On metanarratives – or, how we transform our cultural mythology

Dear friends

Back around 2010, and especially with the rise of new movements like The Dark Mountain Project, there was a vast amount of talk here in the UK (and undoubtedly elsewhere) about all the ways in which ‘the old story isn’t working’ – and how, consequently, ‘we need to write a new one’.

I wholeheartedly agreed with the former statement, but as someone who was an expert in narrative theory, both personal and cultural; and as a qualified mythologist and psychologist who’d worked with myth, fairy tales, personal mythmaking and other forms of narrative for a very long time, including in private practice; and as someone who’d also taught narrative processes and narrative psychology to members of the mental health profession as well as a handful of senior corporate types – I tried gently to explain to a couple of people leading the group on whose fringes I lurked that yes, a new and better replacement cultural story would indeed be lovely, but you couldn’t just sit around the firepit at a festival and make one up. That wasn’t how it worked, I explained, and outlined how the concept of cultural myths and ‘metanarratives’ did actually work, and offered to share ideas that were a bit more realistic for moving forward on all that restorying malarkey they were so keen on. This kind offer of help and expert advice, dear reader, seems rather to have pissed off the young men who ran said movement, and for this and for having the audacity as an older woman both to have qualifications and to know what I was talking about – I was effectively sidelined. So it goes. (So it ever went!)

Happily, because this was the nature of my work and had been for a very long time, I of course carried on teaching and writing about these ideas anyway, and they still come up today in every book I produce. But a few days ago, clearing out an old folder on my computer, I came across the text of an interview I’d given way back in 2012 to Jeppe Graugaard, who I’d met at the 2011 Dark Mountain Festival – a young man who was intrigued, rather than pissed off as a matter of principle – and it reminded me that I haven’t much written about the processes of cultural restorying on this Substack. It’s a big subject, but I wanted to offer up part of that interview here (lightly edited in a couple of places) and then to add a few updated thoughts on the same subject from my 2018 book, The Enchanted Life.

Sharon

The Assembly of the Gods, Delphi

The interview (2012)

Q: On your blog ‘Re-enchanting the Earth’ [NB: this was a very early precursor to this Substack; it no longer exists], you write about the relation between myth, narrative and sense of place beginning from the insight that it is in stories we come to make sense of the world. My research on the Dark Mountain Project takes a similar starting point, so it is really interesting for me to follow your writing about this. You are also editor of the magazine EarthLines, which is explicitly about building a culture of nature and explores ways of being in the world that acknowledges that culture isn’t separate from nature. [Another NB: I founded and then edited EarthLines magazine from 2012 to 2017. It was described by Jay Griffiths as ‘a deeply intelligent publication’, by George Monbiot as ‘a rare combination and much needed’, and by Robert Macfarlane as ‘a real point of convergence for many thought-tributaries and philosophical paths’.] What do you see as the foundational myths or narrative behind the metaphor of ‘culture as nature’ and where do you look for stories about culture as nature?

SB: The concept of the culture of nature, to me, is about seeing ourselves as just one part of the planetary whole, and the rest of the natural world, while at the same time recognising what is unique about humanity: about our own species’ culture, or what Robert Bringhurst called ‘the thin but sometimes lovely web of answers we keep spinning for ourselves’. It means celebrating both our connectedness (or ‘kindredness’, as Richard Mabey once described it) AND, equally importantly, our otherness. Stories of course are a crucial part of that culture, and they’re an aspect of the culture that, if used correctly, can bring us back to an understanding of nature and our part in it. Stories are like a bridge between those two worlds that two thousand years of Western philosophy and theology have insisted on separating. Stories can help us reconnect.

There are many, many myths and stories that portray the unity of culture and nature. Many people will automatically gravitate to indigenous mythologies, and it’s easy to see why: they still use their stories in meaningful ways. ‘I will tell you something about stories,’ the Laguna storyteller Leslie Silko says in her book Ceremony: ‘They aren’t just entertainment/ Don’t be fooled/ They are all we have, you see/ All we have to fight off/ Illness and death. You don’t have anything/ If you don’t have the stories.’ For Native Americans like Silko, a story is an intricate part of a web that cradles all the past, present and future events, ceremonies, beliefs and traditions of their culture. In the centre of this web is the land. Each story is part of another story which is linked to yet another one, and all these stories are connected back to the very origin of creation. That’s very powerful stuff!

