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1- There is something more, a magical reality behind reality. This hidden reality is the realm of myth.
From the very oldest stories and songs of the human race, to the ongoing appeal and relevance of fantastic art, our species has always felt that there are two realities; the waking world or mundane world and the world of magic, the otherworld of dreams and visions. Some people have always taken this otherworld as a literal fact; others have always dismissed it and disbelieved in it. Visionaries, mystics and poets have always taken another perspective, as articulated brilliantly by Li Ho, the T'ang Dynasty's "ghostly genius," who described the mythic realm as being "between somewhere and nowhere." There is much more than what we see in front of us; there is a magical reality. This reality is not bound, however, by the prosaic and narrow viewpoint of traditional occultism- William Blake knew it better than Aleister Crowley. The universe of myth and magic cannot be reduced to something that happens in a particular time and place, to something about which we could formulate objective laws and a kind of technology.
This world is as vast as our imagination and still more vast, as deep as the unconscious and still more deep. It is accessed primarily within the mind, but it is not defined or limited by the human psyche. It cannot be reduced to archetypes although it generates all archetypes. It cannot be reduced to any anthropological theory although it contains all patterns. It's not that there is some other place or other universe where the magic is literally real in the prosaic sense, a universe that impinges sometimes on our own. That would be a "somewhere." Nor is there no such place, for that would be a "nowhere." The realm of myth doesn't literally exist at all, and yet it doesn't not exist. It is in this paradox that the magic is found.
Another way of saying this is that the two worlds are a single world. The world of magic is our own world, and the horror and wonder of the mythic realm are simply the waking world in its deeper sense, seen clearly with the eyes of the visionary. The aesthetic viewpoint of Mythorealism is based on this understanding and its expression in art, seeing the invocation of the Mystery as the artist's vocation.
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