On Mythographic Reading

Abstract

The term mythography is not used here in the ordinary sense of the encylopaedic study of myths. Rather it indicates a graph or display of the action of mythic capacity, which is an intermediary communicator or isthmus between the cerebral and the emotional; between philosophy and creativity; between the discipline of analysis and the effects of art. A mythograph is a chart of the world of soul, the nearest thing to a chart, because soul, emotion, mood and affective colour are resistant to quantification and yet they record messages to the highest degree significant for our culture. Cultural commentary comes not only from theorists, but from artists and other seismographs of the soul world. Indeed, if a critic and an artist talk to one another, it is only in the world of the mythograph that they can do so. Otherwise their worlds are almost closed one to the other. On the subject of myth, and its closely related ‘hieroglyphic’ mode of thinking, William Irwin Thompson writes:

Myth in the Platonic tradition [is] a hieroglyphic mode of thought whereby the Archetypal forms and the sensations of the physical plane come together in a mode of consciousness in which the ego becomes empty to be filled with the Daimon. Since the root-ideas of myth are at a deep and basic level of consciousness, they are not always expressed in day-to-day casual descriptions, but when a person sinks into an imaginative reverie to write a book, or to synthesize the factual results of research, then he or she is likely to move into a more mythopoeic form of narrative, for even science can be a form of storytelling.¹

Since all forms of spirituality have dried up, modern artists are discovering their true role.

Bram Van Velde

The fall of a leaf and the fall of Lucifer are the same thing … It’s marvelous, isn’t it? The same thing. But the problem is, how to express that.

Beckett