The Archetypal Cosmos

‘The Archetypal Cosmos is a brilliant, meticulous synthesis of revolutionary advances on three fronts: depth psychology, new paradigm science, and archetypal astrology. Le Grice has a gift, perhaps even a genius, for extremely clear assessments, expositions, and formulations of complex ideas — all grounded in a deeper vision which makes this clarity possible.

— Richard Tarnas, author of The Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos and Psyche

‘The radically expanded cosmological perspective that Keiron Le Grice has set out in The Archetypal Cosmos reflects a paradigm shift of enormous relevance for the future of psychology and psychotherapy. Le Grice has performed an invaluable service in carefully thinking through and articulating a spiritually informed view of the cosmos that integrates these developments … A lucid and groundbreaking synthesis.’

— Stanislav Grof, author of Psychology of the Future and When the Impossible Happens

‘Keiron Le Grice’s book is a fantastic achievement, combining complex theories from leading figures in psychology and the physical sciences. With both the excellence of the writing and the high-powered nature of the ideas, The Archetypal Cosmos is destined to be an essential element in the contemporary planetary canon.’

— Brian Swimme, Professor of Cosmology, California Institute of Integral Studies

The Archetypal

Cosmos

Rediscovering the Gods in Myth, Science and Astrology

Keiron Le Grice

To Kathryn

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Parallel Frontiers

Part 1: Archetypal Astrology: A New Mythic Perspective

1. World Views and Mythology

The significance of a world view

Mythology and modernity.

2. In Search of a New Myth

Transpersonal psychology, ecology, and the new paradigm

The functions of mythology

The changing mythological situation.

3. Archetypal Astrology and the Monomyth

Astrology and the ground of myth

Fundamental principles of archetypal astrology

The planetary pantheon

The recovery of meaning

The monomyth of the hero’s journey

The evolutionary significance of the hero myth

Individuation and the monomyth

Towards an individual mythology.

Part 2: Formulating an Archetypal Cosmology

4. The Underlying Cosmic Pattern

New paradigms: holism and organicism

The systems view of the cosmos:

pattern

structure

process

Pattern and the planetary order

Causality and acausality

Meaning and purpose

Symbolic correspondences

Numerical and geometric patterns

Synchronicity: the revelation of a deeper order.

5. Self-Organization and the Cosmic Mind

The modern understanding of the nature of mind

Mind in evolutionary context

The anthropic principle

The systems view of mind

The cosmic mind.

6. The Archetypal Order

Consciousness and transpersonal psychology

The archetypes and the collective unconscious

Archetypal psychology and the systems model

Self-organization in the psyche

The nature of the planetary archetypes

The underlying identity of psyche and cosmos

Astrology and the cosmic psyche.

7. The Dynamic Ground

Bohm’s theory of the implicate order

The unity of mind and matter

Energy: a unified conception

Meaning and the super-implicate order

Science and spirituality

Outer space and inner space

The symbolic universe: the significance of the planetary positions

Historical synchronicities with the discovery of the outer planets.

8. Archetypal Resonance and the Birth Pattern

The significance of the birth moment

Morphic fields and formative causation

Cosmic memory

The ‘habits’ of the cosmos

A multi-levelled reality

The persistence of the birth pattern

Morphic fields and the super-implicate order.

9. Individuation and Evolution

Comparing Jung and Teilhard de Chardin

The ego and the birth of thought

The psychological dimension of evolution

Alchemy and hominization

Convergence, personalization, and the whole

Religion: East and West

Swimme’s theory of cosmological powers

Cosmological powers and planetary archetypes

The cosmological dynamics of individuation

Selfrealization and cosmological identity.

Part 3: The Archetypal Matrix and the Spiritual Transformation of Our Time

10. The Return of the Gods

Gebser and integral philosophy

The origin and the archaic consciousness

From the magic to the mythical structure

The mental structure and modernity

Beyond modernity: the integral structure

Contemporary interpretations of myth

Myth as fact, myth as history

Myth as falsehood

Myth as metaphor

Myth and archetypal astrology

The nature of a mythology to come.

Epilogue: The Opening of a New Spiritual Era

The synchronistic significance of the Moon landing

The archetypal meaning of the Moon

The unio mystica and the birth of the Self.

