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Mythocartography: sideways looking for the metacrisis
By Sam Crosby
One. Resisting the map.
“When you get lost, don’t look at your map.”
That’s what the mountain leaders taught me.
Our desire for certainty – that emotional force driving confirmation bias and the illusion of control – is strong enough in the everyday. We’re able to convince ourselves we’re in the right, find ways to support our worldview or that we’ve found what we’re looking for, even with evidence to the contrary.
Imagine what happens in times of real uncertainty and pressure, like carrying the responsibility for navigating a group through wild terrain and realising you’re lost.
“If you’re really lost”, the mountain leaders said, “It’s surprising how easy it is to convince yourself to trust bad information. Then you’re in a worse position. Lost, but you’ve convinced yourself you’re not.”
Consider how easy it is to mistake symbols on a map or even wilfully ignore them. Gradient lines are easy to dismiss. You could take a line of trees to be a forest or a hedgerow. With some creativity, we can even dismiss features on a map as errors or changes since the map was printed. Believe me, I’ve been there.
Simply put, when circumstances turn on us, and there’s no easy or obvious escape from actually being lost, parts of us seek ways to escape feeling lost. And from that place, the map becomes more of an ally than the territory itself.
Strangely, so said the mountain leaders, the reverse is not true. Looking at the physical, felt world first then matching it to the symbols of the map is a far more accurate and reliable way of navigating. By gauging our surroundings, actually seeing (and hearing, smelling, touching, tasting) what’s there, we can make a note of key features we expect to see on the map. E.g. A waterway, a sharp gradient, a bridge. Non-negotiables we expect to see on the map, before we allow ourselves to believe we’ve truly oriented within it. I hear rushing water, I follow it, I see a bridge. No bridge on the map? Wrong map. In this way, we’re able to ground our discernment in reality before we trust the framework, instead of perceiving reality through a framework and feeling protective of it (even if it’s wrong) for that enduring ‘desire for certainty’.
So, as the mountain leaders say, it’s better to bring your discernment to bear before you go trusting the map, particularly so in moments of feeling lost.
And are we feeling lost? Culturally? Globally?
Expressed on a broader scale: we have frameworks, confirmation biases, maps skewing our perspectives of reality. Some may not be serving us, but we have no real means or instructions on how to see that we’re in them and not the reality they represent. And if we can’t see them, how can we resist them? And without discernment, even if we can see them, how can we move beyond feeling protective of them if our priority is certainty, even in the face of contrary evidence?
Dangerous business when we know we’re lost.
And who produces our maps? Did you know that OS maps, the gold standard maps for outdoor guiding in Britain, are an inheritance of war? OS, Ordnance Survey maps, commissioned by the defence ministry of the time, the ‘Board of Ordnance’. Their creator was celebrated for his important strategic contributions.
He described them as a ‘magnificent military sketch’.
I say this not to disparage OS maps, I’d have gone nowhere near mountain leader training without them, but the questions remain.
What are the other maps we inherited, how are they changing the way we’re moving in the world and how were they made in the first place?
Two. The big map we inherited (the map of no-belonging)
For many years, many of us have been in the same map. An inherited outlook. Logical, scientific, rationalist, individualistic, atheist, capitalist, reductionist. A cultural fixation on “sensemaking”. What is its purpose, where did it come from, why is it starting to fray so badly?
Questions connected to productivity and progress. Questions connected to grief.
During the Industrial Revolution, we learned to prioritise productivity. And, in that process, we began to sever ancestral threads.
People migrated to cities, transforming tight-knit rural communities of extended kin into smaller working families. Children were separated from grandparents and cousins. Jobs required no ancestral knowledge or land skills or craft apprenticeships, just the basic operating skills for machinery. The measure of a human life became productivity, people became defined by job roles and elderly people were no longer seen as viable contributors.
And without generation following generation, we lost the frameworks around cultural memory. The wisdom of elders. Initiation.
How many modern adults are forewarned of the fundamental but ferocious moments in the average human life? Moving house. Carrying the coffin of a grandparent. The mysterious exchanging of details and perspective with a stranger after a prang in the car. At some point, as adults, we become responsible for these things without any passing of the mantle, without any guidance at all, let alone ceremony.
Likewise, in those first initiatory moments crossing from child to adult, becoming who we are, there is very little to help us on our way. Modernity asks us to self-define, to choose our own path, our careers, even our social media handles.