The problem for us with indigenous mythologies is that those that are often most loved – Native American mythologies, Australian Aboriginal mythologies, for example – aren’t from our own European culture. And if you want stories to have traction – by which I mean if you want them to really dig deep inside a person (or a group) and be able to create change – they need to be built on images and symbols that are relevant to a culture, and that bring a sense of cultural continuity. And many of our old Western fairy tales and mythologies do indeed demonstrate that unity and continuity.

I think part of the problem is that we don’t always see our own stories in the same way as we see stories from other places. People are used to hearing our own fairy stories, myths and legends presented simply as stories, as entertainment for kids; we don’t use them any more in the way that indigenous cultures use stories, for teaching and for healing. And so people tend not to think of them in the same way as they would stories about Grandmother Spider or Coyote. But picking up on Coyote: if you take Irish fairy tales just as one example, the leprechaun is a classic Trickster character! – and yet he has been so diminished as a cultural icon by so much shallow Disneyesque characterisation and jokey emerald ‘bling’ that we forget where that character came from, and what he had to teach. There are many similar examples: the unity of human and animal worlds in myths and stories that have shapeshifting as a motif, for example. My ever-favourite Scottish selkie tale springs to mind: the loss of one’s skin representing the loss of a connected self, for example. The folk and fairy-tale culture of most European countries – certainly the Celtic fringes – show ‘fairies’ as nature spirits, and offer us stories about the ways in which humans approach the natural world and interact with it that recognises a much more deeply interwoven relationship than we have today. The Grail legends are perfect metaphors for connection and disconnection with the natural world and the Otherworld that’s entangled with it.

So you don’t have to look very far. The problem is that we’ve forgotten how to approach such stories: both with reverence, and with understanding of their various contexts. The good thing is that there are people out there who’ve made a lifetime’s study of those stories and their symbols and images who can teach us and remind us of what we stand to lose if we let them degrade any further.

Q: One of the points you make in your writing is that ‘stories work from the bottom up’. That we arrive at a larger, coherent metanarrative through our ‘smaller’ stories. A metanarrative isn’t simply something we can make up, or decide on, that then will make sense of everything for us. Working with stories and narratives as a process of change requires more than simply choosing a story of the world that we like. What do you see as the dangers of what you call ‘magical thinking’ around narrative: the idea that all we need to do is to invent a new or better story and then our problems will be overcome?

SB: What I fear is very simple: a shorting out of the batteries. I fear that people – for a bunch of very good reasons, and armed with both enthusiasm and talent – will waste their time and energy trying to create something which can’t be created. That they’ll go running off down paths that ultimately don’t lead anywhere, and we don’t have enough talented people who understand the nature of the problem we’re facing that we can afford to lose a bunch down some dark alley. I also fear above all a killing of the magic. Because that’s what this process is, of changing the story that a person or a group or an entire civilisation tells about itself. A curious mixture of magic and alchemy is required to create a story – with all its depths of symbols and its archetypal imagery – that buries its way into a person’s heart, and then the heart of a community, and then the heart of a whole culture. And magic and alchemy have to be learned. And given time to work. You can’t short-circuit the process. We’re too quick these days to want to fix things. But some things can’t be rushed. They have to grow. Slowly. And deeply.

I remember when I first wrote about this issue of how metanarratives are created on my ‘Re-enchanting the Earth’ website. I had an outraged email from a prominent writer and activist who said to me, ‘You can’t say that it doesn’t work like that. Who has the right to tell other people how stories should be understood?’ And I found that curious! – because of course there are people who spend their professional lives researching stories, and the ways in which myths and metanarratives develop, and working with them in various ways – just as I have worked with and studied them. And it’s a great pity that this is all too poorly understood and that there is sometimes resistance to it, because there is treasure to be found in that work. There’s a tendency to dismiss academic work on stories and narratives as dry, scientific, missing the point – but that’s far from the truth. Wonderful academics – who are also poets, storytellers themselves – like Robert Bringhurst and Sean Kane are writing about how cultural narratives are formed. Sean Kane in particular has written about this process:

‘A new story [may be] released into the social repertoire … But the release cannot be sudden … The story has to be told and retold until it passes the test of narrative art, and then the further test of the society’s repertoire of acceptable mythological experience. The story has to conform to the patterns of narrative pleasure and the patterns of being in a society. Only then is the society ready to move mythically in the direction indicated by the story. Even then, the society shifts its overall mythological memory subtly, not in a way that disrupts its hierarchy of narrative experience.’ (From The Wisdom of the Mythtellers.)

