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Writing today, I am thinking about last week’s Jung Society of Atlanta seminar. James Hollis, Ph.D., spoke to us about “Stories Told, Stories Untold, and Stories That Tell Us.” And that’s really what we are about here at Mythic Imagination.
Our Mythic Journeys™ conferences have at their center “The Big Conversations” with interdisciplinary discussions about life’s big issues, about our metaphors, our search for meaning, for beauty. Our magazine focuses on stories, both personal stories and these “big” stories. Some are told in poems, some in folk tales, some in music, in art, in
interviews, in essays, in fiction…wherever the creative spirit, the human imagination finds expression.
When we think about the meaning of “mythology” itself, the etymology indicates muthos from the Greek, a story, a tale. Muthos also sounds like our English word, ”mother,” and although I can find no etymological connection, I feel a
connection. In a way, myth, story is our mother tongue.
Both on a personal level and on a cultural level, we are
shaped by mythology.
On a personal level, the myths are the stories from our
family of origin; those told to us when we were young, plus those we tell, both to ourselves and to the world, to explain ourselves, to define ourselves. And underneath it all are streams of stories and assumptions about ourselves,
streams which are often not conscious. These are “stories
which tell us.” As Dr. Hollis quoted from Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night, ”No prison is more confined than the ones we know not we are caught in.”
Then, on the “big” level, the cultural level, we are shaped
both consciously and unconsciously by mythology – the big foundational stories, often the sacred stories, the wisdom stories of each particular culture, each particular civilization. Think about these foundational stories as we examine current events in our world. Are we acting out the old stories? Remember, as Joseph Campbell said, “Myths are public dreams.”
Paraphrasing Carl Jung’s famous statement, “…Where did
the gods go when they left Mt. Olympus? They entered the solar plexus of the moderns…,” James Hollis explained they became our neuroses…the “gods” are the energies, their names are the husks….and for the moment our neuroses, our complexes carry these big energies….both personally and culturally.
So here, in our little magazine, our goal is to enrich our
lives, to help us find meaning in what can seem like a
chaotic world, to connect us to one another, and to connect us to our various cultural histories and energies.
In this issue, Honora Foah welcomes us, as she discusses
wildness and wilderness, creativity, and captivity. We discuss with Honora and Dahlan Foah our ongoing Mythic
Imagination project, “Creativity in Captivity,” which began
with our recent production (with Emory University’s Center
for Ethics) of “Testaments of the Heart,” a concert of music
written by prisoners of the Nazis during the Holocaust. The interview includes a discussion about the roots of today’s situation in the Middle East. We feature an essay, “A Delicate Balance,” by Jeanna Collins on education about the Holocaust which features poems by children, and we announce “The Witches of Lublin,” a new radio show, which informs us about the history of many European Jews pre – Holocaust, plus it brings us the story of wild and beautiful klezmer music from that time. It features Ellen Kushner, a Mythic Journeys presenter.
