The earliest human consciousness to which we can go back must be conceived as a divine consciousness, a consciousness of God: in its true and specific meaning the human consciousness is a consciousness that does not have God outside it but which—though not with knowledge but with will, not by a free act of the fancy but rather by its very nature—contains within it a relation to God.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: v. 2 Mythical Thought: 7
Children should be bathed in myth, because the child’s mind is mythic in structure and content. Children delight in the loose rhythm and fluid construction of myth, (or its cousins fable, legend, and fairy-tale) and are enthralled with the wild energies, quick metamorphoses, magical potions and powers, mysteries and miracles, oaths and omens, talking dragons, shape-shifters, fairies and demons, indeed the whole population of fabulous beings performing fantastical acts. It all resembles a terrific dream, and myth is probably some halfway house of collective consciousness between dream and the waking state. But some misguided “myths” about myth have taken root that prevent many from appreciating its role in education.
First, it is only a “rational” scientistic (not scientific) conceit that equates myth with something untrue. This prejudice stems from believing myth is only an imaginary story rather than perceiving myth as an imaginative structure of human understanding. Myths are the earliest stories of human consciousness and imaginative stories of all kinds are, even now, the child’s inner world, for imagination is a perennial power. Some myths, like many of the Greek and Roman myths of the west, are culture stories with culture-heroes. The really big ones, though, which tell of a time when human society was not so large a part of life, are the footprints of the gods in the sands of time.
As Cassirer states above, our first consciousness was a consciousness of the divine. The divine has not to do with the past, but with the eternal which is always present. Since the divine is eternally present its essential structures are a permanent part of our consciousness and not just some anachronistic holdover from another time, like crocodiles from the age of the dinosaur. The big myths tell of the upset, called expansion, of human consciousness that occurs when the divine enters the human world, and generates all the terror and adulation, joy and dread, that is how we react when things start dissolving from one shape only to reappear in another, where creatures act much as quantum mechanics says the universe “down there” does. It is the kind of wonderland Alice
Now it is true that myth is closer to that time and psychology in human individual and collective life we call childhood. It is more primitive. But primitive has two meanings, as Northrop Frye would say. First, is the psychologically primitive. This sounds like someone to avoid, but the psychological primitive is closer to archetypal structure and process. He encounters the divine as living presence(s), not abstract intelligence. The metaphor here is the human body. Archetypes are psychological constraints, the innate, but flexible, boundaries to human learning and life that Jung believed were rooted in our biology, and Frye connected with the poetic intelligence. As structures, archetypes are like the skeleton of the human body, absolute limits to what we can attempt without breaking apart, what gives the mind shape and holds it. By knowing them we get close to understanding how we are hard-wired: what we have come into the world ready to do. As guides to the process of development, archetypes help define our powers and potentials, which means our understanding is capable of doing some things but not others, like the ligaments and tendons attached to the bones that both limit and release human action. But capability can expand with training and care. When we work within these constraints we learn quickly, almost instinctively, otherwise we struggle and get off course and often fail. Mythical consciousness reappears during any period of intense social and psychological upheaval, like now, when reason fails because things must be renewed and not just reorganized. Myth always kicks in whenever great new paradigms of awareness are lying just over the horizon of rational knowledge. When it does it signals that another divine visitation has occured.
The other meaning of primitive is the historically primitive. This is mostly a social and technological meaning. It says that clans and tribal societies without our technology, poor things, have myth, but advanced people, like us, have science, and it is much better to have science. From this view, myth is a kind of early and poor man’s science: true, but not for the reasons given. That such comparison is made is based on dubious historical connections, mostly having to do with vulgar applications of the evolutionary principle, that whatever came before must be simpler and less developed: ergo, myth came before science it must be simpler and more childish, something the mature mind detaches itself from, like the first stage of a rocket. Within a certain tradition of thought and experience that may be so, but myth and science are not in the same tradition of thought. Myth is/was an imaginative art and the arts do not improve in the sort of linear fashion that science does. The arts revolve back in a ricorso movement to the same essential questions and answer them anew. Science does not grow out of myth anymore than humans grow from monkeys.
Myth and science are complementary means of understanding. I mean that though myth and science talk about the same thing, reality, they bring it forth in complementary ways: one imaginatively, the other conceptually. Each has its own logic: each is empirical. There is no doubt that conceptual is a later psychological development than is imagination, both in the child and in history, and science is a later development than myth. But, because they are complementary mental powers, both are necessary. Thus if one develops at the expense or exclusion of the other, at the moment of its peak development it flips into the other in order to compensate for an unbalance that results in neurosis, if an individual, and cultural sterility if a civilization. We saw this happen when a scientific sword of material facts cut through that dense thicket of imaginative—by this time it was more imaginary--correspondences that had grown around the European mind to choke the understanding. But from the perspective of complementary innate powers and not their successive appearance on the stage of history, if myth leads to science, then science leads to myth. This is not a one-way linear evolution, but a comprehensive rebalancing in a higher cross-fertilizing relation.
For example, myth presents the creation as alive, every thing in it is a presence, is part of a vast, complex order of living things that obeys the laws of magic, and human beings have a deep inner relationship with every part of it. If one wants to call this childish, so be it. Science sees the universe as composed of inorganic and organic substances, obeying impersonal mathematical laws, and with which we can only have observer/observed, or even, exploiter/exploited relations of alienation. It is indifferent to us and we are interested in it only to the extent that we can get something from it. If we want to call this mature, fine. Yet, when alienation becomes unbearable the mind automatically goes mythic, and a good deal of modern physics is sounding more and more like ancient myth.
“The human consciousness,” says Cassirer, “is a consciousness that does not have God outside it,” but rather “by its very nature contains within it a relation to God.” Myth remains a powerfully imaginative way to unfold that divine consciousness within.
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