There are three major requirements for the formation of a diamond: pressure, heat, and carbon. Diamonds form hundreds of miles beneath the Earth's surface when naturally occurring pressured carbon confronts temperatures of about two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The resulting gemstone is the hardest, most resilient, and most beautiful substance known to humans. A diamond is not the fruit of death and rebirth, a diamond is the result of strife and transformation.  Much like diamonds, humans are forged into sentient creatures of divine image through the pressures and fires of tragedy, transforming the dark and repulsive acts of life into things of beauty. The mythic dimension is, then, that moment of transformation; that space in which the human is subjected to intense pressure and unbearable heat, crystallizes a desperate faith in divine purpose and meaning, and is extracted from the depths of the mundane in order to refract the light of consciousness. The mythic dimension is the place where humans are differentiated from animals and myth is the reflective process through which such differentiation occurs. 

    In Joseph Campbell's essay "Renewal Myths and Rites" he discusses the myriad of ways in which humans have used mythology, or in many cases proto-mythology, to justify the often unpleasant activities of daily survival and to ease the passage through the inevitable catastrophes of human life. Campbell's work points us to a recognition that mythology arose out of man's discomfort with the savage nature of his existence. He tells us that "man was a killer from the start, a beast of prey, who knew, however, what he was doing when he killed, and who sought to protect himself by magic" (Campbell 61) This magic is a fusion of ritual and the mythologies that neither begot nor were birthed by these sacred acts, but rather, provided a structured narrative that enriched the performance. This magic is the process through which the prima materia, man, transmutates into a reflective, refractive creature capable of reconciliation with spirit and devoted to a personal code of ethics. Illustrative of the dual nature of man's life as seen in the sun and the moon, the inhale and the exhale, or life and death, myth and ritual serve as complimentary elements which catalyze man's illumination. Myth and ritual therefore, are both the source and the product of man's consciousness.
     Campbell divides prehistoric man into two primary mindsets: that of the hunter and that of the planter. It is out of these two different modes of survival and being that one very similar mythology was born: death begets life. Campbell explains how evidence suggests that the hunters' is the earliest mythos of man, and that the development of an agricultural planting community, and therefore mythology, was a much later occurrence (Campbell 52). There is however a third possible mindset that Campbell overlooks: that of the gatherer. Preceding any recognition that plants can be cultivated must have been the realization that plants can be eaten, and considering the necessity of weaponry for hunting, it is likely that man was originally a gatherer, taking advantage of the natural bounty of the earth's wild crops, for although exotic fruits and vegetables require particular climates for growth, wild berries, nuts, and grains grow much more prolifically. And although man would have learned the hunt from watching his predatory adversaries, he no doubt would have witnessed the ease with which herbivorous animals were able to sustain themselves. Supplemented by the incredibly diverse insect kingdom, man's diet was most likely more akin to that of our close cousin the ape, than that of the distant four footed beast, the lion.
        Why then does Campbell offer no evidence suggesting a gatherer mythology? Could it be that the gatherer did not require the objective viewpoint that myth provides because his life was free from the guilt of killing? Could it be that the correlations between the womb and the tomb were not so apparent to the man who never plowed the soil? Like the diamonds origins in pressure and chaos, mythology is bred through the awareness of suffering and the triumph over adversity. Man's connection to the divine cosmic conversation is this mythological diamond, which at once brilliantly refracts god consciousness into a multi-faceted prism of stories and images, while also evidencing the stone cold, hard facts of life. Mythology provides context for man in a very haphazard world. Indicative of our desire and passion for knowledge, but revelatory of our naivety and desperation, mythology attempts to translate an unknown language, the language of divine consciousness, into terms humans are capable of understanding. The fact of the matter is man is simpleminded when compared with his own perceived image of the divine, though it is in his attempt to know that which cannot be known that we see man's unique nature unfold. It is in the creation of these myths that we become human.
      Whereas the animal relies on his superior command of the physical senses for survival, the human being is all too aware of his shortcomings in this arena. Gifted with intellect in place of, say, a reliable sense of smell, man must devise ways to intellectualize the therefore unavoidable reality of death.

                        "The hunter, dealing death daily, is washed in blood- as, indeed,

                        is all of nature. And the first myth of the self-protective ego,

                        defending itself from the necessity of yielding its own blood to be

                         the life of the world, is that of an immortal ground underlying the

                         phenomenology of the passing world." (Campbell 48)

This 'first myth', in which man begins to formulate the idea of an eternal something, be it human, world, or light, is the anchor that holds man's psyche together in the face of the dismembering forces of the external world. Rescuing man from the immobilizing fear of nothingness, a mythology of an eternal godhead transforms the unknown into an approachable, albeit illogical, realm to which man has visitation rights but not eternal citizenship. This myth is the most important foundational belief of the human psyche, which, according to Carl Jung, perceives and strives for eternal wholeness, because it gives man a type of sixth sense, an intuition that is aware of both the fragility of life and its existential perfect-ness.

     Man the hunter, then, is the father of myth. In his attempt to save himself from the decay and disintegration of physical death, he resurrects himself as a fragmented piece of a broken cosmic mirror, and thus imbues the universe with that first breath of creation. And just as the life of man is ripened through emotional turmoil and physical obstacles, so then is this mythologized god fulfilled through its fall into the realm of man. Crashing through the heavens to meet with man on Earth, bits and pieces of this shattered godhead become caught in the celestial web, providing inspiration for, and perking the curiosity of, even the most prehistoric man. Campbell depicts the hunting mythology of the Cro-Magnon era as integrated with celestial phenomena, illustrating how "man is returned to the innocence of the sun and stars… by an equation of himself with the sun, the great lion of heaven, and of his victims with the herds of the night sky" (Campbell 53) The cyclical nature of the heavenly bodies echoes the eternality that man so desperately seeks to find in his world, and it is through witnessing the patterns of heavenly return and rebirth, that man can find solace amid the ever transforming processes of earthly life.

     Modern man becomes a softer stone as each year passes by. The conveniences of modern technology neglect to provide man with the adversity that our forefathers used as inspiration to listen to the divine narrative.  Disconnected from the whole story and unable to see a bigger picture, man now inhabits a cosmos in which, as Friedrich Nietzsche so curtly pronounced, God is Dead (Nietzsche). Resurrecting the tales of the past and examining the psychological and philosophical motivations of even our most distant ancestors may be an effort in futility. Lacking the proper conditions for transformation, the messages in mythology will fall on deaf ears, and modern man will remain malleable and supple like the gold he so fanatically hunts and admires.  Just as the diamond's beauty comes in part from it's origins in the underworld, and just as the light of the sun resuscitates the Earth at the dawn of the Winter Solstice, so is man's beauty revealed in his ability to endure pain and suffering and his willingness to engage in the tragedy of life. Despite the widespread plague of complacency among modern humans, there are those who recognize the obstacles, and seek to overcome the debilitating fears of the internal and external worlds. They are our diamonds, our heroes and it is their journeys that will be our mythological legacy for forthcoming generations.