderlin:
The divine energies
Are still alive, but isolated above us, in the archetypal world.
They keep on going there, and, apparently, don’t bother if Humans live or not... that is a heavenly mercy.
On revisiting my response I realize that what I had written might be pertinent to the whole consortium. So in the hopes of feeding the fire I post my response here exactly as written on on Nov. 2, 2009.
The idea that ritual flows from “belief” supposes that any human actions undertaken according to what one accepts to be real must be “ritual”—writing a check in the belief that the bank will honor it, going to the grocery store in the belief that one will find food, doing a job in the belief that one will be compensated, buying a car in the belief that one’s status will be elevated, all these would be contemporary rituals. From a strictly behavioral viewpoint this makes perfect sense—any action can become ritualized behavior; always using a particular pen to write a check is a ritualized behavior. So one can speculate that modern rituals have more “meaning” because they are predicated on what we agree is “real.”
The problem with this view is something like the problem of body without soul, society without culture, or myth without mythos (thank you Heather!). Ritual without connecting to the sacred is made up of what Berman calls “secondary” or “substitute satisfactions.” For hundreds of thousands of years human beings have practiced rituals which brought them into relationship with Awe and Mystery. This means that at the center of the ritual process one crossed a kind of bridge, or made a passage into a wider world-view; here, one temporarily enters an unbounded condition in which transformation is possible—not guaranteed, but possible. This extra-ordinary condition is what Felicitas D. Goodman called “the altered state of consciousness,” and in her words “Ritual without the shift to the altered state of consciousness is simply not possible.” This quality of sacred ritual is described by Eliade as: “imitating divine gestures or certain episodes of the sacred drama of the cosmos… its content is archaic and refers to sacraments—that is, to acts which presuppose an absolute reality, a reality which is extrahuman.
Signing a contract can certainly be a significant, even solemn occasion, but I wonder how often does it imitate a “divine gesture”? how often does it bring us into relation with an extrahuman reality? Sacred rites are about relationship, in them we dance toward something mysterious and awe-ful.
Making the “shift” of consciousness, crossing the bridge, or making passage removes us from ordinary to extra-ordinary time and thought. The symbols and images that inhabit such junctures speak to us, as Sean Kane recounts: “Beyond this point is a zone where ordinary human thinking cannot go. You must make a shift to another kind of thinking."
The opening of Charles Eisenstein’s article entitled “Rituals for Lover Earth,” describes a modern surgery in terms of a shamanic rite. It is a clever trick when he pulls the curtain to reveal the modern surgery room, but (and this is a big but) I have personally been the subject of such so-called rituals repeatedly throughout my childhood, and I can say from experience that the “medicine man” in the modern surgery was not interested in the care of my soul. To the modern medicine men who experimented on me the human body was simply a machine that needed to be repaired or remodeled. In Eisenstein’s depiction again we have a behaviorist describing the requisite disinfecting of the surgeons hands as a purification rite. But when we really attempt to do a purification rite are we not seeking to reach something deeper than what mere soap can reach? I am unconvinced that the surgery qualifies as a transformative ritual. So how does Eisenstein define ritual:
I would like to offer a different conception of ritual that illuminates its continuing ubiquity in today's world, and that suggests a means to deploy ritual as an agent of transformation. Let's play with this definition: a ritual is a prescribed sequence of symbolic actions that draws meaning and power from a "story of the world". In turn, it reinforces and affirms that story.
I completely agree with this definition and I also completely disagree. Why? Because it is only half of a definition. The missing half is the story creation is telling about us. That is to say, there are stories and then there are stories. Of course, story is a given—all human thought, perception, and consciousness itself is made of story—that is the way we think. There are one-sided stories that exploit and there are the multivalent stories we call myths that are generative. In my experience myth and ritual are equal partners in the cultural project of mythopoeic expression—each one gives rise to the other.
