Authors: Rollo May
Taking off from actual history, the myth then gives us images that come alive. The community which experiences the myth and the morality of the true myth are both there. Since human beings can now fly around the earth, the boundaries over which people war now become a deadly and cursed mistake, an insane and cruel destruction of our small, fragile, but beautiful earth.
Sir Fred Hoyle said in the very middle of our century, “Once a photograph of the earth, taken from the outside, is available … a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.”
*
We now have that new photograph. It was taken by the astronauts and printed in full page by countless newspapers and journals. It showed the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans, the China Sea and the Indian Ocean, the continents of Africa and South America, and all the countries of the Orient spinning on the surface of this earth. This photograph did leave an indelible impression on millions of peoples’ minds—the picture of the earth emblazoned in dark blue and gold, turning serenely in its orbit, populated by people who are truly brothers and sisters.
Rusty Schweickart did not see the borders of the nations of Europe and Central America, which are nonexistent from this range. And Rusty felt, as we all did, that there was something ludicrous as well as tragic about the efforts of these countries,
posturing like roosters, killing each other to preserve borders that no longer exist. The meaning of these great days and nights, merged together around the spaceship, was that scores of nations were trying to preserve boundaries which had become anachronisms. The moment of seeing that picture was the heralding of the time when at last it will be recognized, even though politicians may be the last to admit it, that what happens in Moscow also happens in Washington, that what occurs in London will also occur in Bombay. The moment in history has come when nation shall not lift up sword against nation and they shall study war no more.
The very dangers that we face, exemplified by nuclear bombs, are themselves commandments that we must learn to live together as brothers and sisters in a great family. From the Marshall McLuhan Institute in Toronto there had come a strange statement in the middle of 1982. The leader was quoted, “I’m delighted with the atom bomb.” But before we could shout out our protest at such inhumane sentiments, we read the next sentence, “Something is necessary to bring us all together.” And this is the danger we all face of destruction of the earth’s atmosphere, the pollution of our oceans even as we explore the heavens. Since they are the same dangers for all of us, whatever our color or nationality, it behooves us to face them together.
We now do have a common enemy. It comes by way of our understanding this myth. The very technology for the destruction of our enemies also leaves us hostage to the destructive power we generate. We cannot turn the clock back (nor do we want to), but the control of nuclear energy is the requirement needed to bring us all together. The near tragedy of Three Mile Island and the actual tragedy of Chernobyl demonstrate the irrefutable fact that we are one world. When thousands of tons of lettuce and green vegetables had to be burned in Italy after the Chernobyl accident and tens of thousands of reindeer—almost the whole economy of the Laplanders in northern Sweden—had to be slaughtered because of the radiation contagion,
we knew in our hearts we could never live separately again.
When headlines appeared in the
New York Times
after the accident, “Russia Asks the Help of the Scientists of the West,” many of us were overtaken with a strange conviction:
this marks the beginning of the world in which the nations will no longer be border-ridden
. The new myth of the stars and trips to the planets will then have taken effect!
Radiation surely hasn’t the slightest respect for fictitious borders. The efforts to keep these borders pure becomes, were it not so tragic, a strange joke—to protect borders which exist only in one’s imagination! In the twenty-first century they will seem like anachronisms of the most destructive kind. This holds not only for radiation in Europe but for all the peoples on the crust of the earth.
As Rusty Schweickart has revealed, the power of myths is still with us. “And outside on the front porch of the lunar module, you watch the sun rise over the Pacific and it’s an incredible sight, a beautiful, beautiful sight.”
“And what’s it all mean?” Here Rusty is forming a myth self-consciously, venturing his ideas on the most important point of all: “I think that in some ways there are other benefits which are more significant.” As Rusty repeated, “I think that we’ve played a part in changing the concept of man and the nature of life.”
