Sneak Peek: Immanence of Myth

A peek under the hood as I dive into my first full-length non-fiction work. (The book will be co-authored with Rowan Tepper, M.A. though the present first drafts on Key64 were written by myself.)

Though it's explained in this passage, this will be an exploration of myth in its function as intermediary between human and world (represented as language, music, sculpture, or any other form of expression), and how the myth-making process underlies all of the beliefs that we hold about the world, no matter how logically consistent they are. Though it is my general preference to simply know this, and explore the creation of myths in different media, I've been feeling lately that an expression of those underpinnings may be insightful, even useful for others.

Further discussion of myth and culture would be useless or even misleading without an exploration of the various elements that build up this "mythic tapestry," through a philosophical rather than historical exploration of these elements. It is worth noting that many works already exist which provide a systematic philosophical analysis of the ideological history and function of myth.1 (F.N. 1 Included prominently in this list are Cassirer's The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, Joseph Campbell's Masks of God I-IV, Theodore Adorno and Max Herkheimers Dialectic of Enlightenment, Eliade's many works especially Myth and Reality and Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. This is not to say that the postulates or conclusions provided in these works are congruent with one another, or with our own thesis; nevertheless all of them contributed to bringing myth out of the realm of fanciful poetic naturalism.) Though in various ways we are indebted to these works, our ultimate mission is not to explore what myth has been, except inasmuch as that can shed light on what its function is at present, nor is it to merely further the thesis of these works. Rather, it is our aim to continue a movement already well underway, namely, the re-legitimization of myth and myth-making as one of the principle, if not the principle, form of human representation.

We are nowhere with this word "myth" until we can determine what its personal and cultural function is, in total, and where the points overlap between these various elements. In other words, we need to build a map of a cognitive terrain that is not necessarily a “where” or a “when,” and so the rest of this work is dedicated towards exploring what one might call the ideological topology of myth.

Read first draft excerpts on Key64.net.