Cultural Chromosomes

Volodymyr Kish

Last month, in a surprise move, my daughter Zenia got married in a civil ceremony in the U.S. where she is currently living while completing her PhD. Thanks to some creative and thorough planning, she had arranged for my wife Daria and I, as well as the groom’s parents, to be there, as they both felt it critically important for us to participate in this important milestone in their lives.

Though initially rendered speechless by the audaciousness of their act, we soon accepted the personal and pragmatic reasons for their choice, and are quite happy with their decision to formalize their longstanding relationship.

What particularly pleased me was the fact that my daughter had gone to great lengths to secretly source a korovai, the traditional Ukrainian wedding bread, and insisted on my incorporating the welcoming Ukrainian bread and salt ceremony into their wedding ritual. I was deeply touched that, in so doing, she recognized the importance of the symbolic ties we have to our culture, our past, our ancestors, and our traditions. Traditions have always played an important part in my life, and I am pleased that at least some of that has rubbed off on my children.

Traditions are part of the personal and collective mythologies that we all have that provide structure, meaning and values to our lives and the way that we relate to each other, as well as the Universe in which we live. I use the term mythology here not in the sense of made-up fables and legends, but in the way that Joseph Campbell, the renown American scholar and writer did in appropriating the term to mean the symbolic infrastructure that provides the framework to our personal existence and its place in both time as well as both temporal as well as spiritual space.

The metaphysical side of our existence is extremely difficult for us to describe with our limited vocabularies, so over time, we as humans have developed more symbolic and metaphorical means to gain an emotional and spiritual understanding of concepts that are hard to grasp on strictly an intellectual level. Thus, most of the world’s religions throughout history have developed elaborate “mythologies” to try and put some structure behind the “truths” of our existence. In this sense, mythology and truth are complementary and not incompatible concepts. It is only when we fail to distinguish between literal truth and symbolic truth that we run into the black hole of religious debate.

Campbell felt that we all as individual humans needed a plausible “mythology” to be happy and successful members of society. This mythology becomes the framework around which we build our lives. It provides purpose and meaning without which we become susceptible to anarchy and depression. It locates us and grounds us on the infinite continuum of time and space, providing a foundation on which we build our individual realities for the brief time that we spend on this earth.

Needless to say, each of our mythologies is a dynamic thing. We add, subtract and modify to that which we learn and inherit, hopefully contributing along the way towards the progress and enlightenment of society and civilization as a whole.

What is important is that we understand how we got to where we are now and to do that, we need to both understand history as well as appreciate that our traditions are the symbolic archives of the processes that have led us to being the individuals that we are here and now. Through those traditions we pay homage to our predecessors and remind ourselves that we are part of a long chain of human evolution and progress. Those traditions are an integral part of our personal history and form what I like to call our cultural chromosomes. They are something we should preserve and cherish.