animates a site or locale. That same vital animating principle, acting on the level of
consciousness of the individual or group, might also constellate aspects of the
place-elsewhere-place archetype to reveal not only its own primordial, archaic and
imaginal dimensions but also the boundaries of the soul. Amongst those who seem
most adroit at perceiving place as sentient and responsive, as capable of being
intimately and intensely known, is the shaman, the progenitor of the mythopoeic
writer; the psychopomp between ordinary reality and the transpersonal realms;
between place and elsewhere-place.
Shamanism dates back to the emergence of Homo sapiens and is one of the
oldest forms of mystical-religious life but it also reveals a time when the roles of the
poet-storyteller and the shaman were indistinguishable (Tolstoy, 1985:229). The
shaman-poet-priest was revered as the keeper of the soul of a people, and their
stories and chants, literally spells, were perceived as divine revelations (Tolstoy,
1985:236). For that reason, I want to determine if MLC as an influence on the
mythopoeic writer and the reader can facilitate access to the same dimension as
that facilitated by SC; and whether archetypes, as identified by Carl Jung, are
involved.
Myths, folk tales, poetry, and mythopoeic literature, contain patterns of
human experience that provide insights into the dimensions of our everyday lives.
The question of the relationship of the unconscious to the mythopoeic and to daily
life has long been the subject of much conjecture. From the strange images of
ancient cave paintings to the modernist predilection for the surreal in literature, the
mythopoeic has provided a means by which humanity has been able to explore and
represent that which is usually hidden from us yet which plays such a central role in
who and what we are. A deeper understanding of the mythopoeic or spiritual
aspect of such literature was provided when Carl Jung articulated a model of the
psyche that revealed a transcendent dimension that linked human behaviour and
motivation with mythic literature and the arts. Jung wrote:
I n myths and fairy tales, as in dreams, the psyche tells its own
story, and the interplay of the archetypes is revealed in its natural
setting as formation, transformation, the eternal Mind’s eternal
recreation (Jung, CW 9, par. 400),
and,
The human psyche is the womb of all the arts and sciences (Jung,
CW 15, par. 133).
One of the tasks of this thesis is to examine the nature of place and the
significance of its relationship to the imagination, indeed, to the human psyche.