The Existential Significance of Mythology
Mythology provides a great wealth of material that is not only profound to think about, but also good to think with. Quoting Joseph Campbell; “Mythologies are allegorical interpretations of living realities, once experienced with such intensity that since continued to shape the human consciousness and their world” (1). Here, myths are not merely fictional stories telling, but uninterrupted existential experiences of the human sphere, passing down from countless generations before us. The totality that myth and reality generate in our psyche offers a rich paradigm for understanding general psychological, cultural and societal truths of the human world.
According Carl G. Jung’s notion …show more content…
We first heard his name when Hesiod relates Iapetus’ line of descendants with Clymene (cite):
“Now Iapetus took to wife the neat-ankled maid Clymene, daughter of Ocean, and went up with her into one bed. And she bare him a stout-hearted son, Atlas: also she bare very glorious Menoetius and clever Prometheus, full of various wiles, and scatter-brained Epimetheus who from the first was a mischief to men who eat bread; for it was he who first took of Zeus the woman, the maiden whom he had formed.”
It’s no incident that Hesiod places this passage dealing with Prometheus’s lineage immediately after his narratives of the Olympian Order: the poet juxtaposes the descent of Iapetus with that of his brother Kronos (citation). What a beautiful symmetry! Both Titans, gods of time, are sons of Uranus - the great dome of heaven which brought forth the celestial movement and measured all-of-time. Kronos is All-Devouring-Time; while Iapetus presides over the mortal life-span who assigned earthly creatures their finite time. The line of Kronos leads upward to the eternal light of celestial heaven, where the Olympians dwell; while Iapetus ' remains below where it established the temporal existence of men. Sons of Iapetus, divine primordial men, fill the lot of the human counter-pole of the divine world; opposites Zeus and the luminous gods of …show more content…
The trick of Prometheus, his thief of fire, consecrates the separation of man and gods through the institution of sacrifice, and the consequence as we learned are the ambiguous character of human existence at set us apart from beast and gods: fire, religion, marriage, agriculture and civilization. This ambiguity embedded in the core of our liminal existence, Moving fluidly across boundaries – above/below, male/female, nature/culture…Prometheus consecration help established the human condition in a liminal, wounded, suspended state and offered a possibility of transcendental and transformation power of that liminal