Mythical imagination

Primitive mentality is said (Cassirer) not to invent myths but to experience them. They are original and involuntary revelations of the pre-conscious psyche and promote a consciousness of solidarity of all life, a unity of feeling among individuals and a sense of harmony with nature and life as a whole. This primitive, mythical world embodies a unitary energy of the spirit, manifesting as creating gradually an intermediate reality, a realm of the image and of pure imagination which exists on the borderline between wholly subjective (internal) and wholly objective (external) reality. The mythical image is not a representation of something, but replaces that something, it is that something, so that phenomenal and real are fused, every phenomenon becomes an incarnate pure expression not a representation. Reality and appearance cannot be contrasted, reality is fully present in its appearance. If something affects mind, feeling or will then it is a fully objective and undoubted reality, so that being effective is the same as being.

It follows that the mythical mode is not so much a personalization of natural forces and events as objectivizations of intense if fleeting impressions occupying primitive consciousness. There is only a fluid boundary between personal and impersonal, it and thou, everything being interconnected and this very interconnectedness being strangely impersonal. The sense of "I" only emerges gradually and mythical consciousness is never fully lost, so that the original potency of the myth in unifying internal and external, seeing the universe in the particular, continues and asserts itself in the entire field of consciousness. The human spirit has no absolute past. What has passed it gathers into itself and preserves as present.