The Ongoing Importance of Myth

In a bold and ground-breaking move, Canongate Books has started publishing an ongoing series of classic myths being retold by modern authors. The initial simultaneous launch of the first three titles (in more than 30 countries around the world) features Margaret Atwood telling the story of Penelope the wife of Odysseus, Jeanette Winterson retelling the myth of Atlas and Hercules, and Karen Armstrong writing an original long essay on the history of myth.

“In our scientific culture, we often have rather simplistic notions of the divine. In the ancient world, the ‘gods’ were rarely regarded as supernatural beings with discrete personalities, living a totally separate metaphysical existence. Mythology was not about theology, in the modern sense, but about human experience. People thought that gods, humans, animals and nature were inextricably bound up together, subject to the same laws, and composed of the same divine substance. There was initially no ontological gulf between the world of the gods and the world of men and women. When people spoke of the divine, they were usually talking about an aspect of the mundane. The very existence of the gods was inseparable from that of a storm, a sea, a river, or from those powerful human emotions – love, rage or sexual passion – that seemed momentarily to lift men and women onto a different plane of existence so that they saw the world with new eyes.” – Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth

Upcoming volumes include the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur by Russian author Victor Pelevin, and the Biblical story of Samson and Delilah by Israeli author David Grossman. One hundred writers have been approached to write an edition in the series.

Why re-tell the old myths with these contemporary authors? Guardian reviewer Peter Conrad explains how every era re-makes the myths to talk about their own experiences.

“The stories about the loves and quarrels of the gods and their descent to earth cry out to be reinterpreted. A new significance is added every time; these fallible, all too human deities – who seemed lushly carnal in the Renaissance, chastely neoclassical in the 18th century, infectiously depraved in the 1890s – inhabit a perpetual present, which makes them our contemporaries. The babble of options does not matter: a myth, as Levi-Strauss declared, is the sum total of all possible versions.”

Canongate publisher Jamie Byng in the Sunday Herald explains why he has undertaken this vast (Herculean you might say) mythic project which is expected to not complete until 2038.

“…the most common presumption about myths is that they are not true. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that a myth is “a purely fictitious narrative” and that something mythic has “no foundation in fact”. But this seems to miss the very point of myth; and to overstate the value of fact. In a letter to his brother, John Keats introduced the wonderful concept of “negative capability”. We, said the poet, are “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. But this “irritable reaching after fact and reason” seems to define one aspect of the contemporary world’s political and social anxieties. Today, our culture seems more detached from the idea of myth than it has ever been. Part of the problem is that myth has been discredited. Our obsession with fact and reason, a consequence of the scientific revolution, has allowed us to dismiss myth because it is not rooted in verifiable certainty. In doing so, we ignore the extent to which myth deals in emotional, rather than literal, truths.”

For those of us who grew up loving the ancient myths and tales (back before I ever knew that being a modern Pagan was an option) this series of books looks to be a rare treat. Ancient myth still resonates today in our modern world, and I’m happy to hear that a new generation of writers is taking up the challenge.

Tags: Neopaganism