Look at it another way. In David Bohm’s work on the “implicate order” he contrasts the implicate with the explicate. In Bohm’s idea the totality of reality is unknowable, that is, it can never be “explained” therefore any given explanation of reality will be incomplete. In this understanding we can see that the modern stories which Eisenstein cites—writing a check, signing a contract, affixing a stamp, waiting in line, voting, filling out a form, writing a report, issuing a grade, affixing a label, signing off on a proposal, asking permission, showing a passport, etc.—are all explications and therefore incomplete stories. We live incomplete stories and pretend they are whole by stuffing the gap with substitute satisfactions. Such substitutes are socially accepted answers; it always feels safer and more comfortable to “live the answers” but Rilke said “it is better to live the questions.” In such uncomfortable uncertainty—the bridge or shift—transformation can occur.
What we must seek, then, are stories to live that are made more of questions than of answers. Such a story will be paradoxical, multivalent, and able to embody and hold contrary meanings, it won’t really explain anything, rather, it will disclose reality by implication. I am convinced that this kind of multivalent implication, or mythic disclosure, presents what Berman calls a “primary satisfaction of wholeness.” When we can’t get primary satisfactions we enter into the civilized conspiracy to suppress primary satisfactions and so we turn to substitute satisfactions, i.e., stories that ultimately do not satisfy the soul. Another compelling description of the substitute satisfaction is Derrick Jensen’s idea of the “toxic mimic”:
Toxic mimics take a very real, necessary, creative, life-affirming, and most of all relational urge and turn it—pervert it—until it does not further any mutual relationships at all but instead superficial relationships based on domination and control. Toxic mimics can cause people to forget those original relational urges, to forget mutuality is possible, to forget depth is possible, to eventually believe control is natural and desirable.
Or as Caroline Casey puts it “For want of a mythology, we have its toxic mimic, the soap opera of celebrity culture. A mythology invites us to be active participants. Celebrity culture … engenders passivity and cultivates nothing but envy. The point is that human beings are always living a “story of the world,” but whether people forget or disbelieve the old whole-hearted stories does that really mean they lose power and become fake? Now back to Eisenstein:
Nearly all of the sweat lodge ceremonies I have been to were replete with fake rituals. Even if they scrupulously followed the prescribed procedures of the native tradition from which they originated, what was once authentic had become fake. That is because we did not truly believe the Story of the World in which the rituals were once embedded.
Following this logic if we stop believing in the gods they will disappear, die, or worse, become fake. I feel that Eisenstein is carrying a huge counter-intention, and this causes me to mistrust his conclusions. The hopeful thing that Eisenstein has hold of is that these substitute stories and rituals are dying and that humanity is transitioning into a new story.
I think that in his hope for a new story Eisenstein has confused the modern one-sided story with the primal wholehearted story. While his hope is temptingly attractive I suspect it is one more version of the utopian fantasy dressed up in different clothes; the story of infinite progress and the break-through into an age of wonders is apparently alive and well. For my part I am prepared to work in the great project of culture which is myth-making, although I know I will not see the new myths in my lifetime, I am content in the effort to play my part in weaving a tapestry that is beyond my comprehension.
For many years I have crazily devoted myself to forgotten, disbelieved, laughable, ridiculous stories. These stories have been pushed to the edges of society, into the alleys and gutters, the ghettos and asylums, ah but they have not lost power at all; gratefully, I recall the words of another madman, Hölderlin:
The divine energies
Are still alive, but isolated above us, in the archetypal world.
They keep on going there, and, apparently, don’t bother if Humans live or not... that is a heavenly mercy.
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by martin shaw on -
Thank you for this gorgeous piece of writing and thinking Danny. I'm interested in this idea of the 'toxic mimic' and the perception many have that ritual and myth spill endlessly into modern life (albiet without any sense of sacrality). So playing devils advocate i am throwing in a short review of french philosophers, academics and wild heathen souls to get a sense of the contrary nest of associations that the word 'myth' entails. It begins with a very societal perception and ends in a place far more soulfully abundant. Needless to say, the views of Barthes, Foucault etc are not the opinions of the author, but gives us something to rub against-its from a much longer essay, so the footnotes are probably a little nutty. The mimic, Barthes implies, is what myth leaves us with. I had a much longer boxing match with Barthes on this issue over in the 'Bridge of Breath' group last year-its the 'toxic mimic' that replaces a symbol with a sign and can't see the difference.