Often, the fact that there is even such a thing as ‘narrative art’ is ignored; often it’s assumed that creating a culture’s ‘myths to live by’ is really no different from sitting down at a desk and dreaming up a short story. As a culture we have a tendency to want the quick fix. We want to believe that we can change the world, and change it right now! But we don’t always want to put the work in, the long and necessary and very disciplined work, to do it in a way that will stick. That’s the danger, to me. I worry that people, all excited by the transformative power of storytelling, won’t take the time to understand how those superbly transformative stories develop.

The kinds of stories we’re talking about are filled with archetypal images and motifs that have been growing for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. The idea that you can sit down in a workshop one day and write a new story that has that kind of transformative power just doesn’t make any sense. Which doesn’t at all mean that people should stop trying, or stop writing stories! Stories are life. But we need to approach the process with reverence. As an apprenticeship. Stories are magical. They have to be seduced, cajoled. Stories are the basic constituents of the world – at least, of the way we perceive the world and our place in it. They deserve to be treated with respect.

And at the other end of the scale of argument … it’s really not disputable that stories come first and metanarratives come later, because it’s very embodied precisely in the definition of metanarrative – it’s what the word means. A metanarrative is a story, an abstract idea, that’s thought to be a comprehensive explanation or reflection of a culture’s accumulated experience or knowledge. The prefix meta- means ‘beyond’ (in the sense of ‘sitting above’), and narrative is of course a story constructed in a sequential fashion. Therefore, a metanarrative is a story about stories, encompassing and explaining other ‘little stories’ within conceptual models that bring those stories together into a whole. In postmodern philosophy, a metanarrative is a story that both unifies a worldview and justifies a culture’s power structures. Examples of these stories are nationalisms, religions and science, to name just a few. Materialism as a worldview is a metanarrative. Metanarratives aren’t usually told outright, but they’re reinforced by other more specific narratives told within the culture.

Q: As an alternative to trying to construct ‘top-down’ metanarratives, you talk about letting a multiplicity of narratives grow into a coherent whole. I would like to quote you one this, because I find this vision very compelling. You talk of this as:

A web of myths and stories that, by being so deeply interrelated, will lead automatically and organically to that new metanarrative that everyone wants so badly, but that can never possibly derive from the top down, like some new unelected political regime.

I wonder if you could say more about how you see this process of how smaller stories grow into a larger, coherent narrative?

SB: I’m not sure it can be very simply defined. But to me it’s about both inspiration and a process of accumulation. Let’s take as an example the current metanarrative that most people in Western countries subscribe to: it began with people exploring ideas which seemed to them to offer a superior vision of the world and of human nature compared to the story that had been told before. One of human superiority to ‘nature’, and of the superiority of the spiritual world rather than the physical earthly world. And to give just one example, you can trace historically the detailed structure of Greek mythology and the role of the Greek gods and goddesses, and see it change as Greek thinking began to shift and to move in those directions.

Then, putting it very simplistically, other stories piled in and combined with the Greek stories (such as Christian and other monotheistic stories), and that whole dualistic narrative grew over time, became entrenched in people’s thinking, informed their language, their assumptions … And what happened during this process is that these stories informed and were informed by events and processes in the world, so for example the stories of superiority and growth and wealth were reinforced by developments in medicine and civic infrastructure and so on … there’s a feedback loop. And that narrative turned so easily then to a narrative of human domination over nature, a story of progress, of the superiority of rationality and technology, of growth, growth, growth …

But that metanarrative took a long, long time to develop, and along the way it changed and grew, and new stories were told that fed into it and embedded it so deeply in the ways in which people were educated that it came to seem so obviously ‘true’ that it couldn’t be challenged. People didn’t even recognise it as a guiding story any more: it was just how the world was.

Nevertheless, it was challenged. It was challenged all the way, in one form or another. It was challenged by various cultural movements, like the Romantics; by other writers and poets like William Blake – even by some scientists. By people who didn’t want to live in a world that worked like that. And over time, as the flaws in that metanarrative began to become more and more apparent and dissonant with events in the ‘real world’ – let’s take industrial pollution, overpopulation, climate change just as a handful of examples – those challenges to the story became more and more frequent.

