Mythologies of world offer fresh insights

Today, Faye Longo posts "A New Mythology" to urge re-imagination of our world. She refers to Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul in this blog entry that suggests world mythologies may contain valuable insights for today. Longo writes,

"Descartes’ image of the world and everything in it as a machine has helped us dramatically to improve our lives and to evolve at an unbelievable rate. But the bottom line is that those views are dangerous to us now. If we continue living like we have been the world is going to be a very dark place. I can see this already happening everywhere I turn. I see it in the depleting ozone layer, in global warming, and in the crazy rate in which we drain our resources. I see it in the starving nations, the tortured children and animals, and in the dumps and waters overflowing with garbage. Most of all I see it in my own city, community and life. We give up so very much to run efficiently, like good little machines should, but we are NOT machines, our world is NOT a machine, and the beings in it are NOT machines! If we continue to keep this view, to have this be our "image of the world" or our world myth everything will die."

Longo cites a number of writers sympathetic to this view and continues,

"What I am suggesting is that we take another look at those ancient mythologies and the many world mythologies that still exist and, with our current knowledge intact, study them for what they have to offer. Elsa-Brita Titchenell explains this much more clearly in her article "Mythology Today", "If we recognized the never-failing wisdom, thinly veiled in all ancient traditions, the human predicament would be greatly relieved and mankind would be less prone to suffer the delayed effects of its own unwisdom." (1999). And Moore has this to say, "... we could resurrect mythmakers of the past by recovering an appreciation for mythologies from around the world."(1992)

Longo provides references at the end of this post. A number of themes such as suffering children and environmental degradation echo Thomas Moore's recent blog post with Psychology Today, "Therapy for World Politics".