If we were guided by older people, we might learn something of the way things are. We might learn something of what they see in us. A hint or two about our gold, the way we can be of service to our community. If we were guided by old stories, we might have a sense of our place in the overall picture.
Without these things, we stumble into adulthood, a heavy focus given to our individual affairs, our individual successes, our individual measure of what makes a good life, guided only by our equally clueless peers, or celebrity, or gossip or worse, more nefarious forces.
What impact does that have on the making of modern people? What is our place? Sooner or later, we self-initiate and call it burnout. And in the meantime, we experience a modern condition so familiar to us by now that we have a ‘syndrome’ for it. Imposter syndrome. We don’t know who we are, and we rush ahead instead of looking back.
Faster paced, individualised, urban lifestyle and material gain have become the more appropriate framing of our time, instead of slower, traditional, intergenerationally connected living. This is the map of modernity. It’s a powerful map. We have benefited. We’ve traversed extraordinary terrain, scaled cosmic heights and plumbed digital depths.
But we have no sense of belonging.
Within the bounds of this map, even our greatest successes can leave us feeling hollow.
Within the bounds of this map, we have made some of the most dangerously powerful individuals history has ever seen.
Within the bounds of this map our progress has made us undeniably rich materially-speaking, but our souls and the natural world have never been more impoverished. We and our planet are burning.
Metacrisis, the ‘crisis behind all other crises’ (failing food systems, polluted waterways, global warming, extreme weather events, wealth divides, war, displaced populations, mass extinctions, AI developing beyond our control and so on), is not purely economic or political, it’s a problem with the map itself.
And by some strange quirk of modernity, it seems to be that the only truly reliable way to see and resist the map is moments of crisis and trauma.
I experienced this when my son was born with a profound brain disorder. As a rationalist facing something utterly irrational, my maps failed me, totally and utterly. It was a hard-reset in terms of what was real, what mattered, how patently abstract some of the biggest waymarkers of modern life revealed themselves to be. Being right. Being smart. Being successful. How hard these ideas had been working to fill in the blanks on the map of no-belonging, and how useless they were in the face of visceral shame and grief.
Three. The crossroads moment
Ill health. Family loss. Breakup, burnout, near misses. The realisation, on a nameless Tuesday morning, that money and holidays and stuff are flawed aspirations. Or the slow, creeping eco-anxiety and a sense that something in the world is rotten.
Even with a slow build-up, the immediacy of these experiences can be shocking. Heart-breaking. Underworld stuff.
Something gives.
But in time, there can be a sense of resurfacing after a crisis or trauma. A sense of waking up even if it’s still in motion. The wound has been dressed and basic functions and faculties have returned, then there comes a question. “Who am I to be from now on?”
This is a critical moment. An opportunity to change. A crossroads.
If the mountain leader guides have it right, this is the moment to dare to look at the world without the map.
Maybe celebrity culture has been gently reminding you that you’ve amounted to nothing. But in these moments of depth you hear your family telling you you are worthy, you are loved.
Maybe your phone notifications and flashy ad messages have been signalling danger, provoking you to fight or flight, responding to stimulus, scrolling, buying, rushing. But in this moment, your body thinks it’s safe.
Of course, revealing the map isn’t the end of the work. It’s a first step. And two ways reveal themselves.
The first way, compelled by our trusty ‘desire for certainty’, is to return to the old me and the map I know best. Imagine a willow tree bending and bowing down to strong winds, only to spring back up when the storm passes. “Well, that was a horrible phase but I’m over it, fighting fit, let’s not talk about it again.”
The second way is to pass through a threshold, to be remade. Imagine that same willow tree, bending, bending, bending until it breaks, falls down to the earth and sets new roots. Foundational work. “I don’t know who I am now, but I know what I was is no longer true.” A liminal space.
The first way is well known. It’s the story of the modern world. Instead of addressing the broader causes, we have framed burnout, depression, anxiety and mental-ill health as symptoms to be treated. Therapy is available. Self-help. Optimisations. Methodologies to work well within the bounds of the map.
But how can we prepare for the second way? What is there to be said for a rationalist experiencing something utterly irrational? A navigator without a map.
