Applied Mythology Certificate Level 1Week 1: Myth and Depth

© 2014 to present by Craig Chalquist

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Myth: Alive and Flourishing

Why Study Myth?It comes back to life all around us.

It shows up in our dreams, symptoms, complexes.

It gives us cultural continuity.

It teaches us to think in image, symbol, metaphor.

It encourages us to imagine, fantasize, and feel.

It introduces us to the language of humanity.

It includes the speech of nature, place, and Earth.

It mediates our relationship with the Divine.

Myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless pattern, the religious formula to which life shapes itself.- Thomas Mann

In their daily lives, people often search for explanations for their existence and identity, for the origins of their activities, for the plans of gods, and for certain truths to emerge. Myths are able to give answers that modern knowledge systems cannot afford to give. In postmodern times and beyond, myths help to stretch the boundaries of the prevailing worldviews and modes of thought.- Elina Helander-Renvall

It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation…The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change. - Joseph Campbell

....Myth also gives expression to the knowledge that we are not lords of ourselves, that we are not only dependent within the familiar world but that we are especially dependent on the powers that hold sway beyond all that is familiar, and that it is precisely in dependence on them that we can become free from familiar powers. - Rudolf Bultmann

Myth is a past with a future, exercising itself in the present. - Carlos Fuentes

Mythology TerminologyAllegory: a deliberately purposeful, usually moralistic story with preset symbolic meanings (e.g., Prudence, Wisdom). Uses signs rather than symbols (Jung).

Euhemerism: the hypothesis that deities point back to historical persons.

Myth: from muthos (“story, telling”): an originally oral drama involving sacred beings.

Mythologem: a common mythic theme, motif, or image (e.g., the universal flood, the theft of fire). Known as mythemes by Claude Levi-Strauss: the foundational units of a myth.

Mythopoesis: the creative making and remaking of mythic material (e.g., The Lord of the Rings, the Gnostic interpretation of Eve and Adam).

Personal Myth: according to Jung, the myth we are born into.

Secondary Revision: the conscious elaboration of dream (and myth).

Xenia (zen-EE-uh): Greek term for “hospitality to the gods.”

Reductive Theories of Myth:(Theagenes, Max Muller, Andrew Lang, Euhemer of Sicily, Sir James Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski, Claude Levi-Strauss, Sigmund Freud, Walter Burkert, Jacques Derrida, Elizabeth Vandiver, “common sense”)

• Reduction of myth to one component of it (nature, culture, codes, historical events, allegory, pathology)

• Deep fear of myths’ numinosity: Scrooge Defense

• Possession by Procrustes.

Organic Theories of Myth:(Mircea Eliade, CG Jung, Joseph Campbell, JRR Tolkien, Michael Bernard Beckwith, Lu Wei, N. Scott Momaday, Sean Kane, Yuan Ke)

• Respect for the story as a whole

• Application rather than allegory (Tolkien)

• Polysemous: many possible meanings.

Myth is deep psyche dressed in imaginative cultural garb: a bridge or fabric of stories that connects us to the transhuman, and through it, to the world’s innermost workings, which in the end are the same as our own.

Myth is collective psychology personally felt. Myth is a sparkling membrane stretching across the place somewhere in between fact and belief.

Campbell: 4 Functions of Myth

Mystical: myths give us a sense of awe about the cosmos.

Pedagogical: myths teach us developmental tasks.

Sociological: myths convey cultural norms…. (Charlene Spretnak: …and agendas, some destructive.) Also known as charter myths.

Cosmological: myths ground worldviews and address the age-old questions like: Why are we here? What is our place in the world?

All psychological, in service to self-realization.

More Functions:Aesthetic: myth leaves us with a certain set of feelings or moods (Kawai).

Chronological: myths play creatively with time (Chalquist).

Liminal: myths give us glimpses of personal and cultural in-between spaces (Anzaldua).

Ecological: myths adhere to specific places (Chalquist).

Dramatic: myths entertain (Lithui Yang).

Loss of Mythic Consciousness: 10 Consequences1. Loss of frameworks of meaning. Without myth we are like blind people not used

to vision: just blobs of color. 2. No way to make sense of where the transpersonal meets the personal. Myths are

the chariots of the gods.3. No sense of how to handle recurring problems (e.g., Hermes vs. the Argus).4. A repressed mythology returns as a monster, a fury, like a repressed bit of psyche. 5. Rollo May: loss of myth is loss of a sense of home. Jung: myth roots us in the past,

culture, ancestors, collective.6. Repeat of pathological stories (e.g., Ragnarok, the Underworld of petroleum).7. Myths we do not highlight are left to be made use of by the unscrupulous.8. Dysdaimonic inflation: identification with an archetype (e.g., Walt Whitman,

Robin Williams, George W. Bush).9. Literalism: myths dogmatically interpreted degenerate into ideologies.10.No adequate containers for dreaming the gods onward (Jung).

A chart of the evolution of consciousness.An X-ray of the inner meaning of historical events and changes.A barometer of deep shifts within the collective psyche.Initiation into full inner and outer maturity (myth enacted in ritual).A look at the factors operating behind/before everyday awareness.A foreshadowing of what’s “in the air” and what’s to come.A transgression that breaks through borders, levels, and categories.A hint of transpersonal forces at work in dreams and synchronicities.A reminder to attend to the journey, not just its goals or stages.A bringer of missing, unrealized pieces of ourselves.A shift from what’s inside us to what we are inside of.A framework for personal and collective meaning.A guide for the big transitions in life.Spirit in storied form.

