What the Hell is 'Applied Mythology'?

by Honora Foah
Co-president — Mythic Imagination Institute
[Image: "Hedgerow Nestor" © Terri Windling, used by permission]

This October, Mythic Imagination Institute, in conjunction with The New York Open Center, will begin a year-long certificate program in 'Applied Mythology'. An odd appellation, to be sure. Bear with me.

Mythology is a stream that has cultural, psychological, political and spiritual dimensions. These currents weave through each other.

The Certificate Program in Applied Mythology will be an immersion in all of these dimensions of mythology, with an emphasis on experience. That is, the mythology being applied to your body. And life. And work. And community.

One thing about myths themselves is that they are works of art. While collectively made, they use all the tools of artistic creation. Art affects us because it uses fundamental facts of human response as its language.

Why in the world do we like music? Who knows? But music uses pitches/frequencies and rhythms that our bodies not only respond to, but find meaning in.

Patches of color laid down on canvas in a certain rhythm are 'beautiful', 'disturbing', 'exciting'. Again meaningful. Why is that?

We are also pretty well unable to make sense of experience without telling a sequential story about it. This sequencing is how we 'understand' and make sense of what is happening around us. And some of the latest brain/linguistics research suggests that we learn absolutely everything through analogy and metaphor. Myth and art amplify and embellish and polish metaphor to a grand shine until it reflects the world back to us.

All of these things, while physiologically based, are given content by a community or culture. That is, we all are born with the capacity for language, but whether we speak Chinese or Navajo depends on the particular community into which we are born. There is some amazing new work being done about the inherent/genetic aspects of morality and how, like the inherent capacity for language, these universal predilections are shaped into specific cultural mores.

The Applied Mythology Program takes these foundations of human understanding and meaning-making, which throughout most of human existence have been shaped into myths and stories, and immerses us in the experience of that thing. For instance, the third session, 'Listening to the Soul's Song: Rhythm, Music and Cycles', will be a lot of music--listening, singing, learning rhythmic patterns. Many myths are about the great cosmic cycles, many myths are about the rhythms of nature. We will tell myths and stories from many traditions about that, but rhythm will not be an abstraction. For much of the weekend we will engage in rhythmic activity, while we explore the rhythms within mythology.

The idea is to develop a flexible, embodied relation to the mythic realm, the realm of image, archetype and narrative, 'the world' as Michael Meade says, 'behind the world'. Mythology has always been a foundation of human wisdom, knowledge and culture. Mythology is also the voice of an ecology, the voice of Nature and the voice of the nature of a place and a people.

These voices are confused and fractured now in exactly the same way as our ecologies are fractured and tormented. The tools of mythology, which are constituent parts of human response, are now in the service of television, marketing, and religion gone amuck.

'Applied Mythology' is meant to make us smarter and more aware of how our natural responses are being manipulated, but much more importantly, the program is intended to help us become more creative as we develop into, in Jean Houston's words, 'social artists'. We are the authors of our own lives, and the authors of our culture.

Without being ridiculously hubristic about that (a fault well covered in mythology), our ability to contribute to our difficult and wayward times is enhanced by wisdom and skill. Both of these become stronger through the forms and functions of mythology.

The lead teachers for the Applied Mythology sessions will be Michael Meade, Jean Houston, David Spangler, David Gonzales, Lisa Sukolov, Fred Johnson, Ari Berk and me, with other delightfuls, including Michael Karlin popping in and out. It will meet for 3 and half days every other month in NYC, with readings and activities in between.

So many of you over the last few years have asked how to continue and go deeper with this more embodied approach from which Mythic Journeys has been woven. This program is our response, one that is being created with joy and enthusiasm.

Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, the myths of man have flourished; and they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind. It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.
— Joseph Campbell