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Modern myths are the role plays of collective consciousness.
Chiron reminds us that only through recognising and accepting our inner wounds can we find true healing.
One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form.
Don't you think that today it is in this sort of popular literature that you find strong archetypes, symbolic images which have vanished somehow from the more highbrow literary works ?
Stanley Kubrick replied - Yes, I do .... I believe fantasy stories at their best serve the same function for us that fairy tales and mythology formerly did. The current popularity of fantasy, particularly in films, suggests that popular culture, at least, isn't getting what it wants from realism.
" September 26 [1964]. Stanley gave me Joseph Campbell's analysis of the myth - The Hero with a Thousand Faces - to study - very stimulating "
Authur C. Clarke
Man is an amphibian who lives simultaneously in two worlds -- the given and the home-made, the world of matter, life and consciousness and the world of symbols. In our thinking we make use of a great variety of symbols-systems -- linguistic, mathematical, pictorial, musical, ritualistic. Without such symbol-systems we should have no art, no science, no law, no philosophy, not so much as the rudiments of civilization: in other words, we should be animals... But symbols -- as the history of our own and every other age makes so abundantly clear -- can also be fatal... Consider, for example, the domain of science on the one hand, and the domain of politics and religion on the other. Thinking in terms of, and acting in response to, one set of symbols [science], we have come, in some small measure, to understand and control the elementary forces of nature. Thinking in terms of, and acting in response to another set of symbols [politics and religion], we use these forces as instruments of mass murder and collective suicide. In the first case [science] the explanatory symbols were well chosen, carefully analyzed and progressively adapted to the emergent facts of physical existence. In the second case [politics and religion] symbols originally ill-chosen were never subjugated to thorough-going analysis and never re-formulated so as to harmonize with the emergent facts of human existence. Worse still, these misleading symbols [politics and religion] were everywhere treated with a wholly unwarranted respect, as though, in some mysterious way, they were more real than the realities [if any] to which they [supposedly] referred.
In a way, human beings have never been part of the natural order; we're not biological in the normal sense. Normal biological animals stop eating when they're not hungry and stop breeding when there is no sense in breeding. By contrast, human beings are what I think of as "biomythic" animals: we're controlled largely by the stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony with the rest of the natural order. For a long time, our unnatural beahvior didn't threaten the natural world, but now it does.
"You mourn, for it is proper to mourn.
But your grief serves you; you do not
become a slave to grief.
You bid the dead farewell,
and you continue."
-- Neil Gaiman, from The Sandman Vol. 10: The Wake; "Exiles"
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