The Mythic Vision

Thursday morning: a Grade One French Immersion class. The children have spent part of the previous day doing a collage on space. A sheet of shiny silver paper is suspended over one of the blackboards and their cutout drawings of space creatures and planets are taped on top. When it comes to journal-writing time the children suggest two topics: Les animaux and l’espace.  But what about “Les animaux dans l’espace”? This idea elicits a few chuckles as the children imagine horses in astronaut suits, or cows browsing on the moon. Then Ashton, sitting in the front row, reverses the combination and comes up with “L’espace dans les animaux.”

He describes to me what this conjures up for him: If one were to look inside, in the hollow spaces of an animal’s body, one would find the stars and planets and the vastness that is outer space. I nod, slightly astonished. What Ashton has described is akin to a story from Hindu mythology. When the boy Krishna is reported by the other children to have eaten dirt, his mother Yashodha scolds him. Krishna says to his mother, “If you believe them instead of me, look at my mouth yourself.” He opens up for her to see.

Then she saw in his mouth the whole universe, with the far corners of the sky, and the wind, and lightning, and the orb of the Earth with its mountains and oceans, and the moon and stars, and space itself; and she saw her own village and herself. 1

Yashodha’s vision is too much for her. She becomes frightened and questions reality, thinking, “Is this a dream or an illusion fabricated by God? For God’s power of delusion inspires in me such false beliefs as, ‘I exist,’ ‘This is my husband,’ ‘This is my son.’ ”A moment later, however, God has taken away her memory and she is simply a mother, holding her son on her lap.

The six-year old’s playful reversal of possibilities yielded a parallel vision—L’espace dans les animaux.  His ability to imagine reveals the mythic vision to be available to us at any moment. Playing with categories is what gives us access to that vision, which we need to glimpse, at least occasionally, in order to loosen our identification with a sense of self as solid and unchanging. Myth shows us the true scope of the canvas in which we are living our lives.

1Bhagavata Purana 10.8.21, quoted in Wendy Doniger, The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).