This was originally a comment on Facebook, but I\’m preserving it here, because it\’s important to remember and things get lost:
The whole \’hero of our own story\’ thing is also bullshit modern Western enculturation. I love Joe Campbell as much as the next guy, but the monomyth is just a cultural comparison tool. We are not solo-creatures, not individuals at all. The narratives which are our lives are merely portions of a greater saga, one that includes our ancestors and (potential) descendants.
There\’s a fundamental misapprehension of what stories are, borne of the false idea that story=fiction, when instead what it is, is a recounting of events. When we start thinking like that, then the stories of indigenous cultures are once again understood not to be simply metaphorical, but a fundamental way, in a very precise and particular way, of transmitting and refreshing vital information to a people.
This is why the recounting of a particular story or ritual not only passes on information, but reconnects the participants, or story-teller and audience with the primordial world of the powers, allowing them to participate and maintain the ties which hold their universe together.
Thus, there\’s a fundamental difference in perspective – your experience, your personal narrative is not solely personal but trans-personal. It exists because all of those who wove their actions together, consciously and unconsciously to create a place for \’you\’ to emerge.
Without that understanding, things get fucked up. We get beings thinking they can do what they like, without consequences, believing in lie of endless progress that does not need to connect to the wisdom of the landscape, heart and soul. We get beings who slaughter people who believe this way, or call them savage and seek to \’educate\’ them in schools and destroy their culture, or label it a \’life-style\’ choice instead of what makes us human.