Endnotes

References and Further Reading

Index

Copyright

List of Figures

3.1. Astrological Birth Chart of C.G. Jung.

3.2. Table of Planets, Planetary Symbols, and Archetypal Meanings.

3.3. Example of Archetypal Multidimensionality: The Pluto Archetype.

3.4. Archetypal Themes in the Crucifixion: Saturn-Pluto and Saturn-Neptune.

9.1. Table of Brian Swimme’s Cosmological Powers.

9.2. Comparative Table of Cosmological Powers and Planetary Archetypes.

9.3. Global Financial Crisis World Transit Chart.

10.1. Table of Jean Gebser’s Structures of Consciousness.

11.1. Chart of the Neptune-Pluto Conjunction, circa 1880–1905.

Acknowledgments

Over the course of this eleven-year project, I have benefited from the assistance and insight of many learned friends, teachers, and colleagues. In particular, since 2004 I have been fortunate to study and teach in the unique multidisciplinary research environment provided by the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness programme at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Francisco. I am especially grateful to Richard Tarnas for his encouragement and support during my time at CIIS, and for his pioneering contribution to the field of archetypal studies, which has done much to illuminate my understanding of archetypal astrology and its wider theoretical context and implications. I would like also to express my gratitude to Sean Kelly and Paul Marshall for their editorial suggestions and astute comments on several chapters in Part 2 of this book. My thanks, too, to Brian Swimme for his helpful feedback on Chapter 9. For providing financial assistance to help me complete my studies, I am grateful to CIIS for multiple awards of its International Student Scholarship between 2004 and 2008, and to the Joseph Campbell Foundation (in association with Pacifica Graduate Institute, Santa Barbara) for the award of the Joseph Campbell Research Grant in 2006.

I give special thanks to Rod O’Neal, co-editor of the Archai journal, for his insightful editing and careful proof reading of the manuscript in its entirety, and to my other friends and colleagues at Archai — including Bill Streett, Grant Maxwell, and Chad Harris — whose creative work behind the scenes has helped launch the field of archetypal cosmology over the last couple of years. For reading and commenting on the manuscript in its later stages, I give thanks to Jonah Saifer and Nicola Sayers; for feedback on early drafts, my thanks to Doris Broekema, David Randal Davies, Pamela Russell, and Erin Sullivan. A warm thank you, too, to Christopher Moore at Floris Books whose enthusiasm for my work and helpful editorial suggestions turned my working manuscript into a publishable book.

I wish to express my deep gratitude to David and Margaret Davies for their generous support over many years, to my family, and to the following friends for aiding my transition from Britain to San Francisco and for providing a helping hand during my time at CIIS: Georgia Bailey, Deborah Bursnell, Adrian and Nicola Cook, Joseph Kearns, Jessica Kostosky, Jennifer Martin, Clare Meeuwsen, Kimberly Hoard Nasrul, Jody O’Connor, Steven Swanson, Bernard Voon, and the late Kelleen Nicholson. I am particularly grateful to my good friend Richard Wormstall for his insight, encouragement, and generosity. Our many discussions over the years have been a continual source of renewal and stimulation.

Finally, I would like to pay tribute to my father, Barry Le Grice, who passed away in 2007, and who was deeply influential on my own spiritual journey; and my son, Lukas Rafael, born as I was completing the final sections of writing. Most of all, my deepest appreciation and gratitude goes to my wife, Kathryn, for her love and support over many years, for her unwavering faith in my work, and for her insightful and meticulous editorial input to the text. This book is dedicated to her.

KLG

June 2010, San Francisco

The honour of the gods has been

Too long, too long invisible

Friedrich Hölderlin

Introduction: Parallel Frontiers

The mystery of the night sky, those enigmatic passages of slowly but steadily moving lights among the fixed stars, had delivered the revelation, when charted mathematically, of a cosmic order, and in response, from the depths of the human imagination, a reciprocal recognition had been evoked. A vast concept took form of the universe as a living being in the likeness of a great mother, within whose womb all the worlds, both of life and death, had their existence.

Joseph Campbell

The seat of the soul is there, where the inner and outer worlds meet.

