back to participation mystique] that is at the core of human existence. The
importance of the experience of the place-elsewhere place continuum is that it so
clearly portrays the coincidentia oppositorium, the conjunction of opposites that are
brought into human consciousness; a truth that must lie at the core of an existential
transpersonal model of human existence. Perhaps the most mythopoeic way to
express this is that there is another place, and it is hidden in this one and, ironically,
to pierce the membrane, we must look inward.
(f) Mythopoeic Literature as Shaman’s Drum
People are, in their most profound aspect, creatures of poetry.
They like to make up stories out of the deep metaphors of
existence. These metaphors are a part of our physical
environment and resist all our attempts to make them rational.
They are bridges to the irrational, that well of supra-sensibility that
we go to at times when we experience thirst (Cowan, 1989:9).Each of the mythopoeic texts cited in this dissertation was approached as a
psycho-spiritual document, a symbolic record of intense inner experiences. Each
one satisfies the requirements for the criteria of a literary work emerging from MLC
because the contents of the fictive literary creation are beyond the purview of the
individual psyche of the mythopoeic writer and reader. The research has
demonstrated that rather than being an expression of the mythopoeic writer and
readers’ personal psychic content, mythopoeic documents constitute a self-
realization of the transpersonal objective psyche, the mythic other with which the
de-centred self seeks reconciliation. Mythopoeic narratives constitute a nekyia, an
account of a descent into the darkness of the otherworld, in a quest for the
archetypal Self. Mythopoeic narratives are a profound expression of encounter with
the collective unconscious and underscore the correspondence between the internal
tension from which mythopoeic literature emerges and the hidden complexities
within the readers as well.
Excluding the Shaman-Rebbe, all of the respondents in the research stated
that they were not conventionally religious and thus in a Jungian sense, having
withdrawn such religious projections, their inner world becomes immensely
enriched. This is a necessary precondition for the emergence of psychological
content because having no conventional religious projections, they are more
predisposed to discovering the transpersonal contents of their own unconscious.