Modern Mythology

Humans are meaning seeking creatures. It is an undeniable human characteristic. Against all the chaotic and depressing evidence to the contrary, we seek out meaning and are on personal quests to fill our lives with some degree of purpose. It may seem foolish sometimes, but it is an unquestionably human drive. One of the key ways that this impulse is manifested is through mythology.

Mythology isn’t something that happened in the past; some ancient, misaligned quasi-religious belief. Mythology may be based in the past, and many times is based on a historical event or figure, but what defines a functional, relevant myth is that it is something that we are experiencing over and over again in our daily lives. It’s an occurrence that has been liberated from a particular time period and has been brought into our contemporary lives.

Take for example Jesus. Jesus was a historical figure that lived and was killed around 30 c.e. He had devotees and influence over a set number of people who believe that he died and rose from the dead. This is historical fact. But it wasn’t until years after his death that people like St. Paul began to mythologize the figure of Jesus. St. Paul had very little concern for the particulars of Jesus’ teachings or the events of his life—at least, he mentions them very little in his writings. Rather, he was concerned with the mystery of Jesus—especially regarding his death and resurrection. Paul wanted to bring this character out of the past and into the present. He succeeded, and Jesus has become an enduring mythological figure, someone that Christians experience on a daily basis now, in the 21^st century. They experience him through both ritual (studying scripture, going to church, taking the Eurcharist) and through action (leading a life according to Jesus’ teachings). Thus, Jesus has become a spiritual reality. His death and resurrection happened once, and now, it happens over and over again.

In the past, things were no different. Myths allowed our ancestors to relate to their surroundings, and to the forces that they believed sacred. It allowed them to experience divinity. The gods were all around them and they saw their handiwork daily. To them, the gods were inseparable from love, passion, anger, storms, the sea, and the quiet beauty of nature. Myths lifted them out of this mundane existence and gave them the ability to see the world with new eyes. Myths addressed timeless truths, fears, desires, and pointed them in the direction of a life more richly endowed.

Freud and Jung had an interesting take on Roman and Greek mythology. They looked at these gods and likened them to facets of our personalities. They proposed that these characters were archetypes from the collective unconscious, and the tales they existed within embodied universal truths that were universally relatable. Freud and Jung then went one step further and posed the question—could not these gods be the emotions and feelings that we experience on a daily basis? Perhaps Mars, the god of war was simply another way of understanding aggression, and so when the Romans spoke of him, they simply referred to a person being consumed with rage. Perhaps by personifying this emotion, it helped the ancient Greeks understand themselves and how they related to the universe around them, just as the mythology of Jesus helps modern Christians participate in the divine.

Can it not be said that a human is a microcosm of the entire universe, composed of the same basic stuff in different quantities? As above, so below.

James Allen and Willy Wonka

Happy New Year! After a recent reading of James Allen’s short but powerful treatise, “As a Man Thinketh” I watched the 1971 version of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and discovered a striking resemblance. Simply put, the fictional character Willy Wonka (both in Roald Dahl’s original book and as Wonka was personified by Gene Wilder in ‘71) lives by a life philosophy that very much mirrors that of James Allen’s. Take for example the lyrics to Willy Wonka’s first song in the film:

If you want to view paradise
Simply look around and do it
Anything you want, just do it
Want to change the world…
There’s nothing to it.
There is no life I know
That compares with pure imagination
Living there, you’ll be free
If you truly wish to be.

What a marvelous way to view the world. What a magnificent and open minded sentiment—to believe that nothing truly holds us down, nothing holds us back from what we wish to achieve aside from our own minds. This is precisely what James Allen writes about in “As a Man Thinketh.” And so it is.

A woman is nothing more and nothing less than the whole summation of her thoughts. While she cannot always control the events that occupy her mind, she can control the way she reacts to them. A person’s circumstances reveal the true nature of their thoughts and is an immediate manifestation of his or her thoughts.

“Men think that thought can be kept secret,” James Allen writes, “but it can not. Thought quickly crystallizes into habit, which materializes as circumstance... Bestial thoughts crystallize into wanton drunkenness and sensuality…[while] thoughts of courage, self-reliance and decision crystallize into circumstances of success, plenty, and freedom.”

Does this not make perfect sense? We are attracted to that which we dream, and will always move toward that dream until we manifests our destiny. We MUST become our dreams. We must. It is our destiny—just as long as we remember that it is not easy, and that failure is a necessary station on the road to success. We must not be discouraged by disappointment, by cynical thoughts, or by the doubts and fears that invade us at every turn. These types of thoughts must be rigorously excluded for they serve no need whatsoever.

So why then does the world seem so full of doubts and fears? Indeed, at every stop along the tour of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, nay sayers jump at him with cynical thoughts and aspersions, claiming that their own eyes deceived them somehow. It was only through an immense feat of will power that Wonka was able to achieve all that he dreamed. Perhaps the finest manifestion of this idea is the final utterance of the movie.

You know what happened to the boy who got everything he ever wished for, don’t you, Charlie? He lived happily ever after.

So few movies are imbued with such a palpable sense of magic, of possibility, of wonder. So few actually foster that sense that anything could happen if you wish for it badly enough; if you truly believe it can happen and that you are capable of it.

And what a wonderful thing to inspire! I wish there were more messages like that in the world. God knows there are more than enough messages to the contrary, telling us we’re not good enough, we’re not smart enough, we’re not thin enough, or pretty enough, or lucky enough to achieve the things we hold so dearly in our hearts.

"Cherish your visions, cherish your ideals. Cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts. For out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all heavenly environment; of these if you but remain true to them, your world will at last be built."

Could not these very lines be spoken by James Allen or Willy Wonka?