The Cry for Myth (10 page)
Authors: Rollo May
In angry, vehement words, Oedipus refuses the tricky proposal of Creon, the present dictator of Thebes, who tries to get the exiled king to return by capturing Antigone as a hostage. Fortunately Theseus, ruler of Athens, comes out in time to
send his troops to overtake Creon and bring Antigone back again to the grove at Colonus.
The myth does point toward a conclusion emphasized by modern existential psychotherapists, that because of this interplay of conscious and unconscious factors in guilt and the impossibility of legalistic blame, we are forced into an acceptance of the universal human situation.
We then recognize the participation of every one of us in man’s inhumanity to man
. The words to Oedipus from the hero, King Theseus, who exhibits no inner conflict at all, are therefore poignant and eternally important:
… for I
Too was an exile.…
I know I am only a man; 1 have no more
To hope for in the end than you have.
Another theme in this integrative drama is the power of Oedipus to impart
grace
—now that he has suffered through his terrible experiences and come to terms with them. As he himself says to the Athenians who have come out to see him and his daughter in the grove at Colonus:
For I come here as one endowed with grace,
By those who are over Nature; and I bring
Advantage to this race….
Theseus accepts this: “Your presence, as you say, is a great blessing.” This capacity to impart grace is connected with the maturity and other emotional and spiritual qualities which result from the courageous confronting of his Oedipus’ experiences. He cries,
One soul, I think, can often make atonement
For many others, if it be devoted….
But there is also a clear symbolic element to make the point of his grace unmistakable: the oracle has revealed that his body after death will ensure victory to the land and the ruler which
possesses him. The mere
presence
of his body is enough.
*
The last emphasis in the outworking of this myth is
love
. At the end of the drama old Oedipus takes his daughters with him back to a great rock to die. A messenger, who then came back to the group to report the marvelous manner of Oedipus’ death, states that his last words to his daughters were:
… And yet one word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love.
Oedipus does not at all mean love as the absence of aggression or the strong affects of anger. Old Oedipus will love only those he chooses to love. His son, who has betrayed him, asks for mercy and states, “Compassion limits even the power of God,” but Oedipus will have none of it. The love, rather, he bears his daughters, Antigone and Ismene, and the love they have shown him during his exiled, blind wanderings is the kind of love he chooses to bless.
His sharp and violent temper, present at the crossroads where he killed his father years ago and exhibited in his sharp thrusts with Tiresias in
Oedipus Rex
, is still much in evidence in this last drama, unsubdued by suffering or maturity. The fact that Sophocles does not see fit to remove or even soften Oedipus’ aggression and anger—the fact, that is, that the “aggression” and the “angry affects” are not the “flaws” he has old Oedipus get over—all this illustrates our thesis that the aggression involved in killing his father is not the central issue of these myths. Oedipus’ maturity is not a renouncing of passion to come to terms with society, not a learning to live “in accord with the reality requirements of civilization.” It is Oedipus’ reconciliation with himself, with the special people he loves, and with the transcendent meaning of his life.
Finally, the messenger comes back and reports, describing Oedipus’ miraculous death and burial,
But some attendant from the train of Heaven
Came for him; or else the underworld
Opened in love the unlit door of earth.
For he was taken without lamentation,
Illness or suffering; indeed his end
Was wonderful if mortal’s ever was.
This touching and beautiful death of a great character is magnificent as Sophocles presents it dramatically. As
Oedipus Rex
is the myth of the “unconscious,” the struggle to confront the reality of the dark, destructive forces in man,
Oedipus in Colonus
is the myth of consciousness, the aspect of the myth which is concerned with the search for meaning and reconciliation. Both together comprise the myth of human beings confronting their own reality.
From our concern with these dramas of Oedipus, we can see the healing power of myths. First, the myth brings into awareness the repressed, unconscious, archaic urges, longings, dreads, and other psychic content. This is the
regressive
function of myths. But also, the myth reveals
new
goals,
new
ethical insights and possibilities. Myths are a breaking through of greater meaning which was not present before. The myth in this respect is the way of working out the problem on a higher level of integration. This is the
progressive
function of myths. The tendency has been almost universal in classical psychoanalysis to reduce the latter to the former, and to treat myths as regressive phenomena, which are then “projected” into ethical and other forms of meaning in the outside world. The upshot of this is that the integrative side of myths is lost. This is shown in the great emphasis on
Oedipus Tyrannus
in psychoanalytic circles while
Oedipus in Colonus
is forgotten.
But
myths are means of discovery
. They are a progressive revealing of structure in our relation to nature and to our own existence. Myths are
educative
—“e-ducatio.” By drawing out inner reality they enable the person to experience greater reality in the outside world.
