What is a healthy mythology?
Jeroen
Not all those who wander are lostNetherlands Veteran
I was considering what kind of archetypes we carry within ourselves, the stuff that powers our subconscious. In a modern human, these things might come from:
- Early childhood stories — fairytales, Disney, comic books
- Media — television, movies, YouTube, ebooks
- Religion — the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, other epics
So very different from the kinds of folk tales which might have been told by our ancestors in the Middle Ages to their young children, which might have shaped their mythologies. It strikes me that a child born in the USA in the second half of the 20th century would have had a very different mythological formation than a child born in say the 19th century, or even a child born at the same time in India.
Modern stories often have a “big bad” which is to be defeated, which means that kids who grow up on a diet of such stories may carry in themselves a lot of evil archetypes and some good archetypes (the heroes) which tend to be in the minority because they are frequently re-used.
What do you think about the mythological basis of your life?
Comments
I've resonated with the archetypes in the book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine, particularly the magician. I often use the more "childish" forms to explore myths and archetypes.
@person
A spiritual friend recommended the book "Jung and Frodo: 7 Paths of Individuation in Lord of the Rings". Since you're mentioning archetypes and quoted Celebrimbor in another thread, I suspect you might find the book interesting.
I mostly read it and found it fun and stimulating. It's a light read, maybe too light ie. too simplistic. But it touched on two of my interests, psychology and Tolkien, so I was glad to have stumbled upon it.
@Jeroen
Are you aware of Joseph Campbell?
I believe he was the first to propose and document with examples across times and geography that all mythologies follow the same general pattern: what he called "the hero's journey".
From that perspective, it does not much matter if the mythology is Inuit, Mongolian, Roman Empire, Gaelic, Disney... it's all basically same-same in structure and overarching messages.
People say the hero's journey is why Star Wars resonated with so many people, and why the best stories have some version of it.
I was aware of the Hero’s Journey and Joseph Campbell, yes. As I understand it — I haven’t yet finished reading Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces which is available as pdf online — he discovered an underlying pattern in many heroic myths. That pattern doesn’t define entire mythologies though, which are more complex arrangements of archetypes with multiple mythic stories.
There are other mythic stories such as the “creation myth”, “the stealing of fire myth”, “the flood myth”, “the underworld journey myth” which don’t necessarily conform to the hero’s journey, although some do. Some archetypes also don’t occur in the classic hero’s journey as you find it in Star Wars, such as a Mother archetype, or a Creator archetype.
Kind of what I’m getting at is that most of the stories people are told at an impressionable age these days seem to be of the quality of Donald Duck, rather than the Epic of Gilgamesh. There is a lot of junk storytelling going on, stories which do not have a mythic quality and which is dumbed down for a tv audience.
You could say that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a mythology, although it’s heavy on heroes and light on relationships and actual life events like marriages, babies and such.
Thanks @person, I will definitely buy myself a copy of that.
Of course, that’s what I grew up with in the 1970’s. Today young kids are getting TikTok and Roblox and their mother’s iPhone to play with. It’s not just the underlying mythology that they get fed that I am concerned with, it’s the whole formative experience.
When I was aged 10 I was reading Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea and Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Christo and The Three Musketeers, because I was roaming Amsterdam’s libraries and bookstores pretty much unsupervised. So proper long-form novels and stories, which require concentration and language understanding.
@Jeroen
Probably quite right that the hero's journey is not the only myth type. I would be interested to learn whether the other types of myths mentioned are also maybe universal and similar across times and cultures.
Creation myths and Flood myths occur in many cultures. About the others I am less sure.
Joseph Campbell wrote a series of four books, The Masks of God, in which he expounds the mythologies around the world and at various times. Unfortunately not available as pdf, but the Wikipedia article on Campbell contains some detail.
Thanks! Very interesting.
I consider myself a perpetual startling or beginner. A sort of ugly Aunty Cinderella...
https://buddhismnow.com/2013/07/05/first-steps-buddhist-meditation/
I just stumbled upon an account of an exchange with Socrates that is nearly literally the same as a Zen story I was previously acquainted with. What are we to make of that?
