Sunday, June 1, 2014

MYTH SPEAKING


Myths speak to us of our essence and of our origins. Each of us shelters round a campfire of myths, adrift in the infinity of a wilderness that is as frightening as it is full of possibilities. In such a wilderness a myth is not so much a spiritual path as an eternal reminder of what lies within and behind the phenomenal realm of our senses, a place divinely invisible and internal, and yet everywhere present – a force bodied forth in trees and rivers, boulders and clay pans, in the crops and animals that feed us, and in seasons and multitudinous energies of the natural world, which we discover by means of that most ancient of human occupations: wandering.

Humanity’s active participation in the creation and re-vivification of a mythic consciousness is also an act of wandering – psychic wandering – that provides modes of becoming, which dramatise and evoke recognisable and recurring forms of being and transformation. Such transformations are not necessarily positive or constructive. Indeed, history is littered with the records of those that exploited myth for the purposes of base propaganda or worse. Like anything of genuine power and value, myth can be turned to the selfish needs and goals of anyone clever enough to tell a good story, or at least the :”right” story at the “right” time.  Even so, the myth that works merely to serve the narrow power and purpose of political dominance and manipulation also harbours within itself the seeds of its own irrelevance, and is likely to be supplanted by a seemingly more relevant and fashionable myth, just as it supplanted the myth thatcame before it.

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