"The great myths are intuitive. They contain poetic truths, whether told to amuse and delight or to convey the best science man knew in a pre-scientific age, as witness the Creation story in the Book of Genesis. In a mysterious universe, says Arnold Toynbee, man tries to express what he can of the ineffable. Human ideas and values have been shared by many cultures: the intangibles of beauty, hope, vision, and aspiration.
Myths helped explain the natural world, the seasons, the weather, the heavens. They were often grounded in physical reality, though their imagination reached far beyond the boundaries of empirical experience. Religious myths were concerned with the meaning of life, the ways of men and the ways of the gods. Man sought to explain himself to himself. Mythology was used to inspire the young and teach them while they were being entertained.
We of the twentieth century who profess to be civilized also need mythology, as the pantheon of show-business gods and goddesses reveals. In a mass culture we have comic strips, pop art, theatre of the absurd: rock-and-roll singers, movie magazines, the organization man, conspicuous consumption, and constant motion. In their mythology the Greeks rose above brutal aspects of their lives; our modern myths also bring dreams of a life that is glorious and fair, but in advertisements that worship youth, that tell us hard work has been abolished, that make us think we can take it with us.
The Greeks made their gods in their own image and so do we, but ours are less heroic. They level us down to Mr. Average, and when someone speaks of a great society we are not sure what the term now means. Our gods are products of press-agentry; one is sadly let down when he meets an idol to find that the star is a marionette set in motion, even trained in conversation, by a company of managers. A central doctrine of Greek religion was: remember that you are mortal. Socrates' maxim, Know thyself, grew out of the same need for humility and honesty before oneself, and thus before all the world.
Edith Hamilton says that mythologists transform a world of fear into a world of beauty. Perhaps it is in these ancient and not in our modern myths that we can contemplate how the human might become, in her words, supreme over the unhuman.
EARL TOPPINGS
Trade Editor,
The Ryerson Press"
- From the 1965 introduction to The Age of Fable. Bulfinch's Mythology.
Once upon a time (at the fifteenth year of my existence) I was seduced / thrown / absconded from the grim steaming wreckage known as school, successfully bloodied and mangled, into the great wide world, and further study. Come the spare hours, more than I ever had in classrooms before, I took to reading mythology. Not just the classics, nor any preferred culture, rather, world mythology. Like a person with 48 toasters on the go at once, I was all over the show in the kitchen of ancient tales. From Izanagi and Izanami to Nut and Tefnut. Anansi to Tangaroa. Tyr to Daruma.
And it was good. For clearing the psyche-sinuses, and simply for a deeper awareness of how archaic human tales the world over have correlated, whether evaluating the repercussions of unchecked actions, or explaining common human weakness, and uncommon human strength. Emotion. Nature. Death. Sex. Birth. Heroism. Love. Animals. Afterlives and underworlds.
Anyhow, once upon another time, (tick off 4 years) I'm page flicking on a lazy day through one A-Z of Mythology or another. A young woman in the crappy apartment I shared, also in the living room, doing pie. Taking a moment out from the pie seeking asylum in her face (pie was always doing this), she asked me, "Do you believe in that?"
(pause) (blink) (pause)
My book said MYTH on the cover. 4 bold letters. One word.
Hmm, 'yes or no' question, though I believe my answer contained an attempted explanation about how mythology in itself is not a religion but a study. My answer probably contained a few swallowed swear words of shock also. Perhaps pie was playing goalie to the puck of my words, cos I don't think a cog moved 1 millimetre in her head. Apparently this was also a good time for her to mention she was a christian. First I'd heard or seen of that. Wait - I see. Convenience Christian. How deeply original.
Then again, I'm talking about a lady that picked up a National Front racist propaganda pamphlet (one page, A5) and within two minutes was convinced they might have had a fair point, and that it could be worth looking into. The pamphlet ended in a rant about how whites should only eat 'white food'.
(pause) (blink) (pause)
I fail to recall if her Fijian friend was living with her at this point. Here's to a future of potatoes.
Whoops, back to what I was on about, not The Idiots of Christmas Past.
Myth. The introduction to Bulfinch's Age of Fable I shared was written 1965, and although it's getting fifty on, I still found it interesting to wonder what myth means today.
While science has allowed for the analysis, breakdown, manipulation and comprehension of many elements of our universe, people can't escape layering imagination and projecting onto the face of the awesome. It's been said, but plenty, across the board that pop culture and comic books are the mythology of our time. Comic books - modern mythology... meh, I wave my hand somewhere round the middle of my chest at that idea now, with an expression of colon backslash. I've long been into reading both, and I reached that conclusion alone a time ago. Now I think comic books, pulp etc. are only covering a small portion of what the term modern mythology might really mean. Compared to the function served by tales of our ancient selves, the majority of popular comics might give an internalized 'feast for thought' on things like morality, relationships, sacrifice and no short stack of concepts surrounding life and death, to dwell on where our actions in the world are concerned.
