by May, Rollo
In such directionless states as we find ourselves near the end of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that frantic people flock to the new cults, or resurrect the old ones, seeking answers to their anxiety and longing for relief from their guilt or depressions, longing for something to fill the vacuum of their lives. They also beg for guidance from astrologers.* Or they grasp at superstitions from the primitive past, however reminiscent of the age of witchcraft.†
Our twentieth century was originally heralded as the age which would be graced with rationalism, the age when enlightened education would be widespread, religion would at last be cleansed of all superstition and would be itself enlightened. Indeed, almost all the fond aims of the Enlightenment have been at least partially realized: we have great wealth for some people, freedom from tyranny as a goal for most people in the West, dissemination of science, ad infinitum. But what has happened? As a people we are more confused, lacking in moral ideals, dreading the future, uncertain what to do to change things or how to rescue our own inner life. “We are the best informed people on earth,” Archibald MacLeish proclaims:
We are deluged with facts, but we have lost, or are losing, our human ability to feel them…. We know with the head now, by the facts, by the abstractions. We seem unable to know as Shakespeare knew who made King Lear cry out to blinded Gloucester on the heath:… “you see how this world goes,” and Gloucester answers: “I see it feelingly.”*
Language abandons myth only at the price of the loss of human warmth, color, intimate meaning, values—these things that give personal meaning to life. For we understand each other by identifying with the subjective meaning of the language of the other persons, by experiencing what important words mean to them in their world. Without myth we are like a race of brain-injured people unable to go beyond the word and hear the person who is speaking. There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular—though profoundly mistaken—definition of myth as falsehood.
The thirst for myth and the discouragement at the lack of adequate myths show in the use of narcotics. If we cannot make sense of our lives, we can at least temporarily check out of our boring routine by “out-of-the-body” experiences with cocaine or heroin or crack or some other drug which will take one temporarily out of this world. This is also a pattern we see not infrequently in psychotherapy: when the person finds his prospects overwhelmingly difficult, he may consider that at least he can participate in his own fate by overdosing or shooting himself. If we are going to be annihilated anyway, it is less humiliating to go out with a bang than a whimper.
The flocking to cults in our day, especially by young people but by older ones as well, is also an indication of the desperate need for myths. Any group which promises bliss and love and an inside track to whatever gods may be can get an audience, and people flock to the banner of a new cult whatever it is called. Jim Jones and the Guyana tragedy, when 980 of his followers committed suicide because the authoritarian Jones told them to, is a warning we cannot forget.
Cults have the power of myths without the social limits, without the brakes, without societal responsibility. The cry for myths must be listened to, for unless we achieve authentic myths our society will fill the vacuum with pseudo-myths and beliefs in magic. The sociologists inform us of a number of polls in the 1960s and 1970s which showed that the belief in God was decreasing and the belief in the Devil increasing.* This is a reflection of the passion for cults by people who feel our society is disintegrating and need to have some way of explaining it.
Instead of being viewed as random, irrational behavior, 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 a social order that is incomprehensible and unresponsive to them.†
THE DENIAL OF MYTHS
It will seem confusing indeed to propose our need for myths when we have become accustomed in our culture to label myths as falsehoods. Even people of high intelligence speak of “only a myth” as a deprecatory phrase; the Biblical creation story, for example, is “only a myth.”** This use of the word “only” as a deprecation of myth began with the Christian Fathers in the third century A.D. as their way of fighting against the common people’s faith in Greek and Roman myths. The Fathers argued that only the Christian message was true and the Greek and Roman stories were “only” myths. But if the Church Fathers could have had more confidence in the great wealth of mythology which came with Christianity—from the celebration of Christmas with the Wise Men following the star in the east to the indescribably charming gift giving, or the impressive experience of Easter with its celebration of spring and the birth of plants and flowers and grain as well as the myth of the resurrection—they would have had less need to attack the great myths of classical Greece and Rome.
But there is another reason in our day for the mistaken definition of myths as falsehood. Most of us have been taught to think only in rationalistic terms. We seem to be victims of the prejudice that the more rationalistic our statements, the more true they are, as we saw in Hannah Green’s substitute psychiatrist. This monopoly on the part of left brain activity expresses not real science but pseudo-science. Gregory Bateson rightly reminds us that “mere purposive rationality unaided by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life.”* As we have said earlier, our first reaction when the myths have not sufficed is mythoclasm; we attack the very concept of myth. The denial of myths, as we shall see later, is itself part of our refusal to confront our own reality and that of our society.