Novalis

Staring into the vastness of space we behold a great and fathomless mystery. The night sky evokes a sense of immeasurable depth and inconceivable expanse, of timelessness and the infinite, of the terror of the dark unknown and the enticing lure of the still-to-be-experienced. Simultaneously, it impresses upon us the enigma of our ultimate origins and the promise of our distant future. The universe, we sense, is both our source and our goal, our beginning and our end. The evolving context of life itself, it is the originating ground of all things.

Throughout history the vision of the starry firmament has captivated the mythic imagination, inspiring feelings of awe and wonder in all those who gaze with open hearts and minds to the vast darkness whence all life came. The night sky has stimulated our deepest spiritual yearnings and, in the great civilizations past, it was revered as the sacred kingdom of the gods, the heavenly domain in which the souls of the dead found their divine resting place. The encompassing background to the unfolding human drama, the sky has ever been a symbol of the transcendent spiritual power that lies above and beyond the personal sphere of human existence.

Thousands of years ago it was, no doubt, a similar experience of the night sky that compelled our ancestors to envisage the universe as the all-embracing womb of the Great Mother goddess within which all life springs forth and to which all individual forms will, finally, return. Even today, for all the ingenious technological developments and great cultural achievements of modern civilization, we retain a sense of this primordial intuition of our deep mystical identity and mythic relationship with the universe. If we can set aside our more limiting rational preconceptions, we can recognize in the mystery of space something of the mystery of our own deepest being.

From the very beginnings of civilization in the third or fourth millennium

BCE

, the heavens were the great focal point of mathematics and mythology, of philosophy and the arts, and of science and religion. With the development of celestial mathematics, early astronomy and astrology — then a single discipline — became the catalyzing force behind the birth of human civilization itself in the ancient city states of Mesopotamia, where religion, science, and writing first emerged. Since that time, the celestial realm has been studied and explicated by the scientific mind, its planetary movements tracked and modelled mathematically, its laws of force and motion observed, measured, calculated, and abstracted.

In recent decades, the dawn of the Space Age, heralded by those first astonishing rocket flights out of the Earth’s atmosphere into the darkness beyond, stirred the collective imagination, revitalizing humanity’s enduring fascination with the heavens. Telescopic space exploration has since bestowed upon us stupendous images of the far reaches of our solar system, of the birth and death of stars, of black holes, and of spiral galaxies — of a universe of inconceivable magnitude, complexity and mystery, that has forced upon us a radical revision of all our previous cosmological assumptions. Closer to home, space exploration has also afforded us a dazzling new vantage point of the Earth, bringing images of a seamless unitary sphere, a luminous living planet glowing in the darkness of boundless space.

This global vision, made possible by the rapid technological advances of our time, is in some sense representative of our new expanded global perspective of life in all its forms on our planet. With access to information about all parts of the world and all times of history, we have at our fingertips a wealth of knowledge far surpassing that of any other period. Surveying the great chronicles of history, we can see our own era, our moment in time, in its rightful perspective as a culmination of all that has gone before, rather than a negation of the past, and a coming together of all cultures, all forms of knowledge and art, all religions, myths, and philosophies. Our vantage point gives us a sweeping view of our evolutionary past. We can see all streams of history flowing together. We can appreciate how every event and every life has contributed in some small way to where we now stand. For all the problems confronting us in the world today, we find ourselves in a uniquely privileged position. Yet with this privilege comes responsibility and challenge, for our time also seems to be one of critical, even epochal, transition heralded by many factors and indicators: ecological, economic, political, technological, psychological, cultural, and spiritual. We are living with the decline and dissolution of the old order, with the tumult and uncertainty of a new birth. The need for an orienting context to guide us through these many changes has become urgent.

As our vision has expanded outwards into the dark infinity of space, so too modern physics has probed deep within the microscopic world of the atom, to the quantum realm, that mysterious underlying reality in which many of our ordinary concepts and categories, such as space and time, cause and effect, subject and object, utterly break down. And at the same time the modern mind has also turned its gaze upon itself in the continuing endeavour to comprehend the inner dimension of human experience. Whether through the trance of the shaman, the spiritual quest and illumination of the mystic, the vision of the philosopher-poet, and, more recently, through the new disciplines of depth and transpersonal psychology, human beings have sought to make sense of the workings of the human soul or psyche. Here we have discovered a world that is just as mysterious as space itself and that displays similarly its own characteristic order. Our advancing steps into these strange new lands have been tentative, our forays brief, accompanied always by trepidation and exhilaration in equal measure. And while we commonly suppose that these expeditions are in no way related, perhaps the paths of cosmological and psychological exploration might in fact reveal a deeper symbolic unity. In the interdependent and interconnected universe disclosed to us by modern science, might it be that these three areas of exploration — the inner world of the psyche, the quantum realm, and the realm of outer space — are more deeply connected than we have been led to believe, or than we had ever imagined? Could it be that in their deepest strata psyche and cosmos are so closely related as to be, in some sense, identical?

