Personal Mythos

Each person innately has a unique image bestowed upon them which guides them in how to grow into wholeness and what to become. It is an image of their most authentic and truest self which has its own life force. It pressed on the outer ego to make itself known

At one point in C.G. Jung’s life, he asked himself, what myth am I living by? Realizing that he was without a myth, he wrote, “I took it upon myself to get to know ‘my’ myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks.” He immediately set about to discover a way to answer that question for himself, knowing that only from being fortified by that information, would he be of use to others.

The Fisher King, whose kingdom mysteriously holds the Holy Grail, has a wound inflicted upon him in his groin that will not heal. Similarly, a severe wound pervades each of us individually as well as the collective.  It is a single question that must be asked by Parsifal in order to enter the kingdom and will heal that which has laid the land to waste and has caused great affliction to everyone.  It is a question that we all must come to ask at some point in our lives, and it arises from the intertwining of the masculine and feminine energies within ourselves — the sacred marriage that makes our hearts whole.

This myth has numinous power and great meaning for the modern psyche of both men and women.  The sacred task before each of us is also at the heart of the Grail story for Parsifal, to make conscious what the unconscious (feminine) instinctual self holds to be true and to enact consciously (masculine) those truths into the world.   The world’s pain is beseeching us to do the deep exploration and balancing of these energies.  Are we constantly moving forward with our well-laid plans only to feel bereft and hollow when we find there is something missing in our hearts?  Do we continue dreaming of ever ending possibilities and never accomplish a thing?  Are we suffering along with the world in agonizing ways that make us feel helpless in knowing which way to turn?

The Song of Wandering Aengus

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.