Finally, myth speaks the frank truth of the world as it presents itself to our senses, clearly, evidently, directly as a world alive - animated, intentional, intelligible, and at moments, vividly beautiful. Myths let plants and animals speak, endow rivers and rocks with names and beings, trees with spirits, mountains with gods, and the underworld alive with ghosts and ancestors below, each footfall shadowing every thought and feeling. Myth tells the truth because it is utterly of this world, in this world, and for this world, no matter how preposterous its range of fantasy. No matter what ogres appear in its tales, myths show the world as it is and always is. Never can myth say, as in the gospel of John, "My kingdom is not of this world."
— James Hillman
Hillman is drawing a line in the sand, and the line runs directly through John 1. Myth cannot say "my kingdom is not of this world" because myth has no outside — no transcendent vantage from which to judge, redeem, or escape the sensory field. The ogre is not a problem to be overcome; it is a disclosure of what the world actually contains. The river's name is not decoration; it is the river's interiority made speakable.
What the gospel of John accomplished — and it was a genuine accomplishment, with genuine relief behind it — was to locate truth somewhere other than here. A truth that is not of this world is a truth that cannot be contaminated by this world's suffering, its mud and its loss and its recurring failure to resolve. That move has been with us long enough that we inherit it without recognizing it as a choice. We tend to feel that whatever is most real must be somewhere above the sensory, the animal, the underworld's dense population of ancestors pressing up through every footfall.
Hillman's counter is quiet but total: the ogres show the world as it is, and as it always is. That "always is" refuses both the promise of eventual clarity and the mourning of present mess. It simply reports.
James Hillman·Mythic Figures·2007