We are in the season of the year given at once to both endings and beginnings. As the first day of winter arrived, all of nature is signaling, for the northern hemisphere at least, the end of the past year's life. Christians just celebrated the birth of the divine child that signaled a beginning of not only a new hope but a world-changing new religion. And in a few days the world over will celebrate the end of one calendar year and beginning of another. It is perhaps the one time in the year that we pause the longest and give the most fanfare to celebrations that have grown out of something archetypal. Whether it be the Christians' divine child or the aged Father Time leaving while the infant New Year arrives, our images of the season in some way connect to death and renewal - a theme as old perhaps as the human psyche or consciousness.
In the mad dash to fulfill our more recently developed and more commercial rituals of celebration, however, are we in danger of drifting into an unconscious state about what we are celebrating? It is easy in the modern hectic way of life to become obsessed with details and frenzied by the business of the season. Economies depend so heavily upon the commercial aspects of it all. We hear some Christians complain about merchants taking "the Christ" out of Christmas, but on an even wider scale, are we becoming so obsessed with modern aspects of the celebration that we are becoming disconnected from the roots of the myth, the bearer of the archetype, that gave rise to celebration in the first place. Whether Christian or not, there could be a danger in the disconnection.
In The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious Jung speaks of the significance of myths to mankind. He says, "Myths are the original revelations of the preconscious psyche..."and that they have "vital meaning." He goes on to say, "Not merely do they represent, they are the psychic life of the primitive tribe which immediately falls to pieces and decays when it loses its mythological heritage, like a man who has lost his soul. A tribe's mythology is its living religion, whose loss is always and everywhere, even among the civilized, a moral catastrophe." (Jung 154)
When we lose the myth and disconnect from the archetype, we are essentially shutting the door on a part of ourselves, perhaps a part that lurks in the shadows and that we do not know very well. Myths defy rationality and fly in the face of scientific discovery, but then to evaluate them with scientific reason is to try to take apart something from another reality with the tools of our material world. Myths are telling us that we are more than what we may discern with the five senses. Myths connect us to our earth, our history, our humanity in a way that we cannot fully explain. It little matters whether they are literal, historical truths. If they bring us in touch with something that transcends the everyday physical world and gives us a numinous moment, they are connecting us to something intangible that lies at the core of our humanness. As diverse as the peoples of the world are, we are connected in the rhythms of the universe and in universal patterns in our humanity.
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