Of course, this supposition is not entirely without precedent. The intuition of a connection between the celestial macrocosm and the human microcosm has long been upheld in oriental and premodern world views, in mystical philosophies, in esoteric lore, and most especially in the ancient discipline of astrology — the study of the correspondence between human experience and the positions and movements of the Sun, the Moon, and the planetary bodies of the solar system. While many people in modern Western society would be quick to reject outright the truth claims of astrology, a startling new body of evidence of striking correlations between planetary cycles and patterns of world history recently presented by philosopher and cultural historian Richard Tarnas has given to astrology a new, unexpected credibility and provided the most compelling evidence yet that this ancient symbolic system, following decades of reformulation through its encounter with depth, humanistic, and transpersonal psychology, is once again worthy of serious consideration.¹

Supported by this data, a new form of astrology — archetypal astrology — has now emerged, drawing on the astrological tradition yet informed by the insights of depth psychology and supported, increasingly, by the theoretical conceptions of some of our finest scientific minds.² As the new sciences begin to reveal an unexpected relationship between the inner realm of the psyche and the outer realm of the cosmos, perhaps we might now once again look to the deeper meaning of the planetary patterns of the solar system for orientation and guidance in the next phase of our evolutionary journey. For, we will find, not only can archetypal astrology help us to render intelligible the patterns of our historical and recent evolutionary past, and to illuminate the challenges of the present, but this new form of astrology can also, I believe, provide us with a mythic perspective that might serve humanity in our unfolding future. Such a perspective would befit our newly attained cosmological vision and global planetary awareness while including within its scope the mythological and spiritual wisdom of the ages. Seen through new eyes in this new millennium, archetypal astrology might enable us to discover the underlying unity of the psyche and the cosmos and, beyond this, to point to the deeper order and containing ground that supports both realms.

Could it be, then, that our continuing endeavours to push back the frontiers of both the cosmos and the psyche betray a single, deeper motive? Perhaps our quest within, to explore the human psyche, and our quest without, to explore the universe, are but different expressions of the ubiquitous spiritual quest, as old as humanity itself, to discover our ultimate origins, to come into conscious relationship with the source and ground of all being. If so, then archetypal patterns, reflected in the structural order of the cosmos and manifest simultaneously in the depths of the human unconscious, might serve to illuminate our way on this heroic journey.

This book presents the outlines of a new mythic world view through an exploration of the theoretical basis of archetypal astrology and its application to mythology, psychology, and contemporary spirituality. In particular, the vision of reality that I present in these pages draws upon the work of Carl Gustav Jung and Joseph Campbell in the fields of depth psychology and comparative mythology, respectively. Both have been extremely influential not only within their own areas of expertise, but also across many other areas of Western popular culture and, most especially, on contemporary forms of spirituality and psychological self-exploration. Both have also contributed in important ways to the assimilation of esoteric symbolism and Eastern religious wisdom into the Western cultural and intellectual vision. And both have been instrumental in identifying the universal themes of the world’s myths and religions, and the underlying psychic structures from which these originate.

I also draw on the ideas of several different theorists within the various fields of new paradigm thought — including David Bohm, Fritjof Capra, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Erich Jantsch, Stanislav Grof, Rupert Sheldrake, and Brian Swimme — whose work has done much to enhance our understanding of the nature of the universe and to present an alternative vision of reality to that offered by the orthodox scientific community. What all these thinkers have in common is that they challenge the dichotomies — between subject and object, mind and matter, and nature and spirit, for example — that have come to define the modern Western understanding of reality. Many of these theorists have also made bold moves to bridge these dichotomies, to reach out across the subject-object divide, by developing more holistic, complex, and unified world views that recognize the fundamental interconnectedness of all phenomena.

