Catastrophe: What myths show us about the way of the world

Endings, loss, and uncertainty. Fears of a catastrophic future. Many of us are living with this right now or wondering how to. How to act. How to participate.

Perspective and guidance can be gleaned from myths and old stories. They are a poetic record of life in a world where catastrophe happens. A world in which people have at various times, felt that everything was falling apart or that the world might even end.

 

Transcript of Catastrophe: What myths show us about the way of the world

Hello and welcome to Myth Matters an exploration at the intersection of mythology, creativity and consciousness. I’m your host Dr. Catherine Svehla. Wherever you may be in this wide beautiful, crazy world of ours, I’m glad that you decided to join me here today.

Well, and here we are on the other side of the elections here in the United States. Many of us here and around the world see the results as a kind of catastrophe, as the beginning of a series of endings and the unleashing of a lot of avoidable suffering. And of course, as a mythologist, I thought, well, what is in the myths? And it’s not a matter of finding a myth or the myth. There are mythic perspectives on the particular dynamics of this moment.

But what I am thinking about, and what I’d like to share with you today, is what can be gleaned from the old stories as a perspective on life in a world where things like this happen, where catastrophe happens. A world in which people have, at various times like this one felt that everything was falling apart or that the world might even end. What do our myths, taken as a group and as a perspective on the world tell us about life here on planet Earth and how things work?

Well, first of all, myths tell us that there is a lot more going on and a lot more at work than the actions of human beings. That we’re not the only ones here and we are not in control of the world or even our own lives to the degree that we often convince ourselves that we are.

Our myths tell us that the outcomes and the endings are not clear at the beginning of the story, and they’re usually surprising. The endings are usually surprising.

They tell us that guidance comes from unexpected and uncanny sources ,in ways and places that we don’t control. And along similar lines, they tell us that understanding the significance of this guidance when it comes in these strange forms is one of the things that a successful and satisfied person is able to do. And sometimes these events, this guidance, comes in big forms and sometimes it comes in what appears to us as a small detail, something that is easy for us to dismiss, that’s later revealed to be the key.

There’s also this thread that weaves through a lot of our stories, that speaks to a tendency that many of us have to assume that things are as they appear, and that can get us into trouble. We might do this through a habit of inattention or superficiality. Lack of character. We don’t stop and ask ourselves enough questions or good enough questions.

Another thing that our mythic life shows us is that goodness prevails. The kind hearted, the generous, the virtuous, the people who show up for others. The good people, they ultimately are the ones who find happiness and satisfaction and the things that they need. And not only that, but goodness is what survives ultimately. In stories that we have about world endings, we see that what makes it through, what actually survives is what is good.

And while the decisions, so to speak, about destruction and what’s going to be preserved are made in the other realms by larger forces, people play a role in preparing and preserving what is good and what they love for whatever could come next.

Endings and catastrophes in our myths and stories set the stage for transformation and renewal. They are part of the process. The endings are also beginnings. But these patterns and the purpose of any given set of events in the time in which they take place, these are very difficult to understand because they take a long time to emerge, to be understood, lived and fulfilled. The stories that we have about other times that people felt that the world was ending were told in retrospect, and retrospection is a very powerful tool.

And finally, our myths and our stories show us that there is more than one interpretation. They don’t mean one thing. There are multiple interpretations, multiple truths, multiple meanings that can be found, and they continue to grow and shift and show themselves to us in the ways that we need them to in our time and place.

It can be really helpful to look at our mythologies and our stories right now, to maybe spend a little bit less time with the news, not because you’re going to find the answer for all time for every person, or the explanation of our moment necessarily, but what speaks to you in a given story can give you a very important clue about the best way for you to respond in action, or the best way for you to deal with your feelings, to find your own perspective on where you are in the world and what’s unfolding right now.

Now I want to go back through the things that I just shared with you, and unpack them a little bit more and give you some examples along the way of some stories. I imagine that many other examples will occur to you and you may even be surprised by how many stories you know that speak to what I’m sharing here.

So, the first thing is that there’s more going on, that we are not the only movers and shakers in the cosmos. Yes, human action, human culture, has impact and consequence, but we are not in control of what is going on, and we are not in a position to make decisions about the direction of the planet or the cosmos. Now, in the stories we have, of course, gods and goddesses, fairies, elves, demons, guardians–we also have animals, trees and companions in our visible Earth community, there are so many others with us. So, we’re not in control, and we’re also not alone.

