a short history of myth book review

Steven H. Wilson

Author, publisher, new media artist.

REVIEW – A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong

The point of the question, of course, is that God is often not treated as an item of speculation.  God is treated by many as a defined quantity, about whom everything is recorded in sacred literature.  If those sacred texts defy what we think we’ve learned about the universe, then we’re wrong and those texts are right, even if they were written a thousand years ago by people who thought a flat earth was the center of the universe.  Ironically, many atheists cling as stubbornly to this narrow definition of god as do fundamentalists.

I guess there’s no room for  that  god in science fiction.  If you’ve read my science fiction, however, you know that I don’t believe in that god, and that I certainly think there’s room to discuss multiple definitions of god.  My work is lousy with references to gods of all sorts.  I’m fascinated by religion and mythology, even though I’m a rationalist and believe in the scientific method.

Karen Armstrong is a rationalist, too.  A former Roman Catholic nun, she’s written quite a number of books on the histories of religions – Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism among them.  I’ve studied a couple of her works in my scandalously liberal Methodist Sunday School class.  I’m about convinced that Ms. Armstrong knows more about the human conception of God than I will ever know or God will ever tell me.  Her books are long, scholarly, and sometimes daunting; but they’re worth your time, if you want to understand the very complex history of human religion.

But you’re probably saying  “Hey, Steve, what’s all this got to do with your promise to point us at good SF?  We want to find the next  Moon is a Harsh Mistress , not take a college course from a lapsed nun! She might come at us with a ruler, and then where would we be?  In a broken heap at the bottom of the stairs, like stunt doubles from  The Blues Brothers!   If we’re going to read a long book, it better have robots, computers, spaceships, time machines or at least babes in chain mail bikinis!”

Hang tight.  First of all, Armstrong’s,  A Short History of Myth  is, as its name implies, not a long book.  At 149 pages, hardbound and only five inches by eight, it looks like it should be part of your Winnie the Pooh collection, except that it has no stuffed bear on the cover, tubby or otherwise.  It’s a brief outline of what Armstrong sees as the six ages of myth, beginning around 20,000 BCE and running up to the present day.

The bearing this has on speculative fiction was admirably summed up in the much-maligned film  Star Trek the Motion Picture,*  wherein the artificial intelligence called Vger seeks its creator, hoping to answer the question, “Is this all that I am?  Is there not more?”  That is the purpose of myth: to look beyond the everyday, the factual, the mundane and find out what there is that we cannot see.  This is transcendence.  This is ecstasy.  As Armstrong puts it:

“We seek out moments of ecstasy, when we feel deeply touched within and lifted momentarily beyond ourselves.  At such times, it seems that we are living more intensely than usual, firing on all cylinders, and inhabiting the whole of our humanity.”

As can be inferred, “myth” means something more than a misconception such as Penn and Teller might debunk for us, or an overblown story which we like to believe, but is, in fact, false, like George Washington and the cherry tree.  Myth, as related by Armstrong, is a story which informs us on how we are to behave, how to interact with others, how to make moral decisions.  Myth sets an example for us in story or parable, and myth has direct bearing on our lives.

And this is an important point: Myth is not mean to be  believed  as fact or history.  Pick up any volume of Greek myths, or a book of creation mythology, and the jacket will tell you that ancient peoples created myths in order to explain how the world came to be.  This suggests that myths served, for ancient civilizations, the same purpose as Kipling’s  Just So Stories .  That is, they gave a whimsical explanation for how something that exists now developed in the way it did.  Armstrong disagrees with this definition.  Myth, she says, was not used by the ancients to entertain or to answer questions about history; it was meant to give people a moral framework and show them how the divine (a great world which exists beyond this one) was reflected in their everyday lives.

