>So in a sense all heroquests are grounded in the mundane world as
this
>IS where they took place. When is more questionable as historical
>events can also be mythical & therefore part of the Godtime as other
>posters so ably argue.
'Where they took place'. You see, temporal based thinking keeps
creeping in. Heroquests and the 'mythic age' did not, of course,
happen in the
past at all. They happened outside time, and so are in fact happening
all around us right now. In fact in some sense _now_ is the _only_
time in which they are ever happening.
Any discussion predicated on the proposition that "Heroquests happened _before_ history" is doomed because how can you have anything 'before' time? This is why you can only do a major quest once - there's not such thing as the first time, second time or last time you perform a myth, they are all the same event. When you appear to do a quest multiple times they're realy just different views of the same thing from different perspectives.
Yet we can see that the world around us appears to the the product of mythic events that shaped them in the past. That's because we're not percieving reality as it truly is, we're only seeing one slice of it. All the myriad aspects of the true world - the material world, underworld, hero planes, otherworlds, god world and ultimate transcendent reality are normaly impercievable to us except in fleeting glimpses. Our experience of the world is as an ongoing process of discovery, but the process and state of conciousness imposes a certain structure on that which we discover. The fact that there seems to be a histrical development of myth is because we explore and discover myth through history, not because the mythic world itself has any historical component.
I suppose what I'm saying is that so long as you talk about myth in terms of it happening 'before' time or in any way in the past, you will always confuse myth with history. It's inevitable because it's implicit in your choice of language. The problem is, we're trapped by the fact that our languages impose this structure on the debate in a way that is almost impossible to avoid. We just need to be aware of that and keep it in mind.
Simon Hibbs
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