I think we see this often in myths that stay with us as powerful allegories because they exemplify a trope or pattern that we may want to express. For example, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice could exemplify how excessive greed or inability to control your urges can lead to losing everything. Orpheus quite literally fails the “marshmallow test”. A similar thing happens in the story of Eros and Psyche, though in this case through her own perseverance Psyche manages to eventually win back what she lost. David vs Goliath is a story about how moral fortitude, courage and wits can triumph in the face of naked brutish violence. The tale of Hua Mulan is a story about the conflict between duty to the family and duty to the law, and how one navigates that (so is the story of Antigone who buries her traitorous brother and gets executed for it).
The thing is also, these are patterns, not universal truths—you’ll sometimes find myths expressing opposing patterns because both can hold in the appropriate circumstances. And some myths simply express values that we do not acknowledge any more as worth uplifting. Abraham and Isaac is about blind obedience and faith unto God. The Tower of Babel is about how if you try to build or do something too ambitious you’ll get smacked down, and you should just know your place.
We have a lot more stories that have become established with this “mythic” power today, if anything. David and Goliath is also Frodo and Sauron or Luke Skywalker and the Death Star. If you think about the ties between power and responsibility your mind likely evokes Spider-Man’s famous motto. No parable about vicious ambition eating itself and leading to a disastrous fall is better known today than the Tale of Walter White, He Who Broke Bad. And the old stories aren’t dead. We know more about other cultures than we used to. We eat that shit up, if anything. We have games and shows and comics about the Greek-Roman gods and their myths, and about the Norse, and about the classic Biblical stories… Are these myths weakened by the fact we don’t literally believe in their truth any more? But well, look at for how long Christian Europe still hung onto classical pagan myths as a source of metaphor. You only need walk through a frescoed 18th century palace, go visit a museum, read the Divine Comedy to see medieval and early modern artists expressing themselves with the language of Greek gods and heroes. Did they literally believe those to be true? Obviously not, they were good Christians who would never do that. But they believed them to be meaningful and powerful and thus sort of story-true instead of true-true. I think we’re doing perfectly fine on that department, and if we’re not it’s because of limits and constraints to artistic expression which have more to do with its commercial model than any spiritual impoverishment. Requiring people to literally believe every single myth they reference is factual would require them to be naive idiots. And we still have our supposedly true-true myths that still are in some sense myths—meaning they double as powerful stories imbued with meaning. We have stories about the creation of the world by the Big Bang, about the rise and fall of the powerful Dinosaurs, about the rise of one clever ape who managed to spread across the world and become Man, about all sorts of kings and heroes and empires and their wars and struggles. I’d argue the mythical cycle built around World War 2 is in some sense the creation myth of the modern liberal world. These myths of course don’t quite look the same way that the Iliad and Odyssey did—but then, does anything look the same as 3000 years ago?
I think we see this often in myths that stay with us as powerful allegories because they exemplify a trope or pattern that we may want to express. For example, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice could exemplify how excessive greed or inability to control your urges can lead to losing everything. Orpheus quite literally fails the “marshmallow test”. A similar thing happens in the story of Eros and Psyche, though in this case through her own perseverance Psyche manages to eventually win back what she lost. David vs Goliath is a story about how moral fortitude, courage and wits can triumph in the face of naked brutish violence. The tale of Hua Mulan is a story about the conflict between duty to the family and duty to the law, and how one navigates that (so is the story of Antigone who buries her traitorous brother and gets executed for it).
The thing is also, these are patterns, not universal truths—you’ll sometimes find myths expressing opposing patterns because both can hold in the appropriate circumstances. And some myths simply express values that we do not acknowledge any more as worth uplifting. Abraham and Isaac is about blind obedience and faith unto God. The Tower of Babel is about how if you try to build or do something too ambitious you’ll get smacked down, and you should just know your place.
We have a lot more stories that have become established with this “mythic” power today, if anything. David and Goliath is also Frodo and Sauron or Luke Skywalker and the Death Star. If you think about the ties between power and responsibility your mind likely evokes Spider-Man’s famous motto. No parable about vicious ambition eating itself and leading to a disastrous fall is better known today than the Tale of Walter White, He Who Broke Bad. And the old stories aren’t dead. We know more about other cultures than we used to. We eat that shit up, if anything. We have games and shows and comics about the Greek-Roman gods and their myths, and about the Norse, and about the classic Biblical stories… Are these myths weakened by the fact we don’t literally believe in their truth any more? But well, look at for how long Christian Europe still hung onto classical pagan myths as a source of metaphor. You only need walk through a frescoed 18th century palace, go visit a museum, read the Divine Comedy to see medieval and early modern artists expressing themselves with the language of Greek gods and heroes. Did they literally believe those to be true? Obviously not, they were good Christians who would never do that. But they believed them to be meaningful and powerful and thus sort of story-true instead of true-true. I think we’re doing perfectly fine on that department, and if we’re not it’s because of limits and constraints to artistic expression which have more to do with its commercial model than any spiritual impoverishment. Requiring people to literally believe every single myth they reference is factual would require them to be naive idiots. And we still have our supposedly true-true myths that still are in some sense myths—meaning they double as powerful stories imbued with meaning. We have stories about the creation of the world by the Big Bang, about the rise and fall of the powerful Dinosaurs, about the rise of one clever ape who managed to spread across the world and become Man, about all sorts of kings and heroes and empires and their wars and struggles. I’d argue the mythical cycle built around World War 2 is in some sense the creation myth of the modern liberal world. These myths of course don’t quite look the same way that the Iliad and Odyssey did—but then, does anything look the same as 3000 years ago?