Author and activist Manda Scott says, “We know we need to move from a Trauma Culture to an Initiation Culture. But knowing these things is not the same as living them as a reality. To get here, we need waymakers, people of huge heart and raw courage to walk away from the limited, goal-based directions of our culture and step into the ways of being where we meet in open-hearted, full-hearted, strong-hearted relationship with the land and all that lives there.”
If these are our guides, we’ll need maps to match the courage. Good news: there are maps available to us.
Maps without boundaries or gradient lines or ratio scales. Maps which allow us to be lost, to get better at being lost, to make a practice of exploring from lostness, instead of seeking to escape lostness. Ancient maps, which by miracle survived the ancestral-thread-severing Industrial Revolution, and resisted the story of the modern map. Cultural responses to the crossroads questions we will all face in our lives, as individuals, changemakers, activists and entire societies.
We call these maps mythology.
Four. Mapping the unmappable, thinking the unthinkable
Passed down through the generations, like water through mountain rock, ancient myths are nutrient-dense, nourishing tonics. Thousand-and-more-year-old stories which have survived on the basis of being valuable to enough people, generation after generation, in search of a better way. Blissfully free of AI tampering, marketing and political agenda. Time-tested, universal truths.
As maps, myths are multidimensional.
Speaking through strange, seemingly senseless images, they can lead us through the strange, seemingly senseless, unthinkable experiences of human life. They’re perfect companions for rationalists facing irrationality. They equip us for inner work, soul work, which calls for ‘sideways looking’ instead of compasses and telescopes.
And myths are beyond maps.
Mythic common-ground becomes a place to play in the unspeakable. A wounded king, an old woman on the moon, a fountain of youth. We’re suddenly able to play in the depths of our condition without ever fessing up to what we’re really saying. Without even knowing what we’re saying. And, for the briefest of moments, we’re absolute equals. Seen by one another.
When myth enters a gathering, the doors and windows slam shut. There is a quality of attention in the updraught. Words take on a different shape. Meaning spills over. Some of the most defensive hearts open the gates for a moment.
Rooting into the place of a story gives us something real, a felt sense of how things are here, how they’ve been before, how they might be in the future. Myth is born of place, of land, of the human interaction with the ‘all that is’. They’re the exchange we make with the world. The mythic inferences and cadence of a physical place are far more than passing fancies and nostalgia, they’re invitations to be welcome. To feel wanted. To feel enough. To feel home.
Wisdom. Wisdom. Wisdom. They are overflowing with wisdom. Wisdom which isn’t learning something new but being reminded of what you’ve always known. Ancestral, ancient, repeating, universal ideas. The type of wisdom which breeds peace and courage. A boldness. “Your allies are lying in wait”, the old stories say, “But it’s not until you take the first bold step that they’ll appear.” We know that, that’s not new, that’s remembering.
And, maybe most powerfully of all, is the reflective material. In ancient myths we don’t just see ourselves, but the many selves we’re made of. The cast of characters within us, our beautiful parts, our jealous parts, the sensible and rash parts which for some incalculable reason will not make an accord. The part that shows up when we’re triggered. The part that shows up when we’re rested. We recognise ourselves for the beautiful, complicated, multi-layered ecosystem that we truly are.
And there’s important information in where myths come from.
The map of modernity is a response to productivity as the highest focus, made in the crucible of industry and technical know-how.
OS maps were made for strategic planning, a response to military needs.
Mythology comes out of the ground, it’s the ineffable substance between “living” and “being”. The “coming to terms” with our condition. Our forebears held ceremonies when burying their dead, an honouring of the mystery of death and grief with myths of other worlds. Our ancient ancestors ritualised the hunt and thanked animals for their sacrifice, a response to hunting living beings that have eyes like ours and leave behind young like we do. This goes beyond the rationalist view, when our beliefs were less subject-object and more to do with a great moving spirit, interconnection between all things. Worms turning soil, turning the whole world. Myths come from a time before time, when animism, the soul in all things, was codified into the images of wolf and hare and moon. When rivers were so much a part of our being and our culture that they were hard to talk about.
Myths are echoes from a time when the world was understood to be fully alive.
Mythology is a response, made by generations and cultures around the world, to lived, human experience. Reality, given shape in images, in many ways the opposite approach to science, which is abstraction giving shape to our reality.
In the face of the meta crisis, itself a symptom of a crisis of meaning, mythology offers us something deeper to root into, never pretending to make sense, but overflowing with meaning.
Five: Mythocartography: navigating in metacrisis
Mythocartography encourages us to look at the world before we go back to our maps.