Myth Is

Making Friends with Myth1. Read the stories that seek you out.2. Explore what resonates, what rings true for you.3. Go back to the stories that fascinated you in childhood: hidden

gold.4. Discern what makes you uncomfortable in a myth: complexes,

literalisms, life tasks.5. Study what myths are up for the culture.6. Allow the stories to transform you.7. Do active imagination with symbols and characters.8. Cultivate symbolic interpretation. (Metaphor: “to carry over.”)9. Look for mythic motifs and images inside and outside.10.Look into the various levels of myth: the personal, cultural,

ecological, etc., and ultimately the archetypal below it all.

Depth Psychology:Definition: A body of knowledge and practice that studies the dynamic relationship between the conscious and unconscious psyche.

Ancestors and Founders: - Aesara of Lucania (3rd cent. BCE): her three-agency model of the psyche—mind (judgment), spirit (strength), and love (desire)— influenced Plato, Freud, and Jung. “Human nature seems to me to provide a standard of law and justice both for the home and for the city.”

- Muhammad ibn Umail (900-960): called for a symbolic-interpretive approach to alchemical work. “Turn the gold into silver.”

- William James: first to study religion/spirituality psychologically.

- Pierre Janet: “subconscious,” transference, free association, trauma.

- Sigmund Freud: psychoanalysis, dreams, drive/defense.

- CG Jung: complex psychology / analytical psychology.

Premises of Depth Psychology:- The mind is an arena of self-organizing fantasy and instinct.

- Psychic operations are layered on interacting image and affect.

- Most of these interactions are unconscious.

- Most express themselves transrationally via symbols, fantasies, dream.

- When unconscious material becomes conscious, consciousness and the unconscious both undergo transformation.

- The quality of our health depends on the stories we tell ourselves.

- Stories that express full psychic complexity give us health and strength; stories that diminish psychic complexity diminish us.

- This is true whether the stories are personal or collective.

- Change the story and consciousness changes with it.

DP TerminologyAmplification: gathering up the cultural history in a mythic image in order to clarify what purpose it now serves.

Archetype: a universally occuring motif (e.g., Birth, Death, Rebirth, Initiation, Wisdom, Passage, Beauty, the Underworld, Spirit, Trickster, Goddess, God, Hero).

Complex: a long-standing inner wound, personal or cultural, gathered around a mythic or archetypal core.

Defense: a mental move that blocks awareness of something inner or outer that is scary.

Enantiodromia: how one extreme turns into its (usually repressed) opposite.

Personification: how psychic material shows up as a character.

Projection: unconscious recreation of a traumatic event with all its key characters and plot brought into the present.

Shadow: the sum of what we repress about ourselves because of incompatibility with how we see ourselves.

Splitting: dividing an experience (e.g., of a projected parent figure) into conflicting opposites.

Wholeness: reliable conscious experience of and trust in the flow of experience that constitutes our sense of self.

Behind Jung: Gnostic MythJung’s “Confrontation with the Unconscious” began in 1913, around the time he studied Gnosticism

1916: Seven Sermons to the Dead

Red Book: brimming with Gnostic imagery; Philemon is Simon Magus (prototype of Faust) and “Soul” is Helen/Sophia

"Archetype," "syzygy," "shadow," “projection," "image," “Depth” (Bythos), “wholeness,” "unconsciousness," and "Anthropos" are Gnostic terms. Gnosis is the search for wholeness

Four stages of anima development named after Gnostic figures

The Self, the unconscious God, psyche between matter and spirit, amplification, dream work: all Gnostic in origin.

Behind Jung: Gnostic Myth

Mythology + Depth Psychology:Goals of Applied Mythology

1. Detection and elaboration of recurring mythic stories and images and of new myths.2. Education of the receptive on the nature and dynamics of myth and depth.3. Understanding of how one’s personal myth aligns with the time and place.4. Cultivation of critical consciousness of how myths are misused.5. Illumination of constellated myths as responses to collective psychology.6. Deliteralization and deep transformation of destructive cultural forces.7. Deep Storytelling: creative retelling of marginalized and emerging myths.8. Contribution to the New Story (Thomas Berry) of how to live wisely on Earth:

building new altars for the return of the sacred as immanent.

Examples of Topic Areas- Ecology: petroleum, mountaintop removal, sustainable food, energy.

- Earth as a mythic presence (raising her voice? Appearing in dreams?)

- News and current events (fads, ISIS, Apollo statue at Gaza)

- Indigenous: surfacing stories, practices

- Mass media: superheroes and zombies

- Personal myth (yours, public figures)

- Myth and religious happenings

- Technology: inventions, etc.

- Mythic figures in dreams

- Myth and the economy

- Space exploration

- New myths

Suggestions for Applied Myth Work- Spend some time each day looking around and within through “the eye

of myth” (Michael Meade). What myths are up just now?

- Select one and do your homework on it: When did it emerge, and why? What is its cultural background? How do people respond to it, and with what degree of consciousness? What do storytellers say about it?

- Free associate to the myth and its symbols: what comes up?

- Converse with your fellow Certificate participants about it.

- Self-inquiry: Why this myth for you just now? What feelings does it bring you?

- Ask for dreams about the work. Tend the dream series.

- How would you retell the story?

- Imagine a creative product at the end and an audience for it.

Change the Story and You Change the Game

Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices. — CG Jung

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