These types of figures in our stories can be read as symbols and metaphors. They can also be taken as experiences in the psyche and imagination, and as bridges between the imaginal realm and the material world. Reading myth as metaphor is an important practice and approach to mythology, and yet it’s important not to reduce the figures in our myths to mere metaphors. I will come back to this point a little bit later.

Now, what about this? Outcomes and endings are not clear and usually surprising. Well, one of my favorite stories is the fairy tale “The Firebird and Princess Vasilisa.” I told this in an episode back in 2020 and I will post the link to that. In this story, you have a huntsman who works for the king, and he has a valiant horse. And one day, the huntsman is riding his horse and they’re out in the forest, and they find a golden feather from the tail of the Firebird on the forest path and the huntsman picks it up. He has no idea at that point, what that action is going to set in motion, and neither do we. No idea. It comes as a surprise, and this is true of so much of life.

Now, my favorite part in this story is when the horse says to the huntsman, “Do not weep. The trouble is not now. The trouble lies before you.” Which might feel pretty accurate to our moment now, and it lines up with something that the Dalai Lama said about trouble. The Dalai Lama said “Trouble is bound to come, so cultivating the right attitude is crucial.” And in that, I hear again, this willingness to accept that we can be surprised.

We don’t actually know what is going to happen until it’s happening, and at the same time, we’re not just sitting here doing nothing with no means of participation. In fact, we need to participate, and this is where that guidance comes in. We have many, many stories that turn on a dream or a hunch, on hearing or finding something, on meeting with someone unexpected, hearing an animal talk… stories in which there is some meeting or encounter with an emissary from the in-between realm, from between the ultimate divine and our material plane. And it can come in the form of a call or a dream, or synchronicity, something or someone that appears in your path.

In the story that I just mentioned, we have the talking horse as a guide, and in another story that I told recently, “The Nixie in the Mill Pond,” we have the power of a dream and then the appearance of an old woman. The woman has a dream and when she wakes up she acts on it, she climbs up the mountain that she saw in the dream, and this leads her to the old woman who advises her on how to rescue her husband.

The woman in that story was wise enough or desperate enough, or both, to take the dream seriously but sometimes we don’t, and our stories tell us about that too, about what happens when we dismiss someone or an event as being irrelevant or insignificant. We may do this from arrogance. We may do it out of a habit of inattention but one way or another, we assume that things are as they appear or as we imagine them to be.

In a fairy tale called “The Water of Life,” for example, we have a sick king who has three sons, and these three princes each go out, one at a time, in search of a possible cure, the water of life. The youngest brother succeeds,with the aid of a dwarf who’s standing by the side of the road. Now, the two eldest brothers also met the dwarf when they undertook their quest, but they dissed him. They were rude and dismissive. They didn’t stop to talk to him. They thought they knew what they were doing and how their quest was going to work, and they ended up completely immobilized in a deep ravine.

This type of judging, pre-judging and arrogance, is a common character flaw in fairy tales that leads to a person’s downfall.

This brought to mind a Latvian folk tale called “The King on Trial.” This story contains a number of the elements that we’ve looked at so far. So, I want to tell you the whole story, and I invite you to relax and listen to it and notice what you notice. Your moment in the story could be an interesting experiment for you, in this practice of allowing things to reveal themselves and being willing to offer them significance.

“The King on Trial”

Once upon a time, there was an arrogant king, who was very fond of flaunting his power. One day he stood at the window of his castle, and thought to himself, “My power is so great that there is nothing that anyone can do against me.” At that moment, a lovely bird flew toward him and perched on the windows. This bird was so beautiful, that the king reached for it. And the bird seemed tame, so he thought that he wouldn’t have any trouble at all catching it. But just as soon as he reached out his hand, the bird flew away. 

The king was determined to catch the bird, so he hurried outside and started running along following behind the bird as it flew. He followed the bird’s path until he reached a river. The bird started to fly across the river and of course, the king couldn’t fly. He had to swim. He took off his clothes, laid them on the bank, and jumped into the river, and swam after the bird. When he reached the other side and came out on the bank, he saw the bird. It fluttered around a little bit and then flew into a thicket of bushes and completely disappeared from sight. 

