Rising Myths --by Jean Houston, Ph.D

September 1997

Princess Diana's death, and that of Mother Teresa's following hard upon it, has given rise to a maelstrom of words, opinions, accusations, speculations, questions and ponderous pronouncements that must by now have depleted whole forests, and glued entire nations to television sets, radios, telephones and computers. The only people at work in this country must be those in the broadcast and print media; everybody else is talking, arguing, chatting, gossiping, wondering, protesting and pontificating. And not just over the airwaves. Face to face in kitchens, living rooms, coffee houses, workplaces. We are all trying to explain what happened. Not just to the princess and the saint, but to ourselves.

We seem to be watching -- and in large part helping to create-- a new feminine myth. Surely, if that's what's happening, this is the first time such a thing has occurred on such a scale in a thousand years or more. In the past it happened over decades, or centuries. This one, like the river of candles and flowers that are its substance, shifts and breaks and flows again every moment. So it deserves intelligent attention, because myths exist in order to illumine our lives and our future.

The new patterns are not easy to discern, for several reasons. One: we're living in it, a mythic river flowing with flowers, tears and lit candles; pulling out long enough to assess the river seems all but impossible. Two, our information is coming through the media, and therefore suspect in these days when so few people trust what they read, hear or see. So we can't know if what this pundit or that media guru declares is accurate or true. But their sources can't fully be trusted either: the spotlight shines so fiercely on those who hold different aspects of the story. Historically and factually this is maddening, but these are the very qualities required for a myth-- fluid, uncertain, impossible to pin down.

A third reason that trying to define this story as a new feminine myth is because so many tendrils of old stories came together in the events leading to the deaths in Paris and in Calcutta; perhaps this is merely a new telling of an ancient tale.

But it has certainly struck the new woman with enormous poignancy, carrying as it does not only remnants of fairy tales but also, more deeply, the myths and mysteries surrounding the beautiful goddesses who go or are pulled into the land of the dead. The flower-loving Persephone who is carried into darkness at the end of each summer's harvest, and mourned with a blighting vengeance by her mother the Earth Goddess, Demeter, until she rises again in the spring. Exquisite Psyche, tormented by her mother-in-law, the jealous goddess of love, Aphrodite, willing to go into the underworld in hopes of regaining her beloved Eros. Sumerian Inanna, Babylonian Ishtar, stripped of all their elegant regalia, enter the realm of the dead and themselves die, to rise again after three days. These are a few of the tendrils.

The princess carried the name of the goddess Diana, as her brother reminded us in his eulogy. Diana is goddess of the moon, known to us in three aspects, maiden (new moon) mother (full moon) and crone (waning or dark moon). We live with images of the human Diana, as she changed from shy maiden to fiercely loving mother; most of us knew Mother Teresa only as she aged, as she became the crone. There is a particularly beautiful time of the month when the new moon has just been born and the dark moon is also visible. "Look," says the poet, "the new moon is holding the old moon in her arms." Those pictures of the tall glowing Diana and the wizened tiny Mother Teresa holding on to each other capture some of that moon magic. Between them they embodied the most powerful goddess image that we have. Mother Teresa, no doubt, would feel scandalized to be compared to the pagan triple goddess. Certainly she was much more than that; but for those of us who look to myth to help inform our lives, she reverberates with additional stories, besides the Christianity she so exquisitely represented. Mother Teresa, bride of Christ, began her service to the dead and dying in a building next to the temple of the Mother Goddess of Calcutta, Kali, mistress of life and death, creation and destruction, and herself consort to the Hindu god who embodied the Life Force.

People, primarily men, tell us that the Diana myth is a creation of the media. That as soon as they quit talking and writing about her it will die. That she isn't worthy of this adulation. She was just a woman, and she never had to work a day in her life and she was pampered and spoiled, and made mistakes and whined in public and spent thousands on her clothes, and so on and on. But when myth begins to roil within us, look out! Worthiness by old standards is irrelevant. Foibles, character defects, humanness don't hurt; in fact they add to the deliciousness of the story. What matters is a mystery and no one will ever be able to plumb its depths fully. When we are in a myth we are in part in the unconscious and the collective unconscious at that. Rules that are important at all other levels, including the spiritual, do not apply here.

As for the thought that the media has created this one, that gives us a real frisson. We are learning how myth must always have been a creation of the hectic, harried, yet desirous union of readers, watchers, listeners with their chosen beloved, mediated by the ones who served that union. Priests, scribes, storytellers, bards -- reporters. How do we know the ancient stories except by the accounts we have of them? They may have no more to do with factual truth that most news stories; they may have more misquotations, miscalculations, sheer bitchiness and cruelty under the guise of cleverness and rationality than can be found in any issue of any current national magazine. They may have left out much more than they told. And what they left out may be more important than what they wrote. They may be self-serving in the extreme. They may even have been written because the author wanted to make money, and sold only because the poor benighted public was hungry for just such tawdry stuff. May be. But this period after Diana's death has provided, in fast forward time, just the process which fascinates those of us who love myths. How they are created; how they create themselves. And as Claude Levi-Strauss told us many years ago, the myth is not just the basic story, it is every comment on it, every opinion, every disagreement, every disparagement, every glorification. Every retelling.

It's up to us, who read the stories and myths to try to relate them to the vital human activity that they may be the "front" for. As it's up to us to discern the myth that Diana and Teresa are telling us. That we are starved for images of beauty, elegance, of caring, touching, loving; starved for emotion, for vulnerability, for openness to truth. These images in their cumulative affect create a tidal wave of our own desire to express gratitude and love. Yes, but there is more.

Mother Teresa, in her uncompromising faith in God and love for Jesus, after a life of passionate devotion, is no doubt exactly where she expected to be at her death. We will sing her praises and hope to carry on her spirit. It is a wonder to have lived at the same time as she did. But she died within a given, a known world. No surprises there. Only the timing, the world-famous mother of many homeless and destitute children joining in death the world-famous young mother of princes, tells us to notice: Something mythic is going on in the realm of the feminine!

Princess Diana went into that tunnel passage to death, on the Cours la Reine (the Queen's Road) beneath the Place de L'Alma (Place of the Soul) as a woman like the moon, resplendently beautiful, changeable, sometimes shadowed by clouds, but willing to shine light in places many of us are afraid to go; she went in accompanied by three men who should have been her guardians, for she still needed guardians; she went in, as other women have reflected ruefully, as a princess and a passenger, therefore still dependent; she went in flight from those who wanted to sell a piece of her; she went in at an explosive speed. That passage into the tunnel became the scene of a shocking tragedy.

But the mythic story is not only about who she was going into that tunnel; it's who has emerged from that tunnel of death and rebirth to join the feminine stories in our souls. That Diana, with her friend the Great Mother Teresa, have taken up residence in our mythic imaginations, and if we allow them, can shine brightly from within us, providing more care and greater love to this most precious planet and all its inhabitants.