It is, in the purest sense, a practice of ‘getting better at being lost’.
Instead of reaching for a map and seeking to become ‘unlost’, mythocartography encourages us to stay present in the not-knowing, to loosen our desire for certainty, to relinquish the feeling of control as a way to recognise and honour that there is no control. Lostness is part of being.
Mythocartography is about learning sideways looking to inspire enquiry as a methodology to meet crises. And ultimately, when we become better at being lost, when we finally meet the moment we stop trying to find ourselves within a map, we simultaneously find ourselves in the world. Belonging, in the moment.
Mythocartography in action:
Working With Myth: When bringing myth into a setting, we resist the word ‘use’. I.e. Instead of ‘using myths to go deeper’, mythocartography holds a process of working ‘alongside myth’. Rather than a resource to be used or a framework to predict, we make space for unfoldings. More exploring than explaining. And each person receives the story in their own way, an orientation or an image or a dilemma to meet them where they are, rather than where they want to convince themselves of where they are for that desire for certainty. And, as in the animist aspect, we move away from mining the resource of myth, instead opting to dance with it as a living, soulful being. A microcosm of the movement our times are calling for.
A Different Kind of Time: One of the pillars of mythocartography is ‘a different kind of time’. Myth itself slips backwards and forwards, thousands of years rush to meet us in the modern day, beyond the mythic veil, it’s hardly a surprise to learn someone has been at a crossroads for a year and a day, or all of eternity. Many of the practices, environment and equipment we support myth-work with are designed to move out of clock time. Kairos, not Chronos. Time in the body, in nature, alone and with others, looking backwards and forwards in time, all essential elements of belonging in the moment.
Mythic Common Ground: As a map-making process, mythocartography is prismatic, kaleidoscopic, multi-faceted. The foundational practice is the game of “yes, and…”. Moments of lostness are also moments of potential. Often, when someone offers their interpretation of a story, other participants are surprised. Instead of course correcting, the room follows the intuition. Engaging our senses, our body, our soul, our memory, the turns of phrase, the inflections of culture within myth, we are offered aliveness and possibility. Questions, rather than answers, become the more bountiful ground to play on.
Mythocartography is a practice of working alongside mythology. Picking it up and dropping it again. Coming into the living, breathing world as part of the experience of route-finding in your own inner and outer landscapes. It’s ancient story, of course, but it’s also a way of being. You might call it myth-informed. You might call it old ways and old words. You might notice yourself dreaming a little more, pausing a little more, wondering if the old woman next door has more wisdom in the tip of her hat than you’d ever quite paid attention to before.
And the pivotal moment – often the most powerful moment – is a feeling of belonging in the self. The experience of no longer being absent in your own life.
Some of the oldest stories, the ones that point towards universal truth, give us spaces to orient ourselves. When we see ourselves reflected in the same images and challenges people have been facing for millennia, something foundational changes.
It’s the equivalent of finding the landscape features the mountain leaders speak about. Non-negotiables by which to assess the maps we’re living in. Greater resistance for maps we’ve always known, on some level, to be way off the terrain we’re actually living in.
And from that place of belonging and discernment, we recognise our maps as maps, not reality itself. Perspective comes more cleanly. Sideways looking, ancient clarity breeds peace, wisdom, courage.
With such deep roots, people-pleasing can give way to standing in our power. Activists can speak plainly, rooted, more resistant to nay sayers, conspiracists, media. Elders can disconnect their popularity from their opinion, sharing what is real for the benefit of the whole. Corporate professionals can, at last, release themselves from the tension, having quietly accepted how broken the stories of materialism and finite growth on an infinite planet are: free of the fear of being branded as outcasts or failures, but full, rooted, conscious beings.
But won’t these things just come with their own challenges? What happens when this way is a norm? Isn’t ‘mapping with mythology’ just another map, another iteration of orienting to life as a human being which will calcify and find its own way to draw us down into the underworld?
Maybe. But here’s the sideways looking…
Mythology is bigger than us. We cannot hold it. It permeates the entire living world, from our fingertips and the thumping golden thing in our chests to the roots and the sky, the whales and the rain, to the nest-building trills of wren on a spring morning.
