Emergent
Written by Rohaan Solare on Saturday, January 9, 2010 9:00 - 4 Comments
Demystifying Myth And The Power Of Myth To Bind And To Free
Dreams are private myths, myths are public dreams
Joseph Campbell
The Mythic Realm: Our World Rendered Symbolically
By demystification I mean too say… shed some clarity on a subject not well understood in a culture that has become mythically illiterate.
My goal is also to emphasize the need for a new and overarching myth or story. A story that will serve us as we encounter a time period unlike any we’ve encountered before. There are millions of people around the world who are ready to embrace a greater vision of what it means to be a human society—a global humanity.
Those of us ready for something greater signify the critical mass needed to begin coalescing around a story broad enough to unite all who dream and wish to work for a better world. A world built on cooperation. I will use the terms myth and story interchangeably.
Joseph Campbell was emphatic about the planetary myth—the story of humanity as a whole. His deep knowledge of the mythic realm compelled him to assert that the future of humanity’s socio-cultural evolution lay with a new story capable of accounting for everything relevant to a story relating everyone to everybody else and everyone to the entirety of the planet. The world’s current dominant story system thrives by creating divisions and coercing others to its point of view.
What is Myth and Why is it Important?
Myth is such a seemingly tenuous, multi-faceted and yet all encompassing subject, like the air around us, that I find it difficult to define in just one nice neat sentence. It would be 
like trying to define life in a single sentence. Not to say I won’t try, but perhaps the simplest “on the street” definition of myth would be...a story told almost exclusively in symbolic terms.Not that the foregoing defines myth, but it’s useful to start the conversation.
There are two primary schools of thought on the subject of myth. The objectivitist school is inclined to view myth as a primitive (read obsolete) way of describing the phenomenal world. The second school, the subjectivists, say that myths are timeless reflections of universal “truths”, values and archetypes. As with most dichotomies both can be said to be true and greater accuracy tends to result when we reconcile the persistent illusion of absolutes.
Campbell may have tended more toward the subjectivist view, but I do not find him strict by any means. One may investigate myth for both elements and I think Campbell was more interested the timeless functions of myth versus their more temporal or practical aspects. I too am more interested in the timeless, but I am tempered by a desire to not confuse the two.
How does Myth Relate to Religion
Campbell quipped… “Mythology” is what we call someone else’s religion.” Here Campbell alludes to the literalization of myth.The Western world tends to read its Bible in a literal manner. The literal interpretation of ancient text is to wholly misunderstand the point and meaning of mythos.
I would say that religion is what results when myth is commodified, packaged and artificially flavored. Religion also inserts intermediaries (priests, cardinals, bishops, popes) between you and the direct experience of whatever facet of mythology is in question. Religion seems more to function as a form of political control and social engineering device.
If myth is natural and organic then religion is processed, full of preservatives and toxic ingredients. Mythology gives you wings while religion binds you literally and figuratively. The etymology of religion comes from the latin word religare which means “to bind.” Myth equates to direct experience and with religion one must go to a very specific place on regular basis and have someone tell them about the “spiritual-religious” experience.
Religionists also talk about the rewards that await us if we conduct our lives “righteously” while alive. In contrast someone from a culture still steeped in its mythos will tell you that you that everything is “sacred”, you never leave the temple and that our rewards are to be found in the here and now. Albert Einstein sums it up by saying…
“There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle or you can live as if everything is a miracle.”
Religion begins by separating, by selecting what constitutes the miraculous, a “sin”, a “grace” and the will of God. Who is to judge what is “sacred”, what is “holy” and what is not and what is “God’s” will. Don’t get me wrong myth is by no means a relativistic free for all. Everything has limits and without certain boundaries everything would be one big unintelligible mess, but myth does not impose, insist or prescribe punishment. Mythos guides, suggests, references or points toward and perhaps warns of treacherous terrain.
Some definitions of myth according to the late Joseph Campbell.
Joseph Campbell, defines myth as “… a directing of the mind and heart, by means of profoundly informed figurations, to that ultimate mystery which fills and surrounds all existences
Myth, Campbell says, is “a rendition of forms through which the formless form of forms can be known (The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology).” Further on in the same work, he says that mythology “an organisation of images conceived as a rendition of the sense of life.”
“Religion is mythology misunderstood.”
Rites, Campbell tells us, are “not references but presences (Primitive Mythology)”, just like “physical formulae; written, however, not in the black on white… … …, but in human flesh. The individuals rendering it are not individuals any more but epiphanies of a cosmic mystery and, as such, taboo – hence ceremonially decorated and symbolically, not humanly, regarded and treated(Ibid.).”
“The material of myth is the material of our life, the material of our body, and the material of our environment, and a living, vital mythology deals with these in terms that are appropriate to the nature of the knowledge of time.”
