Choose your temple: How mythology can help you spend the time you have left

A name is a cage. It binds you to a type and casts you in this role or as that person. It shrivels your complexity and jams it into an artificial vice. A name says to the world, “This person is this thing, and this is what I’ll call it.” But no person who has ever lived is ever just one thing. Even the fullest names we give one another will capture only a tiny fraction of our depth. As Walt Whitman famously wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

The world is often unkind to this kind of Whitmanian complexity. It might be easier than ever to “be yourself,” but this implies that there is one, single “yourself” to be. It implies you have an essence — an authentic filament to who you are that defines you. So, being happy — and being modern — is to stay true to yourself.

But life is not like this. A human cannot be explained by a name or entombed under a single identity. We need a better way to understand the contradictions and diversity found within a single life. We don’t need to find the story of a life, but the many stories. For the mythologist Martin Shaw, studying the ancient, time-worn folklore of our predecessors is one of the best ways to understand ourselves and what it means to live.

Persona to presence

Growing up is a time of change. Whether you like to understand that in the neuroscientific sense of neuroplasticity or the psychoanalytic sense of identity formation, the core truth is the same: Very few people are the finished item at 16 years old. We experiment and dabble, flip and flit. We are finding our place in the world, and that necessarily involves an element of existential fidgeting. Shaw puts it like this:

“When you’re young, it’s quite important to have a fairly fluid personality because you are constantly being put in mildly or extremely threatening situations like going to school, forming friendship groups, and the rest of it. You’ve got to know that you can play well with others, and that involves persona to a degree.”

Then, you grow up. You don’t wake up in a single day as an adult. There is no signing of the grown-up charter. You just start to fossilize a bit. You move about less and stay put more often. It might be that you stop arranging to meet that group of friends or stop buying those kinds of books. You start to listen to the same bands and prefer some conversations over others. For Shaw, growing up is about recognizing and accepting limits to your persona and developing presence.

“Now, the big question, of course, is what on earth is presence? What does it mean when you say, ‘That person didn’t say much, but they had presence. I had a feeling from them.’ And interestingly for me, the people that have the most presence have often made a covenant with limit somewhere in their life. They have decided that rather than an endless pursuit of growth, they’re going to trade some of the growth for depth. And they sort of draw a circle around the areas. And most attract or are claimed by actually, rather than attracted to, as we know now.”

Committing to a temple

What does “making a covenant with limit” have to do with mythology? And what has presence got to do with fairy stories? Shaw argues that the stories we tell of heroes, gods, and little girls lost in the woods are not simply stories but rather “temples” of life — they are certain ways to live that come with a mummer’s circus of costumes, scripts, behaviors, actions, and, importantly, values.

“I always ask my students when they start to work with me, I say, ‘What temple do you serve in?’ And they, ‘Well, what do you mean?’ And I say, ‘Where do you give your libations? Creatively, philosophically, energetically, where are you hanging out? Do you hang out in a gym all the time? Are you mostly concerned with getting a pay rise? You know, and I say if you’re not happy with the temple that you’re in, how do you leave with causing minimal damage? Do you need to change your job? Do you need to make some other move in your life? So, yeah, I think it is naive to assume that all stories [are] wishing us well.’”

When Shaw says, “Not all stories are wishing you well,” his point echoes one made by philosophers, psychologists, and mythologists for millennia: How we think we want to live is not always how we should be living. We might spend all our time in the Temple of Aphrodite, clinging desperately to fading beauty and measuring happiness by sex. That might make you happy, it might not. We might sacrifice our youthful, beautiful days in homage to Hermes, the god of business and work. Some might see that as a sacrifice — a libation — well made. Others might regret it.

So, for Shaw, the wisdom found in reading stories and hearing myths is not simply that they are fun — and they can be very fun — but rather they give us a clue to the kind of life we want to live. They are messy and complicated, in the way that life actually is. They will not say, “This way and this person is the way to live,” but will present the options for us to pick. And the job of life is to recognize the temple in which we belong.