Mythic Resonance

LiveJournal Tags: magic,mysticism,myth,paganism,polytheism,Phantasypublishing

The mythic realm is the world of stories, tales of things that happened nowhere and at no particular time, the essence of which evokes a mythic insight. In the words of William Blake:

This world of imagination is the world of eternity; it is the divine bosom into which we shall go after the death of the vegetated body. This world of imagination is infinite and eternal, whereas the world of generation, or vegetation, is finite and temporal. There exist in that eternal world the permanent realities of every thing which we see reflected in this vegetable glass of nature. All things are comprehended in their eternal forms in the divine body of the savior, the true vine of eternity, the human imagination.

Blake considers the imagination to be more real than the mundane world. He considers it to be the source of the mundane world, the “true vine of eternity.” When you are confronted with this world of the imagination- in the context of one of the ancient myths, in a piece of art or fiction, in a dream or vision- and you experience some part of its mysterious power, the result is mythic resonance, the personal experience of transcendent reality.

Mythic resonance is not an either/or- the shades of gray are uncountable. The effect might be subtle or it might be life changing, depending on the power and significance of the experience itself. Particular myths encode particular gnosis, and this gnosis varies, too, from one person to another. No two experiences of mythic resonance will be completely the same.

The mythic experience is an encounter with a mysterious truth. I use the word “mysterious” because this type of truth is not experienced intellectually, but as a kind of force or power.

It has a quality of vastness and of neverending space, of opening out onto vistas of wonder. It produces a powerful sense of the infinite and the eternal. It is awe-inspiring and numinous. It evokes a sense of mysterious terror and of fascination. It is intensely personal, an encounter that touches the deepest levels of the mind.

It is noetic in quality, which is to say that it gives us knowledge, insights that could never have been acquired by reason. It is morally compelling, not because it lays down laws or gives out commands, but because our instinctive response to it is both awe and wonder, leaving us convinced that certain ways of living will bring us closer to it while others draw us away from it.

It is experienced as something of fundamental concern, having to do with the ultimate questions and not a means to any end. And last of all it is ineffable, something that cannot be rationally explained or understood. Because of this ineffability, the only way to represent the experience is to use a language of poetic symbols, and this is exactly what the myths are. They are divine riddles of the ineffable.

In the ongoing debate between hard polytheism and soft polytheism, soft polytheists are often accused of not really believing in the gods because they treat the gods as psychological archetypes or poetic symbols instead of genuinely existing entities. If we assume that the imagination is just a set of colorful images generated by the brain, then obviously any view of the gods that placed them within the human imagination would deny them the status of real entities and reduce them to convenient fictions.

But we don’t have to assume that in the first place. If we take the viewpoint of William Blake, we can think of the imagination as the world of eternity from which our own constantly-changing universe derives its form. From this point of view, the truths we discover in our imagination are not less real than the things we see around us every day, but more real. The archetypes and poetic symbols of our mythic stories are not merely attempts to understand our own minds as incidental byproducts of our bodies, but to articulate the reality of Mind itself, from which all bodies derive.

The myths don’t have to be taken literally to be taken seriously. We can acknowledge that they are stories, that they are poetic symbols, that they come from the imagination- and we can do so with awe and reverence, because the imagination is transcendent reality.