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Author Insight
We're All Mythic
I came to myth through my love of fairy tale and legend, becoming fascinated with the great variety of cultural traditions and artifacts that humans have generated across time and place. But learning to understand mythology through a psychological lens was the key that opened up this magical universe for me. I began to see how mythology is always present, always at work for us humans, and how it holds and reveals so much truth for us, both individually and socially. I have ever since been exploring its depths and curiosities. I’m most interested in trying to suss out the contemporary mythologies that we are steeped in. It’s tricky!
Book Excerpt
How to Participate in the World
MYTH IS:
A web composed of facts, beliefs, memories, traditions, ideas, dreams, stories…This web of mythology grows out of our shared experience, holding us and shaping us, becoming culture.
Mythology performs the crucial function of bridging what we know with what we don’t. This occurs at the interface between consciousness and the unconscious. This mysterious area between “real” and “ pretend” is where dreams and theories, habits and traditions, and all manner of creative things come into being.
Myth is certainly revealed in story form, but is also expressed in very many other ways: through all of the arts… through government and religion, architecture, craft, and design… dreams, memories, habits…speech patterns, foodways, family traditions…even scientific procedures, economic strategies, and political ideologies… In short, every human construction is mythically infused.
Kaleidoscopic and paradoxical, myth cannot be reduced to a defined meaning, but speaks on many levels. It is not falsehood. It is metaphorically true though not literally true.
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