The Myth & the Body
I recently completed the “The Mythic Body” retreat led by my teacher, Colleena Shakti, and many questions have been swirling in my mind ever since I began reflecting on this experience. One in particular stands out as fundamental: what is myth? I’ve already addressed the topic of the “body” in my previous blog post, and now I’m here to examine myth through the lens of the body.
In the Western world, when we think of the term “myth,” Greek mythology immediately comes to mind, along with the concept of “fiction” or, at the very least, the transposition of reality into the world of gods and heroes as presented to us by Homer, Hesiod, and other tragic poets.
In many other, more “tribal” cultures, myth was (and in some cases still is) a living entity that often serves as the foundation of religious life.
Take, for example, complex religions such as those of the Middle and Far East or of India, which cannot be fully understood without studying their myths. In these cases, mythology not only represents the tribe’s “sacred” history—along with the entire value system upon which it is based—but also reveals a hierarchy in the sequence of the legendary events it narrates. This is to say that, as a common denominator, in reality all myths—whether “archaic” or “historical”—there is always a myth of the beginning, of creation, or of cosmogony. These myths tell of how the world, plants, and animals came into being, and of how humans became what they are: mortal, sexual beings compelled to work to feed themselves. They also tell of supernatural beings—the gods and heroes—who made all of this possible. Myth, therefore, is a true story that recounts how reality came into being and serves as an exemplary model and justification for human activities.
I’ll return now o my experience during the “The Mythic Body” retreat, where I interpreted the myth of Apollo and Daphne through dance. I won’t dwell on the details of the myth (I recommend reading Ovid’s original text from *Metamorphoses*); rather, I’d like to share the thoughts that came to me at the end of this journey. These are thoughts that raise questions, especially regarding the body that lives the myth of its own existence and must come into a neutral state, entering that liminal space before becoming the myth itself. It’s a sort of possession in which the characters of the myth—after I’ve carefully studied them—enter me and use my body to tell a story through the language of what we think are their emotions, but which perhaps also draw upon the myth of our own lives…
What is this body, if not a vessel in which to unfold the myth of our own existence? And maybe the existence is where a neutral space silently begins, where we deliberately become actors in one emotion or another, inhabiting roles and creating scenarios that make us feel both safe and alive.
The neutral space thus becomes the emptiness created by the complete release of latent emotions—a space that welcomes the new, organically and consciously, before crystallizing once again into another fragment of the myth of our own existence.
Within this endless cycle, our desire to inhabit life unfolds, suspended between one deep breath and the next, among heroes and heroines who make their way through the worlds to be seen and remembered—and perhaps told of by future generations as they gather around the hearth fire on a cold winter’s night—as part of the mystery of the entire cosmic creation...
Find below the link to my dancing myth!
With Love,
Tania
To my account, mythology is essentially the human psyche’s original mirror, a collective dream translated into story so we can navigate our own inner landscape and learn to understand it with its underlying mysteries.