Myth: A Collision of Ruptures
The first thing that one realises in trying to grasp the semantic implications of myth is that myth can cover an extremely large field…it is clear that myth can encompass everything from a simple-minded, ficticious, even mendacious impression to an absolutely true and sacred account, the very reality of which far outweighs anything that ordinary life can offer.
(6 Honko, L. The problem of defining myth,university of Alabama press, 1986 p41)
We must begin by addressing the very term ‘myth’ itself. It is clear that this essay has particular associations with the term, associations that must be clarified by addressing a wider framework. In this short review I have chosen a variety of mythologists, philosophers and anthropologists to demonstrate just how varied and controversial a field it is. To locate the essays position on the term after a broader survey we will narrow the enquiry to the area of ‘initiatory’ myths.
The mythologist William G. Doty (7 Doty. W. 1986, p9) has compiled fifty definitions of the word, a number he regards as conservative. Componants of the definitions include: myth as aesthetic device, narrative, literary form, as mistaken or primitive science, myths as the words to rituals, or myths dependent upon ritual, which it explicates, explaining origins, subject matter having to do with the gods, the “other” world.
We could associate a phrase like ‘primitive science’ as an indication that myth belongs to a distant past, that it no longer has primacy in the societal conditions of the day.However, as Doty indicates, this is one of a myriad of claims for the title ‘myth’.In this next section I offer three perceptions of myths presence in a current context, through the ideas of Roland Barthes, Mircea Eliade and James Hillman.
Myths of advertising, difficulty, and pathology
Myths are the instruments by which we continually struggle to make our experience intelligible to ourselves. A myth is a large controlling image that gives philosphical value to the facts of ordinary life; that is, which has organizing value for experience…Myth is fundamental, the dramatic representation of our deepest instinctual life, of a primary awareness of man in the universe, capable of many configurations… (8 Henry A. Murray,1986, p10)
Murrays phrase ‘myth is fundamental’ implies a presence not defined by era, whilst ‘controlling’ indicates the possibility that myths are more than benign decoration. Roland Barthes (9 Barthes. R, 1957, p117) views myth as implicit in many aspects of contemporary life-myth is far from dead but infused through the techniques of the media to continue this element of control, of dominating societal wants psychologically. The television set or newspaper are ever changing temples to the desires of the myth-makers themselves. From this standpoint myth is an enemy of both freedom and imagination. Michel Foucualt (10 Foucault. M. madness and civilisation, 1961 p88) indicates that the problem is not the impact of the image but the then investing of the image with a literal truth that then inhibites the life of the believer. He illustrates this in the realm of dreams and madness.
Imagination is not madness…at the moment he wakes from a dream, a man can indeed observe: ‘I am imagining that I am dead”: he thereby denounces and measures the arbitrariness of the imagination-he is not mad. He is mad when he posits as an affirmation of his death-when he suggests as having some value of truth-the still-neutral content of the image “I am dead”.
