PART I I I
The NARROW GATE: BRIDGI NG TWO WORLDS
Enter by the narrow gate, since the road that leads to perdition is
wide and spacious, and many take it; but it is a narrow gate and a
hard road that leads to life, and only a few find it (Matthew 7:14).The universal symbolism of narrow gates found in the great religions and
mythologies, clearly derives from initiation (entrance), or crossing a threshold, from
life to death but also from death to liberation; gates open the way or passage to
revelation. An appropriate metaphor, since in this part of my dissertation I explore
how the shaman, and the reader and writer of mythopoeic literature might enter
through the narrow gate that symbolises the difficulties of rising to a higher
consciousness to penetrate the membrane that separates place from elsewhere-
place and bridge the abyss that separates the mundane from the transcendent
imaginal world.
The mythopoeic writer and reader and the shaman know that it is difficult,
metaphorically, to pass over the narrow and perilous bridge; to find the door in the
wall where none can be seen, to go up to Heaven by a passage that half opens only
for an instant, to pass between two millstones in constant motion or between two
rocks that may clash together at any moment, or to escape from between the jaws
of a monster. Such potent metaphorical images, popular in contemporary
consciousness through characters such as I ndiana Jones and Superman, express the
necessity of transcending the archetypal pairs of opposites, of abolishing the
polarity that defines the human condition as it struggles to reach the ultimate reality
or Otherness.
To discover the hermeneutic key to understanding the way in which
mythopoeic literature influences the psyche of both mythopoeic writer and reader
requires explanation through an extended discussion of all of the material thus far
presented; a discussion that will frequently challenge some of the more sacrosanct
tenets of the Western materialist and scientific worldview.