This much I know: Unless we search for ways to become aware of the myths that are unfolding in our lives we run the risk of being controlled by them. As the maverick philosopher Sam Keen has written in Your Mythic Journey, “We need to reinvent them from time to time…. The stories we tell of our ourselves determine who we become, who we are, what we believe.”
In this book I will tell you things I myself have lived and learned about myth. No doubt, I am inspired by my father's ideas about making the world of books real for us, and by my friend and mentor Joseph Campbell's ardent beliefs that the myths are alive and well “on the corner of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue,” and that “myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths.” But in the following six chapters I explore how I've actually experienced and encountered myth: in books and museums, to be sure, but also in art, literature, movies, poetry, ballparks, playgrounds, cafés, computers, and cathedrals. In other words, this will be a mythopoetic approach to the modern world.
My other inspiration for this approach is the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, who lived in Périgueux, the same small village in the Dordogne where my ancestor Jean-Baptiste Cousineau came from back in 1687. When I was there a few years ago exploring my roots, I picked up a volume of his sagacious Essays and, while reading it one afternoon in an outdoor café, discovered something that has stayed me with me ever since. Into the oak beam of the ceiling in his private library in the Dordogne, a few miles from the Lascaux caves where his ancestors carved and painted their own questions forty thousand years earlier, Montaigne carved the legendary words, “Que scais-je?”
“What do I know?” Montaigne asked himself. What do I really know, deep in my soul? What have I lived?
A few months later I returned to the Bay Area and immediately drove down to Big Sur, where I was scheduled to teach a course on “Myth, Dream, and the Movies,” at Esalen Institute. As part of my preparation the first evening there, I reviewed a book by Evan S. Connell, written at Big Sur years before, and felt the tingle of literary synchronicity when I stumbled across these words: “A man's words should have the feeling of being carved in oak.”
“But how did it all begin?” asks the Italian scholar Roberto Calasso in his mesmerizing study of Greek myths, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony. There is no more probing question. Whether it is the tales of Zeus and Europa, the mystery rites at Eleusis, or the origins of eros and strife, virginity and rape, comedy and tragedy, heroes and cowards, fate and necessity, the seed moment is what makes everything else possible.
At the Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, there is a twelve-foot-long narrative collage by Henri Matisse entitled, “Les mille et une nuits” (The Thousand and One Nights.) In this magnificent piece depicting Scheherazade and the Arabian Nights, the artist has made a cutout of a white magic lamp and set it against a mauve background, its wisps of smoke turning into flowers that drift across the increasingly dark panels, denoting the passage of night. In the upper right-hand corner of the frieze is a tribute to Scheherazade's courage and cunning while telling her soul-saving stories during those mythic nights: “Elle vit apparaitre Ie matin Elle se tut dicretement” (“When she saw the first light of dawn, she fell discreetly silent”).
Mysteriously, discreet storytelling is at the heart of myth.
The Strange Melody
The word myth comes from the ancient Greek for “word,” “tale,” or “story.” The clue to its deeper meaning lies in the roots of the word—just as myths are, in a word, “root” stories. Myth derives from the Greek muthos, which means “to murmur with closed lips, to mutter, to moan.” The suggestion buried deep within the strange melody of this deceptively simple word is that there is great power and perhaps even secret knowledge in stories about the beginning of things. Among some cultures, such as the Tibeto-Burman, there is a belief that unless the origin of something is described one should not even talk about it. Telling a story about how things began, from babies to stars, rituals to customs, is a way of paying respect to its importance, its endurance, and in so doing every event and experience is endowed with a sacred nature.
This belief has its modern parallels with family reunions, religious ceremonies, or holidays. In the moments when we feel the atavistic urge to tell our origin stories—anecdotes about our ancestors, tales of how we met our spouses, the roots of hallowed customs at Easter, Halloween, Hanukkah, or Christmas—we participate in mythmaking. We experience the mythic vision when we thrill to the findings of distant signals from outer space that push back the origins of the universe another billion years, or become alternately disturbed and enthralled by the mapping of the human genome, or are ineffably troubled by the threat of a hydroelectric dam inundating the recently discovered paleolithic temple-caves in Portugal, whose paintings of leaping bulls and wizard-beast shamans go back more than fifty thousand years.
An obscure Scottish definition of myth reveals yet another layer of meaning: “to mark, to notice, to measure,” and “the marrow of a bone.” Out of the heather and highlands comes a helpful suggestion that myths are the stories that mark us deeply, notice the sacred dimensions, measure the depths of our souls, and cut to the marrow with their slicing images of the never-ending struggle between life and death.
In these associative ways of approaching the essence of myth, we begin to see its beauty and its power. While science revels in explaining how the world works, myth and poetry explain why. Its stories and images about creation, origins, animal powers, quests, death, and rebirth are attempts to give a sense of the movements of the soul's experience of the world. This is why myths are lies that tell the truth, unreal stories that “signify the inner meaning of life,” in Alan Watts' memorable phrase. Or as Elie Wiesel writes of Hasidic legends, “Some things happen that are not true, some don't happen that are.”
What the deterioration of the word myth—implying delusion, falsehood, or a farrago of nonsense—reveals is the ironic truth that many of our myths are lies in the sense that they no longer reveal the inward significance of things that happen in our lives. As religion journalist Don Lattin has written, “Myths are stories, and we find meaning in our lives through the stories we tell. Myths are not true or untrue—they're living or dead.”
In fact, the modern world is full of living mythology. There is a wonder-cabinet of curiosities, stories, images, icons, and presences. In the past few months alone I've noted in the pages of the New York Times references to the American Myth of Progress; myths of love and romance in the movies; the myth of killer sharks; the mythic aspirations of George Lucas’ Star Wars trilogy; the twisted myth of Frankenstein as mad gene-splicing scientist; the mythmaking machine of political campaigns; the crippling effects of family myths; the legendary outsider status of Marlon Brando and the Olympian influence of Wall Street insiders; the fabled genius of Leonardo da Vinci and the legendary curse on the Boston Red Sox; and a much-ballyhooed story of the pre-Christian nomadic discoveries of dinosaur bones in Asia centuries before Christ that inspired the headline, “Monster Myths Born of Fossils?” and, just the other day, “Evolution: Myth or Fact?”
Despite the brash claims of scientific materialists and religious moralists, myth still suffuses and enlivens everyday life. We've hardly banished or “progressed” past it. We've simply renamed the stories, both good and bad, the way the names of Hindu gods have changed through the centuries, though their powers remained intact, or the way ballplayers come and go from our favorite teams, while the team uniforms remain the same. The urge to go back to the beginning to understand ourselves, then tell the tale, thereby mythologizing our life and times, is irrepressible.
In this uncanny way it is thrilling to me to notice the way a few of the old stories I grew up on keep reappearing in modern guise in movie theaters, the sports pages, art galleries, or science magazines, often recalling William James’ whirligigging line, “There goes the same thing I saw again before.”
With the old telltale shiver of recognition, I recall a night back in the late 1980s when I found myself in an old café on Place Contrescarpe in Paris, reading an essay by Albert Camus. One line made my eyes sting with bittersweet recognition. “A