We now emphasize the side that is generally overlooked,
that these myths discover for us a new reality as well
. They are roads to universals beyond one’s concrete experience. It is only on the basis of such a faith that the individual can genuinely accept and overcome earlier infantile deprivations without continuing to harbor resentment all through one’s life. In this sense myth helps us accept our past, and we then find it opens before us our future.
There are infinite subtleties in this “casting out of remorse.” Every individual, certainly every patient, needs to make the journey in his and her own unique way. An accompanying process all along the way will be the transforming of one’s neurotic guilt into normal, existential guilt. And both forms of anxiety can be used constructively as a broadening of consciousness and sensitivity. This journey is made through understanding and confronting myths which have not only an archaic, regressive side but an integrative, normative, and progressive aspect as well.
SIX
The discovery of America galvanized and inebriated the Western world. It did more than anything else—even Copernicus and Galileo—to overturn the world view of the Middle Ages. It revolutionized the thought of Western man. He was now convinced that human society was getting off to
an entirely new start
Thomas Merton
W
E FIRST ARE SURPRISED
to note the curious phenomenon that
myths precede discovery
. Medieval Europe did not “want” a new world in the centuries before Columbus set forth in his three tiny ships in 1492. The Vikings under Leif Ericson had come to America in the eleventh century, and the Irish had made several trips to North America before them. But these discoveries were largely ignored. Medieval people were concerned with their own inner world and with heaven, the world above, not a new world like their present one. It took an
inner
change in Europe before the people could let themselves see and experience a new world. A new mythic world had first to be born; it was then time to discover a new outer world as well. We note that people’s myth is decisive, rather than bare
historical fact, in what they let themselves see and not see. It is not by its history that the mythology of a nation is determined, but, conversely, its history is determined by its mythology.
*
This reminds one of Virgil’s saying, “We make our destiny by our choice of the gods.”
To be able to discover and populate the New World required the Renaissance, with its great surge of humanistic change in Europe
. The new burst of love for nature which is shown in Italian art, for example, supplanted the stiff mosaics of the Middle Ages. There was a new confidence in human possibilities, a new sense of adventure, a challenge on all sides to push beyond previous boundaries of geography and science. These new myths set the stage for Columbus to make his voyage. As is often the case,
myth leads to fact rather than the reverse
. The myth leads people to give their attention to one possibility rather than another, and hence to change the direction of their intentions and their dreams. Columbus proposed his expedition at the right time—the
Kairos
†
—when people were ready to accept the discovery of the new world.
In people’s minds this discovery of America was due to God’s favor. It was part of His plan for a fresh beginning for mankind, in an age when almost everything was starting anew. The New World myth did not ignore older myths. The myths which filled the minds and souls of the people on the
Mayflower
were myths of Paradise, the Garden of Eden, the Golden Age. The people transformed these ancient myths into what was to become the great myth of America.
**
Since myths are beyond time, they could all be formed into one glorious narrative. Stephen Vincent Benet wrote in 1943, in “Western Star,” that the myth was filled:
With something of the wonder and the awe
Those mutinous sailors saw …
Sleepy and cursing, damning drink and bread,
To see before them there,...
But thin with distance, thin but dead ahead,
The line of unimaginable coasts.
*
In his keen insights into the influence of the frontier on American society, Frederick Jackson Turner set the important myth for understanding the frontier. He saw the significance of what people were getting away
from
as well as what they were getting
to
. The free land on the frontier, drawing people away from Europe, enabled Americans to build a new frontier and a new culture, partially dependent upon Europe but with its own special characteristics. The frontier was thus the crucial myth; its special characteristics became distinctively American.
Turner pointed out that the restless energy in our new settlements and cities was combined with the individualism, the self-reliance, “the bounteousness and exhuberance which comes with freedom.”
†
The new country had distinctive characteristics which Turner believed were largely due to our leaving Europe behind and striking out for ourselves. He emphasized the impact of the wilderness on this transplanted existence. Although his penetrating analysis did not come until 1890, he described a new western spirit and a new way of thinking about American history. Within the United States, this viewpoint lifted local history from the confines of an tiquarianism into
mythic meaning
.
America was to become for the West a myth of the rebirth of humanity, without the sin or evil or poverty or injustice or
persecution which had characterized the Old World. Our Statue of Liberty is emblazoned with an inscription, erected in the nineteenth century but expressive of these earlier centuries as well,
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses
yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming
shore,
Send these, the homeless,
tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside
the golden door.
This myth of the New World has continued down to the present. In his orations during World War II, Churchill proclaimed that “England will hold on until the New World comes to the rescue of the Old.”
