in all categories, revealed a certain quirkiness that in spite of the futility in
attempting to define what the term ‘normal’ means, might still be considered a little
more unconventional than average. For example, David Malouf shares with Colleen
McCullough an intense distaste for computers instead preferring to use typewriters
whilst Tom Keneally is an extraordinary didact. The shamans too, displayed unusual
idiosyncrasies; one is dyslexic and the other unapologetically displaying intense
mood swings. Each of the readers, also, were a little unconventional, quirky;
Reader 1 was in her youth an extraordinarily accomplished athlete, is educated but
presents with a certain confronting earthiness in her language, Reader 2 is a cat-
lover and displays feline photographs, images everywhere and on everything,
Reader 3 loves, intensely, children’s nursery rhymes, Reader 4 suffered a very near-
fatal snake-bite, followed by months of extreme, unpleasant and uncontrollable
mood swings and Reader 5 is a polyglot and world traveller.
9.4 The Mythic Dimension
Myth is sometimes popularly dismissed as a fantasy or at best an antiquated
way of presenting a moral or analogical point but not embodying a truth that should
stir the hearer or reader to their very soul. However, interpreted with discretion and
used in conjunction with archaeological evidence, mythology can well provide keys
to understanding our own origins. Joseph Campbell, who during his lifetime was
considered the world’s foremost authority of mythology, claimed that:
... mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical.
I t has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth –
penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. I t is
beyond words, beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the
Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond
that rim, to what can be known but not told. So this is the
penultimate truth (Campbell, 1988:163).
Myth also shows the way ideas become embedded in the collective
consciousness; for example, we frequently use the metaphor of Achilles heel to
describe an inherent weakness in a person. This of course comes down to us
through the myth that describes Paris shooting Achilles in the heel with an arrow,
thus destroying him. I t becomes even more interesting when we consider that the
Hindu god Krishna suffered a similar fate, that the Egyptian God Ra was bitten on
the heel by a snake, that the god Osiris was likewise afflicted and that the Greek
smith Hephaestus was made permanently lame, along with Oedipus, which means