Mythopoiesis: The Making of Story
What is Mythopoiesis?
Mythopoiesis is a really beautiful way to describe what it's like to die to your old self, come back to life again, and try to tell the story of what happened and changed in the drama of all of that.
What’s no longer true now and what new insights are now hardening into fact.
Exploring myth is a really beautiful way to find out how the ancients described this deeply human process.
When exploring myth as an inner process, it’s a powerful way to see what stories the ancients and ancestors have impressed within you and how those stories have shaped the kind of adult you are today. And to begin to parse and consciously choose now, what stories are useful and which are not.
Mythopoiesis is an act of regenesis. It’s redemption and forgiveness and the willingness to explore a new way. It’s gritty, soul-enlivening work. It’s not pretty or clean or intellectual.
It’s a re-storying of life that grants us the permission to rewrite our script.
The folks who began the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement (Robert Bly and James Hillman) in the 80’s and 90’s read Mythopoiesis and Mythopoetics as to “make meaning”, which was so appropriate to those times where post-modern thinking and deconstructions was ever-emerging as a necessary cultural “stripping” of all meaning across all domains of western culture.
However, I prefer the literal greek translation of these two words that make up Mythopoiesis, making the meaning to “make story”.
Mythos (story, construct) and Poiesis (to make or create) literally means to create a new story.
Mythopoiesis is the art of making story.
It calls us to be Weavers not just of the fantastical stories we tell around the fire, but also of the stories we live, breathe, and build.
And I see the sacredness of this word not as an over-intellectualization of deep inner process, but as a mandate to tend to the stories that are living in the body, in the land, and in the cultural zeitgeist and ask, “Is this a narrative that is worth making? Is this story worth breathing to life and into form?”
And this is liminal, gritty work. It’s also alchemical and if we are called to tend to the bones of stories (in whatever dimension), it’s worth learning how to be blazingly careful with how we wield its power.
The world needs more storytellers who are not just telling stories, but tending to them as well.
