The New Mythos

i-ma-go, n. pl. i-ma-goes or i-ma-gi-nes:

1. An insect in its sexually mature, adult stage after metamorphosis.

2. Psychology: An often idealized image of a person, usually a parent, formed in childhood and persisting unconsciously into adulthood.

It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, it no longer effective…Our challenge is to create…a new sense of what it means to be human. -Thomas Berry

Toward the end of his life, Joseph Campbell interrupted his major work, Historical Atlas of World Mythology, to publish The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, with an urgent message that he felt needed to be heard. That book serves as a clarion-call for the discovery and development of a new myth to inform our world. That was 1986. Since then, his call has been taken up by many, and now we find ourselves in a time when the cry from most quarters is for the new story, narrative or mythos, Campbell suggested. Humanity is seeking meaning in the patterns of transformation so profoundly effecting our relationship with others and our planet. Where will this mythos appear and what resources are required to give it form? Who will tell the story?

The old gods are dead or dying and people everywhere are searching, asking: “What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being? The only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future, is one that is talking about the planet and everything on it. -Joseph Campbell