“Depend upon it,” Max Muller wrote. “There is mythology now as there was in the time of Homer, only we do not perceive it, because we ourselves live in the very shadow of it, and because we all shrink from the full meridian light of truth.”†
There is surely no conflict between science rightly defined and myth also rightly understood. Heisenberg, Einstein, Niels Bohr, and countless other great modern scientists have made that clear. It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths. We do not have Einstein’s answer to Freud’s defense of myth in his letter on the question, “Why war?,” but there is no reason to doubt that it was affirmative. The relation between science and myth is put succinctly by W. B. Yeats, “Science is the critique of myth.”**
Our problem is not merely one of definition. It is one of inner commitment, a problem of psychology and the spiritual effort to garner up the courage to gaze at “the full meridian of truth.”
MYTH AS OUR GLIMPSE OF INFINITY
It is through myths that men are lifted above their captivity in the ordinary, attain powerful visions of the future, and realize such visions.
Peter Berger, Pyramids of Sacrifice
There are, broadly speaking, two ways human beings have communicated through their long and fitful history. One is rationalistic language. This is specific and empirical, and eventuates in logic. In this kind of communication the persons who are speaking the words are irrelevant to the truth or falsehood of what they say.
A second way is myth. The myth is a drama which begins as a historical event and takes on its special character as a way of orienting people to reality. The myth, or story, carries the values of the society: by the myth the individual finds his sense of identity, as we shall see in Chapter 2. The narration always points toward totality rather than specificity; it is chiefly a right brain function. By their myths, we could say, we shall know them. The myth unites the antinomies of life: conscious and unconscious, historical and present, individual and social. These are formed into a narration which is passed down from age to age. Whereas empirical language refers to objective facts, myth refers to the quintessence of human experience, the meaning and significance of human life. The whole person speaks to us, not just to our brain.*
In mythic films one can leap over centuries and find oneself in ancient Rome or
walking with Socrates in the streets of ancient Athens. Or one can leap ahead into the future in spaceships. This is why films, the “movies,” are a special art of the twentieth century. Or the moods can change instantaneously as the film artist indicates. Mythic films like Platoon can make horrible, unbelievable experiences come to life. The deafening noise, the unending jungle, the drugs, the snakes, the rape, the blood and the profanity, the cruelty of the otherwise nice young men just out of college, and withal the human qualities of the soldiers caring for each other or shooting each other—that was the myth. Nor is myth just these symbols: they must be arranged as a narration which speaks to our conscious and subconscious. This and other films communicate a picture which is put together into the essence of the myth. The result is a soul-shaking narration in which “we are not fighting the enemy but fighting ourselves,” as one of the characters in Platoon remarks near the end. With these films many veterans heaved a great sigh of relief and murmured, “That was Vietnam!” The film Platoon presents what Jung would call the “shadow” and I have called in Love and Will the “daimonic.”
Millions of words were used to describe in 1987 the falls from grace of James Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, two of the leaders of the wing of fundamentalist religion; but when one name, “Elmer Gantry,” was used, people immediately understood. Elmer Gantry is the myth of a clergyman who gets involved in illicit sex and the misappropriation of funds, created by Sinclair Lewis and presented by him in the novel by that name in 1926, half a century before Bakker and Swaggert.
Thus the myth, as Thomas Mann put it, is an eternal truth in contrast to an empirical truth. The latter can change with every morning newspaper when we read of the latest discoveries in our laboratories. But the myth transcends time. It does not matter in the slightest whether a man named Adam and a woman named Eve ever actually existed or not; the myth about them in Genesis still presents a picture of the birth and development of human consciousness which is applicable to all people of all ages and religions.
Myth is not art, though it is used in all the 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 and 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.*
Oedipus was an archaic Greek tale, which in Homer’s narration took on the proportions of a myth and through the pen of Sophocles became the myth of the hero who seeks his own reality, a pursuit which in our day is known as the search for identity. The man who cries, “I must find out who I am!” as does Oedipus, and then revolts against his own reality, stands not only for the Greeks but for all of us in our ambivalent struggle to find our identity. Hence Freud used the myth of Oedipus as central in his contemporaneous psychology. Like most of the ancient Hebrew and Greek myths, this narration of the triangular struggle in the family becomes true in different ways for people of all cultures, since everyone is born of a father and mother and must in some way revolt against them—which is the definition of a classic like Oedipus.
Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim faced the same problem of overemphasis on rationality in his charming book on fairy tales, The Uses of Enchantment He called on the ancient philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, to support him:
Plato—who may have understood better what forms the mind of man than some of our contemporaries who want their children exposed only to “real” people and everyday events—knew what intellectual experiences make for true humanity. He suggested that the future citizens of his ideal republic begin their literary education with the telling of myths, rather than with mere facts or so-called rational teachings. Even Aristotle, master of pure reason, said: “The friend of wisdom is also a friend of myth.”†
Thus the authorities on the teaching of virtue and courage to the youth—what the Greeks called arête—realized that myth is the foundation of values and ethics.
