Day: January 5, 2013

Answering the Call

I find that mythology often offers me deep insights into my own nature and human nature in general. To the people of old, the myths provided answers not only about nature and the workings of the universe, but also about themselves and their fellow humans; Almost a kind of accessible psychoanalysis long before the word was ever invented, built up over millennia, crystallised into memorable real-life characters and handed down from generation to generation in the form of stories of love and war, heroism and deceit.  It’s little wonder that pioneering analysts like Carl Jung found mythology to be such a rich source for understanding and mapping the human archetypes.

Most people have heard about the myth of Minotaur, but how many recall how it came into being? I know I’d forgotten. The name literally means “Bull of Minos”. Minos’ mother, Europa, was carried to Crete on a white bull and many years later, when the throne of Crete became vacant, Minos asked the sea god Poseidon to send a white bull out of the ocean as a sign of his divine right to be king. In return, he promised that the bull would be sacrificed immediately in Poseidon’s honour. The god obliged and Minos took the throne, but the bull that he had been sent was so beautiful that he was unable to kill it, so he added it to his herd and sacrificed his best white bull instead. Of course he didn’t know it, but in this action he planted the seeds of his own ruin. Pasipaë, his wife, became infatuated with the bull and instructed the craftsman Daedalus to construct a wooden cow into which she could enter, and which would deceive the bull. Her plan was successful and the offspring was the Minotaur, a monster with a human body and the head of a bull. Although she initially nursed it, it soon grew to be ferocious and could only be nourished with human flesh. Deadalus was again summoned, this time to create a labyrinth in which the monster could be hidden. There it lived, and was fed Athenian youths and maidens every year until eventually the Athenian hero Theseus was able to enter the labyrinth and slay it, its death signifying the fall of Crete and the rise of Athens.

Although one might be inclined to lay the blame on Pasipaë, ultimate responsibility, of course, lay with Minos. In the simple act of refusing to do what he knew he had to, Minos became a tyrant-destroyer and set in motion the path to his own destruction and the fall of Crete. Today we might wonder what all this has to do with the present, but the underlying theme is universal and timeless; We must make peace with our own truth, free it, and honour it, if we are not to become imprisoned by it.

I think that possibly the greatest cancers of our time are suppression and denial, not only at a personal level, but across the breadth of our social structures. I suppose it’s not hard to understand this, given the nature of what’s happening in the world we live in where we’re surrounded by horror as never before, even if that horror is obscured from us by webs of deception. It’s not that we can’t find or see the truth, but that consciously or subconsciously we choose not to, and having made that choice, become slaves to its suppression ourselves. But truth will not easily remain suppressed, so we fill our lives to the brim with often meaningless activity and entertainment; Anything to avoid the terrors of introspection and holding ourselves to account. It’s no surprise that there is little resistance to attacks on press freedom and increased state surveillance, for instance, or little support for threatened organisations like Wikileaks, dedicated to revealing facts without interpretation. We don’t want to know the truth because it’s a grave threat to our happy delusions. We’re just too busy to care, and denial is so much easier. But the timeless lessons from antiquity tell us that we are on a descent into tyranny and that even at a personal level, known truths not honoured will torment and keep us captive.  We become the monster.

To live and express one’s truth can be lonely and terrifying, but it can also be profoundly liberating; As we cross the thresholds within us, it’s as though we shed our skins, allowing new growth to come. Each truth discovered, accepted and freed becomes a break-out, opening a new path; The past is past, we see the present through new eyes, and the future beckons with renewed promise.