wordless myth
A myth is a wordless pattern that organizes biological energy. The pattern makes its way from wordless stream-beds up into language, over and over again, but anything that’s set down in language is just the molted skin of the actual myth. Or in the cases of many collections of old religious myths, more like a photograph of a photograph of a copy of a copy of a drawing of a description of the molted skin of the actual myth.
Maybe it’s helpful to explain that babies have myths. Before they can speak, before they can understand words, before they can follow even the simplest cartoon story structure — there’s a wordless organizing pattern in a baby that goes something like: when something goes wrong, scream and cry.
After awhile, this morphs a little further into: when something goes wrong, scream and cry — that will fix the problem.
We might take this wordless pattern and put it into words, we might even put it into a story structure — someone has a problem, cries out to the gods, and the gods take mercy on them — but that doesn’t change the fact that the myth itself is wordless, pre-narrative, pre-conceptual.
The myth is simply
[stomach growling] want milk ;; no milk ;; [move, fuss, grasp] want milk;; no milk ;; [cry, scream, wail] milk.
After we learn words, narrative, concepts, and everything that comes with them, it becomes much easier and much more immediate to turn our complicated myths into language and story — we can even get confused and start to think that the words are the myths themselves. We lose sight of the wordless patterns those words emerge from, the currents that organize our life energy into certain shapes and impulses.
But they’re still there. Myth never goes away.
myths can go stale
Very few of us, as hungry adults, try the strategy of screaming and crying and waiting for someone to bring us a green curry with basmati rice and a diet coke. Even though that myth worked really well for us at an earlier time — and still seems to work for a whole lot of people who just got here — it’s no longer relevant for us.
The same thing happens with other personal myths over a lifetime, and other cultural myths over the course of history. What worked with wordless natural efficiency just one day… stops working the next. It sucks. Our wordless patterning currents have to adjust, update, try out new archetypal patterns, new recombinations and evolutions of previous attempts.
It can be hard to adjust, for people and for cultures. We might just want to keep trying the same old myths, and hope they start working again. Or we might start trying to invent new myths beginning from words and concepts, and jerry-rig them into patterning our lives how we like… ignoring that the road from wordless pattern to spoken concept is not a two-way street.
we’re here to renew the sacred
Myths often go stale — sometimes this is because we pulled them too far away from their wordless origins, turning them into legible conceptual rules and heuristics to follow; sometimes it’s just because we or our circumstances have changed, and the myth’s pattern no longer applies.
Whatever the reason they go stale, myths can always be refreshed. It’s always available to us to drop back into the wordless currents and find what works, find the patterns that call to us, that can dynamically reshape us and the world into a new flow.
We just have to be willing and able to let go of what we think the pattern should be, and make room for what it will be.
For us humans, the instantaneousness of language might mask the more primary aspects of sensing.
James Hillman liked to refer to images as primary. He'd frequently say, "stick to the image."
Perhaps there's a lot more going on pre-verbally that can be lost sight of. Perhaps too, to regain awareness of of preverbal states affords a more embodied, sense-making orientation.