So Focault claims some internal barometer is present in the sane for engaging with the intense persuasions of the image, that it needn’t imply blind obdedience, in fact that would be kind of madness. So, is Barthes suggesting that to be identified to myth is to be close to madness? The ‘still-neutral’ content of the image may remain within dream, but Barthes sees nothing neutral in the myth of advertising;
The meaning of the myth has its own value, it belongs to a history, that of the Lion or that of the Negro (examples of objects): in the meaning, a signification is already built, and could well be self-sufficient if myth did not take hold of it and did not turn it suddenly into an empty, parasitical form. The meaning is already complete, It postulates a kind of knowledge, a past, a memory, a comparative order of facts, ideas, decisions. When it becomes form, the meaning leaves its contingency behind; it empties itself, it becomes impoverished, history evaporates, only the letter remains. (11 Barthes, ibid)
Barthes is clearly not sentimental, and rather than relegating myth to ancient history views it as alive and well, suggesting manipulation and even damage when its influence is detected. Rather than myth as a mutable expression of vivid insights into consciouness through the centuries, he orientates it in the centre of modernity, of advertising. Myth takes the personal meaning of an object and places its signification over it, almost as a form of possession. He views the the moment when myth claims an image as the movement from ‘meaning’ to ‘form’-it has become something else, and he implies a terrific loss in this. Certaintly there is an ambivilance to the power in such a move. Mircea Eliade (9 Eliade. M. Myth and Reality, Waveland Press,1963, p188) also claims a ‘mythology of modern elites’ that harks back to some of the very earliest impulses towards myths function:
we may note the redeeming function of “difficulty”, especially as found in the works of modern art…it is because such works represent closed worlds, hermetic universes that cannot be entered except by overcoming immense difficulties, like the initiatory ordeals of the archaic and traditional societies.
So to Eliade we locate ancient urges reconfiguring; that abstraction and complexity in art represent a initiatory challenge-the artist enters a ritualised container-the studio-for much the same motivation that the young tribeswoman enters the desert for fasting and vision, to be set apart from her peers, to amplify inner revelations, to suffer, study and grow. Both Barthes and Eliade’s perception of the word ensures that myth loses it association as primarily concerned with the past and locates itself both in societal conditioning and the psychological impulses of the body.
For James Hillman (10, Hillman.J. A Blue Fire, HarperPerrenial, 1989, p150) the old gods have fled into our pathologies and reveal their character through symptoms-Saturn handling depression, impotence and emotional distance while Aphrodite revels in the endless erotic undertow of much of our advertising, for example. The myths remain, their hints of the transcendental dimmed, but shifting effortlessly into whatever psychological triggers hold society in general captive. A god stands behind the trigger.
But Hillman typically reviles the idea that somehow mythic figures are nothing but mental constructs; “when we think mythologically about pathologizing, we could say, as some have, that the “world of the gods” is anthropomorphic, an imitative projection of ours…but one could start the other end, the mundus imaginalis, of the archetypes (or gods) and say that our “secular world” is at the same time mythical, an imitative projection of theirs, including their pathologies.” From this position, the ‘Otherworld’ of folklore could be this very one we live on. We are the dream of the Gods.
For many theorists the anthropercentric tone of modern definitions of myth continues. in Lauri Honko’s essay ‘The Problem of Defining Myth’ (11Honko. L, 1972). she adds to Doty’s earlier list of mythic definitions with what she describes as ‘modern theories of myth’ of which some appear to support Barthes tone of unease:
myth as a source of cognitive categories, myth as a charter of behaviour,
myth as ligitmisation of social institutions, myth as marker of social relevance,
myth as a medium for structure.
But what of its ancient relationship to ritual and landscape? Theodore H. Gaster: (12 Gaster, T.H. 1954) “ the purpose of ritual is to present a situation formally and dramatically in its immediate punctual aspect-as an event or occurrence something in which present and actual individuals are involved. That of myth on the other hand, is to present it in its ideal, transcendental aspect-as something transpiring (rather than occuring) concurrently in eternity and as involving preterpunctual, indesinent beings of whom living men and women are but the temporal incarnations”
This clearly religious (note reference to ‘transcendental’) connotation to myth and its relationship to ritual could, if we follow Barthes lead, lead to some of the greatest abuses of ‘meaning’ to ‘form’ imaginable. It appears a sinister imprint, a contortion of the original, personal sentiment into a mesmeric charm entirely for the benefit of the societal mythteller, whether a multi-national corporation or advertising agency. Is this the sum of myth? Are spin doctors our greatest storytellers-a literal enchantment? Eliade;
“ Every sacred space implies a hierophany, an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching a territory from the the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different”. (13 ibid, p26) A mirror in Barthes work would be the question; what do we hold sacred now? If our attention grows significantly more secular then the is it possible the gods are adored in disguise, the impulse to worship could be channeled towards the temple of wordly success and prestige, in the myriad of forms it offers itself. Within this remit, some academics suggest a ritual aspect could present itself in the weekly screening of a television programme that amplifies the values that society hold of use.
