Much of our public language now begins with identity. We ask who people are by naming the categories to which they belong. We speak of sex, ethnicity, class, religion, sexuality, disability, nationality, migration status, age, education and social background. These markers are not trivial. They can describe real differences in social experience. They can point to material inequalities, inherited disadvantage, cultural memory and forms of exclusion that would otherwise remain hidden.
Yet, identity is only one way of interpreting human life. It tells us something about social location, but it does not tell us everything about meaning. It can help us ask who has been excluded, who has been misrecognised, who has been denied access to resources, voice and dignity. But it can also become reductive when it treats a person chiefly as an instance of a category. When this happens, the human being begins to disappear behind the label.
Increasingly, I am concerned that we need a richer way of understanding people than the language of identity alone can provide. Identity describes difference. Myth discloses meaning. Identity says something about the position from which a person speaks. Myth asks what story is being lived, inherited, resisted, renewed or unconsciously repeated.
To speak of people as myth bearers is not to deny their social circumstances. Nor is it to retreat into fantasy, spirituality or abstraction. It is to recognise that human beings do not live by category alone. We live through stories, images, rituals, loyalties, memories, wounds, obligations, longings and archetypal patterns. We inherit family stories, national stories, religious stories, class stories, local stories and civilisational stories. Some sustain us. Some imprison us. Some give coherence across generations. Some become brittle and defensive when they are no longer able to speak to present experience.
The shift from identity to myth bearing is therefore a shift from classification to interpretation. It changes the question. Instead of asking only “What group does this person belong to?” we might also ask “What story is this person carrying?” Instead of asking only “What structure has shaped this group’s experience?” we might also ask “What symbolic world gives this experience meaning?” Instead of asking only “Who has power?” we might also ask “What myths legitimise this power, and what counter-myths are emerging in response?”
This does not remove the need for social critique. It may make social critique more pragmatic and more sustainable. A critique based only on identity can become trapped in competitive grievance, moral suspicion and permanent fragmentation. It can identify wounds but struggle to imagine repair. It can describe inequality but fail to create shared forms of belonging. A myth-bearing approach asks what symbolic resources might allow people to move from grievance to responsibility, from inherited pain to meaningful agency, and from isolated identities to shared civic participation.
For example, the figure of the Firekeeper is more useful than many contemporary labels because it describes a role rather than a status. The Firekeeper does not dominate, erase or passively observe. The Firekeeper tends conditions in which warmth, memory, conversation and transformation remain possible. In earlier reflections, this figure appears as a guardian of continuity and meaningful change, holding the space between tradition and renewal rather than burning everything down or allowing the flame to fade. That image offers a more practical social model than the language of identity alone, because it asks what people are sustaining, what they are protecting, and what kind of future their stewardship makes possible.
Another example is the hearth. The hearth is not merely a domestic symbol. It is an image of belonging, orientation and return. In the Hestia mythos, the central fire illuminates many doorways. No single path is imposed, but the light makes choice possible. This is a valuable image for intercultural life. A cohesive society cannot require every person to abandon inherited meaning. Nor can it survive if every group withdraws into a separate symbolic enclosure. What is needed is a civic hearth: a shared centre strong enough to offer warmth, law, language, responsibility and mutual recognition, without demanding the erasure of every older story.
This image is especially useful when thinking about integration. The aim of social cohesion should not be the flattening of difference into sameness. Nor should it be the multiplication of separate identities with no common life between them. The more difficult task is to create shared forms of participation in which people can bring inherited stories into contact with a common civic order. This requires language, institutions, trust, everyday interaction, reciprocal obligation and an expectation that newcomers and established communities both take responsibility for the shared social world.
A myth-bearing approach can also help us think more carefully about sex, family and intergenerational continuity. Identity discourse often treats sex as a social category among other categories. A depth-psychological approach would distinguish biological sex from the symbolic life of masculinity and femininity, and from the psychic task of integration. Jung’s work repeatedly warns against reducing the human person to a fixed gendered role, while also warning against escaping into abstraction. The task is not to deny embodied reality, but to humanise it through symbolic reflection, personal responsibility and the integration of opposites.
This matters socially because a culture that cannot speak meaningfully about men, women, mothers, fathers, children, kinship, ageing and death will struggle to sustain a coherent account of human life. But a culture that speaks about these things only in rigid or nostalgic terms will also fail. The myth-bearing perspective asks how biological realities, symbolic patterns and lived relationships can be held together without collapsing one into the other.