Is anything missing? Belief? Ritual? Ceremony? Reverence? Motive? Like, I say, the open hand waves palm down at chest height. Could it be argued that a child's belief in Superman could shape a direction later in life? Ancient religions belief systems didn't rely solely on children, though. Who believes when they meet a playboy millionare named Bruce that he's a double-life vigilante, the way one might believe a mysterious traveler to be Odin come earthward? Who believes that the girl, Kitty, they met on a bus to Massachusetts is a member of a mutant organization, the way one might believe the muse Calliope inspired Homer's work? We also know the authors of our modern tales, and even if they do make bedfellow a muse of their own, the stories don't always have the added wonder of flourishing into existence before the dawn of life as we know it.
Comics, and their screen adaptions may not give us many genuine new bumps in the night, but there's zero percent mystery in that they draw from the veins of myth, fable, and legend with less restraint than starving mosquitoes. It's nice to consider a reader being sucked deeper into the history of some character immortalized by an epic poem or vase painting. It's just a bummer when a complex, many faceted character capable of stimulating the ole noggin, winds up as little more than primary colour underwear, muscles, and bad one-liners.
Coloured tights aside, DC's Beowulf came to mind. Sssh, I'll still happily read it...
I'm mean, for picking on Beowulf, I know, but I was gettin' image withdrawals. It's just that Beowulf is up against Satan every issue here. Satan + Beowulf? That's as illogical as Brigitte Nielsen and Flava Flav. (you're not getting a picture of that)
Further gripes are about to spill from the satchel now, consider yourself warned.
First up, it isn't common knowledge that Heracles (Hercules, Herakles, Iocles), call him what ya will, frequently had a young male lover in tow, as well as being inclined 1/2 the time to bust crap up and go on the odd rampage bender. Spoiler alert: he died. In bed. Agonized. From shirt poisoning. Really.
Makes perfect sense. A rough and tumble demigod, dual natured, and like a load of Greeks of that era, mature and honest about his sexuality. Okay, okay, I don't really expect Kevin Sorbo to revive his role, go off his tree and start smacking innocents about, arm around Iolaus the whole time.
Still a shame that's it's simply not an option. By which I mean, common modern audiences wouldn't deal well with the concepts, let alone any visual depictions, of such antics from what folks imagine a predetermined clear cut hero.
Has me wondering how much your standard '300' fan knows about Spartan relationships.
Hang about, look at any old myth, pulling no punches, yet not fixating unnecessarily on the ugly & offbeat facts of life. Used t' be, folks could just get on with it, throwing the mean-ass story curve-balls. Can't be we've come so far just to close every mind and draw straight lines.
Black and white t.v.
Baby, what they could've done with CGI in the sixties, make the Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus look like the 6 o' clock news.
Hey, look, someone left some more bitching-on in my pocket! No, I'll spare you the mishandling of Ahura Mazda in the Wishmaster films, or any easy pick from the endless bouquet of bastardized deities incorporated into the horror movie genre.
Modern mythology? Sorry, there was even a subject on this blog today? Current Vampire and Zombie trends seem pretty firmly established in our collective minds and I've always maintained that a deity is as strong as any life, or lives, it directly affects. Perhaps no less real than the result of the actions inspired by it's existence. As for the tale-tellers?
Ut oh... Mr. George Lucas' Star Wars.
Modern mythology - Star Wars. Those 4 words just opened a whole new barrel of Gungan fish snacks, which I'm briskly walking away from and leaving in your capable hands. Any kinda' purpose serving essay this ain't, but while I'm at it... er, fine... uh, we'll say Neil Gaiman, for example, can stay and not be abducted by UFOs then. Not sure about everybody else...
Is it assumed every step taken by a sprawling, impersonal society aims forward? Do the majority want to be their own heroes / idols or are we content to simply look like them now? Watching in admiration as our ideal characters go against the grain, fight odds stacked against them. But when most of us break from that screen, drop those pages again, you'll find we are the grain, the odds against. Traitors, turncoats to our favourite version of ourselves.
Robot ethics are figured out for us, the works already done there. Soul and mind feng shui? Buy it off, distract it, decieve it when it calls. Intelligence is in, wisdom is out. Anybody else's obvious need for ritual or sacred respect is a vulnerability which may be whittled down to a trivial quirk, while judgement is passed on what we remain ignorant about and have no intention of understanding. An age where arrogance and vanity needn't be checked, but encouraged, we've told ourselves it's okay, because it keeps the wheels greased.
More minds on earth than ever before, and we've never been more afraid to speak.
It's all a bit Yeats, really. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams... and then sit your fat ass on my dreams and don't notice, accidentally spill blue slushee all over my dreams, provide an apology that in truth is more of an irritating whine, and then deliberately wipe chicken fat on them anyway.
"The watch shows us time. The time shows us, watch." - Rihia2k
(reason #209 why I'm no rapper)
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