Every individual seeks—indeed must seek if he or she is to remain sane—to bring some order and coherence into the stream of sensations, emotions, and ideas entering his or her consciousness from within or without. Each one of us is forced to do deliberately for oneself what in previous ages was done by family, custom, church, and state, namely, form the myths in terms of which we can make some sense of experience.
TWO
Our Personal Crises in Myths
Myth … expresses, enhances, and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality; it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for 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.
Bronislaw Malinowski,
Magic, Science and Religion
THE MANY CONTRIBUTIONS of myths to our lives can be listed under four headings. First, myths give us our sense of personal identity, answering the question, Who am I? When Oedipus cried, “I must find out who I am and where I came from!” and when Alex Haley searches for his Roots, they are both illustrating this function of myth.
Second, myths make possible our sense of community. The fact that we think mythically is shown in our loyalty to our town and nation and even our loyalty to our college and its various teams which produce such mythic phenomena as Trojans and 49ers. These would be absurd except that they illustrate the important bonding of social interest and patriotism and other such deeply rooted attitudes toward one’s society and nation.
Third, myths undergird our moral values. This is crucially important to members of our age, when morality has deteriorated and seems to have vanished altogether in some distraught places.
Fourth, mythology is our way of dealing with the inscrutable mystery of creation. This refers not only to the creation of our universe but creation in science, the mysterious “dawning” in art and poetry and other new ideas in our minds. “Myth is the garment of mystery,” writes Thomas Mann insightfully in the preface to his great book on ancient myths, Joseph and His Brothers.
SATAN AND CHARLES
An art critic severely handicapped by writer’s block illustrates the myth of personal identity. Charles, as we shall call him, had lived in and out of severe despair for a number of years. Though not formally religious he had during World War II briefly become a Roman Catholic with the desperate hope of getting help in pulling himself together. He had tried various other ways, including classical psychoanalysis, but the experiences remained at the “talking” level and never touched him in his depths. He continued struggling by himself for some months and then, in despair, came to me for psychoanalysis again.
In the course of his free associations after several months of analysis, he said, “I am the writer who does not write…. I am the man who doesn’t pay his bills, I am the needy one. That’s the way I recognize myself on the street, not ‘O yes, there’s Charles,’ but ‘O yes, there’s the needy man!’” On hearing this I was struck by the fact that it seemed more than words; he really did get his identity through seeing himself as the myth of the needy man.
In a later hour he stated, “My neurosis protects my soul. … It is the most precious thing for me…. If I could get well, it would be a defeat for me.” He heartily disliked the popularly stated goals of therapy, e.g., to make one productive, happy, well adjusted, and though he knew neither he nor I held such goals, the culture did; and he heartily disliked our contemporary secular culture.
The critical point in the analysis came when there surfaced in his free associations, “Satan was a rebel for God.” He mused with pleasure over the phrases, “Satan the savior! Satan the rebel!”
In his therapy we then focused specifically on the myth of Satan, with which he identified. He emphasized that Satan, in the form of Lucifer, had been thrown out of heaven and existed by virtue of what he rebelled against. Thus he was saying that he himself existed by virtue of the myth of being a rebel. No wonder his neurosis protected his sou
l; indeed it constituted his soul! His belief in Satan, he emphasized, was not a form of Manichaeanism, for Satan really did believe in God. When we accepted in his therapy the myth of Satan, we found that it brought together a number of strands of his previously elusive character structure: his rebellion, his negativity, and along with these his considerable creative possibilities as a writer.
The reason Charles’ previous therapy had proved ineffectual seems to have been that it was too rationalistic. It had consisted mainly of conscious talking—which Charles could do endlessly—and it never touched the deeper levels of his emotions. The myth of being a “rebel for God” relieved his neurotic guilt and he could then accept the normal guilt of every human being, which turned out to be a stimulus for the therapy. He could now respect himself while at the same time being a constructive rebel; he was freed from the need to destroy himself in the process. There is so much pretense and falsehood in our society that it is not surprising that negation, as in Satan, has to come out in therapy. The myth of Satan was a shorthand way of getting to the basis of his defiance and negativity, and it was essential to our achieving a successful outcome of the therapy.
As Charles structured his life by clinging subconsciously to the myth of Satan,* so each of us has his or her myth around which we pattern our lives. This myth holds us together and gives us our capacity to live in the past and future without neglecting each instant of the present. The myth bridges the gap between conscious and unconscious: we then can speak out of some unity of the tremendous variety in each of our selves. The forms that this myth may take, of course, are infinite. The myths each of us brings to therapy are unique, just as each human being is different from every other one. But the individual myths will generally be a variation on some central theme of the classical myths, in this case Satan, which refer to the dynamic, existential crises in all persons’ lives.