A Time for Myths

Every advance in our understanding of the world and of man's place in that world is a good time for  myth-making. Of all the creatures of the earth, none but man is capable of inventing, telling and enjoying listening to great stories. In the entire universe, man is the only being capable of myth making. Every tribe, every race, every nations has its own myths. It is through their myths that you know them. We have had some great myths: the creation myth, the hero myth, the myth of man's struggle against the forces of nature, of life and of death, for power and love and even of rebirth e.g. the myths of Narcissus, Sisyphus, Faust, Journeys through Hell, the Briar Rose and the annual Easter Resurrection etc.

In "The Cry for Myth" (91) by the great psychiatrist Rollo May (1909-1994), the author of such best sellers as Freedom and Destiny (1981), Love and Will(1969, 1989) and Man's Search for Himself, (1953, 1973) taught us a little of what he learned from his study of the great myths of the world.

To May, "myth  is a way of making sense in a senseless world" and is essential to our mental health. He attributes the proliferation of psychotherapy as partly a result the loss of life-sustaining myths in our contemporary world.  He quotes the great anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski who in his Magic, Science and Religion, says, "Studied alive, myth...is not an explanation in satisfaction of a scientific interest, but a narrative resurrection of a primeval reality, told in satisfaction of deep religion wants, moral cravings....Myth...expresses, enhances, and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality; it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contain practical rules of the guidance of man. Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force. "

May thinks that it is through its myths that a healthy society gives its members relief from neurotic guilt and excessive anxiety. Thus in ancient Greece, "the myth freed Plato, Aeschylus and Sophocles to create their great philosophic and literary works" and when the myths of classical Greece broke down in the second and third centuries, Lucretius found :"aching hearts in every home, racked incessantly by pangs the mind was powerless to assuage and forced to vent themselves in recalcitrant repining.". People in the 20th century are not much better: we have lost any credible myths which give meaning and purpose to our lives. Hence the great numbers who sought relief from drugs (which has the effect breaking down the barrier between the self and the world for the duration of the drug trip but without the integrating power of myths), sex ( which only provides a temporary relief in breaking down human loneliness), cults ( which has the power but is without the limits or social responsibility of myths) and psychotherapy. We are desperate for an "internal identity.".

To May, "the need for myths, indeed, the cry for myths will be present wherever there are persons who call themselves human.". They are narratives through which we try to unify our inner selves in relation to the outside world, physical and social, often difficult and apparently meaningless. Through myths, we try to integrate our ideas, our feelings, our loves, our existential struggles, our lives, our deaths and such transcendental values as simplicity, order and beauty. She thinks that each individual who wishes to bring coherence and order into the chaotic streams of his/her sensations, emotions and ideas from within and without is forced to do what in previous ages had been done for them by family, custom, church and state. She agrees with Hannah Green that myths are "sharers of our loneliness.".

A symptom of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture according to May is the popular but mistaken equation of myth with falsehood. To him, "language abandons myth only at the price of loss of human warmth, color, intimate meaning and values," which we desperately need to give a personal meaning to our lives. It is only through identifying with the subjective meaning of the language of others and what words mean to them to their world that we can experience something of what they are feeling and be able to empathize with them. He says, "Without myth, we are like a race of brain-injured people unable to go beyond the word and hear the person who is speaking.".  Without myths, we are turned into emotional deaf-mutes or existential cripples. He thinks that we must listen to this cry for myth because "unless we achieve authentic myths our society will fill the vacuum with pseudo-myths and beliefs in magic.". Some social surveys in the 1960s and 1970s have shown that belief in God is decreasing and belief in the Devil is increasing. He agree with an article the religious and cultural journal Listening in 1974 that "Devil belief is an effort by the powerless to make sense of the world, to apply causality when disorder threatens and to reduce the dissonance generated by their commitment to social order that is incomprehensible and unresponsive to them."

Why do we deprecate myths? There is a long history. It began in the 3rd century when the Christian Fathers were fighting the common folk's faith in Greek and Roman myths and proposed that only the Christian myth of Three Magis shortly after Christmas and the impressive history of rebirth of the plants and flowers around the time when the people celebrate their Easter. But another more important reason might be the trend of Western civilization towards rationalist thinking.  Gregory Bateson reminds us that "mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream and the like is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life". When we find our myths  insufficient, often our first reaction is mythoclasm or attack of the very concept of myth. This denial of myths is itself part and parcel of our refusal to confront our own reality and that of our society, according to May. The poet W. B Yeats perceptively recognized that "Science is the critique of myth.". We don't have the courage to "gaze at the full meridian of truth.".  As Peter Burger said, "It is through myths that men are lifted above their captivity in the ordinary, attain the powerful vision of the future and realize such visions."

