The empirical research reveals very important data, while the textual research
provides the depth, colour and subtlety needed to reveal and illustrate, indeed to
prove, the mythopoeic quality that I needed to establish.
My research approach was to some small extent influenced by Bruno
Bettelheim’s idea of Geisteswissenschaften, a hermeneutic-spiritual knowing
(Bettelheim, 1982:41), which attempts to understand the object of its study not as
reflecting a universal law but as a singular event, highly pertinent in the case of
shamanism. This process also seemed appropriate to understand the hermeneutical
process, how particular writers gain their knowledge, how particular readers read
the works of those writers, and whether they project themselves, not just into the
action of the story but especially into the places of the story, as a way of vicariously
living and knowing the life and situations of the protagonists.
I n this chapter the profound implications of the term ‘mythopoeic literature’
are illustrated to reveal a literary genre that provides the writer and reader with an
archetypal narrative, something that surpasses the great universal literary themes
and great ideas of Western civilization. I t is a literary genre that induces the reader
to perceive of existence at a deeper than egoic level of consciousness; a genre that
reveals the numinous background behind daily existence and also of the places and
events where human lives are enacted; a genre that reveals a decentred-self that
resides in the depths of the psyche, yet seems to manifest in the places of our
existence and which insinuates an elsewhere place.
Part I I I , The Narrow Gate: Bridging Two Worlds, functions as a discussion
section, elaborates on much of the research and introduces supplementary material.
This begins with Chapter 6, The Mythopoeic Writer as Shaman, in which I present
the case that mythopoeic writers habitually function in a shaman-like manner. I
believe that there are correspondences between shamanism, events that potentially
constitute or may be seen as a form of initiation into the shamanic vocation, and
many aspects of MLC particularly when examined in the context of Jungian
psychology, with concepts such as archetypes, the collective unconscious and
synchronicity. These will be explicated in the empirical research and substantiated
by reference to the work of scholars in this field.
Chapter 7, The I maginal Realm, makes a clear distinction between any
conceptions of the purely imaginative, which in some instances has a pejorative
connotation, and the I maginal Realm or dimension, the latter being a philosophical
and religious concept that has received attention under various guises by Henry
ron
(Ron)
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