What Is Myth, and Why Should We Make New Ones?
Are these just random blotches? Or do you see something more?
We human beings specialize in abstract thinking.
You’re doing it right now.
That the dark stroke marks on white that you see on this screen represent letters with sounds that go with them, and those sounds and letters can be put together to make words with ideas that go with them, is an example of abstraction par excellence. To someone who doesn’t know the language, it’s just a bunch of seemingly random marks.
Now imagine you did that with the whole world: What if you took life’s seemingly random experiences, put them together, and were able through abstraction to find meaning in it all?
That’s what myth is.
Myth is the language of our human experience, written in big, bold letters. So the question isn’t why would you want to create new ones (particularly for our Western culture, so distanced from the myths that nourished it); the question is, why wouldn’t you want to create new ones?
Hi Chris,
What if one’s sense of meaning isn’t understood or expressed through language (as I find to be usually the case in my own personal experience)? Not that others won’t experience meaning differently…
Ken
It’s hard for me to think in non-language terms, Ken–words are my thing–but abstraction doesn’t have to be verbal. There are usually powerful images associated with myths and mythical beings, and those can be a key to accessing the stories as well. (Think of all the artists throughout cultures and history who have been inspired by myth in their works of art.) Language here is more an example of the kind of leap in human thought that myth involves–albeit a very relevant example.