Originally published in the Opinion page of The San Antonio Express-News, September 3, 2022.
Human beings possess a deep hunger to explore, to leave the familiar known world and reach out to mystery, to what is uncertain and to gain new insights that deepen our understanding of who we are as a species. Myths have revealed this for millennia.
With NASA’s announcement of a new series of 8 exploits called Artemis, the mythic dimension is once again front-and-center. The moon will serve as both destination and way station in the Artemis project, whose goal is to eventually reach Mars named after another Greek divinity, one of strife, but also of ambition, excitement and drive.
The Apollo program is no more. Next in line is Apollo’s divine sister, Artemis, who is associated with the moon and its illumination, as well as with nature and especially animals. Her favorite was the bear. As a huntress she possessed, like her brother, deadly accuracy with her arrows, especially as they travelled long distances to their intended mark.
Mythologist Joseph Campbell reminded us that myths use the language of metaphor for their energy and durability. Based on two words—meta=across or beyond—and phorein=to carry--a metaphor, like a myth, is “a transport vehicle” that encourages us to move out of the boundaries of the known and familiar into unknown worlds. By introducing Artemis, a goddess, NASA adopted a new metaphor, a new mythic figure, for such a transport.
This is a healthy sign both mythically and imaginally; it complements the earlier masculine presence of Apollo to establish a greater presence of feminine energy in space travel.
I sense in the “Artemis” naming for the next eight space flights—which includes the goals of sending a woman and a woman of color to walk on the moon’s surface—a mythic expression of integration with the masculine in the service of a greater wholeness and completeness. Her name is no small matter for our national imagination. A new analogy ripens with her presence, for both Apollo and Artemis are known in the wisdom tradition of myth for their healing powers. They are curative forces that promote healing wounds of infection, strife, dissension and disorder.
Mythic thinking has a strong poetic element, and NASA rises in our imagination as a witness to this presence. Mythic—or mythopoetic thinking—rests on the power of analogy in creating a new story by reviving an old narrative and fabricating it in modern clothing. The space program is once again the launch pad for the imagination; it allows us to see ourselves withing a larger cosmic frame.
The power of myth is then twofold: First, to see ourselves anew within the frame of epic and vast terrain; the space program yields to something far greater and grander than us, yet includes our greatness as a species. Second, to see and imagine from a double perspective by retrieving from ancient history, as filmmakers Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas have done, stories and figures of earlier wisdom traditions, and reinstating them within our cosmic dreams.
The ancient past, then, coalesces with our dreams of a distant future. Such is the power of mythic imagination. We all need the mythic world to refresh us as we gaze skyward at the future. Let Artemis show us the way as our new guide, joining the constellation of earlier figures on our trajectory deeper into the universe and into our knowledge of ourselves.