I love myths! "But Rhythm you spend so much time shitting on peoples myths, wtf?" I know, I know. The thing is, I'm not shitting on their myths because I have some issue with myth itself. I have an issue with how some people have leveraged these myths. They're very dear to me and I hate watching the endless parade of people who seem completely intent on removing the beauty and achievements contained therein, or relieving them of their ability to comment on the human experience in an effort to assert their factual accuracy. Now, I'm not the only atheist in the world that likes a good myth (Summer comes to mind), and in conversations with the faithful of any stripe there's probably a great deal of misunderstanding as to why I approach their myths in the manner that I do.
I want to be clear here. I feel that many myths have immense value as metaphor. They are (often but not always) extremely complex in their structure, and plainly demonstrate a fantastic achievement in literary and oral tradition, as well as our constantly evolving concepts of morality, our place in the cosmos, etc etc etc. On these grounds (to me at least) these myths are something to be cherished, retold, and not forgotten. They tell us so much about how our ancestors viewed the world around them, each other, and themselves. This is why I cannot stand it when people assert their myths to be some objective and absolute truth, while simultaneously discounting the myths of every other culture that has ever existed. In doing this they reduce their own myths to the status of irrelevant and useless on the same grounds that they've dismissed the myths of others.
The thing that really get's my goat about this is that many mythological narratives deal with the same questions, and arrive at the same conclusions, though the narratives themselves may be wildly divergent. In the case of those who discount the myths of others, what's being criticized is often not the message itself, but the storyteller, or the style in which the storyteller decided to convey the message. In some cases, the storytellers themselves plainly understood their myths to be metaphor. A literal interpretation of these narratives do them no justice, nor does the implication that the story itself must have been literal to the storyteller. Our ancestors were just as aware of the power of metaphor as we are today.
One of my favorite posters actually made an observation about the way I handle myths in a late night chat session that I think is spot on. I don't need these myths to be "true" for them to be worthwhile. Taking that further, the minute someone goes down the road of arguing any given myth to be "true" (and the others false) it robs their myth of value to me. It becomes petty and small. An attempt to distill something very profound into a simple binary equation that they can leveraged to justify what I believe was already part of their internal narrative to begin with. The concepts therein are often transformed into scapegoats for their own opinions, their own justifications, their own prejudices. Insisting that these myths be married to reality only exacerbates this issue.
It astonishes me that some people feel the need to imagine elaborate shadow worlds to invest these stories with value and merit when they were clearly loaded with these things in the first place.
http://hercules.gcsu.edu/~mmagouli/defmyth.htm
(a great link I came across today with a nice fat bibliography that gave me the idea to write this post)
I want to be clear here. I feel that many myths have immense value as metaphor. They are (often but not always) extremely complex in their structure, and plainly demonstrate a fantastic achievement in literary and oral tradition, as well as our constantly evolving concepts of morality, our place in the cosmos, etc etc etc. On these grounds (to me at least) these myths are something to be cherished, retold, and not forgotten. They tell us so much about how our ancestors viewed the world around them, each other, and themselves. This is why I cannot stand it when people assert their myths to be some objective and absolute truth, while simultaneously discounting the myths of every other culture that has ever existed. In doing this they reduce their own myths to the status of irrelevant and useless on the same grounds that they've dismissed the myths of others.
The thing that really get's my goat about this is that many mythological narratives deal with the same questions, and arrive at the same conclusions, though the narratives themselves may be wildly divergent. In the case of those who discount the myths of others, what's being criticized is often not the message itself, but the storyteller, or the style in which the storyteller decided to convey the message. In some cases, the storytellers themselves plainly understood their myths to be metaphor. A literal interpretation of these narratives do them no justice, nor does the implication that the story itself must have been literal to the storyteller. Our ancestors were just as aware of the power of metaphor as we are today.
One of my favorite posters actually made an observation about the way I handle myths in a late night chat session that I think is spot on. I don't need these myths to be "true" for them to be worthwhile. Taking that further, the minute someone goes down the road of arguing any given myth to be "true" (and the others false) it robs their myth of value to me. It becomes petty and small. An attempt to distill something very profound into a simple binary equation that they can leveraged to justify what I believe was already part of their internal narrative to begin with. The concepts therein are often transformed into scapegoats for their own opinions, their own justifications, their own prejudices. Insisting that these myths be married to reality only exacerbates this issue.
It astonishes me that some people feel the need to imagine elaborate shadow worlds to invest these stories with value and merit when they were clearly loaded with these things in the first place.
http://hercules.gcsu.edu/~mmagouli/defmyth.htm
(a great link I came across today with a nice fat bibliography that gave me the idea to write this post)
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
![[Image: Untitled2_zpswaosccbr.png]](https://images.weserv.nl/?url=i1140.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fn569%2Fthesummerqueen%2FUntitled2_zpswaosccbr.png)
