For me, myth is a way of coming to term with the African-American trauma that allows us to move forward powerfully, without feeling that we're still victims of the past. Mythic wisdom has to change with the times as well. We can't expect that the way wisdom was transmitted even fifty years ago is going to work today. A good example is the Rites of Passage Institute, an educational group that's attempting to find ways to bring rituals reflecting modern-day life to young people, particularly young people in the inner city. To his credit, Joseph Campbell repeatedly emphasized the relevance of myth to our modern lives, and tried to dispense with our modern habit of equating myths with untruths.
Myths are vehicles for transmitting eternal wisdom.
The variables that they deal with are the variables of our unconscious. When you deal with the unconscious, there is no such thing as objective knowledge. But there are regularities within unconscious experience that transcend culture, and myth is very good at capturing those regularities, those patterns of universal experience. And by connecting us to a deeper source, myths help us come to terms with our everyday lives in a more fruitful way. More information about Dr. Ford's work is available at his website .