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1- There is something more, a magical reality behind reality. This hidden reality is the realm of myth. |
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2- The task of the Mythorealist artist is to invoke this reality, incarnating it within the waking world. |
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3- The effect of this incarnation is a sense of mystery, the presence of the numinous embodied in art. This experience of numinous power is mythic resonance. |
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4- The presence of the numinous can be wonderful or horrible, but anything truly numinous is actually both, wonder hidden behind horror and horror behind wonder. |
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5- Beauty without an element of horror is reduced to mere prettiness, and horror without an element of beauty is reduced to mundane fear. Neither prettiness nor mundane fear evokes mythic resonance. |
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6- What true beauty and true horror have in common is the element of awe, an element that allows art to transcend the personal. |
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7- The waking world is the exoteric and the mythic is the esoteric. Whichever element manifests on the surface contains the other element inside itself, the esoteric and the exoteric in opposition and unity. This principle is the balance of forces. |
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8- The balance of forces between the waking world and the mythic is always mirrored in other dualities. Whether Appolonian and Dionysian or classicism and romanticism, the great forces of horror and wonder or the celestial and the infernal, great art maintains a balance of forces and honors both aspects of any duality. |
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9- Invoking the power of the numinous and manifesting it in art, the Mythorealist artist can present a mythic problem, a fundamental unresolved dichotomy whose solution contains an insight. Buried within the story is an illumination. |
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10- Neither the mystery nor the illumination are intellectual in nature, therefore they cannot be planned out intellectually. They must manifest spontaneously, unfolding out of the realm of myth as if uncaused and unsought-for. |
