What is a healthy mythology?
Jeroen
Luminous beings are we, not this crude matterNetherlands 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.