Thus, in MLC, the boundaries between subject and object, self and other,
character and place, break down as in SC. What is interesting too, is that the
narratives of mythopoeic literature often resemble shamanic narratives in that they
describe a quest, wanderings, genealogies, miraculous births, deaths and
resurrections, revenge and deception (Burkert, 1996:69). Consequently, as my
empirical research revealed, writing and reading in a state of MLC takes both the
reader and the writer to a heightened level of consciousness where non-duality is
experienced. I n other words the de-centred self, emerging out of normal
consciousness, becomes unified in the place of the book, an elsewhere-place, a
return to a type of participation mystique, which, in turn, probably indicates activity
in the psychoid dimension, achieved or brought about by a type of synchronicity.
This was confirmed in the research responses from both mythopoeic readers and
writers. For instance, Reader 1 said that her unconscious was affected and she was
... completely drawn into the world of the writer ... drawn into the world of the book
... the world it presents and the possibilities ... something like a trance, a
transcendence of the real physical space I occupy ... it opens the mind, elevates the
spirit ... a mystical experience. Even Colleen McCullough refers to that state of mind
as a ... brown study.
9.2 Embedded Mythopoeic Literary Consciousness
Jung suggested that there is an archaic man in each of us (Jung, CW 9(i),
par. 105), thus, the primordial, mythic soul is operative and influential in our
psyches and its mythopoeic imperative needs to find expression in a narrative form.
Regarding this connection between the soul and its propensity to give narrative
expression to its mythic dimension, Jung wrote:
The fact that myths are first and foremost psychic phenomena
that reveal the nature of the soul ... Primitive man is not much
interested in objective explanations of the obvious, but he has an
imperative need – or rather, his unconscious psyche has an
irresistible urge – to assimilate all outer sense experience to inner,
psyche events .... All the mythologized processes of nature, such
as summer and winter, the phases of the moon, the rainy seasons,
and so forth, are in no sense allegories of these objective
occurrences; rather they are symbolic expressions of the inner,
unconscious drama of the psyche which becomes accessible to
man’s consciousness by way of projection (Jung, CW 9(i), par. 7).