Meanwhile, more and more people began to live alternative stories – and also to communicate those alternative stories more actively. Out of this lived experience, what we can do is begin to tell stories of reconnection with the natural world. Not regressive stories that hark back to a past that can’t come again, but stories that reflect where we are now and how we got here, and propose a better way forward. We tell these stories to entice people to want that way forward. To show them how hollow life is now, and offer up a range of alternative ways of being and living. We tell these stories to make them want to change their lives. And in this way – through the lived experience out of which these new individual stories emerge – little by little the metanarrative changes. So that over time the dualistic narrative of separation and endless growth might be displaced by a new story – again, not a story of reversion to some mythical Golden-Age past, but a story that both consolidates and moves beyond everything that we now know. That’s how a new story grows. Slowly. Assisted by events in the real world and by new ways of living which reinforce it.

And we can see it happening already: the chipping away at the old metanarrative, the different stories that some of us are already choosing to live by. It’s happening now, that transformation in the metanarrative, and we’re a part of it. And it’s not just individuals: group after group is springing up around the world – the non-defeatists who speak positively for change, for action, for getting out there and doing it differently. Groups like Transition Towns, like the Occupy movement, like Peaceful Resistance … gosh, so very many, and growing all the time. It’s happening already.

And this is my point: we can’t change the metanarrative by sitting around trying to think up new stories. We do it by not only perceiving in new ways, but living in new ways. By being the subjects for those new stories. More than that – by being the stories. We ARE the stories. That’s how it’s always been. It’s part of the dualism that we’ve forgotten it, that we see the transformative myths and stories as something separate from us, that we can create – simply conjure up. It makes me want to weep. It isn’t like that at all. If we approach it in that way, we’re still in the old paradigm. We’re still not understanding how stories work.

Q: I know you have worked as a narrative psychologist for a number of years. You describe the process of transformation in individuals as a process of personal mythmaking which shifts the way they view themselves, their place in the world, and the story they’re living out. In what ways have you found in your work as a psychologist that storytelling can aid this shift and how do you see the role of stories in wider social change?

SB: Of all the techniques I used in my practice – and they were all based in some way on creative imagination – creative hypnotherapy, for example – narrative psychology was far and away the most powerful. Because the right stories hold the power to transform. Stories help us to make sense of things: they are ways of organising information and constructing meaning. Again, you have to be careful, because it’s entirely possible to concoct an inappropriate narrative about your life: one in which you’re a victim and it’s all someone else’s fault, or one in which you’re the only person who knows all the answers. That’s where the psychologist comes in – to help construct a realistic and appropriate story! But you can break down the different components of a story into critical parts: characters and their motivations, plotlines and subplots. You can use different voices to tell the story; you can switch point of view; you can change settings … you can use images to stand for things that you can’t or don’t want to name, for traumas, for things lost or things to be gained … Knowing how to deconstruct the stories people tell about themselves into those component parts and reconstruct them into something beautiful that not only accurately reflects the past but offers a way forward for the future, and a set of values and images to light the way, is a wonderfully magical process.

The power of stories in wider social change is more complicated, but at the most basic level, it is clear that if you can change individuals, a few at a time, social shifts will occur. Once you’ve figured out what your own story is, then you can start to take it out into your own community. And then, once you have a bunch of different individuals, groups, communities, each living a narrative that’s different from the old one that was mandated by the culture – then some time, somewhere, a new metanarrative will be born. Organically. There’s nothing especially original about this thought, of course: it’s classic bottom-up, grass-roots thinking. Which is why I’m always so surprised to find resistance to it.

Zeus, Piazza Navona, Rome

What follows is an extract on cultural mythology from The Enchanted Life (2018).

The myths we live by

Do the stories live in us, or do we live in the stories? Do we tell the stories, or do the stories tell us? And if they’re telling us, then what are they telling us to be? We’d be wise to think a while about that one, because stories shape the way that we see the world, and our place in it. They shape the way we view the nature of our civilisation – why it exists in the first place, and what we should do with it now.

