For well over go percent of the time that our species has lived on this Planet, we have thought and lived by myth. Yet we know and care less about this long and formative period of time than about any other, probably because of our chronological snobbery. The word myth means story . Myths are moving pictures that arise from the imagination, that great, creative, unconscious well of wisdom within us that psychologists are just beginning to explore in this century. These stories and images that bubble up in myths still move us profoundly on the unconscious level, especially in art, most especially in the cinema, that great waking dream-machine.
Myth is immediate and spontaneous.
It has beauty but not truth, except the truth of beauty itself. It may sound profound to say with Keats that beauty is truth, truth beauty , but it is really confusion. To say this is no disrespect for beauty, which is one of God's three great prophets in the human soul, the other two being goodness and truth. Myth does not ask for or give either reasons or laws. It neither questions nor commands.