Building the Cathedral | 0. Preface
A New Series on Myth and Meaning
Introduction to a 6-part series on personal mythology as a response to the meaning crisis.
Tolstoy wrote, “All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
The same could be said about individuals’ relationship to myth and meaning.
Anyone with a working, living myth will feel rooted, whole, and meaningful in much the same way. By contrast, there are countless ways in which a person’s relationship to myth might be broken or warped.
Perhaps they were raised in a myth they can no longer accept and so find themselves disillusioned.
Perhaps they confuse their myth with history and literal fact.
Perhaps they were never introduced to a mythic orientation at all—or were even taught to denigrate mythic orientations as inherently stupid and superstitious.
Subjective experience will vary accordingly. For one person, it might be a chronic background sense of unease and uncertainty; for another, depression. Some may bury their anxieties and try to simply distract themselves from the problem (with work, say, or intoxicants.). Others will frantically search for something—anything—to fill the hole, and turn to all sorts of quasi-mythic frameworks in desperation.
Today, such broken myths are proliferating all around us—in cults, conspiracy theories, fundamentalist religions and fanatical political ideologies. People are turning to these broken myths in the hope of resolving their own broken relationship to meaning in a culture with no collective myth.
However, such makeshift substitutes for viable, living myths prove, without fail, to be destructive and, ultimately, unfulfilling. Nevertheless, these sorts of myth-substitutes will continue to spread and gain prominence until our cultural crisis finds some workable, long-term resolution.
As the last great cultural myth of traditional Christianity continues to recede with no new collective myth taking its place, a vacuum has been opening. Some have called this widening abyss “the meaning crisis,” and it will continue to swallow many until some sustainable answer for our times is found.
This 6-part Substack series aims to propose a possible solution to this crisis. As such, it is addressed to that large and growing number of people who have no working, living relationship to myth. For those comfortably served by some religion or another, this series will offer very little. It is written instead for the seekers, the doubters, the individualists uncomfortable with creeds and dogmas and codes, and those looking to find their own way through the desert. It is written for the “nones,” that growing demographic of religiously “non-affiliated” souls who may slink from churches but still seek insight and assurances from their experience. It is for the “spiritual but not religious” folks, whose sense of sacredness exists outside the box, and will not be confined to what’s been given.
It is my belief that the New Myth is already living in such souls. It only remains to draw it out and build it up.
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