By synthesizing the insights of depth psychology and the new paradigm sciences, the aim of this book is to present a new vision of the relationship between the cosmos and the psyche, and between the planetary cycles and the dynamics and patterns of human experience. It is my hope that this endeavour might contribute to an enlarged understanding of human nature and our place in the cosmos, and that it might help to evoke, in the modern mind, an appreciation of the complex interconnection between the structural order of the solar system and the archetypal patterns of mythology.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 examines the place of myth in the modern world, the main functions served by mythology, and the requirements of a new mythology for our time. It presents the argument that archetypal astrology, combined with Joseph Campbell’s model of the mythic hero’s journey, could serve as a basis for a truly individualized form of mythology, one that could help to illuminate the patterns and themes of the individual’s life. In order to understand the reasons archetypal astrology could be used in this way, Part 2 then explores the theoretical basis of astrology in modern science and depth psychology, as it develops foundations of a new archetypal cosmology. Finally, Part 3 considers the relevance of astrology for the larger evolutionary transformation of our time, and proposes a new understanding of the place of archetypal principles and the ‘gods’ in human experience. In an age when, for many, the traditional religions no longer provide the spiritual sustenance they once did, archetypal astrology, I argue here, could provide us with a new mythic framework to serve humanity in this new millennium, bringing us into a meaningful conscious relationship with a deeper cosmic order shaping our lives.

Notes

1. See Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche.

2. Archetypal astrology is part of the larger academic discipline of archetypal cosmology currently being developed by a group of scholars and researchers, based for the most part in San Francisco, California. This discipline is concerned with the study of the correlations between the planetary alignments and archetypal patterns in human experience and also with understanding the theoretical basis of these correlations and their implications for the wider world view. For further information and the latest research and writing in the field, see Archai: The Journal of Archetypal Cosmology. For background on the emergence of archetypal cosmology, see Le Grice, ‘Birth of a new discipline.’

Part 1

Archetypal Astrology:

A New Mythic Perspective

1. World Views and Mythology

In every age the common interpretation of the world of things is controlled by some scheme of unchallenged and unsuspected presupposition: and the mind of every individual, however little he may think himself to be in sympathy with his contemporaries, is not an insulated compartment, but more like one continuous medium — the circumambient atmosphere of his place and time.

F. M. Cornford

Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.

Joseph Campbell

The significance of a world view

The assumptions, beliefs, and ideas through which we habitually, and often unconsciously, interpret our experiences together constitute our world view. We can think of a world view as a kind of implicit conceptual schema or ‘life theory’, which, like all theories, helps to organize and make sense of the information and sensory stimuli we encounter, shaping our experience and understanding of ourselves and the world around us. We know from modern physics and from the philosophy of science that the particular theory or paradigm through which we see the world actually determines what we focus on and deem to be important. ‘What we observe,’ quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg notes, ‘is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.’¹ The theory, in other words, determines the interpretation and even the perception of the experienced reality.

Different historical eras, different cultures and civilizations, and different social groups can all be defined by the world view to which they subscribe. Shared beliefs and attitudes bind groups of people together and at the same time exclude others who do not share these beliefs. With regard to entire civilizations, a collective world view, at its deepest level, determines the prevailing understanding of the nature of reality itself. And this applies as much to our own era as to civilizations past. Our world view is built upon a set of implicit philosophical assumptions about the nature and origins of the universe, and about the purpose and place of human life within it, assumptions shared by our socio-cultural group, or even by humanity as a whole. Even when these philosophical assumptions are not well understood or recognized, they nevertheless tacitly shape and condition all we do. Without having any kind of conceptual grasp of science, philosophy, or religion — without having read a single theoretical book — one would still have a world view that broadly reflects the dominant assumptions about the nature of reality, assumptions conditioned by the prevailing scientific, religious, and philosophical understanding of the time and place in which one lives. If we are born into a society where everyone believes in God, then, in all probability, we too will believe in God. If we are born into an era when people believe the Earth is flat, then we too will live according to this belief and, most likely, our response would be one of puzzled astonishment if anyone dared to proffer a different view.