For the Greeks, greatest of the mythologists, there were two systems of thought, mythos and logos.  Logos was the “logical, pragmatic and scientific mode,” and mythos the moral, the spiritual.  Plato and Aristotle both disliked mythological thinking, because it made no sense in a rational context.  It was all about emotion.  In order to be understood, the listener or reader had to be caught up in the feelings produced by the story being told in, say, a tragedy by Sophocles.  Armstrong is quick to point out that we should not share Plato and Aristotle’s impatience with mythos.  We’re incomplete without it, she says, and not just because we lack religion.  Indeed, she sees that religion doesn’t work for many people today:

“Religion has been one of the most traditional ways of attaining ecstasy, but if people no longer find it in temples, synagogues, churches or mosques, they look for it elsewhere: in art, music, poetry, rock, dancing, drugs, sex or sport.  Like poetry and music, mythology should awaken us to rapture, even in the face of death and the despair we may feel at the prospect of annihilation.  If a myth ceases to do that, it has died and outlived its usefulness.”

It’s almost as if she’s saying, countering the fundamentalists, that it’s not our fault as humans that we’ve moved away from God.  It’s the fact that God has become irrelevant to us that has caused us to move away.  If myths are to inform our moral choices, then myths need to hit us where we live.  And we don’t live in the age when a micro-managing god summoned his prophet to the mount to tell him that the people shouldn’t eat seafood.  Fundamentalists miss the point.  The stories they claim are history and science were never intended to be either.  They were intended to make us feel, to set us an example,  and they were intended to change as our needs changed.   Zeus evolved in Greece from being a distant sky god to being a randy traveler among us, searching out our prettiest girls, and occasionally boys.  This happened because a distant sky god wasn’t much use to anyone.  Indeed, Uranus, Zeus’s grandfather, was castrated and thrown out of power because he was a distant sky god, and couldn’t be interacted with, even in parable.  Uranus was a first draft of the sky god, and it took a few tries to get him right.  For the ancients, gods, like people,  evolved.

But, Armstrong notes, mythology essentially stopped evolving in the Axial Age, around 200 BCE.  Today our spiritual lives are still informed by the Hebrew Prophets, by Plato and Aristotle, by Confucius, Buddha and Laozi.  All progress has been on the rational side.  “Western modernity,” she says, “was the child of logos.”  Fundamentalism grew from the frustration felt by some of those who still wanted spiritualism, who found the purely rational here and now too limiting, who asked, “Is this all that I am?  Is there not more?” and came up with an answer that was, in itself, limiting; because they tried to force the spiritual into the framework of the rational.  They tried to insist that myth was fact.

Others, as Armstrong relates, found other ways to fill the spiritual vacuum.

“We still long to ‘get beyond’ our immediate circumstances, and to enter a ‘full time,’ a more intense, fulfilling existence.  We try to enter this dimension by means of art, rock music, drugs or by entering the larger-than-life perspective of film.  We still seek heroes.  Elvis Presley and Princess Diana were both made into mythical beings, even objects of religious cult.  But there is something unbalanced about this adulation.  The myth of the hero was not intended to provide us with icons to admire, but was designed to tap into the vein of heroism within ourselves.  Myths must lead us to imitation or participation, not passive contemplation.  We no longer know how to manage our mythical lives in a way that is spiritually challenging and transformative.”  

Indeed, I’d have to agree with Armstrong that a lot of our secular answers to these needs ring hollow.  For years, I’ve been dissatisfied with the modern definitions of heroism, such as this one from Arthur Ashe: “True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.”  I’ve always known I disliked the definition, all due respect to Mr. Ashe and his accomplishments.  I knew that the heroes of my mythology didn’t do anything as pedestrian as sublimating their identities and just serving others.  James T. Kirk would have (and did, if you believe his lesser mythologists) died saving the universe.  George Bailey would have died to save his brother Harry or any of his family.  Lazarus Long did die (kind of) to win the approval of his beloved Mama Maureen.  But none of these heroes ever, for a minute abandoned their identities or forgot their own needs, even if they did sometimes give priority to some goal other than their immediate safety or personal ambition.

What troubled me was that I couldn’t write a personal definition of heroism which emotionally satisfied me.  I came up with this:

A hero is someone who puts his principles ahead of all else, including personal convenience, comfort and safety.  