Campbell declares unabashedly that without myth, even myth taken literally humans are lost: “For not only has it always been the way of multitudes to interpret their own symbols literally, but such literally read symbolic forms have always been . . . the supports of their civilizations, the supports of their moral orders, their cohesion, vitality, and creative powers. . . . With our old mythologically founded taboos unsettled by our own modern sciences, there is everywhere in the civilized world a rapidly rising incidence of vice and crime, mental disorders, suicides and dope addictions, shattered homes, impudent children, violence, murder. and despair” (Myths to Live By [Viking, 1972])
Stone Age Venus figures symbolic of the feminine power once highly regarded by our earliest cultures.
The following paragraphs are taken from the page where the above unemboldened quotes are to be found. The author of the page also has some telling things to say about myth.
“A myth is a set of cosmic laws perceived in human terms. (Not interpreted: for that we have religion, philosophy, art and science. Here, perceived is to be taken in its literal sense.) It is the form serving as interface between the abstract transcendent (understood here as “free from all concepts”) and the concrete existent, with information travelling both ways all the time.
A myth is always a narrative whose purpose is not to entertain but to energise the “everyday” through enactment (not re-enactment!) of the eternal creative now. The narrative of myth is brought to life by the performing of rites: ritual acts and utterances most of which tend to remain unchanged over centuries.”
Myth as Navigational System
A symbolic map of the known universe according to the ancient Meso-Americans. My work on the Art and Science of Synchronicity is based on the cosmovision of pre-colonial Meso-America. Those interested may review my ongoing work under the Synchronicity section.
Joseph Campbell died in 1987 and his name is still synonymous with the title of world’s foremost authority on the subject of mythology and comparative religion/spirituality. We may gather from the above quotes that myths are an essential component of a healthy society and how a society who loses touch with its myths is lost and to be plagued by every sort of social and individual ills.
If bread-water nourishes the objective brain-body then mythos nourishes our intuitive-emotional subjective self. How can mere stories have such importance?Myths it seems are timeless encapsulations of how humans render in symbolic terms the various forces, properties, elements and processes of nature.Myths also suggest how we are to relate with others and with said aspects of nature.
The foundational myths of any culture deal with origins (creation, coming into being) our life’s development, our relationship to nature, the mystery of existence and the transcendance of life to whatever may lie beyond the individual’s death. The essential myths offer instructions specific to each culture about how to “best” live and conduct ones life along with guidelines on how to deal with life’s recurrent themes and situations.
Instructions and guidelines are largely culture specific, but the stages of life and its recurrent themes are universal in nature. Birth, death, youth, middle age, social relations and our relations to the elements of nature are basic properties of people and cultures the world over and therefore, universal considerations. It is here where we find the source of Jung’s archetypes and Campbell’s recurrent mythic motifs.
Seen as such we can now understand why stories are so important to the cohesion and survival of the collective-individual. The mental-emotional coherence-cohesion of the individual helps contribute to the coherence-cohesion of the group. The foregoing is a favorite attribution of evolutionary biologists and anthropologists to explain the development and maintenance of mythic systems.
They however do not distinguish between myth and religion. Myth is essential and integral to a healthy society. Religion or corrupted myth is like spoiled food. Religion may once again return to myth by dispensing with all of its artificial ingredients or the impositions of man over humankind and nature.
Myths may therefore be seen as mind maps with built-in sets of directions to best help the collective-individual navigate the terrain of life. We may now understand why Campbell said that a society who has either forgotten or misinterpreted its myths is for all intended purposes lost—disoriented and in the dark. The overarching function of myth is then to orient, to guide and to relate the individual-collective with the phenomenal world.
What I call the overarching function of myth is divided by Campbell into the four functions of myth.
Acording to Joseph Campbell the four functions of Myth are:
order and its support is not guaranteed in perpetuity. And here’s where the myths vary enormously from place to place…It is this sociological function of myth that has taken over in our world–and it is out of date…It is evident from the list that Campbell was rather well balanced in his approach and understanding of the all encompassing purpose and function of mythos
Distinctions between Myths.
The Culture Specific Features of Mythic Motifs
Facetal and Comprehensive Myths
Myths according to width and breadth of scope. Certain myths emphasize a facet (Oedipus) of the socio-cultural matrix while others attempt to embrace its totality (Genesis).
[To be continued.]
This article concludes part 1 of a series of reports of the demystification of myth, its power, purpose and its relevance to the present age–the age of literalism.
The next report will treat the following aspects of myth.
Myths as..
set of relational instructions
time capsule from our ancient past
clue to present conditions
futures forecaster
self-fulfilling prophecy
I would like to hear what others have to add, subtract, correct or clarify upon.
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Sage
The diversity of people (and cultures), facing different individual and community problems, calls for a diversity of stories. And this plurality of stories became problematic since the rising of writing, and the separation of philosophy from the rest of the ritual-mythical culture. So, the wise cannot adhere to a new story. But the young and naive are still naturally drown to subcultures , for acquiring an identity and a sense of belonging to a community.
Astromachia
I’m very interested in the concepts of ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. I am undertaking a rather large practical experiment on the internet at the moment. When it works it works, beyond the wildest dreams of most…
You may recognize my work.
Love your work.
Astromachia
I forgot to mention, that there is a verse to the song of life that we all sing & share. That is the unifier. Some of us have merely forgotten, but we are being reminded in the age of Empathy. Therein lays the power.
