Why We Need Myth
The word “myth” has too often become synonymous with mere misconceptions or errors. We talk about the myth of Columbus discovering the New World or the myth that no one bathed in the Middle Ages. Some myths can be harmful, such as the idea of colonists and Native Americans living peacefully and sharing a Thanksgiving feast. Other myths are merely silly, such as George Washington chopping down a cherry tree.
Such flippant uses of the term have diluted its original meaning: stories about bygone eras passed down from one generation to another, defining the worldviews and moral-philosophical systems of a culture. We talk vulgarly of “myths” that don’t belong to the past and have no great significance to anyone. Even The New York Times runs articles about “The Myth of Comfort Food.” The Washington Post has separate articles entitled “Five myths about fast food” and “To improve your diet, know these four food myths.”
There is nothing wrong with these articles, and correcting misconceptions is a noble goal. The problem is the devaluing of the concept of myth. Ask the average person what a myth is, and their answer will be a variation of “very old stories that people used to believe were true.” Such an answer is reductionist, even if it’s not factually incorrect. The value of myth, why we should keep retelling the stories of Achilles or Odysseus, is discussed significantly less frequently. Myths, be they Greco-Roman or Chinese or Native American, are different in kind, not just age, from the average modern blockbuster, including the superhero films that critics so often compare to myths. While myth and fantasy share certain elements, myth ultimately breaks far more decisively from scientific, quantitative understandings of the world to reveal essential psychological and moral truths that extend beyond the level of the individual.
Even back before the widespread use of scientific methodology to determine what “really” happened in the past, myths created distance between themselves and the present. Myths occur in a shadowed past where the rules of the present don’t apply. Even Homer, who lived so long ago that the details of his life are uncertain, synthesized older stories about the Trojan War, and even those older stories called back to an ancient, primordial era when gods and humans freely interacted. Hercules, Aeneas, and Achilles, among others, had divine parentage, yet if you asked Homer whether Zeus was currently impregnating women, he would likely say no. The difference between the mythic past and the present is not merely a difference in years, but a difference in how the world functions.
This is the reason why the stereotypical fairy tale opening is “once upon a time.” As the famous L.P. Hartley quote goes, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” The conclusion of Virgil’s Aeneid is a climatic, dramatic showdown between Aeneas and the warrior Turnus. During their fight, Turnus manages to lift an enormous boulder to hurl at Aeneas. The Mandelbaum translation describes how “twice-six chosen men with bodies such as earth produces now could hardly lift that stone upon their shoulders.” The mythic past is elevated, containing qualities that the present lacks. Even The Lord of the Rings, one of the more convincing modern attempts at creating a mythos, takes place in our world, but in the distant past, when magic still existed.
Myths thus don’t depend on their thematic closeness to the specific events of the zeitgeist. They don’t depend on being relatable, at least in the straightforward sense that the word is often used today. Modern readers don’t relate directly to the story of Antigone’s struggle to bury her brother against the wishes of Creon, because that’s not a struggle that’s relevant to us. Even ancient readers didn’t relate to the tales of legendary Chinese emperors or Scandinavian kings, as the vast majority of the people who knew of these stories weren’t of noble blood. Myths were relevant to those who lived in the past for the same reason they’re relevant to us now: because the inner truths of these stories allow us to escape our individual, material circumstances and connect with a larger, more capacious view of the world. In doing so, we understand ourselves and others better.
Thankfully, the influence of mythology hasn’t faded from public consciousness. Greek mythology in particular has enjoyed a vibrant afterlife long after the educated populace stopped learning Greek. There are more obvious manifestations of Greek mythology, such as Percy Jackson and Hades, and there are more subtle uses of it, such as Celine Sciamma’s dazzling Portrait of a Lady on Fire. The story of Orpheus and Eurydice experienced an enormous surge in popularity a few years ago, thanks in part to Sciamma’s film, but more overtly because of the immensely popular Broadway musical Hadestown. An article from The Week even described it as the myth that “took over 2019.” Refreshingly, the popularity of Greek myth hasn’t come at the expense of the mythologies of other cultures. Latin American and East Asian folklore is far more prevalent in the mainstream than it was ten or twenty years ago, leading to a much more diverse and lush cultural tapestry.
The problem isn’t that myths are no longer popular, but that we’ve forgotten how to look at them. This failure is not our fault. The world in which we live is significantly different from the world of the ancients. There are benefits to modernity, of course, and I doubt that many would consciously want to travel back to a time when the average life expectancy was about half of what it currently is, but there are also drawbacks to the modern world, and these should be acknowledged. As authors from Michel Foucault to Robert Putnam have demonstrated, consumerist, materialist society severs the individual from history, from a sense of community, and from the more mysterious parts of their own psyche. There is only what Virginia Woolf calls the aridity of the I. The world becomes solely a collection of facts and figures that the individual can sort through.
This is a problem because the individual perspective is innately limited. Contra Descartes, there is no perfect, crystalline, unclouded way to see the world. There are only fallible, narrow perspectives that remain tied to our limited experiences. Reasoning is hardly sufficient to understand our own tempestuous psyches. To presume to understand even friends and loved ones through only our individual, isolated perspectives is indicative of a characteristically modern kind of presumptuousness.
All well-constructed, well-written narrative has the capacity to elevate us outside our limited experiences into a broader, more elemental understanding of situations, emotions, and experiences. Not everyone has the same experiences, but the same types of experiences—personal transformation, dissatisfaction at societal expectations, acute cognisance of our own failings—take different forms and shapes.
Myths are not the only kinds of stories that can lead us beyond the confinement of our individual perspectives, but they are particularly well-suited to cultivating this kind of awareness. Like impressionist or Cubist painting, their freedom from having to be merely physical, representational depictions of normal reality allows the essence of the internal, psychological truths they depict to shine more clearly.
Modern fantasy like Game of Thrones or Harry Potter, or even many contemporary conceptions of myth, take place in a world that’s different from ours in that it contains scenarios or situations alien to our reality. Yet these worlds are still, with rare exception, still fundamentally aligned with our perception of our reality: there are atomized, self-contained individuals whose actions respond to social and economic factors in a way that we find more or less rational. What’s lost is wonder, enchantment, strangeness. What’s lost is the sense of elemental, mystic patterns of experience in which our individual experiences are only small pieces.
Myths are not in danger of being extinguished. Unless the fundamental nature of living in the world alters to such a degree that laments, celebrations, and rituals no longer have any purpose or meaning, we will continue to retell myths. What’s missing is a broader understanding of the concept of myth. The opposite of myth is not truth or history, but rather the ordinary, the egoistic, and the utilitarian. For myths to provide us with the value they’ve been providing for millennia, we must resist adulterating them into pale shadows that repeat our tepid platitudes back to us. Myths are not untruths. They’re ways to see the truths that remain hidden from our ordinary method of looking at the world.
Joshua Fagan is a writer and critic currently residing in New York City. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Star*Line. He is the author of the Amazon bestseller The Philosophy of Avatar, an extended study of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the context of the Western philosophical tradition. As an academic, his work focuses on the intersection of literature, myth, and technology in the aftermath of Darwin, and his critical work has been published in The Robert Frost Review. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt. His YouTube channel has received over 1.6 million views.