That seemed to be a definition of heroism that was less prone to manipulation by draft boards or charities that sink so low as to employ telemarketers.  (For the fate of both of these entities, see Shepherd Book’s sermons on “the special hell.”)

Ms. Armstrong’s book has allowed me to come up with this definition, which I like a lot better:

A hero is someone who acts when others are unwilling to do so, and whose actions inspire us also to act in ways that change our surroundings for the better.  

And here, I think, is the place where science fiction and fantasy intersects mythology, as mythology has always been intended to serve.  Fantastic literature is particularly suited to describing the extraordinary.  There is everyday heroism, of course; but most of us are a bit thick, and it’s easier to get the point across to us if you’re not subtle.  Everyday heroism is subtle.  The heroism of our science fiction stories, our television shows, our movies and our comic books is not.  And so it reaches more easily into our lives and makes itself relevant to us.

Armstrong summarizes, near the end, the downside of centuries of devotion to pure reason:  “…during the twentieth century, we saw some very destructive modern myths, which have ended in massacre and genocide… We cannot counter these bad myths with reason alone, because undiluted logos cannot deal with such deep-rooted, unexorcised fears, desires and neuroses.”

I would qualify this statement.  As demonstrated by Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, rational analysis certainly can help us navigate the morass of emotions which sometimes cause us anxiety and pain.  A lot of the problems that overwhelm us day in and day out can be solved if we take a breath and think our way through them, instead of oozing emotion all over everyone.  I think Armstrong’s point, though, is that cold, rational truth is not enough.  We need an emotional framework in which to function.  We need inspiration.  We need to occasionally ask, as cliched as it sounds, what our heroes would do in a given situation, whether our hero is Jesus, the Dalai Llama or John Galt.  (And yes, I believe there is the power of myth even in works of fiction created to appeal to the rational mind, as is  Atlas Shrugged .  Ayn Rand made it clear that her heroes were not men as they are everyday, but men as they should be.  That is a valid definition for a myth, and I believe she created one that has power for a lot of people.)

And with that last I pointed at the conclusion which I drew while reading Armstrong’s book, and which I was happy to see she drew as well: Our new mythology is not the province of traditional religion any longer.  It is the province of our novelists, our storytellers, our movie makers and our playwrights.  Robert Heinlein saw this thirty years ago when he explored the concept of the World as Myth.  His characters, beginning in  The Number of the Beast , learned that there were a nigh-infinite number of universes in which the fictional realities postulated by the most powerful storytellers were brought into being by sheer creative energy.  Andrew M. Greeley also played with this in  God Game .  I recommend both works.

But it’s important that our new mythologists remember that their job is not only to entertain or to explain.  It’s to motivate, to inspire, to take us beyond the everyday and the pedestrian.  To show us how our lives are a reflection of the world beyond, whatever that is.  This is not all that you are.  There is more.

It’s not a purely rational idea, no.  And don’t think I’m advocating that we abandon reason and surrender to unbridled passion (though we should probably all do that sometimes.)  Like Karen Armstrong, I’m saying that we need to spend at least part of our time thinking and talking about how things should be, in addition to how they are.  That way, when it’s time to go out and do something, we have a road map.

* A story coincidentally developed by Alan Dean Foster, who I featured last week.  In a reversal of his usual practice, Foster developed the plot for the film, and series creator Gene Roddenberry wrote the novelization.

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A Short History of Myth : Book summary and reviews of A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong

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A Short History of Myth

by Karen Armstrong

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Published Nov 2005 176 pages Genre: History, Current Affairs and Religion Publication Information

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About this book

Book summary.

