I was fortunate enough this weekend to soak up a talk on memory, voice and writing by the inspiring and insightful Dennis Patrick Slattery, who I once heard speak, seemingly off the cuff, on Dante’s Inferno for about seven hours straight. (Okay, there was a lunch break in the middle of that one. But still. Seven hours.)
This weekend, Slattery finally defined for me a word I’d rather helplessly watched tossed around during my Master’s studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute: mythopoesis. I believe I was probably in the bathroom or getting a Diet Coke from the vending machine outside when the term was defined, and I never really got around to finding out more about it, though it intrigued me a lot. So it always seemed to me to be a very academic, but also a kind of airy-faery, word. I got the feeling of it — or so I thought — but could never, as they say, use it in a sentence.
I’m still not sure, even after Slattery’s entrancing definition this past Saturday night, that I could use it in a sentence. But it watered more interesting seeds in my mind, anyway, which is almost certainly more important. Myth, he said, comes from the Greek word muthos, which means both story and mouth. Poesis is the act of giving something shape or form. So mythopoesis can be understood as a fancy word for storytelling.
Except there’s something more there. It’s not just fancy-talk. Mythopoesis, I think, is more than storytelling. Maybe storytelling is the first leg of mythopoesis which, it seems to me, lies somewhere on the boundary between speaking and writing. If muthos is mouth and story, which imply verbal speech, but poesis is shape and form, which imply a tangible kind of something — paper and letters, a hand and a pen — then perhaps mythopoesis is the kind of deep truth that can only come of a story that is told and retold until it becomes so etched in memory that it has form in and of itself. The story becomes a living image — voice becomes form — and is released into the world for others to witness, experience, respond.
Astrologically, when we think of words, we think Mercury. When we think of form, we think Saturn. But, too, there is a path to travel — not just the archetypal points in space — the planets — that symbolize words and form, but also the landscape around them, the roadways in our bodies, minds and memories that connect words with form. So, as an exercise in self-discovery, start by seeing how your own instinct for mythopoesis is reflected in your Mercury and Saturn: In which houses and signs do they sit? Are one or both on a cusp? Are they connected somehow — even if indirectly? Are they conjunct any other planets that might impact their character?
Then go a little further. Forget Mercury and Saturn specifically, and try to understand how else your voice takes form in the world. So look: Which planets sit on cusps, especially the ascendant or the midheaven? Are there pathways that connect the lower half or the left half of the chart — those generally more private spheres — with the upper half or the right half, where your public awaits? How do your words travel? What do people hear?
Even deeper, now: Words may be just the end-product of voice because the latter is constantly being generated deep within the psyche. Words are the common symbols that try to describe the deeper ongoing process inside. So look more: Where do you stew? Which planets sit more in the middle third of a house? In fixed houses? Along particularly difficult or particularly complacent aspects? Where does your focus dip down inside of you, and how does it return to the surface? With what does it return?
And then: How do those more internal planets connect with more external ones — the ones on the outer thirds of each house, or the ones on cusps, or the ones to the right or above the horizon? How do you bring the gift of your internal stew out of your throat with your voice, or out of your fingers with a pen? When it emerges — when you poesis your muthos, where does it land? Who hears you? What form does it take?
What response comes back?
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