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| The Heart of Myth: Wisdom Stories from Endangered People |
WHAT IS THE CORE GRAMMAR OF MYTHOLOGY?
Hello Blogosphere!
I’m
Dave Alber, the guest blogger for September on Stephanie Pope’s Mythopoetics In Culture Blog.
I
gave a short bio in the last blog: “What is myth?”
In
that last blog, I wrote about awareness states being primary to the grammar of
myth. If myth, for example, is a sphere, then an awareness state is at the
gravitational core of that sphere. This is the premise of my book The
Heart of Myth: Wisdom Stories from Endangered People, which is an anthology
of living myth (meaning the myths of living polytheistic communities.) Unpacked
section at a time… The Heart of Myth
is an attempt to share with a wider audience the grammar of myth as a system
for the transmission of profound states of awareness.
If
Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces
was Campbell’s attempt to teach people how to read a myth, then The Heart of Myth is my attempt to
unpack the grammar of the mystical function of myth.
To this end, in this blog… we will take our
first steps in our discovery — inward,
ever inward — toward that foundational state of awareness from which myth
emerges.
What follows is from my book pictured above, The Heart Of Myth.
Introduction
Global
Civilization and the Wisdom of Polytheistic Peoples
Since
I was a boy, I spent many hours with my nose in a book while my imagination
flew to other continents entirely. I was often entertained, and am still daily
entertained, by the most direct manifestations of wonder I know—mythological tales from around the world!
To me, myths always present an enigmatic, semi-recognizable, yet palpable
beauty that defies logical explanation. Like riddles, Zen koans, poems, or
pieces of music that bring unexpected tears or elation, myths communicate
experiences that challenge the rational processes of the mind. Whether the
story is a Crow myth of world creation or an Inuit tale of shamanic flight; a
Maori story of the origin of knowledge or an Ainu tale of supernatural realms,
the mythologies of the world present one vast and interconnected tapestry of
timeless beauty and timely wisdom. Simultaneously, these stories refresh us
with their eternal human values and shock us awake to our responsibility in
both our living continuity and the present historical moment.
Perhaps because my enjoyment of mythology has too often been both bookish and escapist, it occurred to me with some shock that economic and political forces now endanger most of the world’s living polytheistic communities. Despite the importance of mythology for artists, psychologists, historians, anthropologists, folklorists, and other professionals in the modern world (not to mention those people to whom the stories are still fluid emanations from spiritual realms), the contemporary inheritors of these primary stories find themselves threatened by voracious economic and social forces that know no bounds and, at present, no human restraint. As Barbara Rose Johnston states in the forward to the Endangered Peoples of the World series:
Human
action and a history of social inequity leave some people more vulnerable than
others. This vulnerability results in ethnocide (loss of a way of life),
ecocide (destruction of the environment), and genocide (death of an entire
group of people).[1]
The polytheistic communities visited in these pages are so imperiled. In popular usage, the word myth denotes an untruth—a lie. And although there is some truth to that, the truth of the lie exists in our own forgetfulness to myth as one of the foundational expressions of both human culture and spirituality. In Homeric Greece, the term mythos was understood as the mode of speech of the muses and poetic bards. However, it was also appreciated as “an unvarnished truth . . . a blunt and aggressive act of candor, uttered by powerful males in the heat of battle or agonistic assembly.”[2] In Ancient Greece, then, mythos was a mode of expression that was both radically complex and profoundly straightforward. Mythos was understood as expressing a direct form of knowledge. This direct form of knowledge is recognized in every corner of the globe as the heart’s way of knowing. “What does your heart tell you?” we still ask our friends and loved ones, when facing important decisions. We trust the heart implicitly with the understanding that it is incapable of lying. What the heart knows, it knows through a direct sympathetic relationship that defies the logic of the materialistic worldview.
The Heart’s Way of Knowing
Sympathetic knowledge is to know another’s experience directly by becoming the
“other.” It is the source of empathy. It is knowledge of the heart. This
knowledge of the heart is the principle way of knowing in polytheistic culture.
To know an “other” is to become the other—to loose the false perception of
separateness with the other—and to feel through the other’s world directly. In
polytheistic cultures when people know
the gods, they know them directly—sympathetically—through their hearts. It is
the nature of the heart to know directly.
In
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space,
Joseph Campbell considers our historical moment in the late 20th century—the
global crisis of the world’s people being unified by a technological economy.
He ponders the question, “What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of
this unified earth as of one harmonious being?”
He writes:
He writes:
One cannot predict the next mythology any more than one can predict tonight’s dream; for a mythology is not an ideology. It is not something projected from the brain, but something experienced from the heart, from recognitions of identities behind or within the appearances of nature, perceiving with love a “thou” where there would have been otherwise only an “it.”[3]
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