The Mythic Dimension

The earliest stories of humanity are religious. Since stories have their origins in roots that are overtly religious, can they ever truly surmount their beginnings no matter how subtly or radically they try? Those stories, incidentally, are called myths. Myth is the first form of storytelling that we are aware of and its roots extend deep into pre-history. Generally, myths tell stories that are fabulous, often evoke the supernatural, and at the same time establish links to existential and experiential realities that form, inform, and reflect entire cultures of perception, participation, and practice. On one hand, the genres of myths that have survived are oftentimes viewed as false because we no longer accept their premises, worldview, or paradigmatic conceptions of reality, while on the other hand, however, myths are never merely true or false. Indeed, it is entirely wrong to think of myths as either true or false. The only question to ask of myth is whether it is living or dead. Communities of consciousness determine whether a myth is living or dead. All thought is mythic in the sense that all thought is based on paradigms, though, one should remember that paradigms can and will shift. When a paradigm shifts so dramatically that we can no longer live within its parameters we tend to "demythologize." However, one should be aware that all demythologizing involves a "remythologizing," whether we recognize the full extent of the new paradigm or not. Another way to say this is that every de-sacralization involves a new re-sacralization. A prime example of this took place during the Enlightenment when many intellectuals (such as Voltaire) rejected ecclesiastical and scriptural authority but in its place divinized reason. One result of that shift is that "Thus sayeth the Lord" is replaced with "Science says". All that simply implies a new myth so close to us that we take it for granted and thus do not recognize it yet as mythic in its paradigmatic importance.

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