We awake after a sleep of many centuries to find ourselves in a new and irrefutable sense in the myth of humankind. We find ourselves in a new world community; we cannot destroy the parts without destroying the whole. In this bright loveliness we know now that we are truly sisters and brothers, at last in the same family.
abortion, women’s assertiveness and, 195
action, supremacy of, 237
Adam, 27, 42, 146
Adler, Alfred:
background of, 68-69
early childhood memories studied by, 68,69–70
on social interest, 69,165
on spoiled child syndrome, 181
women’s equality advocated by, 289
adolescents:
independence asserted by, 39
Orestes myth and, 39, 40
relationships between, 214
Adrienne (case history), 63–65, 67
advertising, 113, 119, 140–141, 242, 267
Aeneid
(Virgil), 156, 157, 166
Aeschylus, 16
see also Oresteia, The
Agamemnon, 231
“Age of Anxiety, The” (Auden), 208
aggression, 283
Ahab (biblical), 277
Ahab, Captain, 277, 278-281, 282
Air and Space Museum, 55
airplanes, 224
n
Alcoholics Anonymous, 61, 190
Alexander, Franz, 102
Alger, Horatio, 115–118
Sisyphus myth vs., 146
success prototype created by, 117–118,131
see also
“Luke Larkin’s Luck”
alienation, industrial development and, 242
American culture:
advertising and, 113,119,140–141, 242, 267
change valued in, 101-106
in
Death of a Salesman
, 43–44
European historical sense vs., 99–100
immigrant experiences and, 48, 49, 95-96
individualism in, 108–110,115
Jazz Age in, 55,125–127,128,133, 13, 137, 13,. 145
loneliness in, 48, 96–101, 106
luck and, 118,119–120
middle west in, 110,142
newness valued in, 101-104
New World discovery and, 91-93
politics and, 102,126
psychological depression and, 113, 120-123
rootlessness of, 48–49, 99
violence in, 100
wealth overemphasized by, 48, 56, 60, 106, 115, 119,123–124,131
see also
myth(s), American
American dream:
as ethical sanction, 131
failure of, 126,137,141–144
individual success as, 115
myth of Sisyphus and, 146–147
Wall Street takeovers and, 119
American Indians:
extermination of, 283
puberty rituals of, 39, 290
American Myth/American Reality
(Robertson), 46, 115
American Steel, 117
Amish, 122
Amphytrian 38
(Giraudoux), 293–294
ancestral roots, 47-49
Anders, Bill, 208
androgyny, 36
Answer to fob
(Jung), 237
Antigone, 83–84, 85
Aphrodite, 39,111
Apollonianism, 218
Apollo 7
, 298
apotheosis, 290
archetypes, 37, 38
Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious
(Jung), 37n
arête
, defined, 29, 244-24;
Aristotle, 28
Arndt, Walter, 236n
Arnold, Matthew, 152–153, 154,155, 235–236
art:
as criterion of spiritual health, 261
Eros-Thanatos struggle and, 77
myth vs., 28
trivialization of, 43, 261-262, 266
see also
creativity
Asimov, Isaac, 24n
astrology, 22
astronauts, 208–300, 300–301, 302
Athena, 36, 284
Auden, W. H., 208
Augustine, Saint, 155, 161
authors, cultural influences on, 170
Bakker, James, 27, 225n
Barnes, Hazel, 41
bar mitzvah, 39
Barton, Bruce, 126
Bateson, Gregory, 25
Beatles, 98
Beatrice, 159,163,164,193, 220, 230, 253
beauty, feminine, 228
n
, 242, 244-245
Becker, Ernest, 53–54
Beckett, Samuel, 42, 207, 209
n
Beethoven, Ludwig van, 236, 262, 275, 282
Bellah, Robert N., 69,110
Benét, Stephen Vincent, 92-93, 218
Berg, Bernice, 60
Berger, Peter, 26
Bethe, Hans, 219
Bettelheim, Bruno, 28, 194
Bible:
astronauts’ reading of, 298
church symbolism and, 51
creation story in, 24
Melville’s characters and, 277
mythic names in, 43
Satan described in, 271-272