Mythology is a map and a terrain. We can see through it and we can also see from it. It simultaneously offers a way to navigate and allows us to see other maps and models which might otherwise go undetected. Like the sage advice of the mountain leaders, it gives us a sense of perspective, but it’s just as happy to slide away into the undergrowth the second we need it the most. In simplest terms, it is always ready to surprise us. Maybe the very moment we think we’ve “found ourselves in the map” of mythology is exactly the moment to rethink our relationship to the map.
Instead of the short termism of political terms or paper-drawn maps, Mythocartography is multigenerational. Long view.
Instead of a rejection of ideas, modelled so well by atheism, Mythocartography is a convener. Images and places in which to meet one another.
Instead of seeking to mitigate ‘human error’, like the scientific, productivity-first view fostered in recent history, Mythocartography is inclusive. Humans as living, erring beings.
It involves meaning making, practice and crucially: belonging.
And in that work, questions are far more valuable than answers.
These aren’t maps as answers.
They’re maps as questions.
The practice of working alongside ancient myth to navigate a world whose maps are failing.
A personal note on human-centred methodology:
This essay is human-centric. For a fuller, more generous approach, ‘Mythoecology’ might have been a better phrase than Mythocartography. The concept of mapping anything at all is a very human-centrist view, and this essay could have been better served by wholeness. But “where we are right now” is a vital consideration.
I personally love the idea of animism and I behave in ways which deepen into this love. Extended time alone in nature, extended time with allies in myth, poetry and more. There are moments when I place my hand on a tree or my forehead on a cliffside rock, when my body responds. Whether I can hold that aspect for a breath or for a few days, the thinking mind is quick to get in on the act. I’m a rationalist, raised among rationalists, and so far it’s proved a very hard worldview to crack. Maybe hallucinogens or guided quests or more brushes with the underworld will get me closer to the animist view, but I don’t think it’ll ever be a done deal. Not for me.
But I can help my children to step closer. And, in generations to come, if the idea of full-blown, intergenerational and interbeing connection is something to do with our maps, I would see cause for celebration. But I believe there is work to be done in the meantime. For anyone familiar with the ‘three horizons’ model, Mythocartography is involved with the second horizon. For anyone unfamiliar with this model, let’s call it a stepping stone.
It aims to meet people where they are on their journey. The human being who is lost within a map. The rationalist who is facing something deeply irrational. The successful professional who is coming to terms with the superficiality of materialism. The activists and educators who want to challenge the world order, but get stuck in imposter syndrome and conflict with colleagues.
Mythocartography invites all of these people, who represent different stages of the same reckoning, into a deeper relationship with the living world.
But first, it invites them to find a way back to themselves.
Rationalism is not a failure, it is just our beginning. And I include myself in this. Together, in this work, I advocate that we avoid laying claim to certain territory, or laying siege to others. Ours is the work of mapping the unmappable.
The bottom line is belonging.
Bio
Sam Crosby is an oral storyteller, mythologist and facilitator, founder of Recalling Fire, the immersive, oral storytelling practitioners bringing ancient myth to ecologists, activists and educators navigating uncertainty. Guided by the work of Dr Martin Shaw at the School of Myth, fellow of the Bio-Leadership Fellowship, mentor for A Band of Brothers and Alumni, Dartington College of Arts. He works with leaders, organisations and community groups across the UK and beyond.
Next steps
This is mythocartography. A way of seeing the maps we’re living in. A self-aware process of mapping the unmappable. An open enquiry, more interested in questions than answers. And it is a reciprocal process. Information from ancient forebears, passed down to those of us to be in service to distant descendants. Storytelling, not as teachers, but as conduits. Participants in the oral tradition, not as listeners but as custodians.
And the next question is a very practical one. How is it applied? Well, friend, we stand at a crossroads. It all depends on the route which calls to you.
For a way stop, and to find out how this could meet you in your own work, our immersive residentials might suit. www.recallingfire.com/events
If you want something to take on the road you’re already on, the podcast, Drop The Map. is Recalling Fire on substack www.recallingfire.substack.com
To contribute, the Elderhood Manifesto is in need of co-authors:
https://www.recallingfire.com/elders
To bring this work to you, either personally or in your organisation as programmes and facilitation, www.samuelcrosby.com
Or, out beyond the border of rationality itself. There is a version of this work which goes further than the rest. A few days in wild terrain. Uncertainty as our guide. If you hear that call, write to me. hello@recallingfire.com
Thank you for the gift of your attention.
See you out there.
Sam Crosby
