However, it is of first importance not to lose sight of the fact that the mythological archetypes (Bastian’s Elementary Ideas) cut across the boundaries of these culture spheres and are not confined to anyone or two, but are variously represented in all. For example, the idea of survival after death seems to be about conterminous . . . → Read More: Mythological archetypes cut across boundaries of culture spheres.
|
|||
|
And so, to return to our opening question: What is–or what is to be–the new mythology? It is–and will forever be, as long as our human race exists–the old, everlasting, perennial mythology, in its “subjective sense,” poetically renewed in terms neither of a remembered past nor of a projected future, but of now: addressed, that . . . → Read More: What is–or what is to be–the new mythology? “The symbols of the higher religions may at first sight seem to have little in common,” wrote a Roman Catholic monk, the late Father Thomas Merton, in a brief but perspicacious article entitled “Symbolism: Communication or Communion?” “But when one comes to a better understanding of those religions, and when one sees that the experiences . . . → Read More: Symbolism: Communication or Communion? Nietzche, nearly a century ago, already named our period the Age of Comparisons. there were formerly horizons within which people lived and thought and mythologized. There are now no horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. (MLB . . . → Read More: The Age of Comparisons For it is simply a fact–as I believe we have all not got to concede–that mythologies and their deities are productions and projections of the psyche. What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man’s imagination? We know their histories: we know by what stages they developed. Not only . . . → Read More: Mythologies and their deities are productions and projections of the psyche. It is my whole present thesis, consequently, that we are at this moment participating in one of the very greatest leaps of the human spirit to a knowledge not only of outside nature but also of our own deep inward mystery that has ever been taken, or that ever will or ever can be taken. . . . → Read More: Inward Journey Part IV. Not only are socieities no longer attuned to the courses of the planets; sociology and physics, politics and astronomy are no longer understood to be departments of a single science. Nor is the individual interpreted (in the democratic West, at least) as an inseparable subordinate part of the organism of a state. What we know . . . → Read More: Inward Journey Part III. “Can we not see,” remarks Dr. Laing in his commentary on the whole experience, “that this voyage is not what we need to be cured of, but that it is itself a natural way of healing our own appalling state of alienation called normality?” Something much the same was the view, also, of both Dr. . . . → Read More: Inward journey of the mythological hero – Part II. The first is what I have called the mystical function: to waken and maintain in the individual a sense of awe and gratitude in relation to the mystery dimension of the universe, not so that he lives in fear of it, but so that he recognizes that he participates in it, since the mystery of . . . → Read More: The four functions served by a properly operating mythology And so we have this critical problem, as I say, this critical problem as human beings, of seeing to it that the mythology–the constellation of sign signals, affect images, energy-releasing and -directing signs–that we are communicating to our young will deliver directive messages qualified to relate them richly and vitally to the environment that is . . . → Read More: Our critical problem today: a Waste Land situation |
|||
|
Copyright © 2013 Mythic Dreams.org - All Rights Reserved. |
|||