We’ve always told stories which explain how things came to be. Since the dawn of human history, groups and communities of humans around the world have sat around campfires, or gathered inside royal halls and humble huts, to tell stories to each other about how – and why – the world is. This particular kind of story is called a myth. Myths tend to deal with weighty matters: gods, heroes, the creation of the universe, the purpose and meaning of life; they provide the foundational narratives for entire civilisations, incorporating and organising their beliefs and morals. Which makes it all the more curious that the word ‘myth’ is often used to convey something quite different today: a belief or idea which is false.

All cultures, all civilisations – all tribes and groups of human beings – have their unique guiding mythology, whether or not it is overtly recognised as such. And these stories which civilisations tell about themselves are the stories which determine the overall shape of individual and communal lives. They determine our world views: the assumptions we hold about why things are the way they are, about how things work, about what is valuable and about what is possible. And in turn, these assumptions underlie the choices we make, large and small, every day of our lives.

It’s impossible to overstate how profoundly religious stories in particular have changed the world. Wars have been fought because of them, and people put to death because of them. Moral codes and systems of justice have been founded on them. Religious stories are the ultimate example of the ways in which stories can define our existence: if we are believers (and sometimes even if we are not), then based on what happens in them, and based on what their characters say and do, we make our most significant decisions about how to live and die.

There are, of course, other guiding mythologies at work here in the West, as well as religious ideologies; here are a couple of those which seem to me to define the nature of our civilisation, and the nature of the problems we face. Step back for a while, and think about what those cultural mythologies are telling us. How do they actually impact our daily lives?

The myth of more

The myth of more is a myth of progress. Behind it is a belief in the idea of the triumphant journey of an all-conquering mankind towards deathless perfection, as we leave our animal natures behind and launch ourselves on a one-way, linear trajectory towards a perceived mastery of the planet – if not, preferably, of the entire universe. This, we are told, is progress, and progress means more of everything. We must always be striving for more in everything that we do and are: more territory for humans, even to the stars and back; an ever-increasing lifespan; we must constantly be striving for physical perfection and, ideally, for eternal youth. Progress means never sitting still, never counting our blessings – always wanting more, more, more. In order to be fully human, we must want to progress; it’s one of our defining characteristics. Otherwise, we’re no different from animals.

The myth of more generates the fundamental law which pervades the lives of all of us who live in capitalist countries, and which is a given in all of our societal stories: we must always produce more. More, more, more. And we must buy more of the stuff that is produced, because a) that will make us happy and respected individuals, and b) if we don’t, ‘the economy’ will collapse. And the economy must always grow (though it’s interesting to reflect on the fact that no one ever gives us a really good, slam-dunk reason why). In this (dystopian) story inside which we’re trapped, all the characters are called consumers, and their value to the world they live in is judged by the level of their consumption. We are, quite literally, what we buy.

If that description seems a bit excessive it’s probably because, as British journalist and activist George Monbiot wrote back in 2012, pathological consumption has become so normalised that we scarcely notice it. While researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard and her co-writers discovered that, in the past three decades alone, one-third of the planet’s natural resources have been consumed – but of the goods which flow through our still-expanding consumer economy, only 1 per cent remain in use six months after sale. As Monbiot suggests, ‘So effectively have governments, the media and advertisers associated consumption with prosperity and happiness that to say [otherwise] is to expose yourself to opprobrium and ridicule.’ And yet, a growing body of psychological research suggests that materialism is associated with anxiety, depression and broken relationships.

But what if we stepped out of that cultural narrative for a moment, and asked ourselves whether this is the story we really want to be in? What if, instead, we chose a different economic model to live by – one which didn’t depend on despoliation of the planet for its success? What if, rather than slavishly following the dictates of our global leaders, we laughed at the ads which try to tell us that we need a new smartphone every year, or that we should assess our self-worth by the size of our car? What if we stopped buying the cheap shirts made by children in Bangladeshi sweat-shops, or picking up from the supermarket shelves the carefully packaged, factory-farmed pork from pigs who have never seen outside in their lives? What if we found different myths to live by, and what if those myths taught us to truly value what we have, rather than always striving for more? What if they taught us to value enchantment rather than exploitation?

We can be heroes, just for a day

The intense competitiveness of the capitalist model which dominates Western societies is likely to be responsible for the equally intense sense of personal ambition which festers inside so many of us, and the constant striving for individual recognition which we’re taught to see as normal. Parents push their children to be the best at everything – at sports, at academic subjects, at the musical instrument they so badly want them to play – pressing them so hard that levels of anxiety, stress, anger and emotional withdrawal are sky-rocketing among children who feel a constant pressure to perform.