Often such beliefs are so fundamental to the way we see the world and so intrinsic to our deepest suppositions about the nature of the universe that they go unquestioned and are upheld as indisputable facts. Ideas that contradict and challenge the prevailing collective world view are often rejected out of hand without having been properly considered, dismissed as being patently untrue and deemed unworthy of serious evaluation. All world views have an inherent bias, and this remains the case in the contemporary Western world where an exaggerated and unjustified belief in the efficacy of modern science to explain everything is itself a fundamental supposition that, until recently, was rarely called into question.

Astrology is one alternative perspective that has suffered more than most from the unconscious bias implicit within the modern Western world view. The dominant ideas derived from religion, philosophy, and science — ideas that have become central to the consensus understanding of the world and that have been pivotal in shaping the nature of modern life — have marginalized and seemingly invalidated astrology such that today many people flatly dismiss it, or see it merely as a curious form of entertainment for the intellectually naïve and deluded. The philosophical assumptions within the Western world view have, particularly in the modern era, created a powerful self-perpetuating prejudice against astrology, a prejudice that forms an imposing barrier to any reassessment of the validity of astrological correlations.

Of course, the modern world view excludes far more than astrology. Yet in certain crucial respects prevailing attitudes towards astrology are symptomatic of a deeper set of beliefs that dictate our understanding of the universe and of human nature. Exploring the theoretical basis of astrology will lead us deeper than we might expect, and force us to examine many beliefs that are so ingrained in the way we see the world, so intrinsic to our fundamental orientation to life, that we might never ordinarily think to question them. It is to one particular set of these beliefs, concerning the modern understanding of the mythic and spiritual aspects of existence, that we will now turn our attention.

Mythology and modernity

It is a defining characteristic of contemporary Western civilization that an appreciation of the spiritual dimension of life does not constitute an essential part of the prevailing collective world view.² While modern life confers upon most people in the developed world many advantages over earlier eras (measured in terms of material standard of living, longevity, health care, individual freedoms, opportunities, comforts, luxury goods, and so forth), one has only to consider the art, sculpture, and architecture of any of the earlier civilizations — Greek or Roman, Egyptian or Babylonian, Indian or Chinese — to recognize that, despite the great achievements of modernity, something immeasurably important has been lost. With the rise of our technological consumer society, collectively we have lost a sense of the sacred purpose and the encompassing spiritual context of life. We have lost the awareness that human lives are rooted in a deeper reality transcending concrete individuality, an insight that was fundamental to most civilizations, and that gives to human existence a more deeply sustaining sense of meaning and purpose. Although the material conditions of life have improved beyond measure, as a culture we have now come to believe that the universe in which we live is soulless, meaningless, and without purpose. And this disenchanted vision is seen not merely as one possible view of reality, but as an incontestable objective fact supported by science — as the true understanding of the way things really are.

Many complex factors have contributed to the spiritual problem of the modern Western world, and we will address some of these in this book. Yet, essentially, one root cause of this situation is that we seem to have no valid mythology that might turn the focus of our attention to the spiritual dimension of life and in so doing counterbalance the onesided rationalism and materialism of our time. The prevailing world view of modern Western (and increasingly global) society is no longer shaped by a guiding mythic narrative. The Western world has lost its living connection to myth.

One of the foremost authorities on mythology in recent times was Joseph Campbell, whose lifelong study of the world’s myths brought him popular posthumous acclaim in the late 1980s when his ideas were brought to the wider culture with the broadcasting of The Power of Myth interviews with Bill Moyers. Earlier in his life, in a well-known passage, Campbell gave the following evocative description of the deepest import and purpose of myth:

It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.³

In Campbell’s view, myths are the ‘inexhaustible energies of the cosmos’ manifest in the human psyche — either taking shape in the imagination or revealed through direct visionary revelation. Myths are a record of humanity’s spiritual history, and they have formed the foundation of world views past and present. Woven around the lives of spiritual teachers and prophets such as the Buddha, Jesus, and Krishna, myths have given rise to the major religions, which have in turn shaped and sustained the world’s great civilizations. Through the stories of myth, people in all times and all places have explained their relationship to the mystery of life, to the gods, to nature, to the cosmos, and to each other. As essential to the formation, cohesion, and preservation of societies as other more tangible factors such as laws, economics, or technological developments, myths, according to Campbell, are the living forces of society, providing guiding images and symbols ‘by which the energies of aspiration are evoked and gathered towards a focus’.⁴

