For 16 years, I worked in global justice and human rights, I’m still involved as a volunteer on the board of an Irish civil society organisation. And so, I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating the idea of human “progress” and “development”. I even ended up doing a masters in the ‘anthropology of development’ to peek beneath the rug or indeed, pull the rug from under myself with all of the lies I had learned from our overculture in the name of progress.

I share this because it’s relevant to how we perceive our ancestors and our mythical heritage.

Of course, development brings its benefits but when understood only as progress in one direction, it becomes a systemic lie, one which we all seem to have to work towards at the expense of our mental health, our bodies, and life around us.

Development is essentially a Western notion that has no equivalent in many languages. It is not natural or universalistic and does not appear in all cultures. In ways, it is a practice by which the existence and destinies of non-conforming Western societies are formed through Eurocentric ways of imagining and perceiving the world.

This impression of development creates a false polarity between the traditional and the modern whereby the modern is glorified as the universal goal and any deviation is relegated to the primitive, of being stuck in the past.

A culture’s mythology is often located within the traditional sphere. And where you have an othering of the mythic or folkloric beliefs of a peoples like in Ireland under colonial rule, the obsession with modernisation can intensify because we have to be seen to be progressing, to be rational, to be intellectual, to lose our “backwardness”. It’s a survival tactic.

A consequence of this is that our mythology loses its power, and we fall out of our enchantment with the world.

So why am I sharing this today?

Well because, I want you to know that mythology can be a form of resistance against the fallacies of our overculture. Indeed, this is one of the roles I believe it is now meant to serve. Mythology isn’t simply a wander through traditional fantasy, nor is it static or meant to remain in the past, it is meant to evolve and it is essential to our times. As Jung once said,

‘Enchantment is the oldest form of medicine’.

Mythology is a gateway to enchantment. It doesn’t need to kill itself worrying about progress because mythology is timeless just like your soul is. And like your soul, it is also called to be in service to the times we are born into.

So as you begin another week, another day, another hour, another minute, remember that your soul is timeless and by being on this path, you are breathing life back into our mythology. You, my love, are a mythical disrupter.