This striving to be the best or the greatest is reflected in our cultural worship of the hero: the individual who rises above all others. The most popular books and movies today are profoundly heroic in nature. Look at the storylines of the most successful Hollywood movies: all too often, they can be reduced to the formula: swashbuckling, swaggering hero – male or (increasingly) female – conquers all and ensures that American values prevail. These are the characters that we’re supposed to look up to, and aspire to emulate – and among the most popular movie heroes of the past few decades are characters like gun-toting Dirty Harry, ex-soldier Rambo, and fist-flourishing Rocky Balboa. And when common-or-garden heroes aren’t enough for us (more, more, more) then there are always the superheroes to help us out: we don’t seem set to lose our taste for Batman, Spider-Man and Captain America (or even, improbably, Ant-Man) in a hurry. Vampires, of course, are the new superhero, and teenagers all over the world are falling for them like flies.

Several decades ago, American mythologist Joseph Campbell developed his well-known outline of the ‘Hero’s Journey’. In his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell suggested that the world’s most important mythological stories share a common framework: they all involve a hero – who happens to be a person of exceptional gifts, which may or may not be recognised by his society. He, or someone he loves, or the world in which he lives, suffers from a symbolic deficiency (in a fairy tale, for example, it might be a missing ring of power, or a bucket of water from the well at the world’s end). He must then set out on a great adventure to find the missing treasure and bring it back to the world he left.

The notion of the Hero’s Journey is linear, all-conquering and world-saving. It’s derived from the intensely individualistic, human-centric cultural mythology that has us firmly in its grip. What, then, would a post-Heroic journey look like?

…

Most of us, of course, don’t think of ideas like progress or heroism as ‘guiding mythologies’ for our civilisation; we just take it for granted that that’s how the world is. The truth is, we have no idea how much we’ve been conditioned. Our social, economic and political institutions – as well as our own daily lives – are so embedded in this story that it’s hard for us to imagine there is anything outside it. That’s how dominant cultural narratives (the ones which tell us how we must live) gain their power over us.

It’s also interesting to ask who these people are who define and refine these stories for us, and you don’t have to think for very long before realising that they’re the people with ‘authority’; the people who always seem to have their voices heard. They’re scientists, politicians, interest-group lobbyists, economists, the heads of major corporations and their spokespeople, and members of the media . . . all these groups, and more, determine both the shape and the content of the dominant narrative which is presented to us. Just as important, they also determine the narratives which are not presented to us. Equally fascinating is that they do not present their offerings as stories at all – and certainly never as the foundational myths of our culture – but as definitive and unassailable explanations of how the world simply is.

But the way the world is, according to these stories, doesn’t seem particularly well-designed for anyone other than the wealthiest and most powerful segments of the human population. It’s not designed for the starving human masses in the desert countries, and it’s not designed for the vanishing non-human species which comprise the Sixth Mass Extinction of life on this planet. There is no doubt, as theologian and cultural historian Thomas Berry argued several decades ago in his essay ‘The New Story’, that humanity needs a new story to live by, and a new paradigm for what it means to be human. Berry proposed that such a story should incorporate an ‘integral vision’ in which ‘[h]uman persons bear the universe in their being as the universe bears them in its being.’ In other words: one in which we see ourselves as an intrinsic part of the world around us, not as separate.

But there’s the interesting thing: what if, searching for new stories to live by, we actually looked back at those old stories again – the fairy tales we loved as children, and the myths which entrance us still as adults? What if we could find some clues there? – in the stories which tell us that we are part of this living, breathing world around us; the stories which taught us and inspired us for millennia – the stories which, today, are largely dismissed as primitive, and relegated to the domain of children. Like the old Irish tale of the great cow of plenty, the Glas Ghaibhleann (pronounced ‘Gavlen’). She was a great cow whose milk flow was so abundant that she could feed multitudes, and she travelled the land, giving her creamy milk to anyone who needed it, filling whatever vessel they carried, no matter how large or how small. But when a wicked person tried to take more than her share by placing a sieve under the cow – which enabled her to fill many buckets placed underneath the sieve, because of course the sieve never seemed to be full – the magical cow disappeared forever from the earth, offended by such greed. Or like the rich body of old European stories about the quest for the Grail, in which the question the adventuring knight must ask in order to gain the Grail, heal the wound of the Fisher King, and so heal the Wasteland, is a simple, pointed, empathic, ‘What ails thee?’

