Carl Jung learns about Myth from Mountain Lake of the Pueblos
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Carl Jung learns about Myth from Mountain Lake of the Pueblos
[Mountain Lake said] “The Americans want to stamp out our religion. Why can they not let us alone? What we do, we do not only for ourselves but for the Americans also. Yes, we do it for the whole world. Everyone benefits by it.”
I could observe from his excitement that he was alluding to some extremely important element of his religion.
I therefore asked him: “You think, then, that what you do in your religion benefits the whole world?” He replied with great animation, “Of course. If we did not do it, what would become of the world?” And with a significant gesture he pointed to the sun.
I felt that we were approaching extremely delicate ground here, verging on the mysteries of the tribe. “After all,” he said, “we are a people who live on the roof of the world; we are the sons of Father Sun, and with our religion we daily help our father to go across the sky. We do this not only for ourselves, but for the whole world. If we were
to cease practicing our religion, in ten years the sun would no longer rise. Then it would be night forever.”
God; there is no “new day” leading to “new shores,” but only the dreariness of calculated processes.
My old Pueblo friend came to mind. He thought that the raison d’être of his pueblo had been to help their father, the sun, to cross the sky each day. I had envied him for the fullness of meaning in that belief, and had been looking about without hope for a myth of my own.
Now I knew what it was, and knew even more: that man is indispensable for the completion of creation; that, in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence – without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through the millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end.
Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being. Carl Jung, Memories Dreams and Reflections, Pages 255-256.
