What Do Ancient Myths Have To Do With Anything?
In short? Everything!
When I first began to explore Jungian archetypes and their expression through ancient myth, I was fascinated, but not entirely certain about their relevance. I mean, these stories were first told literally thousands of years ago – how could they possibly help me to make sense of my life in the 21st century?
It was only when I began to reflect on the connections between the events in my life and the narratives of the Ancient Greek gods and goddesses did the penny drop. Using my background in narrative theory and literary criticism, I began searching for patterns, interpreting metaphors, following plot trajectories and performing character analysis in both my own experience and the narratives popular in Ancient Greece.
In other words, I started to make sense of my life, my relationships, my way of being in the world through the fantastical stories of Mount Olympus.
To give you an example….
The end stages of a Phd are always very difficult. You have very tight deadlines, a lot of pressure for your research to be as robust as possible and the guilt of not being available to the important people in your life. You need to be completely focused all the time. This means that you go to bed thinking about your thesis. You wake up in the middle of the night thinking about the thesis and you spend your day working on the thesis.
The target of completing the thesis, strongly defending it and graduating at the end of it all, fills your vision until it’s all you can see. Everything else just falls away.
I think of this as my Artemis stage. Artemis was the huntress. With her bow and arrow she never failed to miss her target. Forward focused, her momentum carried her forward until she reached her goal. She was not a lover or a mother, rather she was a virgin goddess – one unto herself.
When I reflect on this goddess and the various stories that involve her, I can appreciate with a new awareness that my focus narrowed significantly during those last 6 months. My eyes were very firmly on my target and my momentum was a force to be reckoned with.
And yet, because of this extreme focus I became very blinkered. I didn’t see those around me. Couldn’t spare my energy to attend to their needs. To have allowed my attention to be diverted would have meant I would have missed my target.
When I finally reached my target, I hit a crisis point. After all, if Artemis is about focus and achieving your goal, how does Artemis serve when the hunt is finished? I found myself casting around for anything to focus on next. What would my next goal be? What achievement could I target next?
This scattering of energy, this dispersal of focus felt incredibly uncomfortable to someone who has been in the zone for as long as I had. I felt confused, disorientated, lost.
By correlating my experience of this time of transition, I can see very clearly how the archetype of Artemis was incredibly dominant. And I can also see how that served me really well in one situation and not so well in another.
With this understanding, I then cast my mind back to other times when I had displayed a similar pattern of focus moving into confusion, and it helped me to recognize and respond to my typical energy flow. I’m now much more capable of managing these transitions, and, as a consequence, I’ve found that the amount of energy I bring to all areas of my life is significantly more sustainable. I no longer put myself at risk of burnout.
So, in answer to the question I started this post with, the ancient myths can help us enormously in exploring how we cope, how we respond, how we relate, how we progress. They give us a filter through which we can reflect upon our own narratives, giving us a distance that then gifts us objectivity. They give us incredible insight into ourselves, our relationships, and our careers.
The ancient myths maybe indeed be ancient, but they are still startlingly relevant.
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