In A Short History of Myth, Karen Armstrong writes that writers and artists, not religious leaders, are filling the age-old human psychological need for myth in the contemporary world. Writers and artists are filling the vacuum that was left by the suppression of mythos in the wake of the Enlightenment. Logos is all well and good, but it can’t deal with our deepest, darkest imaginings, yearnings and feelings. The need for myth lives on and, when not filled by something better, results in everything from Nazism to Elvis worship. It will be expressed, one way or another.

“If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world.”

If Karen Armstrong sees artists and writers as playing a priestly role, Daniel Pinchbeck sees them as playing a shamanic role. In Breaking Open the Head, Pinchbeck writes that there are at least ten million people in our culture who potentially fit the shamanic role. It makes sense if you believe that shamanism is a universal human phenomenon, as it is in tribal societies. If you then estimate that one of out of every twenty-five or thirty people “receives a shamanic calling”, it’s but a short leap to the conclusion that millions of people in the Western world are shamanic without realizing it. Pinchbeck doesn’t limit the shamanic role to writing and art but also includes alternative healers and even the mentally ill.

In Pinchbeck’s case, psychedelics, not mythology, receive the emphasis. What both mythology and psychedelics have in common is that they are about transformations in human consciousness. It’s likely that in archaic times they were used together. Hippies reading Gravity’s Rainbow may have known something of the same experience.

To me, these are different, juicier, more ancient perspectives on what a writer’s or artist’s role could or should be. They are refreshing in their simplicity, power and holism.