The Power of Myth and Storytelling: Part 5 – The Sustenance of Myth
Friday 31st July, 2009
As we have lost the power of myth in our modern world we have also lost the magic in our lives and become distant from our mysteries. It is time to allow our stories to guide us back to our truth – to dare to be who we dream of being. We are a part of ever unfolding mystery. Knowing our stories keeps us in the narrative and sustains our sense of magic. By allowing the magic back in to our lives, we reclaim our place in the mystery. Every mythology has to do with the wisdom and magic of life related to a specific culture and a specific place. These mythologies are timeless narratives handed down from generation to generation. Because storytelling is a living, breathing tradition, associated with landscape and mythic memory, these stories adapt and change with the times in which they are told – to any era, any person, any moment. Anonymity allows them to slip seamlessly through time, belonging to the teller in the moment, each teller remembering who passed the telling along to them... So the old wisdom is integrated naturally with the challenges of the times and enhanced through the way life has developed. They integrate the individual into their community and the community into nature.
The Time is Now
Let’s not waste another moment! It is crucial that we reclaim our stories, for they fuel our vital force as they incandesce across time, space and culture. The stories we do have are all too often brushed off as “just for kids” or regarded as old-fashioned fairy stories with no further value attributed to them. We have almost forgotten their power. Now our times are calling for a new mythology. In embracing our own individual stories and seeing the myth contained therein we can be inspired to create new world stories that evoke the awakenings we need culturally and globally to create positive changes. Stories that bring focus and understanding to thresholds we must cross and threshold guardians we must meet, as well as the potential journey beyond. These stories have the capacity to nurture the sense of deep peace and courage we need, and facilitate connection with our own eternal truth.
Your Myth
Myths are vessels of our collective wisdom treasured and handed down through time. Symbols, dreams and artifacts are keys to their mythic and traditional associations as well as telling their own stories. They can also inspire you to tell your own perception of stories, as I did of Inishbofin (see Myth 1: The Tradition of the Seanchaí), and help in the evolution of your own myth. Always keep an open heart and mind. Trust the intuitive message they spark in you. An essential ingredient is to allow your intuition and instinct to go to work unfettered as things are not always what they seem. Your imagination will produce the treasures of your myth.
Imagination
And we do have our stories – we just have to grasp them. This was brought home to me by my grandchildren recently. We bought them a beautiful large edition of Puff the Magic Dragon, a wonderful children’s song now made into a superb picture book. It came complete with a CD of the song. My grandchildren adore it and when we are in the car together, which we are frequently as we drive through the Otway Ranges between their inland home and our coastal one, we listen to it many times over, singing along. I used to sing this song in my parents’ car when I was a kid! (But without the CD as we didn’t even have car radio back then.) I reflected on the story – a boy, his imagination, and his friend Puff the magic dragon. When Jackie Paper grew older he forgot about Puff, no longer allowing his imagination to guide the way. Puff is heartbroken and retreats to his cave, his will to continue is gone. Life moves on in the cycle of time – as the serpent, we shed our skin and go onto our next cycle. Sorrow, loss, fear are all part of change and change in life is one thing that is for certain. But sadly, Puff, like the imagination, when cast aside, is unable to flourish. Puff is diminished, green scales falling like rain, and he loses his power. Of course this also speaks loudly to the place of the imagination in the modern world. The most illuminating part for me was the first time I read the book – which was, of course, with Ruby and Tige. The story continued for one last page, taking up where the song left off. Puff was all depressed in his cave, and Jackie Paper is grown (and observing the scene), when along the pathway on the side of the cliffs comes a girl in a red dress. Puff’s face lights up as he sees her coming, and this is the end of the story – or so I thought! However, Ruby’s face had also lit up and she immediately piped up upon seeing this last page, “And here comes Ruby!” The cycle continues and bless our little people in all their wisdom. Ruby had entered the story and created her own part in it. At all of three years of age!