G. S. Kirk (14 Kirk.G.S., 1986, p55) offers a caution of this kind of generalisation; even Dotys, Barthes, or Honko’s, “each of these universal theories (and none of them is presented as stipulative, or as valid for only one particular kind of myth) can be negated by citing many obvious instances of myth that do not accord with the assigned origin or function. Indeed the looseness of the word ‘myth’ itself, and its wide range of applications in common usage (even apart from the vulgar meanings such as “fabrication”, together with the failure of specialists to offer acceptable special definitions, suggest that it is a diverse phenomenon that is likely to have different motivations and applications even within a single society-let alone in different cultures and at different periods”
The urge to monotheism, to create ‘one’, mythic voice contains an emprical undertow, claims Kirk. He emphasises its nebulous aspect; that to restrict its flow of association is to lose contact with mythic thought entirely.
How monotheism accomodates rupture is an interesting question-
the word rupture indicates a break or fissure in the surface of appearances; “for religious man, space is not homogeneous; he experiences interruptions, breaks in it; some parts are qualitively different from others…in the homogeneous and infinite expanse, in which no point of reference is possible and hence no orientation can be established, the hierophany reveals an absoloute fixed point, a centre, (15 ibid, 21)
In this quote from Eliade, he claims that we orientate ourselves through hierophany-a sacred rupture, rather than a consensual and unrealistic ‘one’.way of viewing reality. Myth could be said to be a collision of ruptures, all holding echos of one another whilst resisting easy generalisation. From this perspective, our rupture is our axis mundi, our place of orientiation, our holy hills, our cathedral.
The Power of a Place Speaking
The ‘looseness of the word myth’ spills out from entirely societal dictates in the opinion of Sean Kane (16 Kane. S. 1994, 45-79). The previous implications of myth as primarily manipulation or control is turned on its head; “ the terms for a definition of mythtelling involve a concept of ecological patterns which elude, or should elude, human manipulation, and are therefore coded as sacred” he goes onto suggest that even seeing a human consciouness at the centre of the narrative is mistaken; “brought up as we are on human centered literature, events in myth often don’t make much sense. We like to follow the destiny of the human protagonist. However, with myth it is a good idea to assume that the story is being told from the viewpoint of the supernatural. Some myths, like the events they recount, are given to humans by spiritual beings. In this respect, a myth is the power of a place speaking.”
How does a place speak? How many polyphonic expressions pour over us daily from any number of environments-do they qualify as stories if only we had the ears to hear? Are myths literally issuing from rocks, lightning storms and snowflakes? Is it possible that what we call myth is an arc of imagination that rises from the awakened mind and at some invisible but tangible moment collides with the arrival of plant, mineral or star conciousness? What also is the sound issuing from concrete, fumes and electricity? Do they engender a kind of dark mythic arch, or does the vital, truly mythic synthesis require contact with an unmanipulated natural force?
Kane also isolates dreaming as a possible crossroads where this arch of relationship can embolder new myths; “ Myths are cross sections through the interweavings of nature where various points intersect or are amplified. Storytelling interprets these mental energies of nature. And the normal place of these mentalities is dream” So is the storyteller to create an image laden language from the velocity of their night eruptions, that, polished to lustre through generations of tellings one day becomes a myth? There seems to be an implicit trust in the dream-image, that its arrival is magical, and remains so by the telling of the image rather than the explicating of a concept. “Hillman does not recommend bringing a dream up into the light and air of conscious light for interpretation, translation, and application. Rather, he suggests we stay with the dream, letting it take us to places rarely glimpsed, except perhaps in complexies and compulsions.” (17 Moore. T. , A Blue Fire, HarperPerrenial, 1989,p239). So we follow where the myth is leading rather than shaping its unweildy frame for our daily, daylight ambitions.
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