Socrates story
Zen story (go to "Wanting God")
There were probably travellers who spread these stories quite widely…
Agreed.
I have been thinking about this more, the topic of mythology has been on my mind of late, and I’ve been reading the Wikipedia pages on myth, folklore and creation myths, and it strikes me that there are myths often being recreated in popular culture, even without people knowing what they are doing.
For me, the creation myths carry a special significance. There is a page on Wikipedia where they examine the types of creation myths which kind of sings to me, I find it hard to pick a favourite but the creation ex nihilo which is the standard Christian interpretation appeals to me least. Instead things like the chaos-order dichotomy of Ancient Greek mythology I find speaks to me much more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_myth
I came across Sting’s musical production The Last Ship a while back, and it kind of encapsulates the mythology of the ship building people of England’s Northwest, where Sting grew up. As a piece of myth making I would really encourage you to take a look, it’s the DNA of the stories of those people…
Then there were the legendary Buddhist Theri
https://www.buddhistdoor.net/features/the-progression-of-womens-education-in-buddhism-from-historical-texts-to-modern-revival/
...and the convicted but absent fake Guru...
https://buddhism-controversy-blog.com/2017/03/11/robert-spatz-the-ogyen-kunsang-choling-cults-guru-gets-4-years-suspended-sentence/
What does this have to do with mythology, @lobster? Please start your own thread about these things, or put it in the nonsense announcements thread.
LOL
Everything.
It is a personal mythology, that becomes a mainstream mythology. Until finally we have a Buddha mythology. If you think my thread belongs elsewhere, maybe the moderators will agree. Maybe not.
Scared, scarred or scary?
https://www.morganwitches.com/blog/the-symbolism-of-solve-et-coagula/
Choose your lack of a soul wisely?
I was revisiting this thread, and just watched The Last Ship again, to see why it resonated so clearly with me, besides Sting’s wonderful music of course. There is something majestic about those huge steel ships rising above the shipyards on the Clyde, and it’s tales of doughty foremen and musical welders… real salt o the earth kinds of people.
It reminds me of my mothers stories of her childhood and growing up with a father who worked in the fish hall, filleting fish for my grandfathers company and making deals with the fishermen for their catch and bringing the fish in boxes on ice to restaurants in nearby towns. So many stories about that time. But people who were not very different from the shipyard crews that Sting sings about.
Sting says in the intro to the film I linked that before his foray into musical theatre he was unaware to what extent each song, each line in the work would be scrutinised, and he thanks his wonderful collaborators. It’s excellent that so much of the songs is in dialect, with accents of the region.
There are other mythological works, not the least of which is The Lord of the Rings. We just recently watched the Extended Editions of the films again, they are a wonderful telling of the story and here too language is important, in the songs, the history of the races, the scripts they used.
Myths - Purpose
Some myths were and are just tales to frighten or comfort children.
Some myths are to entertain, no more, no less.
Then there are the myths with morals, for learning, for remembering, for healing.
The Lord of the Rings is an example of a mythological story loaded with the seeds of moral guides or codes, lessons drawn from the telling al hidden within.
Yes, The Lord of the Rings is about good and evil made tangible. Sauron is said in the prelude to Fellowship to have poured “his cruelty, his malice and his will to dominate” into the One Ring at it’s creation, and so it stands as the symbol of evil power that must be destroyed. Along the way, the quest reveals much about the nature of good and evil in the hearts of those who encounter the Ring, from Boromir who is seduced by it, to Faramir and Aragorn who stay true to the path determined by the Wise. It is about goodness and virtue and providence in the end.
A theme that runs through the story is the wickedness of industrialisation, in what happens to Isengard for instance, and in Saruman’s crossing of orcs with men to create the Uruk-Hai. In a way the good land from which the hobbits come is the idealised rural England of the Shire, a land of gardens and farms and public houses where ale is drunk. The idea is that wild nature is magical, but in cultivated nature goodness can be found.
The thing about the story is that it brings so many things that might otherwise take a long lifetime to realise, into the open and makes them obvious. The benefits of long life as enjoyed by the Elves is shown in their nobility and wisdom.