Of course, many theorists do not share Campbell’s opinion of the exalted place and function of myths. On the contrary, the consensus view is that the word myth simply means falsehood, and that myths now have little value, except as artefacts of historical interest. The so-called Enlightenment theory of myth holds that myths are based on a defective and false understanding of the world. Many leading scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries advanced this rationalistic interpretation, most notably James G. Frazer who deemed myths to be ‘mistaken explanations of phenomena’ such as creation, origin, celestial movements, seasons, growth, death, fire, and so forth — explanations that have been superseded, he thought, by philosophy and science.⁵

In a further denigration of the value of mythic thought, myths are now often seen not only as being false, but also as inherently pathological — as being nothing but the comforting delusions of a neurotic mind. Thus Freud: ‘I have long been haunted by the idea that our studies on the content of the neuroses might be destined to solve the riddle of the formation of myths.’⁶ He explains further:

As a matter of fact, I believe that a large portion of the mythological conception of the world which reaches far into the most modern religions, is nothing but psychology projected on to the outer world. The dim perception … of psychic factors and relations of the unconscious was taken as a model in the construction of a transcendental reality, which is destined to be changed again by science into psychology of the unconscious.⁷

For all the reductionist tendencies in the Freudian interpretation, however, in its recognition that myths originate in the depths of the unconscious psyche lay the seeds of a new approach to understanding the origin of myth, one that was more in keeping with the Romantic sensibility, and one that Campbell would later employ with great success. The Romantic view regards myths as ‘an expression of the deepest creative potentialities of man’.⁸ Myth, in the Romantic interpretation, is decidedly not the obsolete expression of a ‘primitive’ or neurotic mentality for it reflects a direct intuition of deep truths that were readily available to premodern civilizations and that remain accessible to the modern mind if myths are read symbolically.

The Romantic perspective sees myth and science not as mutually exclusive but as equally legitimate modes of apprehending truth. Raffaele Pettazzoni notes, in support of this, that myth is not prior to logic in some hierarchy of cognitive development; rather, ‘human thought is mythical and logical at the same time’.⁹ Thomas Mann goes further, suggesting that ‘in the life of the human race the mythical is an early and primitive stage, in the life of the individual it is a late and mature one’.¹⁰ What seems clear is that far from being pathological, mythic consciousness is actually much more deeply and vitally connected to the living stratum of the human psyche than the rational intellect, which, as the modern era has demonstrated all too well, has often contrived to forget, deny, or repress the deeper matrix from which it emerged, and thus to claim for itself the life powers more properly depicted as autonomous gods. Neurosis is primarily an affliction of the modern era, not of the premodern archaic cultures.

Present in religious texts such as the Bible, in the Greek and Roman literary epics, and in fairy tales and fables, mythic themes are familiar to us all. Consult the mythic literature of most traditions and you will find accounts of the periodic cycles of creation and destruction of the universe, the forging of first people, a virgin birth, and the death and resurrection of a hero. And there are many other recognizable themes: the quest for immortality and eternal youth, the cosmic struggle between forces of good and evil, the theft of fire from the gods, the battle with monsters and slaying of giants, the seductive call of the sirens, the descent into the underworld, floods and droughts, plagues and infestations — such mythological mainstays are well known and continue to captivate the popular cultural imagination when retold in contemporary fiction and film. And lest we think the mythic imagination pertains rather to a bygone age, let us remind ourselves of the power of the recent mythic blockbuster movies to fill auditoria and enthral audiences around the globe: The Star Wars series, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Harry Potter films — these and many others like them have been among the most popular releases of the last thirty years. Such films, pervaded with mythic themes, cater to a deep hunger for transcendence, inspiration, and enchantment, transporting us to a world in which human actions have a profound cosmic significance, a world that calls forth great heroism, and that elicits through its high drama the activation of the deepest virtues and powers.

Yet unlike earlier eras, today, reading the old stories of myth or watching the portrayal of mythic themes in modern movies, it is commonly supposed that such myths have no basis in objective reality, that they do not reflect the way the universe actually is. Myths are widely understood as describing fantastical, illusory