Historically, men have two ways of looking at and speaking about the truth. One is specific, empirical, rationalistic, logical, objective and left brain. In this mode, the person through whose words we apprehend the truth is irrelevant. The other is holistic, collective, emotional, subjective, mythological and right-brained. The myth or story "carries the values of the society: by the myth, the individual finds his sense of identity...The myth unites the antinomies of life: conscious and unconscious, historical and present, individual and social". Whilst empirical scientific and rationalistic language refers to objective facts, myths refer to what May calls "the quintessence of human experience, meaning and significance of human life." In a myth, we can jump across centuries and relive the past of our ancestors and there we confront what Jung calls our "shadow" and what May calls our "daimonic".

May thinks that it is through myths that we transcend time. In her essay Ancient Myth in Modern Poetry (1971), Lilian Feder says, " Myth is not art, though it is used in all arts; it promises more; its methods and functions are different. Myth is a form of expression which reveals a process of thought and feeling--man's awareness of response to the universe, his fellow men and his separate being. It is a projection in concrete and dramatic form of fears and desires undiscoverable and inexpressible in any other way.".  Thus Oedipus is the myth of the hero who seeks and rebels against his own identity. It is true not only of Oedipus. In a way, it is true of all of us.

The ancient philosophers knew how myths could be used. Thus Plato used the parable of the cave and urges that the citizen of his ideal Republic start their education by the telling of myths and Aristotle said that " the friend of wisdom is also a friend of myth." They realized long ago that myth is the foundation of values and ethics. We too, must form our own myths if we wish to find some kind of order or coherence in the otherwise mad chaos of our sensations, ideas and emotions in the conditions of modern life.

To May, myths serve at least four functions: it gives us a sense of personal identity; it gives us a sense of community: each village, town, nation, race has its own peculiar myths and bonds its citizens together; it undergirds our moral values and finally, it is our way of making some kind of sense of the mystery of creation: our universe, our society, our own lives. Joseph Campbell says in his Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious (1959) that myths are involuntary statements about archetypal patterns in human consciousness or original revelations of the pre-conscious or as Jung says, " They are the psychic life of the primitive tribe, which immediately falls to pieces and decays when it loses its mythological heritage, like a man who has lost his soul." Levi-Strauss, the great anthropologist, agrees. He says that myths get thought in man "unbeknownst to him...For me, it describes a lived experience" and often what is manifested in our private dreams are the traces of the public myths of humanity e.g our birth, our conflict with our parents as we strive for independence, our ritual passage into adulthood together with all its attendant struggle, fear and guilt, the  emotional crises we experience in our love relationships, the existential crises associated with our work etc.

As Gilbert Highet said in The Classical Tradition (1957), "...myths are permanent. They deal with the greatest of all problems, the problems which do not change because men and women do not change. They deal with love, with war, with sin, with tyranny, with courage, with fate: and all in some way or other deal with the relation of man to those divine powers which are sometimes to be cruel, and sometimes, alas, to be just." Our myths must be reinterpreted by each succeeding generation to fit the new conditions and new needs of our age. In the same manner, great dramas and tales, like Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, Peer Gynt, Waiting for Godot, Death of a Salesman, The Great Gatsby, Moby Dick and Captain Ahab etc. speak to our hearts and reminds us what it means to be human. Through re-enacting them imaginatively, we allow our hero to suffer and to die for us and through sharing our myths, we bond with other members of our own community.

Friedrich Nietzsche, in "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music" spoke with anguish about the sufferings of Western Europe after the death of God, " What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless other cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?" May agrees with Nietzsche that our powerful hunger for myth is at the root, a hunger for community. He says, "To be a member of a community is to share in its myths", to feel the pride in its myths and rituals...The outsider, the stranger is the one who does not share our myths, the one who steers by different stars, worships different gods." . Is that not precisely  what our religions is all about?It is through our myths that we find our spiritual homes or as Nietzsche says, "our mythic womb"! It is through our myths that we celebrate important moments in the public life of our own community eg. Christmas, New Year, Mid-Autumn Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, National Day etc. Religions should therefore be considered and understood as part of our myths and not the other way round!