When you wake up—still half‑lost in sleep—you shuffle to the kitchen and make a cup of coffee. You pull back the curtain. Sunlight spills in. It’s a tiny ritual you perform every morning without a second thought.
But here’s a question: have you ever noticed that you’re actually starting to re-enacting a host of ancient myths that follow later in the day.
I’m serious.
To begin with, you pull yourself out of sleep, that strange in‑between place where dreams wander off on their own and nothing quite makes sense. As you open your eyes, the room slowly comes back. The contours of things reappear. The world, which completely disappeared for the whole night, quietly takes shape again.
Then you put on your “day self”. The part of you that knows who you are, what day it is, and what needs doing. The dreamy nocturnal part fades into the background, and your thinking mind puts back in gear.
And without really noticing it, you’ve just done something very old.
In ancient Egyptian myth, the sun god Ra rises each morning to bring light and order back into the world. Your version starts when you turn off the alarm. Chaos gives way to form. Darkness gives way to direction. A new day begins — not with a fanfare, but with a sleepy decision to get up.
So you might be thinking, ‘okay, this is a cool parallel… but so what?’
The “so what” is that what happens inside you—the small, intimate world of your feelings—isn’t separate from the big patterns of life at all. Every culture has stories of loss, transformation, and renewal because those movements happen everywhere: in seasons, in ecosystems, in the rise and fall of worlds. And they also happen in us. The microcosm mirrors the macrocosm.
When you feel completely undone—when you grieve the loss of someone you love—it can feel like a descent into an underworld. That inner journey, as personal as it feels, echoes a much larger rhythm. Our ancestors recognized this long ago. They noticed the same patterns playing out in nature and in the soul, and they wove that understanding into myths and rituals.
Those stories are like maps of the inner landscape. They remind us that what’s happening inside us isn’t random or meaningless—it’s part of a cycle that has been lived, named, and remembered many times before. And when you realize that, you’re no longer just stuck inside your own pain. You’re standing at the meeting point of the small world and the great one, able to draw on a deep, ancient wisdom as you find your way through.
You begin to realize that your journey is more epic than you ever gave it credit for. Something shifts when you see this: you’re not just someone enduring a hard moment, you’re a hero in your own right—no less real than any figure from a Greek tragedy.
When you descend into your own underworld, you’re not failing or falling behind. You’re in the middle of the story. You’re shaping it as you go, even if it doesn’t feel graceful or heroic right now. And this moment—this dark, uncertain stretch—isn’t the end. It’s a chapter in motion, a passage between what was and what’s still becoming.
You don’t need to watch Greek drama or read classical epics to appreciate the epic scale of human experience or grasp the depths of the tragic human condition. These grand narratives exist within each of us, playing out in our daily lives. While Greek dramas and epic poems certainly create magnificent spectacles that amplify our sense of awe and pity through their larger-than-life heroes and cosmic stakes, we ordinary people possess all the same essential elements of human dignity and struggle. Our lives contain the same fundamental conflicts, desires, and moments of profound significance, even if they unfold on a smaller, more intimate stage.
This recognition has become especially pronounced in modern times, where we have developed a profound appreciation for the individual as sacred and sovereign. The democratic spirit of modernity insists that every person’s inner life matters, that every consciousness is worthy of deep attention and respect. We no longer believe that only kings and warriors merit epic treatment; the checkout clerk, the teacher, the office worker—all carry within them the weight of human experience.
If you examine modern schools of the novel, you’ll discover how authors understand that ordinary people repeat and re-enact the ancient myths, embarking on grand journeys even when they never leave their hometown. James Joyce’s Ulysses provides perhaps the most famous example. The novel’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom, simply potters around Dublin on an ordinary Thursday in June 1904. His journey deliberately mirrors that of Odysseus returning home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, but instead of battling Cyclops and resisting Sirens, Bloom attends a funeral, buys soap, eats lunch, and navigates the complexities of his troubled marriage.
For all the mundane activities that fill Bloom’s Thursday—getting breakfast, visiting the newspaper office, going to the public baths—he encounters events and moments of surprising depth and resonance. He confronts his personal history, including his grief over his infant son’s death and his anguish over his wife’s infidelity, all within the larger context of Irish history and the struggle for national identity. Joyce demonstrates that Bloom’s journey through Dublin is no less grand, no less heroic, and no less worthy of epic treatment than Homer’s Odysseus sailing across the wine-dark sea. The interior landscape of a single human mind on a single day contains multitudes.
The remarkable thing is that you don’t need to be consciously aware that these myths are shaping your life—they’re already embedded in your psychology, operating beneath the surface of your awareness. Over the course of human culture spanning millennia, these archetypal patterns and stories have been passed down through generations, depositing themselves in the depths of our minds where we cannot directly perceive them. They function like invisible scaffolding, providing an unconscious framework that helps us organize our experiences and derive meaning from the chaos of daily existence. We live out these patterns without realizing it, our choices and responses echoing the ancient stories our ancestors told around fires thousands of years ago.
But something transformative happens when we become aware of these mythic undertones running through our lives. This awareness creates what we might call psychological gravitas—a weight, a depth, a sense of significance that elevates our understanding of ourselves. When we recognize the mythic dimensions of our experience, we suddenly possess a vocabulary and a structure for understanding what happens to us and what we do. The random-seeming events of our lives begin to cohere into patterns; we can see ourselves as protagonists in an ongoing story rather than merely drifting through disconnected moments.
This consciousness fundamentally changes our relationship to meaning-making. Instead of passively receiving whatever significance our culture assigns to our actions, we can actively participate in creating our own meaning. As we carve out purposes for our life journey and make deliberate choices about the direction we want to move, cognition of these innate mythical elements provides us with a pathway—a method for consciously constructing meaning rather than stumbling upon it accidentally. We become both the author and the hero of our own story, aware of the ancient patterns we’re working with and capable of adapting them to our unique circumstances and aspirations.
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