By Owen Ware
Source: OUPBlog
Many of us feel disconnected, from ourselves, from others, from nature. We feel fragmented. But where are we to find a cure to our fragmentation? And how can we satisfy our longing for wholeness? The German and British romantics had a surprising answer: through mythology.
The romantics believed that in modern times we’ve forgotten something essential about ourselves. We’ve forgotten that we are mythmaking creatures, that the weaving of stories and the creation of symbols lies deep in our nature.
Today, we view myths as vestiges of a bygone era; products of a time when humanity lived in a state of childlike ignorance, lacking science and technology and the powers of rational reflection. William Blake (1757–1827) rejected this bias against mythology, as did Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829), Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), Friedrich von Hardenberg (1772–1801), and John Keats (1795–1821), among others. They claimed that the worldview we now inhabit is a mythology of its own.
Our challenge, the romantics argued, is not to liberate humanity from myths but to create new myths—new symbols and stories—that serve to awaken the human mind to its hidden potential. We are all mythmakers. We all use our powers of imagination to sustain the worldview we inhabit. Our task is to become aware of those powers, and with that awareness rewrite the narratives that have kept us trapped in feelings of separation from ourselves and the world at large.
The modern experience is one of alienation, incompleteness, and aloneness. We’ve fallen prey to the illusion that everything is divided. The new mythologies that the romantics set out to create turn on symbols and stories of a greater unity that connects all things. The romantics held that our path to wholeness lies in reawakening the imagination and experiencing the world poetically. They believed that myths can allow us to see ourselves as members of a larger family—a “world family”—that includes all living beings on Earth.
But how, you might ask, is this even possible? How can mythology serve a liberating function? Are myths not false and deceptive? And shouldn’t we try to escape myths entirely?
All good questions, and ones the romantics heard loudly in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Here are four ways the romantics worked to address them:
1. Reinterpretation. Ancient myths are complex, even confusing, and their meaning is always open to interpretation and reworking.
Shelley’s play Prometheus Unbound is not a simple retelling of a classic myth. He reinvests the story with new meaning by positioning Prometheus as a symbol of humanity who struggles against Jupiter, a symbol of inhumanity. The old myth then acquires fresh significance; it becomes applicable to our modern yearning for community and connection with nature.
2. Reconciliation. The human mind abounds in dualities that can intensify feelings of separation; myths allow us to extend our minds beyond these dualities, thereby instilling feelings of unity.
Blake writes about how the mind creates contraries, such as “reason” and “feeling,” “man” and “woman,” “heaven” and “hell.” His literary and visual work afford us the opportunity to see that these oppositions are not absolute; they are two sides of a whole. A new poetic mythology can allow us to intuit this; it can open the “doors of perception” in ways that allow us to see the unity of the spiritual and the sensual.
3. Reflexivity. When we become aware of our mythmaking powers, we can fashion symbols and stories that position ourselves as the authors or artists of our lives.
In Heinrich von Ofterdingen by Hardenberg (known by his pen name Novalis), the protagonist discovers a book that reflects images from his own life. He has the uncanny realization that the book he is reading is a kind of mirror into his soul. The novel thereby displays a process of acquiring self-understanding through symbols, stories, images, and allegories—in short, through all the elements of mythology.
4. Participation. Because the romantics wanted to make us aware of our creative powers, the stories and symbols they fashion serve to invite us into the very process of mythmaking.
Schlegel’s novel Lucinde is a story about a young man who discovers his artistic potential by falling in love. The novel is itself an invitation for readers to turn inward and discover their own ability to make their lives into a work of art. The novel is meant to be a stimulus for self-inquiry for the reader, who is called upon to see herself through the lens of mythology.
What then makes any given mythology “new” is that it isn’t trying to mask its origin in the human imagination. All the mythologies of romanticism share this feature in common. They are ongoing works in progress, as alive today as they were over two centuries ago. The mythologies of romanticism are like paintings left deliberately unfinished by a painter, with the hope that we will feel inspired to pick up the brush and contribute our own complex patterns of color.