The same applies to migration and intercultural cohesion. Identity categories can tell us that people come from different ethnic, religious or national backgrounds. They can tell us that some groups face disadvantage, exclusion or suspicion. But they do not tell us enough about the mythological worlds people bring with them: ideas of honour, family, hospitality, sacredness, authority, gender, sacrifice, shame, duty, freedom, education, law, death and belonging. These are not decorative cultural details. They shape how people interpret institutions, neighbours, rights, responsibilities and conflict.
This is where Joseph Campbell’s caution is important. Campbell argued that mythology performs several functions. It opens people to mystery, provides a cosmological image of the world, validates a social order, and guides individuals through the stages of life. He also argued that mythology is not easily lifted from one place and placed unchanged into another. A living mythology is rooted in shared experience, landscape, social order and historical horizon. The Joseph Campbell put this point sharply: myth “cannot be exported into another land or another time” without the risk of losing its living force.[1]
This creates a real problem for modern plural societies. People from different mythological inheritances may occupy the same civic space without sharing the same underlying symbolic grammar. They may use the same public words while attaching them to different moral worlds. Freedom, respect, family, equality, dignity, faith, education and community may not carry the same associations for everyone. This does not mean coexistence is impossible. It means cohesion cannot be built by administrative language alone.
Campbell also observed that cultures previously separated by geography are now in collision, and that modern societies no longer possess the bounded horizons within which one inherited moral order can simply hold sway.[2] This makes assimilation more complex than older models often assumed. A person cannot simply be expected to discard one mythological inheritance and adopt another as if changing uniforms. But neither can a society remain coherent if all inherited mythologies are treated as equally binding in the public sphere. The problem is not solved by either forced sameness or unmanaged pluralism.
A pragmatic social cohesion model would therefore need to work at several levels at once. It would recognise the reality of social identity and inequality. It would uphold a shared civic framework of law, language, rights and responsibilities. It would expect integration into the common life of the society. But it would also take seriously the deeper symbolic work through which people come to understand themselves as participants in a shared world.
This is where the idea of myth bearers becomes useful. It allows us to ask what people bring with them, not only as labour, culture, ethnicity or belief, but as narrative inheritance. It allows us to ask what myths are already active in a place: the myth of the tolerant nation, the myth of decline, the myth of progress, the myth of victimhood, the myth of purity, the myth of the stranger, the myth of the lost homeland, the myth of liberation, the myth of resentment, the myth of the hearth. Some of these myths can support cohesion. Others can quietly destroy it.
The task is not to invent a synthetic myth and impose it from above. That would be artificial and probably ineffective. Nor is the task to pretend that all mythological inheritances can be harmonised without conflict. Campbell’s concern about mythological transfer should make us cautious about easy universalism. The more realistic task is hermeneutic: to interpret, translate, test and renew the stories by which people live.
This suggests a different kind of social critique. Instead of treating society as a battlefield of identities alone, we can ask which stories produce responsibility, courage, restraint, reciprocity and care. We can ask which stories produce suspicion, fatalism, domination, humiliation or withdrawal. We can ask whether our institutions merely manage difference, or whether they help people enter a shared narrative of contribution and belonging.
In this sense, myth bearing is not an escape from politics. It is a deeper level of political and cultural realism. People do not enter society as abstract rights-bearing units alone. Nor do they enter only as representatives of demographic categories. They enter as carriers of memory and expectation. They bring gods, ghosts, ancestors, wounds, loyalties, prohibitions, hopes and images of the good life. A society that ignores this will misread itself. A society that understands it may be better able to create forms of cohesion that are neither sentimental nor coercive.
The question, then, is not whether identity matters. It does. The question is whether identity is enough. If we want a more humane and durable account of social life, we need to understand not only who people are, but what stories they are living through, what stories they are trapped inside, and what stories might allow them to participate more fully in a shared world.
To consider people as myth bearers is to restore depth to social critique. It asks us to look beneath labels without pretending that labels have no social force. It asks us to hold difference without making fragmentation sacred. It asks us to seek cohesion without erasing inheritance. Above all, it asks what kind of common hearth might still be possible among people who do not all come from the same symbolic home.
Endnotes
[1] The Joseph Campbell Foundation summarises Campbell’s account of mythology’s functions, including the mystical, cosmological, sociological and psychological functions, and notes his warning that living myth is bound to the world in which it arises rather than being simply exportable across place and time.
[2] The same Joseph Campbell Foundation account notes Campbell’s concern that cultures once separated by distance are now in collision, that rigid bounded horizons have weakened, and that the emergence of any genuinely global mythology remains uncertain.
[3] The UK Government’s Integration Area Programme describes integration challenges as locally specific, shaped by demographics, migration patterns, geography, industrial history and local economy, and frames integration around people living, working, learning and socialising together on the basis of shared rights, responsibilities and opportunities.
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