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Anticipating Personal and Collective Shifts in Relation to MMAC Time Science
The word shift is commonly used in reference to the motifs associated with the 2012-“End of the Mayan Calendar” phenomena (2012-MC). The expectations of those most realistically attuned to the mytho-symbolic significances of 2012-MC sense that there are large scale socio-cultural shifts in the works. Emergent-Culture.com is essentially dedicated to the planet wide socio-cultural movement (planetary culture) that I believe lies at the heart of the “co-incidence” between the end of the 5125 year Maya Long Count Cycle and the unprecedented levels of socio-economic turbulence seen all around the world.
The notion of mere “coincidence” is dispelled once one understands what the Ancient Mesoamericans (Maya, Toltecs, Olmecs, etc) discovered about the nature of time and reality. I use the the term Ancient Mesoamericans because precolumbian Mesoamerica was home to upwards of 80 different tribes and most followed the same calendrical system. Additionally the Maya were not the first to use the core of the Mesoamerican calendrical system—-the tzolkin cycle. Although they were the ones who developed Mesoamerican calendrics to its highest degree. I also prefer to use Ancient Mesoamericans because it helps differentiate between present day Mesoamericans and those who lived in Middle America prior to the European invasion.
Since it was the ancient ones who were responsible for the development of Maya-Meso-American Calendrical system. (MMAC)
And What is Time?
In the Western world time is a very muddled concept. Western science is only now beginning to acknowledge that their classical conception of time is ill defined, overcomplicated and just plain wrong. Have a look at Wikipedia’s treatment of time to get a taste of what I mean. Time has been so misunderstood that Western scholars have written entire books about the subject without reaching any kind of conclusion or consensus about what time is.
Those of you familiar with my writings on time and Mesoamerican calendrics (calendar/time science) know that from my vantage point, time is nothing more than movement and that’s how the Ancient MesoAmericans (AMA) saw it as well. Albeit a special kind of movement.Something I call ordered movement. There are various definitions of time and many are useful, but I’m talking about time in the most fundamental of terms. Time is not the fourth dimension as Einstein believed.[…]
[NOTE: The foregoing paragraphs serve as an introduction to a chapter on my developing book on The Legend of 2012. The remaining text below this note is the tail end of the chapter where I show how one may apply MMAC time science to one’s life in order to anticipate significant personal life events, and as a way to self validate what I consider to be the most profound and universally relevant cosmology (worldview) presently available. It is universally relevant because it applies to everyone regardless of whether one believes in it or not. It is universally relevant because it’s a mesocosmically scaled cosmology and that means that you don’t need to understand equations or use special tools to observe and appreciate, e,g. microscope, telescope.
The chapter goes on to develop the idea of time as ordered movement/change and of how the earth’s basic movements translate into the scheduled and sequential movements of all organisms. The mechanism is detailed down to the DNA molecular level in an attempt to show how all of life unfolds to the beat of some cosmic piper. The piper’s “musical score” is intrinsic to the earth’s movements, the workings of DNA code and all human activity in general. I suggest that the Ancient Mesoamericans discerned the cosmic score from their study of astronomical and earthly cycles both overt and subtle. Some cycles are so subtle that no other culture discovered them. The most subtle of these cycles were encoded into their Tzolkin cycle calendar.
I also relate the tzolkin and genetic codes and then show their relationship to the implicate and explicate orders that the Physicist David Bohm describes in his Holomovement cosmology. This article focuses on a particular type of movement we call a shift or transition. These shifts happen at predictable time scales because the growth and development of all organisms happen according to timing constants built into the very fabric of our reality. It seems that the AMA discovered those constants. The following excerpt tells you how to apply those constants.] click here to read entire article
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The Delusions The Deluders and the “Truth”: How Culture Programs Your Mind is licensed by Rohaan Solare under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
I appreciate your work in bringing to our attention that which many of us intuitively already know and which more are beginning to awaken to–that we are lost without a true story. The dominant story we currently live with is a lie and isn't sustaining us any longer, on any level, except for those who get off on greed. What we all innately know is that there are two stories (light vs. dark) deeply embedded in our collective psyche: the story of gratitude, wonder, joy, right livelihood, and allowance and respect for the Earth and her inhabitants, and the story of greed, anger, fear, suffering and lack with overlords watching and judging our every move. It's easy to see which story most of us would like to live by, and we've done a fairly good job of managing both in our world (even if one was submerged), but now it seems to be the moment to choose.
I don't consider the "dark" story to be bad or wrong (as with reconciling the persistent illusion of absolutes) and it's possible it served us well in some ways, but I am certain that most of us are worn out from having lived it for so long. And because it's felt like we were cast to the wolves when the shift from "Eden" to "hell" began, we're dealing with deep unresolved issues: where is our real mother and father and why have they abandoned us? Can we trust ourselves to allow a shift back to the garden, or will we look for new leaders to tell us what to do? Will we still operate from the myth of the return of Christ as savior or will we find new story that asks us to step up to the plate?