The king waited around for a while. He tried to be patient but the bird did not reappear. So finally, deeply disappointed, he turned around, got back in the river, swam across to the other side, to the spot where he had left his clothes. But his clothes weren’t there. He looked all around, and his clothes were nowhere to be seen. 

Just then, a kindly beggar came by. The king stopped him and told him his story, and the beggar gladly offered the king the clothes that he was wearing. The king gratefully accepted them, put them on, and made his way back to his castle. But when he reached the castle gates, he found that he could not enter. He wasn’t allowed in because no beggars were allowed in the castle. 

“But I’m the king,” he said. All of the servants laughed, how could a beggar be king? Well, the king insisted and his children were summoned, and then his ministers were summoned, and all of them looked at the man, but none of them recognized the king. So, he was turned away and he had to wander the countryside as a beggar. 

Not long after this, the new king announced that there was going to be a grand ball, a wonderful dance and huge feast, and everyone was welcome. Even the beggars. The king-turned-beggar was very hungry and not knowing what else to do, he appeared at the castle with these huge groups of other beggars. And sure enough, there was a long, long table, full of food, every kind of food, and not only were the beggars being given food, they were also given alms.

The beggar-king remembered the balls and the feasts that he had once given. He began to weep. His weeping was heard by the new king, who immediately summoned him to his side. “Why” he asked the beggar, “are you weeping when there is so much food and festivity around you?” “Oh” said the beggar-king, “I once thought that I was so powerful, and that nothing could be done against me. How arrogant I was. But now I understand, and I will never be the same.”

The new king recognized him and at these words, he took off his royal garments and presented them to the beggar-king. And then poof, on the spot, he vanished. The beggar-king was now recognized as the real king, and he ruled again from his castle. But from that day forward, he was humble and good at heart. 

Humble and good at heart. Makes you wonder about the nature of that bird, doesn’t it? 

The king’s heart and his character are transformed, and goodness prevails. Another one of the messages embedded in our myths and fairy tales. There are so many villains in our old stories. There is so much arrogance and greed and the willingness to be cruel, and yet the villains are either changed or they come to a bad end. Now, is this naive? Is this wishful thinking, or is it true? What do you think when it seems like evil is winning and the bad guys are getting away with it? Is it possible that we haven’t yet reached the end of the story?

Now I said that endings and catastrophes set the stage for renewal and transformation, and that goodness, what is good, survives, and that we can see this in the examples of myths about previous worlds and world ending that have made it to this time. For example, in the Hopi mythology, this is the fourth world, and the other three worlds were destroyed because people forgot what mattered, because they became greedy and divided. Each time the decision was made by the larger powers to destroy the world and start over again. And this happened through things like fire and flood. The good people were offered a way to survive. For example, at the end of one of those earlier worlds, people were taken in by the ant people underground and lived underground with the ants until the world was ready for them to come back up onto the surface. 

Norse mythology begins with the chief god Odin receiving the prophecy that there is going to be a great war called the Ragnarok that will bring about the end of the world of the gods as he has known it, and the mythology involves Odin’s attempts to prevent this from happening. The trickster Loki, who is a very creative and also often malicious figure, plays a role in bringing about the Ragnarok. In many ways, this final war is signaled by the death of Balder, who is good, who is the good and light god. And yet, even in this instance, we are told that when the war ends, the beautiful, green, growing and glowing world re-emerges.

This might take a long time. The patterns and purposes may take a very long time to emerge, take shape, and be understood by us. According to Hindu mythology, for example, the world is made of four main yugas. These are epics or cycles, ages of time. Each one of these yugas is made up of tens of thousands of human years. In Hindu mythology, the universe is completely destroyed and recreated once every 4 billion years or so, and each one of these yugas involves a stage of change. There’s an evolutionary push behind all of this. Four billion years. That’s a long time.

Now, the idea that an ending is also a beginning is fairly easy to see in mythologies built on a cyclical nature of time. But you may be asking yourself, what about the Christian Bible and the Book of Revelation, a myth about the end of the world that hasn’t yet occurred? And what is prophesized there? Lots of people are talking about the end times being near because it appears that some of the signs detailed in the Book of Revelations are taking place. For example, religious deception, false prophets in other words. Pandemics, famine, war, natural disasters. 

