Mythology is a dramatization of a series of images that formulate the life of the archetypes. The statements of every religion, of many poets, and so on, are statements about the inner mythological process, which is a necessity because man is not complete if he is not conscious of that aspect of things.
A man without mythology is merely a product of statistics, as it,were, an average phenomenon. Our natural science makes everything into an average, reduces everything to an average, while the truth is that the carriers of life are individuals,not average numbers. And of course, all the individual qualities are wiped out, and that is most unbecoming. It is unhygienic. It deprives people of their specific values, of the most important experiences of their life, where they experience their own value, the creative background of their personality.
The trouble is that nobody understands these things, apparently. It is quite strange that one doesn't see what an education without the humanities is doing to man. He loses connection with his family, as it were, with the whole stem, the tribe—the connection with the past that he lives in, in which man has always lived.
Man has always lived in the myth, and we think we are able to be born today and to live in no myth, without history. That is a disease, absolutely abnormal, because man is not born every day. He is born once in a specific historical setting, with specific historical qualities, and therefore he is only complete when he has a relation to these things.
If you grow up with no connection with the past, it is just as if you were born without eyes and ears. From the standpoint of natural science you need no connection with the past, you can wipe it out, but that is a mutilation of the human being.
- CARL JUNG
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