Ep. 506 - We Relate Through Stories

Living Myth

This episode explores how storytelling serves as the fundamental mechanism for human relationship and connection. Michael Mead discusses how

Key takeaways

• The word 'relate' stems from the Latin 'relatare', meaning to carry back or report.
• Ancient Egyptian myths link the origin of paper (papyrus) to the primordial mound rising from the waters of Nun.

Main topics

• Etymology of Relating
• Ancient Egyptian Creation Myths

Notable quotes

Through mythic stories, we learn to relate to the deepest parts of the ourselves.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a profound reminder that reconnecting with our i

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:09) Welcome to the Living Myth Podcast with Michael Mead, where this shifting, changing world is looked at from a mythic perspective. This episode focuses on the idea that sharing stories is at the heart of any relationship. The word relate comes from Latin roots meaning to carry back, to report, to tell. From ancient times, humans have related by carrying stories back to each other. Through mythic stories, we learn to relate to the deepest parts of ourselves while also reconnecting to the realm of great imagination and universal truths. If we forget our connection to mythic stories, we can lose essential understandings of how the world renews itself and how we can be agents of creation ongoing. Speaker 1 (1:11) The word relate comes from the Latin relatare, meaning to carry back, to recount, to report, to tell. Humans relate through telling stories. We do it naturally, as it is in our nature to shape our experiences and our hopes and dreams into tales that we carry back to those that we relate to. We bring back the story of what happened to us during the day. We share it with whoever we try to be in relationship with. And in that sense, relationships are built upon the continual sharing of stories. When we stop bringing back and sharing the stories of what happens to us, we lose the essence of our relationships. Mythic tales are a particular kind of stories that can help us make sense of our own stories and help us make meaning out of our lived experiences. Mythic tales release us from the prison of time and carry us back past invisible thresholds to the timeless realms. Through mythic stories, we relate to the deepest parts of ourselves, and we reconnect to the other world of great imagination and universal truths. In these deeply troubled and increasingly divided times, we need stories that can bridge distances and carry us back to the origins of life, back to the beginning, when all the potentials of life were present. Mythic stories are intended to help us awaken to the meaning of our own lives and keep us related to how creation wants to continue and partially through the unfolding of our own inner stories. When we see ourselves mostly as related to the modern world, we tend to imagine things in terms of history, and we tend to feel ourselves to be at the front edge of time marching on. In the modern world, if you ask where something comes from, you will likely learn the history of its making and its current value in the marketplace of life. People in ancient times, by contrast, often felt connected to things that were timeless and felt aligned more with cosmic rhythms rather than the issues of the current moment. Ancient peoples often tried to stay in relationship to the origins of life, and they did it by telling stories of how it all began and how it might begin again. In having a relationship to how everything began, people were able to have more of an understanding of how each moment and each period of life was always on the verge of revealing inner meanings. Speaker 1 (4:32) In the ancient world, for instance, seeking for the origins of paper might lead all the way back to the beginning, back to the time before history even began. The prevailing idea was that everything had to have been there from the beginning. Even something as thin as a sheet of paper could be traced all the way back to the time of creation and the beginning of life on earth. In that old way of thinking, everything was connected to the origins and each word was also a story that could be unfolded to reveal relationships that otherwise are hidden. The word paper comes from the Greek word papyrus, but the story of paper derives from what in ancient Egyptian myth was called the first occasion, the onset of creation. that occasion which made all other occasions and all subsequent events and all histories possible began when nothing could be seen except the endless darkness of the primordial ocean called none nothing could be seen and yet everything was there hidden and concealed in the darkness of the great ocean of none Then a mound of earth rose from the noneness or the nothingness of none, and that pyramid-shaped hill was the first sign of what we call the world. It was the beginning of the earth, and its shape would be repeated in the form of temples and pyramids, some of which still stand on some of the ancient land. and from the mound that had first risen from the dark waters of nun there soon rose the sun which began to reveal the light and the heavens above the earth which had also been concealed As the revelations of that first occasion continued, life began to spring forth at the edges of the primordial hill. Reeds rose from the unseen depths and dark waters of nothing and none as nature began to express itself in living forms that would multiply and expand from the roots of the unseen. Because those reeds first appeared at the edge formed by the primal waters that secretly harbored life and the original mound of earth that gave birth to the heavens, they were considered to be connected to the roots of being and the unseen source of all of creation. As primal kernels of creation, the seeds of those plants represented the ever-renewable essence of life itself. And much later, when all the expressions of nature have been articulated, human beings entered the story. When the first people came along, it was those papyrus plants that provided them