Mythic Living

Whenever I read other people's writing where they naturally and effortlessly reference the myths of their ancestors, I smile. Watching every little sign and signal of the resurgence of the gods and ancestral belief in the modern world is like witnessing the first shy budding of Spring. But many forces of habit and social pressure stand between us and experiencing the world of myth in the way our ancestors did. I have spoken of many of these forces in different articles on this blog, but today I'd like to draw attention to a particular one.

When one reads any surviving literature from ancestral pagan times it is clear that there was little discontinuity between the lives of gods, the world of myth and the life of mankind. Numerous times in a day our ancestors would have identified themselves with particular deities as they performed certain actions associated with them. This may have been through certain prayers and observances to that god, or simply an unconscious and natural flow of association. In this way the world was illuminated, mundane tasks came to life with mythic resonances. The life of average people was far from 'average' in the way we experience it today. In this way what we call 'work' disapears and joins the realm of the imagination in one continuity of daily wholeness. And I know from being a Hearth Keeper today that such a state is still obtainable.

Many people who are part of the resurgence of the old gods will have acheived a measure of this life-poetry once more. But we still struggle with the forces of postmodern irony and self-consciousness. Those who know what 'postmodern' means could probably express to you exactly how naive and unsophisticated it is to associate one's loves, one's loss and one's daily doing with the grandeur of myth. Those who can't react anyway, instinctually embarrassed by such behaviour. They might call it 'grandiose' or 'taking one's self too seriously' or maybe just in Australian slang: 'up yourself.'

Such concepts are distinctly modern. Our lives themselves are unfoldings of the myths. The myths have not stopped. Modern pagan and polytheist people who fall into the 'extreme-scholar' basket may become a little rigid about what can be classed as part of the myths. And this is natural enough. We are left with myth in calcified, written down form. It seems to have ceased it's evolution, it's weaving outward, seems to have solidified once and for all. But nothing living solidifies. And the moment the myths become part of the mind and heart of living people, for reasons as simple as that we 'know them by heart', they begin to change, to grow, to morph. The living of the people of the gods is once again an outgrowth of a folk-soul populated by gods and always engaged in sacred unfolding.

What does this mean for the lives of 'ordinary' men and women? Well, to begin with, that we are not ordinary. That what we do is still 'echoing in eternity' along with the deeds of the ancestors and that we can stop and pay attention to the myths as something we participate in. It might sound strange to some, too basic to others. But I believe it's deeply pertinent. Have you ever hesitated for fear of sounding foolish and naively Romantic when you wanted to compare your love to the love of two famous lovers in history? Or an episode between heroes and demi-gods? Did you feel that you should somehow be more humble?

I would argue that we cannot be humble without humbling our origins also. If such things are acceptable in our eyes when done by the ancestors they should be aceeptable by us also, we are, after all their seed and in some way them, themselves reborn. I would also argue that we do not need to believe that leading a modern life, driving a car rather than riding a war-horse, necessarily puts us outside the scope of myth and poetry. Myth and poetry are as durable as our imaginations are flexible. They never fail us, it is we that fail them. We fail them when we put strange restrictions on where we agree to see them. When we refuse to see beauty outside of certain perameters, when we denigrate our lives by calling them 'mundane' or 'ordinary.'

If we are to once again seize the full imaginative power and robust colour of our ancestors conception of life we cannot fall easy victims to modern irony. As compelling as it is to show how smart, how savvy we are, too cool for such things, the price for this feeling of superiority is far too high. It denies us our chance to live in the grandeur of our humanity and to remember how it interacts and inter-penetrates with the world of myth.