Strange Cultures Offer Common Mythic Truths

Recently, I read three books about worlds outside my cultural experience: The Round House by Louise Erdrich, a novel with a Native American cast of characters; King Peggy by Peggielene Bartels and Eleanor Herman, the story of an American secretary made "king"  in Ghana; and Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, describing the Chicano world of his childhood. It was sometimes a struggle to relate to the mythical devices in these books, from a female buffalo savior in The Round House, to stools imbued by spirits in King Peggy, to a giant gold carp-king in Bless Me, Ultima. The alien symbols and cultural assumptions initially seemed just dashes of authentic "color" and quaint folklore; it took effort to find the deeper spiritual meanings. It required abandoning the metaphors of a 21st century white American for the universal poetry of myth. Joseph Campbell, the famed mythologist, once likened myths to a kangaroo pouch for the human mind and spirit, a sort of "womb with a view." So how do you jump from your own cozy pouch into a strange one? It's not always a comfortable or easy leap. But I have found that the reward of a different view is worth it. “Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found....Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience,” Campbell wrote, and thus myth "goes past your mind and into your very being, into your very gut." When we can connect with that essential human experience--ignoring its setting in a strange place, its expression in a strange language and its conflict with our own accepted myths--we can learn something valuable about being human, about ourselves, which is the ultimate reward for a reader. For a quick introduction to Campbell on myth, see the interview http://www.context.org/iclib/ic12/campbell/