And I haven’t thought of an answer yet, but I offer it for consideration:
So Robert Johnson and Joseph Campbell both suggest that the Grail romances are the myths for the modern era, specficially for the male psyche. I argue along the same vein that the myth for the female psyche is “Pride and Prejudice.” The question is this:
What if the modern American myth is linked to
Peter Pan and the myth of never growing up?
Please leave me your thoughts in the comments.
August 15th, 2008 at 2:45 am
Great mythic minds think alike! Not you and me, but you and Marie-Louise von Franz. Check out her book “Puer Aeternus.”
Congrats on launching your podcast! With any luck, Mythos Radio will be right behind you with stories for kids (and maybe a few for grown-ups, since I fell in love with some of the stories I read to my daughter over the years)!
–Art
August 15th, 2008 at 5:08 am
so *THAT’S* what the “Puer Aeternus” is. It’s one of those Jungian buzz words that gets dropped everywhere…
I am looking forward to Mythos Radio. How is it coming?
August 19th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
There was a great discussion about fairy tales and growing up this weekend at Mythcon 39. J.R.R. Tolkien argued in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” that these kind of stories had been demoted to the nursery, even though they were originally intended for adults and (he thought) should continue to be. C.S. Lewis dedicated The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to his god-daughter Lucy who had reached the age Lewis describes as “too old for fairy tales” — but he quickly followed that up with the comment that she would one day be “old enough to start reading fairy tales again” (source).
Many of the older members of the audience commented that (as they have moved into retirement) they have felt more strongly the appeal of myth and fantasy they had felt earlier in life, an appeal which had been to some extent drowned out in the mundane-ness and busy-ness of life.
The Peter Pan myth gives us two extremes we must avoid. Captain Hook is the “grown-up” consumed with practical concerns; Peter Pan is the “child” with no cares in the world. We must grow up — becoming responsible and mature adults who contribute positively to our world — but not lose the sense of play and wonder we have as children. I think reading mythology and fantastic literature is helping me to tread the path.
August 23rd, 2008 at 10:57 pm
I think the Peter Pan myth in the West is unavoidable. We live longer with less physical pain; we have 1000+ cable channels, Netflix and the internet to amuse and distract us; there are half a dozen and more Viagra type drugs to stave off facing the natural decline of sexual libido; thus denying the experience of the natural aging processes which is nature’s way of telling us that we’ve had our stag time but that it’s time to move beyond and face the facts of life in the body and think less about our hedonistic pleasures and more about the spirit.
Way back in the day Siddhartha’s father tried to play the Viagra-card to keep Siddhartha in an R-rated Peter Pan world by having all those hundreds of Baywatch babes around the palace grounds. But on three excursions outside the palace walls he encountered disease, old-age and death. These images were placed in his path by the gods.
But in our Peter Pan world the gods have a tough go of it insinuating the facts of “life red in tooth and claw” and mortality into our awareness on a timely basis. We are so into the Peter Pan myth that when the gods do visit a disaster on us we are taken totally by surprise and our heckles are raised over the injustice of it all. We’ve certainly come to feel entitled.
But beyond the ugly facts of life lies the promise of regaining our naivety and child-like appreciation of existence; and we must regain it- but at a higher level, “I promise you this. If you don’t change and become like a child, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven. But if you are as humble as this child, you are the greatest in the kingdom of heaven”(Matthew 18, 3-4). So the Peter Pan myth, or Puer Aeternus, is positive when coupled with full realization of the vagaries of corporeal life.
So, as Randy mentioned above, the trick is to find a balance. The Peter Pan type tries to avoid the task of “the first requirement of an adult is that he should take to himself responsibility for his failures, for his life, and for his doing, within the context of the actual conditions of the world in which he dwells, then it is simply an elementary psychological fact that no one will ever develop to this state who is continually thinking of what a great thing he would have been had only the conditions of his life been different: his parents less indifferent to his needs, society less oppressive, or the universe otherwise arranged”(Myths to Live By, 46). But rather than falling into the extreme Captain Hook type that doesn’t criticize but does one’s duty uncomplainingly, one must “develop what Sigmund Feud has called his “reality function”; that faculty of the independently observant, freely thinking individual who can evaluate without preconceptions the possibilities of his environment and of himself within it, criticizing and creating, not simply reproducing inherited patterns of thought and action, but becoming himself an innovating center, and active, creative center of the life process”(Myths to Live By, 47). To accomplish this we need both Peter Pan and Captain Hook. Easier said than done. Personally, I’m a bigger fan of Peter than the Captain.