The Cauldron of Reality
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Mythology has been interpreted by the modern intellect as a primitive, fumbling effort to explain the world of nature (Frazer); as a production of poetical fantasy from prehistoric times, misunderstood by succeeding ages (Muller); as a repository of allegorical instruction, to shape the individual to his group (Durkheim); as a group dream, symptomatic of archetypal urges within the depths of the human psyche (Jung); as the traditional vehicle of man's profoundest metaphysical insights (Coomaraswamy); and as God's Revelation to His children (the Church). Mythology is all of these. The various judgments are determined by the viewpoints of the judges. For when scrutinized in terms not of what it is but of how it functions, of how it has served mankind in the past, of how it may serve today, mythology shows itself to be as amenable as life itself to the obsessions and requirements of the individual, the race, the age.
The years ... when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.
Archaeologists have found evidence that the tale of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah may originate with the mysterious destruction by cosmic bombardment of a neolithic city at the Abu Hureyra site in Syria. We thought Troy was a myth, until the ruins of the ancient city were found, complete with a layer of the ancient city that shows that the city was once destroyed in a great fire. Myths have a way of being proven as history.
Vendramini begins his hypothesis with the concept of TEEM theory or ‘Trauma Encoded Emotional Memory’ which posits that extreme stress can leave a mark on the mind and DNA of an organism, thereby enabling these experiences to be passed down as instincts to its descendants. Vendramini then speculates that there may have been a war lasting many thousands of years with the Neanderthals that explains their eventual extinction, and that the TEEM mechanism would then explain why the human phenomenon of the “uncanny valley” elicits such a feeling of dread. Perhaps we have a primal fear of a predatory race encoded into our genetics. Such a long prehistorical war could also have provided the seed for our archetypal myth concerning the rescue of maidens from sexually violent wild men, as well as providing the origin for tales of trolls, orcs, giants, and other monstrous beasts. But were Neanderthals actually monsters?
If the universe is divinely ordered, if God weaves divine patterns and stories into it, the natural conclusion is that myths are real because they are our way of remembering - and perceiving - the fundamental truths of this cosmic pattern. But in this case we are not only dealing with ‘stories’. A divinely ordered universe following a sacred pattern implies that myths are not only present in the “background” in some sort of symbolic sense (though they are there) but that they must also manifest in our actual, literal, material world. The material world follows the cosmic pattern, just as psychology follows the pattern, and just as our legends and folklore follow the pattern. It becomes a chicken-and-egg question to ask whether history, folklore, or human consciousness came first. If the events of human history are influenced and even created by these overarching divine patterns, then the Jungian archetypes that dwell deep in our subconscious must be made out of the individual moments of human history. “As above, so below”.
And our future may become more mythic still.Mark Bisonehad a great piece where he explores how our culture’s transhumanist-nihilist experiment may be reverse-engineering orcs and other monsters as we speak. I believe we may see an age where the “dam bursts” so to speak, where we live again in an age full of mythic events, symbolism made real, an age where magic comes again to the forefront. We may indeed live to see horrors, but also beauties, far beyond our comprehension. Our story is not over, and all of history will follow God’s order and the divine patterns until the end of the ages.