see also
New Testament; Old Testament;
specific books of Bible
birth, 36, 38, 50
“Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, The” (Nietzsche), 11, 45
Blake, William, 261
n
, 274
Boesky, Ivan, 56, 123, 124
Bohr, Niels, 25
Bok, Edward, 96
Bonnie and Clyde, 95
Boone, Daniel, 45, 94, 95
Borman, Frank, 298
Bosch, Hieronymous, 221
bourgeosie, 242
brain function, left- vs. right-, 25, 288
Briar Rose
(Grimm), 194-216
alternate endings written for, 214–216
case history related to, 197–109, 202, 210–214, 291
creative waiting in, 205, 207, 208-209, 287-288
evil element in, 201-202
feminine development presented in, 196–197, 201, 203, 206, 212
Oedipus Rex
vs., 205
Peer Gynt
vs., 196,197
story of, 199–200, 202–205, 206
time imagery in, 203, 205-206
title of, 194–196
Broadway theater, 43
Brockman, John, 25
n
Bronson, Matthew, 11
Brothers Karamazov, The
(Dostoevsky), 273
Brueghel, Pieter, 227
Bruner, Jerome, 16
Buddenbrooks
(Mann), 256
Buddha, 95
Buddhism, meditation practices and, 145
Buffalo Bill (William F. Cody), 95, 129
n
Buie, James, 121
n
business, women in, 291
Byron, George Cordon, Lord, 94, 284
Calamity Jane, 95
Calvin, John, 220
Calypso, 295-296
Campbell, Joseph, 9, 20
n
, 37
Camus, Albert, 147
Cantos
(Pound), 162
capitalism, 288
care:
inability to, 133-135
myth of, 250
n
Carnegie, Andrew, 96, 117
carnivals, 50
Carson, Kit, 45, 95
case histories,
see
psychotherapy, case histories from
Cassirer, Ernst, 26
n
, 92
n
castration, 81
catharsis:
Faust legend and, 221, 232-233
Moby Dick
and, 282–284
cathedrals, 51, 77, 99–100, 195, 220
Catholicism:
church architecture and, 220,288
see also
Christianity
celebrities, heroes vs., 55
Central Park, Levin murder in, 50–61
Cézanne, Paul, 275
Chambers, Robert, Jr., 50–61
change, myth of, 102-106
in
Great Gatsby
, 102, 129, 130
“Chapbook,” 221
Charles (case history), 31–34, 69, 271
Chernobyl, nuclear-power accident at, 301-302
Childe Harold
(Byron), 94
childhood:
community comfort needed in, 52–53
earliest memories from, 64, 65, 66–67, 68-70
sexual exploitation in, 73
Chiron, 244
n
“Choir Invisible, The” (Eliot), 58-59
Christianity:
classical mythology attacked by, 24-25
holy days of, 50
individualism vs., 177
puberty rituals of, 39
Reformation and, 220
sacraments of, 50–51
Waiting for Godot
and, 42
see also
Catholicism; Jesus Christ; Protestantism
Christmas, 24, 50
churches:
community myth symbolized by, 51
historical sense gained from, 99-100
masculine principles vs. feminine values in, 220, 288
Churchill, Sir Winston, 94
Ciardi, John, 154
n
, 160–161,163
circle, as Apollonian symbol, 218
cities, loyalty to, 46-47
Clark, Kenneth, 250
classical myths, Christian attack on, 24-25
see also
Creek myths;
specific myths
Classic Tradition, The
(Highet), 39
n
Close Encounters of the Third Kind
, 18
Cody, William F. (Buffalo Bill), 95, 129
n
collective guilt, 84, 264–265, 266
collective unconscious, 38, 171
Columbus, Christopher, 91, 92, 300
commercialism, 106,126,140–142, 242
commitment, 181-182
community:
church as symbol of, 51
developmental needs for, 52–53
earth as, 299-302
female symbols of, 164-165
heroism and, 53–54
loyalty to, 45-47
mythic sense of, 30–31
search for, 47-49
space exploration and, 298–299
symbols of, 50–51
compassion, 52,134
competitiveness:
American individualism and, 115
of Faustianism, 218
reaction-formation and, 98
of students, 56
concentration camps, 271
Concourt, Edmund, 140
confession, 151, 155