TRACKING THE GODS: The Place of Myth in Modern Life by James Hollis – Title 68

Whatever our cultural and religious background or personal psychology, a greater intimacy with myth provides a vital link with meaning, the absence of which is so often behind the neuroses of our time. Here the acclaimed author of The Middle Passage (title 59) explains why a connection with our mythic roots is crucial for us as individuals and as responsible citizens of our age.

The author comments on this title in his 2025 book Living with Borrowed Dust:

Those old energies that once took the provisional shape of gods persist and carry on their ancient battles. Today, we call these agitations and skirmishes complexes, neuroses, somatoform diseases, personality disorders, and the like. The once godly realm is now a contentious landscape, a mélange of psychoneurotic diseases. As those primal energies are neglected, medicated, or projected, they pathologize and configure a broken terrain traversed by pharmacology and psychotherapy.

Once that primal link is severed or eroded, pandemonium erupts and all demons appear – addictions; getting high by any means; compelling ideologies; intrapsychic conflicts tragically projected and transferred to one’s neighbors; and the war goes on. Never ask anyone of what they are unconscious or most afraid. They won’t thank you for the hint and will begin to think you are the cause of their problem.

So rich are the heuristic possibilities of that paragraph that I determined that such would be my thesis at the C. G. Jung Institut, and later, the book of the same title, Tracking the Gods: The Place of Myth in Modern Life. While it is perhaps the most important book I ever wrote, it is among the least read, as “myth” is already a disqualifier for the attention of the modern reader, for who has any interest in the gods anymore? But I have never forgotten that paragraph, nor the referred task it brought to my soul in this land and culture so distant from the first sunrise when Zeus rose over the mountain range and illumined the tossing Aegean.