These are the stories which offer us a more enriching set of values to live by. They show us that the greatest treasure of all is a kind heart; the most powerful magic always is made from an act of love; and no life-saving or world-changing goal can ever be achieved without the help of a community of others – human and non-human alike. These are the stories which remind us that, tucked up in the rambling, roundabout lines between once upon a time and happily ever after, lie all the secrets for a meaningful, sustainable life.

The mythical misfits

The stories we tell about ourselves – our personal myths – are intimately related to these collective myths; our own individual stories develop and are played out inside the wider stories of our time. Jungian analyst D. Stephenson Bond, in his book Living Myth, used the phrase ‘falling out of myth’ to describe what happens to us when we can’t live by the dominant myth of our culture any more – when the ways of life that previous generations pursued, when the values they espoused and beliefs they held, become intolerable to us. A cultural myth contains the collective visions, hopes and fears of all the individuals who are born into that culture. It is alive and thriving when it offers up a way of life which inspires us, nourishes us and satisfies our need for meaning. But when the heart bleeds out of our cultural myth and it grows arid and lifeless, we in turn become alienated and rootless. Our lives are lived outside of any meaningful context; they become in a sense ‘unstoried’. In his book The Cry for Myth, psychoanalyst Rollo May wrote about the ways in which the loss of myth in contemporary life has led to a sense of rootlessness, restlessness and loneliness. ‘The person without myth,’ he said, ‘is a person without a home . . . The loneliness of mythlessness is the deepest and least assuagable of all. Unrelated to the past, unconnected with the future, we hang as if in mid-air.’Because myth is many things, but above all myth is meaning. If we fall out of myth, we fall out of meaning.

In every generation there are people who fall out of the dominant cultural myth, but today it seems that there are more than ever before. And that’s because our cultural myth is dying. If we cast aside the veil we habitually wear to shield us from our unendurable everydays, and look around with clear and wide-open eyes, it’s not a thriving, vibrant Western civilisation that we’ll see, but rather the consequences of the increasingly rapid disintegration of a morally degenerate guiding mythology. We might be richer, but we’re certainly not happier, and the world around us is rapidly going to hell in the proverbial hand-basket. I don’t need to talk about all the ways here: every one of us knows it, and the evidence is stacked up high for us to see in every media outlet, on the streets of every village, town or city, in every forest and field in the world. The world is warming, animals are dying, crops are failing, people are starving and our ‘leaders’ are still fiddling while Rome burns. That’s what we’ve achieved, with all our fine myths of progress and superiority. Cultural values and morals once taken for granted are dissolving at a frightening pace.

In Ragnarök, A.S. Byatt offers up a twenty-first-century retelling of the old Norse myth about the end of the world and the death of the gods. These gods deserve to die, Byatt suggests in her Afterword, for they are just like we are now. They have abandoned the Earth. They are ‘limited and stupid . . .They are greedy and enjoy fighting and playing games . . . They know Ragnarök is coming but are incapable of imagining any way to fend it off, or change the story.’ Our story needs to change, and it needs to change before it’s too late – before we perpetrate our own, rather less picturesque, version of Ragnorök. There’ll be no happy ending possible in that story – neither for us, nor the Earth.

Change begins with individuals, and it begins with imagination. It begins with a different story which succeeds in capturing the imagination more effectively than the now-crumbling old story. And if the dominant cultural myth is failing us and failing the planet, then we need to transform it. Why not? After all, humans have always been mythmakers. Carl Jung wrote that when the myths of earlier generations fall into decline, the mythmaking process resides in individuals. The birth of a new personal myth in the imagination of a single individual, or a group of individuals, he said, might lead to the rebirth of new (and more functional) myths in the imagination of the culture.

It’s the people who I think of as the ‘mythical misfits’, then, who kickstart the transformation of the world, and who begin to imagine more sustainable and meaningful ways of living. Today’s mythical misfits … are rejecting a culture which values neither intuition nor imagination, which values neither the living land nor its non-human inhabitants. They’re deserting the stagnant institutions, and creating communities which celebrate life rather than destroying it. When the great blazing bonfire of a culture goes out, what remains are a few individual flames. When those individual flames come together, we can kindle a new fire.