The History and Future of Myth
“This was the last of the great revolutions in human experience…. Life would never be the same again, and perhaps the most significant—and potentially disastrous—result of this new experiment was the death of mythology.” –Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth
“This” to which writer Karen Armstrong refers is the Great Western Transformation, a phrase she coins for the spread of modernity across the globe over the last 500 years. While the entirety of her book A Short History of Myth is intriguing, the last chapter puts forth troubling conclusions.
After chronicling the shifting nature of myth through human history–our sacred stories changing at crisis points to adapt to the new needs of civilization–she arrives at our present era. Here she finds a Western culture so focused on technological progress and the supremacy of rational inquiry that it has discarded the stories that grounded us as useless make-believe.
The problem is, she’s right.
Spiritual and psychological malaise is evident all around us in the West, malaise Armstrong pins on a collapse of myth. It can be seen in the increasing absence of believers in the traditional pews and the fervent embrace of something—anything—from Eastern philosophies to hardcore fundamentalist sects to thetan- and Kool-Aid-consuming cults and other exotic brands of belief. While it’s easy to ridicule these new practitioners (hey, my own tree-hugging neopaganism is a prime target), their craving for meaning is genuine. If our society has failed to feed them, who can blame them for grabbing whatever meal they can?
One danger, which Armstrong ably acknowledges, is that in their grasping some may latch onto unhealthy mythologies, following Jim Joneses, Aryan brothers, radical Islamists, and the like to their and perhaps our society’s doom. But the greater danger is that we’ll end up with no mythology at all, leaving us a rootless, drifting people.
Now hear this: I’m a science guy. I prize rational inquiry above almost anything else (I have no patience for creationism in any form), and I pride myself on a Vulcan-like mentality. So I don’t think we should retreat from the scientific method we use to explore our universe one iota.
But even Star Trek’s Vulcans had their rituals, their kunut kalifi and kahs-wan, shrouded in mystery. Even these fictional paragons of intellect had what served as myth. The idea that we have to give up the stories that tell us who we are in order to reach for the stars is nonsense. Armstrong points out that only relatively recently in our collective history have science and myth been considered mutually incompatible; there’s no reason that we ample-brained beings can’t be comfortable with duality, holding two separate and seemingly contradictory ideas in our ample brains at the same time. We need only recognize the separate spheres that these ideas operate in. And once we acknowledge the separation—that one describes empirical reality, while the other describes not a literal but a moral and psychological truth (are you listening, creationists?), we can see where they cross-pollinate.
We need new myths. “We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national, or ideological tribe,” Armstrong writes. “We need myths that help us to realize the importance of compassion…. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude…. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a ‘resource’.”
If like me you yearn for new myth, there’s no reason to despair. Our mythic sensibilities may have atrophied in the West, but the need for myth will never go away; it is fundamental to our human nature. (I’d argue myth survives in the United States in the comics’ superhero genre, full of larger-than-life archetypes engaged in life-or-death struggles. Which, in a world hungry for myth, is no doubt part of the reason that superhero film adaptations have proven to be reliable blockbusters.) Armstrong posits that myth has passed through several crisis points as society morphed around it; I posit that there’s no reason to believe that myth won’t also emerge from the present crisis in a new and compelling form.
So give Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth a read. (It’s easily digested, consumable in a single night). And let’s get busy writing the next chapter in the history of myth.