[mythistorian]

Thank you so much for your thoughts and impressions @sunbug,

I am always delighted to find a real understanding of what goes on in my writing, designed in a certain way to cut through the difficult path that separates and unites opposites.

You are quite right when you say that I am “advocating a need for a deeper dig, which is not entranced by the appearance or masks of ideas but more interested in the deeper darker roots which sustain.” In contrast to “the right to eat all the ice cream you want,” as you mentioned, I am more interested in myth and ritual as the place where psyche digs into flesh.

And you are right to say that ideology is a collective phenomenon but it takes individuals to give them flesh. The archetypal and the ideological are not so separated, however. For every ideology has a mythic core and every mythology spins and spells a series of ideological fantasies. There is an intertwining between myth and ideology that is not easy to disentangle. They are like myth and history, dialectically distinguished and revisioned as one.

And you are not wrong to suppose in some sense that my conflict with personal mythology is its ‘abuse,’ “by the ego centric or worse, when it rises to an individual pathology and or group one, which desires control.” As you write:

Where as I imagine for so many here inspired by Joseph Campbell, the humbler but passionate quest of the individual heroes or heroines came to that place where all falls away in that aha moment a moment where the collected unconscious takes over. An example: the realization of seeing our planet from the moon… An awareness which we all share, an eternal realization of our connection with everyone and the planet coming from deep down in the roots of the psyche.
Just now and aha moment occurs to me Norland with your excellent description of the psyche digging painfully into the flesh! At the risk of metaphor, I see the symbolic snake painfully biting the place between the eyes opening the symbolic third eye in order to expand sight and awareness.

Very nice metaphor indeed, which touches on the theme of my next mythblast, where I expand the metaphor with the image of the kundalini serpent. I won’t give any spoilers but I will say that the image of the serpent plays a fundamental role in the symbolic order of the archetypal imagination.