Mythic Perspective

🌀🌟To the mythic perspective the world appears personified, implying a passionate engagement with it. We do not ask: "Are things alive or dead?" or "Are Gods real or are they symbolic projections?" Questions of this sort “may be thought illegitimate," says the most psychological of all classicists, E. R. Dodds, “so long as myth-making is a living mode
of thought to confront it with this sort of brutal either-or' is to force upon it a choice which destroys its being. Mythic consciousness answers with Cassirer: "There is nowhere an 'it' as a dead object, a mere thing.'* Subject and object, man and Gods, I and Thou, are not apart and isolated each with a different sort of being, one living or real, the
other dead or imaginary. The world and the Gods are dead or alive according to the condition of our souls. A world view that perceives a dead world or declares the Gods to be symbolic projections derives from a perceiving subject who no longer experiences in a personified way, who has lost his ‘immagine del cuor.’ 

To rekindle this life we start with soul, reimagining its internal processes anthropomorphically.This leads to the ultimate conclusion that we do not actually per sonify at all. Mythical consciousness is a mode of being in the world that brings with it imaginal persons. They are given with the imagination and are its data. Where imagination reigns, personifying happens. We experience it nightly, spontaneously, in dreams. Just as we do not create our dreams, but they happen to us, so we do not invent the persons of myth and religion; they, too, happen to us. The persons present themselves as existing prior to any effort of ours to personify. To mythic consciousness, the persons of the imagination are real. The late German classical scholar who had the deepest insight into the nature of mythical persons, Walter F. Otto, made this same point in an attack against his rationalist and reductive colleagues:

~There is no such thing as personification, only a depersonification--just as there is no mythologizing (in the authentic sense) only a demythologizing. Schelling said that the question how did man ever come to God is senseless; there is only the question, how did man ever come away from God. So-called abstract concepts and words would never have been raised into the personal had they not been from the very beginning personal, that is, divine forms."

James Hillman , Revisionimg psychology pg.16-17