The stories say that if we take only the Road of the Village—the ordained track—we risk perpetuating an infantile grandiosity, firmly anchored to the ego but lacking relationship to the soul, the very relationship the Road of the Forest offers. This is a dangerous situation. The ancestors also say initiation offers a direct, ritualized experience of huge, primeval forces that somehow live both in and near the psyche, what Robert Moore calls “the Great Self,” something numinous and vast, containing more energy than we could ever need. To be far from the Great Self is to lack clarity, to be distant from mystery, to reject discipline, and to lose humor. This self is also archetypal, which means it’s formidable. This Great Self has many names, and lives close to the mysteries.
The business of growing up, of weathering life’s initiations, is to make connection to it rather than any claim of ownership. You could call it finding your mythic ground. It prefers flamboyant failures offered up to the Old Gods as acts of salty beauty rather than mediocre success offered merely to the literal. Its echoes abide in the dark plaits of old Tibetan women, the harsh, barking laughter of a Dagara elder, the stumpy fingers of an Orkney fisherman as he mends his nets. It breaks open in divine silence, the heavy roar of the feasting hall, the first time you protect your child. It is not passive but active, irrational sometimes, interested always. It’s not caught in the addiction for continual excitement but carries its sloshing jewels about, whispering subtle images to the old and magnificent ambitions to the young. It knows that this world belongs to the dead, and that we should hurl true words and displays of grace in their direction every once in awhile.
So, first we need to have an experience of the Great Self, and then we need to develop a relationship with it that doesn’t devour us. I never said it wasn’t dangerous. Initiation is that container, that holding, that makes our meetings holy. This self is the energy that an elder hopes to negotiate and sometimes dance with as they age. It’s a mistake to be too explicit in its description.
Without this regulating process, we are liable to actually avoid contact with the Great Self because we instinctively understand that it is bigger than us and could burn us up. Depression is a great protection against it. If we don’t truly understand it, we are flagellated daily by a sense that our lives could be “something more.” If we encounter it without a container, we are consumed by God-like expectations of what we should achieve with our time.
Culturally we are seeing far more of the infantile than the Great. To meet someone in touch with the Great Self is to witness beauty. Not the beauty of Hollywood, but something leathery, troublesome, and honestly wild. We should not associate this Greatness with worldly stature or obvious charisma. This is not a term of inflation. Finn MacCool, White Buffalo Woman, Valemon the White Bear King, Vaselissa the Beautiful, and even Baba Yaga are all manifestations of the Great Self.
Myth is the greatest cultural vehicle we have for experiencing the living poetry of these characters, and recognizing how in our own lives we move between their energies—The Wolfish Lover, The Maiden of the Flowers, Boys Who Become Swans. What is great has many sides, and the stories show us differing reflections and huge beauty.
The breakdown of initiation and the diminishment of mythic understanding are actually defences against encountering our own beauty. On a societal level, we appear to be working day and night at that defense. But the Great Self is hard-wired in us, and though the ritual mechanisms to approach it are wiped out, it won’t disappear but instead becomes mired in shadow. Therefore a King can only be seen as a tyrant, a Hag only as a bringer of misfortune. We tiptoe away from these beings, far too informed to take them seriously, and then we wonder why we don’t have the energy to vote.
Myth proposes the paradoxical view that we are to dwell in the tension of a “crossroads” of Village and Forest, and that this very complexity provides the grounding of an authentic human life—a strange accord with ego and soul, rationality and vision. Ego gives a shape to these energies for living in the world that benefits others, but with no inner connection they lose their divine inflections and corrupt.
The great initiation rites enact a classic arc of experience to bring us to this crossroads, the motif we find both in ritual and story: Severance/ Threshold/Return.
