On the most basic level, myths are stories passed down through time, within and sometimes between cultures, either through oral telling (the old way) or more recently through written texts.
On another level, myths contain social and religious codes that keep alive a certain way of doing things—knowledge of the earth’s cycles, the wisdom contained within specific places, or ritual customs and protocol—which, for Indigenous cultures, were not separate things. Taken together, this is the cloth that culture is made from.
There is also ancient knowledge embedded in almost every myth. Sometimes this knowledge can be as practical as when to harvest certain crops or when certain animals migrate. Other times, though, myths contain teachings about navigating the vast terrain of the Otherworld, which is saturated in symbolic imagery, mysterious beings, and often, danger.
Myths travel on the backs of wagons, sail across oceans, and become woven into the everyday fabric of a people and place. In the words of archetypal psychologist James Hillman, myths “never were, but always are.”
This anthropological explanation of mythology is useful in understanding how cultures are shaped by the stories they tell themselves. Yet this is only one way of beholding these shaggy old tales that ultimately play by their own rules and refuse to conform to the rigid containers that we inevitably try to construct for them.
As every storyteller worth their salt will tell you, some stories are feral. Myths are living beings that dwell somewhere between the provocative moon-howl of the forest and the comforting hearth of home, often roosting in the nest of our minds.
This second layer of mythology invites you, the listener, to become a necessary participant in the story as it takes root inside you and finds its way to those delicate places within that long to be fed and felt with tenderness. Myths can awaken us to the divine and troubling realities presently at play within our souls. Myths beckon us to get involved.
We can call this the mythopoetic layer of mythology—a way of looking at the world that sees story woven into the very ground upon which we walk. Sprouting from our footsteps like fruiting bodies of earthly wisdom, myths inhabit the intersection between our personal circumstances, the collective unconscious, and what cultural ecologist David Abram calls the more-than-human world.
A mythopoetic perspective helps connect our unique, individual story and all of its complexities to the archetypal Well of the collective unconscious, which is encoded into myth. We can define mythopoetics simply as “crafting a meaningful story.” More precisely, mythopoetics is a way of perception that integrates the raw material of the human experience: our churning sea of emotions, the furrows of our senses, the luminescent web of our imagination.
The mythopoetic lens is the foundation of depth, and perhaps every form of psychology. Freud’s infamous exploration of the Oedipus myth and his conclusions regarding the nature of the unconscious, debatable as they were, was an act of deep mythopoetry that the modern European world had not seen the likes of since the Renaissance. “I am Oedipus,” Freud once said, pointing to perhaps the most essential element of the mythopoetic perspective: an unflinching ability to look at one’s self and see one’s own reflection in a story.
The work of Carl Jung was for Western culture a rediscovery of some long-forgotten technology or art form that helped recontextualize these ancient tales as containers of profound psychological insight, whereas before they were seen only as archaic vestiges of so-called “primitive” cultures. Jung’s method of teasing out deep thematic resonances between myths and the struggles he saw within his patients (and himself) helped establish psychoanalysis and the newborn field of psychology as a revolutionary form of healing—a modality of self-inquiry and inner work that lives delicately between the worlds of art and science.
Psyche speaks through images. Ultimately, though, the meanings behind these images, stories, and experiences are crafted by their beholder. In my work as a therapist and psychedelic guide, I can help people see the picture more clearly, but I don’t determine what comes into the frame.
The mythopoetic perspective is about the ability to see more deeply into ourselves and the more-than-human-world, connecting our lived experience to the Great Well of archetypal images. Learning to speak this language asks us to negotiate the constant interplay between the amorphously subjective, poetic world of symbols and the gritty, emotional world of real human life. We must keep one foot in each world, sitting firmly on the edge of the Great Well of the unconscious while another part of our awareness spirals beneath the water’s surface, fishing for Otherworldly wisdom.
Thinking symbolically means trying to look at things “as if” they are, or might be, other than what they seem. We poke and prod with raven-beaked curiosity, sniffing out the unexpected, following the trail of some elusive creature burrowed beneath the fertile ground of the psyche. From a mythopoetic perspective, everything that emerges from the unconscious is an opportunity to make meaning, and none of it is taken for granted.
In our age of clinical certainty, it can be both challenging and refreshing to try to comfortably settle into this paradoxical realm of “both-and.” Thinking symbolically requires us to get much more comfortable in the unknown.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to reduce symbolic language into a bullet-point formula or blueprint. Such an approach would suffocate this highly emergent mode of perception. Instead of claiming with certainty that we know where we are going, we must instead allow ourselves to be led by the psyche’s unfolding, speaking back to us through the symbols themselves.
We must take the psyche at its word.
This is an excerpt from my book, Psychedelics & the Soul, coming out Fall, 2024 through North Atlantic Books. If you liked what you read, please consider subscribing to and sharing this Substack, and leaving a comment.