Thou Art That

we listen and look carefully, however, we discover ourselves in the literature, rites, and symbols of others, even though at first they seem distorted and alien to us.

If we speak of “The Emergence of the Goddess,” we refer really to the “The Emergence of the Heroine.” A person is a hero or a heroine when he or she is functioning in the interest of values that are not local to the person but are of some greater force of which the person is a vehicle. The woman becomes a heroine as she becomes a vehicle of a force that brings forth life.

Myth has many functions. The first we might term mystical, in that myth makes a connection between our waking consciousness and the whole mystery of the universe. That is its cosmological function. It allows us to see ourselves in relationship to nature, as when we speak of Father Sky and Mother Earth. There is also a sociological function for myth, in that it supports and validates a certain social and moral order for us. The story of the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai is an example of this. Lastly, myth has a psychological function, in that it offers us a way of passing through, and dealing with, the various stages from birth to death.

Kennedy: You have written of the difficulty of one mythological system’s being able to speak to a world which has become so varied. The agrarian and hunting myths that once spoke to everyone no longer apply quite so easily. But you have also said that, with some reflection, we can understand that the ancient stories of heroes and their adventures are the same as our contemporary search for meaning.