The purpose of myth is to energise the world of everyday affairs by providing direct experience of the transcendent. For such an experience to be possible, myth must be transparent to the transcendent. In time, however, any myth will almost inevitably be appropriated by its operators (such as the Jedi, for example). In this process myth will change connotation which points towards the transcendent into denotation which points towards facts. As a result it will be taken as history and consequently lose its presence in the here and now, history being something one can talk about but not sensibly experience, since it is an account of past facts.

Such an ossified, opaque myth will need to be re-made if it is ever to serve as a source of energy again. That is the task of the mythmaker or the hero.

In mythogeneric times of great antiquity the mythmaker would have been, most probably, the shaman, the priest or anyone with immediate – that is to say, unmediated – experience of the mystery and the ability to render his experience sensible to others (rendering sensible is not the same as interpreting; it could almost be said to be the opposite of interpreting). This process is only activated when a human group encounters genuinely new phenomena. In our day and age, Joseph Campbell argues, it is impossible for any separate cultural group to experience such an encounter. In this situation, the individual emerges as the only fertile mythogeneric ground remaining today, since an individual’s experience is always new, however similar it may be to the experience of his neighbours.

The transcendent cannot be bound by the field of space-time. Any direct experience of it, therefore, has the quality of an arrest (the removal of the field means absence of motion) wherein syzygy – cancellation of opposites – takes place. Whatever the phenomenon exciting the individual to the point where such an arrest can occur may be, however, it will be beheld within the categories of the space-time field. Experiences within those categories, Campbell points out, are what “Kant calls ‘the aesthetic forms of sensibility’ (Creative Mythology).” Any arrest they cause will therefore be an aesthetic arrest and any attempt to communicate what has arisen from the experience will be aesthetically in-formed. It will be a work of art.

Subjective in nature though it may be, such a work of art would shock its audience with the immediacy and the power of a live wire as long as it remained transparent to the transcendent. A product of its maker’s direct personal experience, it would lead the audience to their own.

Thus it is obvious, Campbell concludes, that in our global culture only the artist can be mythmaker.

The images above illustrate well the concept of artistic mythmaking. The aesthetic unit we know as ‘Don Quijote’ was so impeccably in-formed by its creator, Miguel Cervantes, that its identity remains as unquestionable as that of a tree, a mountain or any living human being. As such, it has power to provoke an artistic response much as a living person or a landscape would do. As we can see, responses by individual artists will have much in common with each other: such is the existential quasi-objectivity of Cervantes’ original.

As Don Quijote, so Darth Vader.