TOWARDS A MYTHOLOGY FOR OUR TIMES

I find Celtic and Norse mythologies inspiring. Years ago I read Brian Bates’ speculative Wisdom of the Wyrd, an unpacking of the Elder Edda, and it had me by the whatsits. More recently I was studying the Mabinogion with Gwilym Morus Baird, and there is so much in it, study these texts if you get a chance.

However, I am not so convinced when these texts are used as the foundation for a neo- Norse or Celtic Shamanism. These people lived a long time ago – from our lands, yes, but they are not who we are  anymore, they belong to a foreign culture from which we can learn. Their mythology is not our mythology. Because we have lost our traditions, we have forgotten who we are, and we are vulnerable to imposing something on ourselves, and trying to make it our own, in a way that is not authentic.

Nowadays we are globalised, we have access to stories from across the world – and they too can speak deeply to us. Are the coyote tales from the US, sometimes told by people from a living tradition, less ‘ours’ than tales about the old Irish god Lugh? 

We have to find our way in this thing, and I am a believer in whatever works, and I don’t have much time for the idea of ‘cultural appropriation’: it is narrow-minded and goes against the tide of how humanity has always worked.

What I have in mind particularly in this piece is Creation Myths. They don’t work, they are not real, unless you really believe that the world came about in that way. While at the same time knowing that we haven’t a clue how the world came into being, and never will.

With this in mind, I think it is hard for us moderns to avoid the Scientific creation stories, namely the Big Bang (the Universe) and Evolution (Life). I might even speculate that it is a bit false not to have them in our creation mythologies, because they are deeply embedded in our culture, we have grown up with these stories, and what is our Shamanism if it doesn’t grow out of the actual culture we live in (as opposed to trying to revive something that is long gone)?

The Scientific creation stories are unprecedented, in that they are probably the first mythologies ever not to attribute magical or miraculous origins to Life and to the Universe. And that, in my view, is because we have become fragmented and reduced, rather than because we are the first people to climb out of the superstitious past and see how things ‘really’ are for the first time.

So I think these stories need a bit of re-working in order to take the whole human psyche into account. It would mean they are no longer strictly scientific, but they cannot be, for science is a partial form of knowledge, though it sometimes likes to masquerade as the whole.

I have 3 main points that I think need to be worked in to enable the Scientific Creation Myths to become adequate.

1/ They need to be understood as stories rather than facts. They need to be believed in while not being taken too literally.  This attitude is a consequence of the Shamanic understanding that the world is dreamed into being. For some scientists, the idea of consciousness being primary is a consequence of quantum physics. And it is helpful to have at least one other creation story that contradicts the scientific story, whose truth rests on its imaginative appeal.

2/ The scientific universe does have a miraculous origin, but it is not acknowledged. Science brings us back to an infinitesimal moment after the Big Bang, but not to the Big Bang itself. What the Big Bang amounts to is everything suddenly coming out of nothing. If that is not a miracle, then what is? As Terence McKenna said, the scientific attitude to the Big Bang amounts to ‘Give us one free miracle, and we’ll explain the rest’. The Big Bang was Spirit dreaming the universe into being.

3/ Evolution is a great story, a beautiful story. But it has as its mechanism ‘natural selection’, in which new species and adaptations arise out of a combination of blind chance and brute competition. There is nothing elegant about this mechanism, which simply reflects the Victorian capitalism of the time in which it arose. My argument against it is aesthetic – beauty is truth, truth beauty – and for me that is sufficient. The scientific reasoning that is used to account for the arising of the most complex and beautiful life forms is so dismally reductionist as to be hardly worth arguing with. Like everything arose because it meant the life-form concerned left more offspring. Yeah right, like people started writing poetry because it meant they would leave more offspring. Or are we not part of nature?

Which leads into the other adjustment necessary to Evolution, the implication, often unspoken, that we are somehow above nature, or at the top of the evolutionary tree, as evolution has moved from ‘primitive’ life forms to modern advanced forms, and indeed as humanity has moved from its ‘primitive’ forms to modern. This egotistical attitude has its origins in Christianity, and its ‘Great Chain of Being’, which put man above the animals (and above women!), but at least we were below God. In ditching God, our hubristic creation mythology has reached its apogee. It gives us license to treat the earth as we are doing. The environmental crisis is at bottom a problem of mythology.

Another consideration is that Science divides the universe into living forms and dead matter, so the false question arises of when did life arise? For us Shamans, and for anyone who has sensitivity, this division does not exist. The earth is alive, matter is alive, so life has always been there.

So I think Evolution needs to be seen as an unfoldment of beauty over time, by means that are fundamentally beyond our understanding, the contemplation of which reminds us of the Great Mystery; and when we see its beauty, it does not occur to us to rank one life-form as ‘better’ than another. Nor to divide the universe into living forms and inanimate matter, for all is infused with Spirit.