I think that what happens in our mythology here in the West is that the mythological archetypal symbols have come to be interpreted as fact... Unfortunately, in our age of scientific skepticism we know these things did not actually happen, and so the mythic forms are called falsehoods. The word 'myth' now means falsehood, and so we have lost the symbols and the mysterious world of which they speak. But we need the symbols, and so they come up in disturbed dreams and nightmares that are then dealt with by psychiatrists. It was Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Jacob Adler who realized that the figures of dreams are really figures of personal mythologization. You create your own imagery related to the archetypes. At present, our culture has rejected this world of symbology. It has gone into an economic and political phase, where spiritual principles are completely disregarded. You may have practical ethics and that kind of thing, but there is no spirituality in any aspect of our contemporary Western civilization. Our religious life is ethical, not mystical. The mystery has gone and society is disintegrating as a result.
Joseph Campbell, Myths of Light (2003) | Introduction, The Humbling of Indra.
