campbell

The unconscious sends all kinds of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind-- whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity; for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves. There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the convenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into our lives. And they remain unsuspected, or, on the other hand, some chance word, the smell of a landscape, the taste of a cup of tea, or the glance of an eye may touch a magic spring, and then dangerous messengers being to appear in the brain. These are dangerous because they threaten the fabric of the security into which we have built ourselves and our family, But they are fiendishly fascinating too, for they carry keys that open the whole realm of the desired and feared adventure of the discovery of the self. Destruction of the world that we have built and in which we live, and of ourselves within it; but then a wonderful reconstruction, of the bolder, cleaner, more spacious, and fully human life-- that is the lure, the promise and terror, of these disturbing night visitants from the mythological realm that we carry within. 

Within the soul, within the body social, there must be-- if we are experience long survival- a continuous "recurrence of birth" to nullify the unremittering recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is  snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified-- and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn. 

It is the business of myth and fairy tales to REVEAL the SPECIFIC DANGERS AND TECHNIQUES OF THE DARK INTERIOR way from tragedy to comedy. Hence the incidents are "unreal": they represent the psychological, not physical, triumphs. Not in lifelike, but of dreamlike figurations: for the point is not that such-and-such could be done on earth, the point is that, before such-and-such could be done on this earth, this other, more important, primary thing had to be done on earth, this other, more important, primary thing had to be brought to pass within the labyrinth that we all know and visit in our dreams, The passage of the myth hero may be over-ground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward-- into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers revivified, to be available for the transfiguration of the world. The deed accomplished, life no longer suffers hopelessly...