Cultural Mythology: Myth, culture, and consciousness

Daimons and destiny

You know that there is an invisible world beneath/beside/within the visible one. Call it god or atoms; religious belief or science, there is more to this world than meets the eye. So I am struck by the difficult time people can have “accepting” the supernatural aspects of a story. Maybe it’s a matter of context. I tell you a story that includes a goddess and that seems totally implausible. You don’t “believe” in her after all. It’s fiction. And the tale may have been handed down from people we imagine as unsophisticated because they didn't have cell phones.

But if we are at a dinner party you might tell me about the time that you definitely saw a ghost or received a message from an ancestor. Or had a strange dream that presaged later events. Or had an animal talk to you. Or found an open gateway in your consciousness, under the influence of psychedelics, meditation, music, or chance that revealed a breathing, energetic cosmos connected by faintly glowing strings, pulsing with desire. Or looked under a microscope. Contemplated or boosted your immune system. Studied physics. Had a fateful encounter with a stranger.

Who knows what is true about the invisible world? We have lived experience and dreams, reason and imagination, shared facts and fictions, and the compulsion to interpret them. Out of this hodgepodge comes our favorite stories, theories, beliefs (the words are interchangeable in this context)—the ones that create a world that we want to live in. A world that is inherently dependent on metaphor.

I recently reread The Soul's Code by James Hillman, an exegesis on character, calling, and the notion that our lives are guided by a caring, personal daimon. Our dull and unimaginative approaches to life, Hillman says, rob us of mystery and meaning. You don’t have to “believe” like an evangelical to adopt (imagine) a creative perspective about the ongoing role of the invisible in your life. Why not relate to a personal genie that guides your life toward a personal destiny? (Genie, from the Latin genius, meaning "guardian spirit").

With this in mind I’ll turn to the Greek myth of Artemis and Actaeon in the coming posts. It's the story of a young hunter who is turned into a stag by a goddess and subsequently dismembered by his own hunting dogs. Weird, right?  Now it’s time for my daimon to take me out to lunch.

Freedom

An interesting interview with James Hillman appeared in Huffington Post last month. In "America and the Shift in Ages," Hillman talks about the decay of American mythologies like the myth of American exceptionalism, futurism, and Christianity. The mighty efforts underway to preserve these myths (ie, fundamentalist thinking) is proof, Hillman says, of their lack of vitality.

Hillman is a stimulating thinker and important source for my own work and I encourage you to check out the whole interview. But I want to pull out this one bit on freedom because it relates to our current conversation about earned character.

Hillman: One would have to think about what needs to die in this culture; what attachments need to slip away, such as white supremacy, male supremacy, and the sense that we are the really "good people." America has a certain hubris about its virtue. Another thing would be our "unanalyzed" understanding of the word freedom. Probably one of the striking things in the dying of your father was his dependence on help, like nursing homes and nurses and crutches -- yet out of his lack of freedom arose another kind of freedom.

(Interviewer) Pythia: My father was particularly stubbornly American in that regard. He wouldn't even go into a hospital because then he wouldn't be "free" to smoke or drink. But you seem to be saying that as we lose one kind of freedom, there arises the possibility of another kind of freedom.

Hillman: I'm saying that we haven't thought about the idea of freedom enough. It needs to be internalized as an inner freedom from "demand" itself: the kind of freedom that comes when you're free from those compulsions to have and to own and to be someone. For example, think of the kind of freedom that (South African president) Nelson Mandela must have experienced when he was imprisoned. He completely lost his freedom in the outer world, yet he found freedom within. That's an example that broadens our current limited idea of freedom: that I can do any goddamn thing I want on my property; that I am my own boss and don't want government interference; that I don't want anybody telling me what I can and can't do; that we've had too much regulation, and so on. This is the freedom of a teenage boy.

Our definition of freedom is at the heart of our political divisions. The Tea Partyer's, for example, have merely thrown the issue into sharper relief. Feedom is also the central challenge and opportunity in the quest for earned character. The freedom that you grant yourself is connected to your self-definition and way of living; it reflects your highest values. Sometimes willingly obligating oneself is the path to personal freedom. More on this in the next post...