There are lots of doomsayers and vindictive people who point to these signs with glee, because they imagine that the end times will be a time of punishment for all of “those people.” And yet, if the Book of Revelations is read as a myth, like other myths, the Book of Revelations describes the point in which everything that has been will pass away in service to a spiritual evolution. There will be the establishment of a new heaven and a new earth. That goodness will prevail.

All of our myths and stories have meant different things to different people at different times. There is more than one interpretation and there is more than one meaning.

You might be wondering what a person can do in response to this mythic perspective and these ideas about this moment in the story that we are living together.

The first thing that I would suggest is to hold this in mind. To cultivate the awareness that we are in the mystery, that we are in something much bigger than what human beings do. I also encourage you to cultivate your inner life and a connection to the symbolic and the synchronistic in your life. To open yourself up to the possibility of guidance from the unexpected and the possibility of surprise, of good surprises.

The reality and truth of the imaginal realms and of the figures that we call gods or fairies or demons has been debated in the dominant culture for centuries and it’s not likely to be resolved anytime soon. If you have difficulty entertaining this idea, maybe this bit from Keats will be helpful. Keats came up with this concept of “negative capability,” which means, in his words, “to be capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without any irritable reaching after facts and reason.” In other words, to stay in a middle ground ,neither believing nor disbelieving. To allow things to be possible rather than dismissing them as impossible.

Another takeaway from the stories and the world that they describe and the way that world works, is to make cultivating community, friendship and family relationships a central priority. As part of your self care, as part of the development of your character, and as part of perpetuating the type of world in which we would all like to live. To put more goodness into the world, to sustain yourself and the world itself.

And along similar lines, to participate. Choose something that is personally meaningful to you and consciously dedicate it to preserving and expanding the good in the world. Maybe this is something brand new that you undertake, or maybe you dedicate a current practice to this goal. If you are currently living your life with a satisfying sense of purpose, consider how the need to preserve and expand the good can be folded into that purpose. And if you have been wanting to step into a different life, if you have been wanting to articulate a personal mission for yourself, see that as part of your vision for the world and go for it.

Finally, I think we must accept that we may not see the changes we desire in our lifetime. That many of us are planting seeds or planting trees for future generations. And so, it’s important to consider, what do we want to pass along? What do we want to leave? Is our legacy one of despair or wisdom? What type of story do we want those who come after us to tell about this time?

I have a poem that I want to share with you that is helping me negotiate some of these themes and in particular, this notion of time and legacy. But first, I want to stop and give a big welcome to new email subscribers:   Krista, Evelyn, Ellen, Meagan, Juniper, Silvia, Bob, Francesca, and Jane. Welcome to Myth Matters!

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Now, here is the poem that I have been carrying lately. It’s called “The Sycamore” by Wendell Berry.

“The Sycamore”

In the place that is my own place,
whose earth

I am shaped in and must bear, there
is an old tree growing,

A great sycamore that is a wondrous
healer of itself. 

Fences have been tied to it,
nails driven into it, 

Hacks and whittles, cut into it.
the lightning has burned it.

There is no year it has flourished in 
that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it

that is its death, though its living
brims whitely

At the lip of darkness and flows
outward.

Over all its scars has come the
seamless white 

of the bark. It bears the gnarls of
its history 

Healed over. It has risen to a strange
perfection

In the warp and bending of its long
growth.

It has gathered all accidents into its
purpose.

It has become the intention and 
radiance of its dark fate.

It is a fact sublime, mystical and
unassailable.

In all the country There is no other
like it.

I recognize in it a principle, an
indwelling

The same as itself, and greater,
that I would be ruled by. 

I see that it stands in its place, and 
feeds upon it,

And is fed upon, and is native
and maker.

—Wendell Berry
Link to the Berry Center

In her book, When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chödrön writes,” When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test of each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize.” Not concretize. Stay in the realm of possibility. 

If we have a better understanding of our need for myth, and all that our old stories offer, we can live more satisfying lives. We can inhabit a better story and create a more beautiful, just and sustainable world. 

And that’s it for me, Catherine Svehla and Myth Matters. Thank you so much for listening. Take good care of yourself and until next time, keep the mystery in your life alive.