Where is this "Realm of Myth"? Is it in our minds? The philosopher Sallust defined myth as "That which never was, but always is." It is not, in other words, to be found in the world, in the sense of being bound or trapped by a particular moment in time and space. To reduce Myth down to time and space is the Fallacy of Fundamentalism, just as to dismiss it entirely is the Fallacy of Materialism. So if the realm of Myth is not bound by the physical world, not to be reached primarily through the physical world, then we must find it through the mind- through media such as dreams and imagination, visions and ecstasies. And the things we see in these dreams can be communicated through art, evoking their strange power in the waking world. Reaching up through our minds to the realm of Myth, we bring something of its magic back down with us and incarnate it in a work of art. The work of art then acts as a key, allowing those who can enter into its spirit to soar upward again to the realm of Myth. The Mythorealist artist is a mediator between these two realities, a "priest of the invisible" in the words of Wallace Stevens.
Is the realm of Myth only in the mind? It depends what you mean by that. The boundaries of any individual mind go gray at the edges, and the core elements of Myth seem to be universal. Just as the realm of the mind is a private world behind the realm of the external and physical, might the realm of Myth not be another level beyond that of the mind?
But let us confine ourselves to what is right in front of us. Whether or not the realm of Myth is defined by the mind, the purpose of magical art has always been the same- to access this realm and bring its power into the world. People have been sitting around campfires telling each other amazing stories since the Stone Age. Storytelling will always be popular because it taps into something primal in us- the place inside us from which myths are born. The part of us that believes in magic.1
One of our convictions is that fantasy fiction (and so-called genre fiction in general) should not be seen as an inferior off-shoot of literary fiction, but as one of the main streams of human literature in general, from which literary fiction diverged relatively recently. Humans have been telling stories since before recorded history, and most of the stories that we've been telling can be best described as wonder stories- stories in which the realm of magic and the everyday world are indistinguishable, producing a sense of amazement, inspiration and awe. In the long history of human storytelling it is fantasy that is the mainstream. Realistic fiction about the everyday world, while it is a long-established and noble tradition, is in its infancy by comparison. The very earliest literary novel is said to be the Tale of Genji, approximately a thousand years old. Compare this to the Odyssey at about twenty-eight centuries, or Gilgamesh at more than forty. Those epics represent traditions that were already ancient by the time they were written down, whereas the modern genre of the literary novel is thought to derive more or less directly from the medieval romance, diverging from it in the seventeenth century. Only an arbitrary and unjustified prejudice could maintain the notion that wonder stories are mere "pulp" entertainment, an inferior offshoot of "serious" fiction. Wonder and magic are indeed significant, for "man cannot live by bread alone."
Exactly how significant they really are, however, is not always realized, even by their most staunch defenders. The skeptical materialist considers myths to be lies, while the followers of Jung and Campbell treat mythology as archetype and allegory, either for the core beliefs and understandings of a culture or for the psychological states of the individual. Fundamentalists of all varieties take their own myths as literal fact, dismissing all other myths as nonsense or heresy. The perspective of Mythorealism is very different. Myths are certainly not lies, but they are not facts either. Nor are they merely allegorical of psychological states, whether cultural or individual. They are the manifestations of the fundamental mysteries, great truths expressed in poetic form- those things which are more true than the merely factual. As such they are accessible now, in the "waking world" of mundane reality, and not only in some forgotten past, some distant faraway realm, or in books of ancient mythology. They are accessible, for instance, through art and literature- not in the mediocre and unimaginative epic fantasies, but in those rare and special works evoking mythic resonance, the power of the otherworld shining through in our own. They are accessible, also, through personal gnosis, the direct encounter of the individual with the mythic realm. In recent years there has been a growing tendency, manifesting in a variety of different media, to combine the two- to create works of the imagination in which a person of the modern world, though surrounded by the mundane and the everyday, comes into contact with the mythic. These could be described as Mythorealist works.
Examples include the fiction of Neil Gaiman, Charles de Lint and Clive Barker, the Nightwatch series of books and movies, Pan's Labyrinth and many more. There is also a growing body of work that is consciously and deliberately Mythorealist, including this author's Noctiviganti Saga, and Of Faegild and Other Dreams by Lani Thompson. The creation of any of these Mythorealist epics is about more than simple fantasy, entertainment or escapism. The urge to create myth is a fundamental one, a mystic impulse common to all cultures. In our own culture this takes the form of fiction, but the underlying impulse is not essentially different, whether the myth is presented in a work of fiction or an ancient epic, the statue of a god or a fantastic painting.
To learn more about the work of C.S. Thompson, please visit: http://www.noctiviganti.com/
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