Finding Our Way Home
This past year has been a powerful year of connection for me on many levels. More than ever I have seen individuals recognising their separateness. Many of the established ways in our culture have developed a deep distrust of nature and creation. Of the power of the individual to engage in their own relationship with the divine. The feelings of divisiveness seem more acute than ever. People are struggling to find their way home to themselves, home to their dreams and home to what they feel in their hearts is right and just. It is our myths that guide the way, empowering us, offering us codes of conduct and pathways into the mysterious unknown. According to Joseph Campbell, “We need the maps so that we know where we are going, the thresholds to cross and the proper way to cross them. Otherwise instead of the mystical experience you have the psychological crack up. Here you have the one who cracks up drowning in the sea in which the mystic swims. It is terrifying to have your consciousness transformed.”1)
Joseph Campbell loved to quote “ Tat tvam asi, “thou art that.” I am the mystery of the universe. The stories of the Gods are about me.”
Myths allow us to glimpse the uncertain, the invitations, Joseph Campbell says, that we must all follow at some time. But these codes have to be appropriate to the time in which we are living and our time is changing so rapidly it is blindingly obvious that we need our new myths, the stories of now.
Entering the Otherworld
Dreamtime dwellers, ancestors, gods and goddesses, fairies, elves and sprites; all such beings are often connected to particular cultures, landscapes and sites. Repetition, pattern and contrast in the landscape are essential elements in fairy stories and guide us to thin and sacred places in our imaginations as well as in our outer world. If we can recognise the patterns of Otherworld imagery or story of one place it helps helps us to find them elsewhere. This is a practical experience for those of other cultures who participate in our annual pilgrimage to west Ireland. There are various ways to enter this realm of the Otherworld, and the story is a magical key, if not the route to take. Telling the stories of place, of wilderness and of heroic humanity help us to touch the Otherworldly spaces, the thresholds of which we can cross if we imaginatively enter the story.
JC: Myths are the worlds dreams – archetypal dreams that deal with great human challenges.
The power of telling these tales at special times of year, at special places, is truly a mystical experience that harmonises us with all of life and our place in it. Such times of ceremony and celebration anchor people in their community and community in their place and time, in their own lore of the land. Community is essential to our sustainable future and myth sustains culture and cross cultural understanding. New myths for the new times we are entering will potentially create bonds that will unite us in the common goal to find sustainable and harmonious ways of living on earth.
We Have the Capacity
It is time to activate our extraordinary potentials in an extraordinary time of challenge. We have the capacity to balance and sustain ourselves in new and creative ways if we claim the dreams and stories that have been calling to us and let the magic happen. "You are more authentic the more you resemble what you've dreamed you are." (La Agrado in the Almodóvar film Todo Sobre Mi Madre) Mythology offers a way of narrating experience, giving it the power of story. How many myths do you know? Consider how ancient some of them are and their continuing power and radiance, their ability to evoke passion, determination and vitality, to offer insight and to facilitate transformation. Contemplate legends, fairy tales, folk history, local lore, fables, sagas, wonder tales – all the magical stories that have drawn you, captured your imagination, intrigued you. What have they had in common for you? How do they evoke you now?
Demythologisation
Campbell once posed the question of how to see ourselves as a people for whom myth is life and breath. How can we be called back to the vitality of narrated experience? For myth aims to include the listener and ultimately turns us back to our own experiences. We inevitably find the character we are drawn to within ourselves. But our culture denies this “participation mystique,” presuming that myth has nothing relevant or significant to offer us, that myth is part of a primitive consciousness. If you ask me it is part of our wilderness – the part of our consciousness we must recover as our western consciousness can be seen as a process of demythologisation. Campbell saw this as our myth – the loss of myth. And yet we are storytellers. Stories continue to be told, and in grasping and valuing myths once more we will turn the tide and bring back real mystery – seeking an experience of being alive rather than getting stuck trying to explain the meaning of life all the time. 1) Joseph Campbell