Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life
Excerpt-James Hollis
Wherever they first gathered, from swirling desert sands to frost-caked tundra, from great oceans to primeval forests and high plateaus, the questions were there with them: Who are we? How did we get here? Where are we going? repeated in tongues, scratched on walls of caves and hides of beasts, enacted in recurrent patterns attending the passage of seasons, the solemn rites of birth and death, war and love-making. Always the questions were there.
Today, these questions haunt us still. If there is anything that distinguishes the human species from others, it is the endurance of such questions, our power to ask them, and our need to locate ourselves in the great rhythms of change and continuity.
Jungian writers are sometimes puzzling to general readers, not to mention their colleagues in other schools of psychology, because of their references to myth. They frequently borrow from legend, and while there may be some aesthetic appeal in those stories, why they would be helpful to us psychologically may remain obscure. At best Jungians, and their interest in myth, are tolerated; at worst they are considered fuzzy brained and, gasp, crypto-mystics. This book is an effort to explain why Jungian psychology has so frequently been nourished by myth and, more important, why the study of myth is critical for us as individuals and as citizens of our age.
Myth takes us deep into ourselves and into the psychic reservoirs of humanity. Whatever our cultural and religious background or personal psychology, a greater intimacy with myth provides a vital linkage with meaning, the absence of which is so often behind the private and collective neuroses of our time. Expressed in its most succinct form, the study of myth is the search for that which connects us most deeply with our own nature and our place in the cosmos. Surely no more central issue confronts us collectively and individually.
Our culture has lost the longitudes and latitudes of the soul, hence our crazed careening from ideology to ideology. Even the concept of myth has been degraded to the status of falsehood. "Oh, that's just a myth," we say. Yet we who seek to understand, to deepen, are obliged to recover an opening to myth which then permits myth to open to us.