"The mythic truth is the whole truth."
____ P. L. Travers, interview
For some people, the juxtaposition of the words mythic and
truth may take a lot of swallowing. Myth has become so devalued by our society that we fail to see how there could be anything remotely truthful about it. We have substituted news and history for myth in our society, giving them the primacy of factual truth; myth, on the other hand, has taken on connotations of wild and woolly believing, of unsubstantiated rumor or the warped understandings of ancient peoples. Myth is not just about ancient stories of spiritual beings, however; it is the current and ever-living dimension of things that are happening now, to us, to the land, to the world. Myth is the concordance of life's meaning, the story behind the story.
The mythic truth represents nothing less than the totality of a thing: it is all that we can know about something, its essential core and being. Our daily self-deceptions and contradictions cannot hide from the light of mythic truth, which illuminates the truth or error of our lives. The psychological application of myths to the human condition is very interesting and often enlightening; we do indeed share many truths from world myths. But the greatest enlightenment comes when we understand our own mythology, within the context of our own lives.
"What is the core of the myth that you living at present?"
[From: The Celtic Spirit by Caitlin Matthews]
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