By the end of the 1960s, the Beatles’ savior mythos had firmly rooted. Their temporal mythology had been soundly established by their historical import, their archetypal mythology (reflected in their story as well as their art) had been largely created and experienced across the world, and their communal mythology, which had been growing with each passing year (or album, or song), had solidified to the point where their status as generational, even spiritual, leaders was widely acknowledged. Though the Beatles’ end as a working partnership was drawing close, their ubiquitous fame, innovative artistry, and cultural significance was showing no signs of slowing, they were in fact as influential and salient as ever before.

The redeemer drama of the Beatles is clearly illustrated in the animated film Yellow Submarine—released into theatres in the fall of 1968—which presents them as mythic heroes in a story equally evocative of their iconic music, historical narrative, and centuries of monomythic literary invention. The film was created with nearly no involvement from the Beatles themselves aside from a few new songs and a short, taped segment that provides the film’s coda, and yet it is a timeless mythic saga, ironically birthed from the dream-state wherein archetypal symbols originally manifest and resonate.

The Yellow Submarine film was inspired by the “Yellow Submarine” song, which came to Paul McCartney while he was falling into slumber. As he explains, “I was laying in bed in the Asher’s garret, and there’s a nice twilight zone just as you’re drifting into sleep and as you wake from it; I always find it quite a comfortable zone, you’re almost asleep, you’ve laid your burdens down for the day and there’s this little limbo-land just before you slip into sleep. I remember thinking that a children’s song would be quite a good idea and I thought of images, and the color yellow came to me, and a submarine came to me, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s kind of nice, like a toy, a very childish yellow submarine.’”

Songs emerging from the land of dreams is not uncommon, and for Paul, “Yellow Submarine” wasn’t even the first time this had occurred. Famously, his classic standard “Yesterday” came to him in a dream with the structure and melody fully formed. Two other notable Beatles songs, “Nowhere Man” and “Across the Universe,” came to John Lennon in just such a hypnagogic state, and Rolling Stone Keith Richards’s proto-rock riff for “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” manifested in similar fashion. What sets “Yellow Submarine” apart is the archetypal nature of the song itself, and the film based on the dream world it suggests.

King Features, the animation company that had earlier produced the Beatle cartoons, also made Yellow Submarine. Their creative team of writers and animators distilled the Beatles’ archetypal mythology down to its most fundamental allegorical elements: the Beatles sail across dangerous seas, transform into Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and rescue the good people of Pepperland from the Blue Meanies—the savior restoring the community to its pristine state and bringing redemption and peace to the innocent community victimized by dark forces. The story climaxes with the elemental statement, “All You Need is Love,” and ends with an invitation for the people of the world to join in a song of camaraderie, “All Together Now.” This straightforward morality tale—Joseph Campbell’s monomyth in glorious psychedelic Technicolor—reveals the essential construct of the Beatles’ over-arching mythos: a hero’s journey through the deep sea of our collective unconscious, seen through the looking glass of music and art, and experienced by way of sights, sounds, and symbols.

As with the creation of the world, it is impossible to pinpoint exactly when rock & roll began. The term itself, with its implication of both unbridled sexuality and charismatic religious fever, had been a part of the musical (and, to some degree, Baptist Christian) lexicon since the 1930s, appearing with increasing frequency as the 1940s drew to a close. While there has never been a consensus from historians on either the musical or cultural beginning of the genre, there is a near universal recognition, certainly in hindsight, that the explosion of rock & roll, with all its connotations, became uniquely visible in the unrestrained, ecstatic gyrations of a single person: Elvis Presley. In other words, though the “world” of rock & roll may have been created in fits and starts, it wasn’t communally “experienced” until the arrival of Elvis, who anthropomorphized the music into an indelible human image, one that was instantly mythic in stature and impact. Recall John Lennon’s oft-quoted statement: “Before Elvis there was nothing.”

Psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz, who wrote numerous books on the archetypal foundations of fairy tales, contends that creation myths describe “not the origin of our cosmos, but the origin of man’s conscious awareness of the world.” The character of Adam in the Judaic mythos can thus be understood as a symbol for the evolution of human consciousness; his initial androgyny splitting into two equal parts an allegory for the resulting dualities of the natural world, the motif deepened by the story of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, i.e. “of good and evil,” and that of man and woman’s banishment from the Garden of Eden. Joseph Campbell asserts that the Garden is a metaphor for the human psyche; as such the fall from grace in creation myths is an allegory of our struggle to resolve the multiplicity of the conscious world with the pristine wholeness of our deep unconscious.

In the rock mythology, Elvis recalls in numerous ways the original human archetype of Adam, representing duality in many forms and the anticipation of resolution as symbolized by the mythic savior, in Elvis’s case the Beatles. The description of Jesus Christ in the epistles of St. Paul (and writings of other Christian mystics) as the “last” Adam is indicative of the psychic path of transformation and transcendence that began with the Fall: “The first man, Adam, became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit.” Likewise, Elvis was a harbinger of this development in the rock mythology; his character incorporating myriad musical, cultural, and figurative dualities. In addition to his merging of country and blues styles into a novel musical alloy, Elvis’s persona harmonized societal divisions of rural and urban culture; religious demarcations of good and evil; racial perceptions of Caucasian and African American; and physical expressions of male and female, all aspects of the prototypical “rock star” we would see emerge again and again. Elvis was a “white” who sang “black,” a poor country boy who became a rich Hollywood star, a sexually charged performer who sang reverent gospel hymns, a man who moved like a woman, and, by nearly unanimous accounts from both genders, possessing a striking, unmistakable androgynous beauty. He was also (significantly in terms of his personal psychology) a surviving twin who felt throughout his life that he carried the spirit of his lost brother, Jesse Garon, in his own soul.