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Dreaming Mothers of God
Reflecting on Hermes allows us to appreciate the kind of intelligence that operates through association, analogy, and intuition. Metis loves repetition and delicate shading; it would rather accumulate than analyze — and this is what makes myths enjoyable. The mythic thought of Hermes — and all the Goddesses with metis — was just as valid to the ancient Greeks as Apollo’s reason.
Unfortunately, since the Logos concluded that the world is rational and that human reason reflects it perfectly, we’ve lost touch with mythic thought. We suspect, however, that the world is too complex and too profound to be explained by human reason alone, that the universe cannot be contained in an Apollonian formula, that a universe with contradictions is not necessarily an absurd one. Mythic thought suggests that the world is complex, not that it is confused. The ambiguity of myth resembles the ambiguity of dreams; both bring multiple meanings to awareness. Their significance cannot be plumbed in a single interpretation, however intelligent it may be, and thus dream and myth reflect more of the world’s deepest reality than, for example, a theorem, which is useful when a single value is sought. To put an end to structuralist monomania, we must stop treating myth only as a mathematical statement and learn to treat it like a dream, or a painting, or a person.
