Approaches to Myth in a Modern World

Selene & Endymion, Ubaldo Gandalfi, 1770

Myths are cultural stories which are woven into the fabric of our collective unconscious. Myths provide archetypal symbols, fragments or echoes of universal experience, which we can decipher, engage, or contemplate, creating a poetic web of meaning out of our relationships and personal journeys. Reading myths places us in the realm of the ancient imagination, and reminds us that humans and the divine have always brushed up against one another, for better or for worse. We’ve lost a lot of our connection to myth in our contemporary moment, so far removed are we from an age where myth mattered. 

As an astrologer (and artist), I find the myths invaluable—I cannot make sense of the cosmos without them. There’s a sympathetic link between astrology and mythology, as the planets bear the names of the gods of Roman antiquity. Even earlier than the Romans, Babylonians identified the planets in the sky as wandering gods of their own pantheon. When we learn the myths of antiquity, we remind ourselves of the powerful connection between myth and planet, and between the earth and you, which though at times forgotten, has existed for all of written history. 

Why is there such an impulse to forget, ignore, or diminish the importance of myth in our contemporary world, and what can myth really do for us in 2022, anyway? The rejection of myth is as ancient as the writings of Plato, whose ideas on culture and civilization still influence us today. Myth has been recuperated along the way, though, and I’d say that myth is always important to children, and to artists. The work of Jungian depth psychologists, and the work of Robert Graves, can point the way towards a recuperation of myth for our modern imaginations. 

Plato & the Republic, Anti-Myth

Myths and their ancient wisdom were rejected by Plato as antithetical to the happy functioning of a republic. In fact, in Plato's Republic, he advised that poets and those who recited the myths be removed from the polis, arguing that they may mislead the youth, and teach them “immoral” things. He writes: 

Children ought not to learn what they will have to unlearn when they grow up; we must therefore have a censorship of nursery tales, banishing some and keeping others. Some of them are very improper, as we may see in the great instances of Homer and Hesiod, who not only tell lies but bad lies; stories about Uranus and Saturn, which are immoral as well as false, and which should never be spoken of to young persons, or indeed at all.” (Plato, Republic)

Myth tells stories which, like dreams, can be frightening, violent, fantastical, and immoral. The myth of Oedipus tells the tale of a man who kills his father and sleeps with his mother (by accident!). The myth of Medea ends with Medea killing her own children after her husband betrays her with another woman. Myth is full of tragedy, as well as violence, interventions from gods, and events that make little sense to the rational mind. This was not going to fly in Plato’s republic, where all needed to run smoothly, on the energy of logic. Thus our western perspective on the use of myth was born. 

This idea that myth was a holdover from a less “intelligent” moment in human history continued to influence western culture, and reached its peak with the Enlightenment, which saw a powerful turning away from anything magical, intuitive, mythic, or inexplicable. This is the root of antagonistic responses to myth that we still see today. 

Robert Graves, Myth and Poetry 

Robert Graves, one of the most important scholars of mythology, has a really unique perspective on the role of myth in the world, specifically myth and its relationship to poetry. He writes: 

True myth may be defined as the reduction to narrative shorthand of ritual mime performed on public festivals and rendered in [cultural artifacts.]… A study of Greek mythology should begin with a consideration of what political and religious systems existed in Europe before the arrival of Aryan invaders from the distant North and East. The whole of Neolithic Europe, had a remarkably homogenous system of religious ideas, based on worship of the many-titled Mother-Goddess, who was also known in Syria and Libya. (Graves, The Greek Myths) 

Myth is, more than Plato would have liked to admit, often tied to historical events, thus bear an important role in cultural memory and are not simply useless fairy tales. One example for us is the story of Perseus and Medusa, which is often told as Perseus slaying the snake-haired monster, Medusa in a flash of heroic bravery. However, there’s more to this story than the triumph of the solar hero!

In about 1290 BCE, Indo-European invaders from the North and East came into Mycenae, Greece. These invading people were patriarchally oriented, and in their conquering of Mycenae went through the temples, which were devoted to a Moon goddess with snakes for hair, stole all the sacred horses, and replaced these Moon temples with temples to Zeus, or Jupiter, patriarchal dominator of their own mythos. 

The supplanting of feminine with the masculine is symbolized by Perseus’s overpowering of the Medusa, a monster who supposedly deserved to be slain. We know that history is written by the victorious. Myth was an early form of historical record, filtered through symbols of the divine

I should say, though that Graves is not strictly an ancient historian—he’s most well known for a work called The White Goddess, which traces the myths of the west, and posits that all poetry is actually a search or the mythic “White Goddess,” the archetype of the divine feminine. His perspective is unique because he’s interested in both the actual stories of myth, as well as possible historical underpinnings.

The Jungian Perspective on Myth

Not necessarily contrasting with Graves’s work, but certainly adding another layer, is the psychological perspective, namely that of Sigmund Freud and C.G. Jung, that myths can be analogous with shared human experiences, which emanate from the unconscious mind. 

While Freud saw the unconscious as a locus of repressed urges, Jung took this idea further, and named the collective unconscious as a repository of shared psychological memories that we are born innately understanding. Freud really didn’t like this idea, and this was part of what caused their eventual parting of ways. 

James Hillman, a modern Jungian, sees myth as inextricably linked to our present moment, not as a relic of the past. He defines it as a psychology of antiquity, but states that psychology is a kind of updated mythology on which we still rely. At any rate, Hillman posits that the images and stories of myth illuminate psychological human experience, and he writes extensively about the act of accessing the underworld through dreaming. He writes: 

“Myths are not simply part of the past, belonging to another age… Myth lives vividly in our symptoms and fantasies and in our conceptual systems… Mythology is a psychology of antiquity. Psychology is a mythology of modernity. The ancients had no psychology, but they had myths, the speculative tellings about humans in relation with more-than-human forces and images. We moderns have no mythology, but we have psychological systems, the speculative theories about humans in relationship with more-than-human forces and images, today called fields, instincts, drives, complexes.” (Hillman, Dream and the Underworld) 

Dreams, for Hillman, are personal mythic landscapes from which we derive our own stories of healing and individuation. He sees myth as an initial attempt at forming a kind of ancient psychology, but urges us to remember that these mythic images are not just cold psychology, but pointing to something more numinous, more oriented toward the soul. 

Personal Approaches to Mythology

From these three perspectives, we can begin to shape our own attitudes towards myth. Are you Platonic, rejecting myth and all it has to offer? Do you see these stories as a distraction from what’s logical, or rational? Or are you willing to entertain the idea that, not only do these stories reflect a kind of ancient history, the stories of myth are full of archetypal pathways to the soul? 

For me, bringing the mythic realm into my astrology perspective gives me a powerful arsenal of of images and stories through which to understand planetary interactions. And beyond the astrological, reading the myths has always been a way to remind myself that everything is animated with the force of something divine. Everything is touched by a spirit, or god-force, or magical guide. If you’re feeling jaded or disconnected from the greater world, you may be overdue for an immersion into the mythic realm. 

Sources + Further Reading 

Plato, The Republic
C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self
Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, The White Goddess
James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld
Demetra George, The Asteroid Goddesses