Why Mythology is True

Mythology is a constant human experience, and human experience is story telling.

There’s a certain habit with those critical of myths or religion to look for “gotcha” moments. They seem particularly delighted when they find out that two different sects or groups essentially have the same story. For some reason, this commonality is used to disprove the myth, rather than reinforce its universal nature.

Some myths are easy to see parallels of in multiple traditions, most famously the great flood. Another example is as between Enkidu and Samson. It's interesting to see that there is a now a drive to sexualise Enkidu and Gilgamesh's rivalry, much as almost all modern re-dos of the Iliad make Achilles and Patroclus relationship into a modern, sexual, one. I think it’s not a far stretch to see our re-tellings as saying more about our current day ideals than the myths themselves.

The other main trend is to re-tell these stories through the eyes of the women in them - The Silence of the Girls, the Penelopiad and so on are clearly of interest to someone (hard to tell if it’s readers or publishers) and they certainly portray a female angle to a familiar story. Of course, they tend to be horribly anachronistic and full of glaring omissions - the Silence of the Girls talks a lot about death or slavery from war and misses out the crippling, disability and injury which battles leave in their wake. One could easily see Hilary Clinton’s idea that women are the primary victims of war finding fertile ground in the audience of these books.

One reason for this need to re-tell myths is that some of them essentially form cautionary tales for the bronze age. Rather than seeing Enkidu and his relationship with the temple prostitute as domesticating and weakening him as he loses his wild-man powers it is now interpreted as being "an awakening to human dignity" rather than a rather blunt metaphor for how women sap men's power and desire for conquest and combat.

“Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth–penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.”

- Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

There are a few common threads that appear in lots of myths.
One is pairing - this can be adversarial (Beowulf and Grendel, David and Goliath) or masculine rivalry (Enkidu and Gilgamesh) or Junior/Senior (Achilles and Patroclus, Cuchulain and Laeg). This metric runs through almost all myths and continues in modern stories - the first six Star Wars films famously follow Joseph Campbell’s ideas closely and consist of 5 episodes of master/student relationships before the Jedis return and is realised and no longer needs their masters.

One is women. They tend to cause strife and are at the root cause of the majority of conflicts through pride and making challenges and statements that others must live up to or defend. They tended to be used by our myth writers as agents of discord either through rivalries such as the Judgement of Paris, or Mebd’s scheming and intrigue at comparatively low personal risk through the Cattle Raid of Cooley. It’s no wonder that modern writers look to tame these tales to our tastes, especially when they can cast their heroines in the coveted role of victim. Ours is truly a twisted time.

Another is the band. Beowulf is often accompanied by a band of warriors, it's their failure against the dragon that is the harbinger of the doom of his kingdom. Others see the relative failure of his band as being reality as experienced even in the modern world (i.e. as talked about in On Killing) where only a couple of men from a band are really warriors and most of the rest follow or watch. Beowulf and Wiglaf form an Alpha/Beta leadership team and also fulfil the trope of a junior/senior pair. Another good example of the band is Jason and the Argonauts. It'd be an interesting experiment to see if the band is a constant in the legends of more landlocked peoples or is heavily connected to boats and their need for a limited number of crew. Chariot warfare also naturally promotes the junior/senior pair due to the divided responsibilities of driving and fighting.

The final main thread for now is what I've seen archaeologists refer to as liminality - the idea of boundaries between places and worlds and the importance of crossing them. Most legends involve a start place, a difficult journey crossing a boundary and then the real meat of the adventure happening in another place. The Greek legends crossing the river Styx into the underworld are the clearest examples of this, but the current is part of many stories. It's the same idea of crossing boundaries that's meant to be at the heart of prehistoric religion (dating to at least the Mesolithic) where sacrifices would be made into bogs or lakes which were borders between different landscapes or worlds. I must admit that I find archaeologists look to overuse this explanation at the expense of more practical and prosaic ones.

The idea of Arthur throwing Excalibur into the lake is the an act from the same tradition as offering bronze age swords to the water, lakeside deposits at Star Carr (11,000 years ago) or people throwing coins into a well or fountain for luck. It's one of the oldest European superstitions. Tolkien’s modern myth captures this sense of boundary beautifully with characters having an innate sense of the furthest from home they’ve been and the danger of crossing between realms.

It’s also worth recalling that most heroes, in a mythological sense, were not fighting for peace, law or stability. It's usually a sense of either glory (Beowulf and Grendel) or destiny (Beowulf and the Dragon). They don't have happy endings. This isn't the same as the Wild West idea where the White Hat cleans up the town and then leaves it behind as he rides into the sunset. Mythic Heroes are given impossible tasks, often due to fate or caprice, they often leave the world a worse place and at the end they die or ascend to godhood. Even achieving Herculean labours does not bring about happy endings. Glory is a concept which doesn’t fit neatly into the modern worldview and something I shall return to soon.

'Myth is not entertainment, but rather the crystallisation of experience, and, far from being escapist, fantasy is an intensification of reality.'

Alan Garner

As much as all this mythology seems eons away from our own era its messages can still resonate. While our values and rules may change, our biology and nature will not. There’s a reason twisting the truth in myths for modern ends always feels false and something to be picked at like a splinter stuck in the story.

One of my favourite points to remember is that Prince Philip’s life story mirrored so much of classical myth. He was worshipped as a god on one island, like Aeneas he had to flee his homeland following a war in the land of Ilium, and came to wander the sea like Odysseus; he fought heroically in war, was a great chariot racer (he was even a pilot) and married a foreign queen before achieving “divine” status finally being driven to his funeral in a chariot of his own unusual design.

This is Britain, though, and unlike the ancients we don’t like boasting about great deeds of war and renown. So he just became known as Phil the Greek, who liked insulting foreigners, rather than simply the latest in a long line of Proto-Indo European legends.