Stolen Fires: Myth, Creativity, and the Alchemical Imagination
I’ve been thinking about this conversation for days.
John Selig runs Stolen Fires — one of the most vital mythology accounts on Instagram right now — and when I reached out to him, I found out he’d been following me since he started his account. We’d been orbiting each other for years without realizing it. Kindred spirits. This is what the mythic conversation does when you let it.
The Volcano as a Diagram of the Psyche
The conversation begins with an image John posted on Instagram that I genuinely could not get out of my head: Mount Etna as a cosmological diagram.
At its base: Typhon — the primordial monster of chaos, buried and raging beneath the mountain. On its slopes: Prometheus, chained, his stolen fire still burning. In its forge: Hephaestus, working the bellows, alchemizing that rage into something beautiful. At the summit: Zeus, ordering it all from above.
John reads this as a map of the creative process itself — and I think he’s right.
“That’s how it feels to do shadow work, to channel your grief into something creative, to face a part of you that you don’t wanna face. All of those things are in that image — and it’s both cosmic and natural and personal, all at the same time.”
— John Selig
The key insight: Zeus doesn’t destroy Typhon. He integrates him. The most generative order isn’t the one that eliminates discord — it’s the one that puts it to work.
Integration, Not Obliteration: The Zeus Principle
This is where John traces the lineage, and it clicked something open for me I hadn’t seen before.
Uranus wouldn’t let anything be born. Kronos swallowed his children. Zeus freed them all and declared: everyone gets a seat at the table. Even the monsters. Even Typhon.
“In Zeus’s order, everything gets to be born. And the good news is that means there’s a place for everyone and everything — even Typhon, the antithesis of Zeus.”
— John Selig
We followed this thread into fractal territory: Heracles — son of Zeus — subdues the Nemean Lion (a child of Typhon), integrates its power into his armor, and uses it to build civilization. The same mythic structure, playing out at the mortal scale. When John pointed that out, I felt the pattern lock into place like a gear.
The Sailors Are Your Unconscious
When we turned to the Odyssey, John offered the most practically useful reframe I’ve heard in years.
Odysseus is the ego. The sailors — faceless, nameless, perpetually doing the opposite of what they’re told — are the unconscious. When Odysseus goes to sleep and the sailors open the bag of winds, blowing them off course just as home was in sight, John doesn’t read it as failure. He reads it as the unconscious sending a message: you’re not ready yet.
“Odysseus never gets back to Ithaca until all the sailors are dead. Because as the sailors die off, it’s Odysseus facing all the things he needs to face in order to become the person who can get to Ithaca.”
— John Selig
I added what I think is the crucial corollary: the way off the island of Calypso — off the island of depression — is through creativity. Odysseus doesn’t wait for rescue. He builds a boat. The myth is not subtle about this.
Myth as Medicine: Meaning, Depression, and the Awakened Brain
John is 38. A lot of his friends are depressed. He traces it, in part, to what happens when a culture has only one lens — the purely rational — and has systematically repressed everything else.
His argument, backed by Lisa Miller’s The Awakened Brain: myth activates the part of the brain that makes depression physiologically impossible. You don’t have to believe anything literally. You just have to be willing to look through the lens.
I brought in Martha Beck’s Beyond Anxiety here — she makes the same case for creativity: anxiety cannot exist in the presence of genuine creative engagement. John and I kept arriving at the same place from different angles. Myth. Creativity. Spirituality. They’re not separate fires. They’re the same one.
What John Does with All of This
John coaches, teaches game design at a college, and is releasing an eight-week course in May on mythology and creativity. Each week takes one myth, opens it up as a group, and asks participants to bring their own messy, unfinished creative work into the room.
The goal: make the chaos sacred. Normalize the mess that precedes anything worth making.
He’s also working on a book — his words, “at this rate, done in 2029” — and I believe it’s going to be worth the wait.
Find John at stolenfires.com, and on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok as @stolenfires_.
Listen to the full episode and subscribe to the Mythic Podcast at mythicpodcast.com.
Related Reading from the Archive
- Craftsmanship: The Marriage of Love and Labor
The Volcano/Prometheus/Hephaestus imagery John Selig works with connects directly to Hephaestus as the archetypal craftsman — a different angle on the same mythic forge. - Secrets of the Starbucks Siren
Like Selig’s alchemical reading, the Starbucks Siren is myth hiding in modern culture — another example of stolen fire appearing in an unexpected place. - Mythic Coaching: Change Your Perspective, Transform Your Life
John Selig’s Instagram work and Boston’s coaching practice emerge from the same conviction: that ancient stories are a living map for navigating modern life. - The Heart of Dionysus Beats in San Francisco
A companion conversation on how mythic archetypes are alive in the communities and places we inhabit.