This brilliant, readable synthesis of the history of mythology and the function it serves to humanity is the launch title of the groundbreaking publishing event, The Myths. "Human beings have always been mythmakers." So begins Karen Armstrong's concise yet compelling investigation into myth: what it is, how it has evolved, and why we still so desperately need it. She takes us from the Paleolithic period and the myths of the hunters right up to the "Great Western Transformation" of the last five hundred years and the discrediting of myth by science. The history of myth is the history of humanity, our stories and beliefs, our curiosity and attempts to understand the world, which link us to our ancestors and each other. Myths help us make sense of the universe. Heralding a major series of retellings of international myths by authors from around the world, Armstrong's characteristically insightful and eloquent book serves as a brilliant and thought-provoking introduction to myth in the broadest sense -- and explains why if we dismiss it, we do so at our peril.

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Reader reviews.

'Although the book offers no new perspectives or information on the history of myth, it does provide a functional survey of mythology's history.' - PW. Comment: A Short History of Myth is the launch title in UK publisher Cannongate's new myth series featuring retellings of classic myths by modern writers - see The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood and Weight by Jeanette Winterson, also in this issue. It is not surprising that the reviewer from PW finds that this book offers 'no new perspectives or information' as its purpose is not to break new ground but rather to offer an overview of mythology as a whole in order to put the rest of the series into context. The series, conceived by Cannongate publisher Jamie Byng, is being launched by 30 publishers worldwide this Fall. Byng (who incidentally is the brother of Georgia Byng, author of the Molly Moon books for children) estimates the series will be completed in 2038!

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Karen Armstrong Author Biography

Joe Pickering

Karen Armstrong, author, scholar, and journalist, is among the world's foremost commentators on religious history and culture. She is the author of numerous books on religion, including The Case for God , A History of God , The Battle for God , Holy War , Islam , Buddha , and The Great Transformation , as well as a memoir, The Spiral Staircase . Her work has been translated into forty-five languages. In 2008 she was awarded the TED Prize and began working with TED on the Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public, crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Confucianism. It was launched globally in the fall of 2009. Also in 2008, she was awarded the Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Medal. In 2013, she received the British Academy'...

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A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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B- : packed and compact and not particularly convincing

See our review for fuller assessment.

   Review Consensus :   No consensus    From the Reviews : "In other words, her short history of myth is also an even shorter history of religion, and Armstrong does a good job of showing in clear, concise language how both were shaped by the problems of the societies they served. (...) Armstrong's book is a readable, informed introduction to a fascinating subject, but her emphasis on myth's cultic origins makes it a slightly daunting preface to a series of contemporary retellings." - Christopher Tayler, Daily Telegraph "So far, so provocative (.....) But somewhere in the scholarship and swift narrative, Armstrong also provokes some truculent challenges." - Tim Radford, The Guardian "The book is more about provoking thought than supplying raw data, so do not come to it if you want chapter and verse on the Norse gods or the like. What Armstrong does in her skid over the millennia is make comparisons, connections and contrasts in a way that cannot fail to enlighten the general reader. She is particularly convincing on the significance and origins of paleolithic myth -- always a speculative matter, but here handled with maximum plausibility." - Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian "Here, given the task of writing a general introduction to the series, she has produced a book that will make any anthropologist embarrassed or angry. (...) Indeed, it is all-too-familiar a pattern: a fictional account of the past, told to make sense of the present. Unless I have missed some deep irony (a satirical expose of our fantasies about the past, perhaps ?), Armstrong has been extremely misguided in the conception and production of this book." - Simon Goldhill, New Statesman " A Short History of Myth is a handy stand-alone overview of the ever-evolving partnership between myth and man from Paleolithic times to the present. Succinct and cleanly written, it is hugely readable and, in its journey across the epochs of human experience, often moving. (...) Armstrong's exposition is streamlined and uncluttered without being simplistic. She falters once, when she speculates that today it is novelists who can partly fill the void left by myth." - Caroline Alexander, The New York Times Book Review "For Armstrong, myth is a symptom of our metaphysical anxiety, an unreciprocated appeal to gods who have let us down. (...) This academic study opens the way for the fictional efforts that follow, because Armstrong sees myth as a playful, whimsical, subjunctive activity." - Peter Conrad, The Observer "(E)legantly argued and consistently thought-provoking (.....) (S)he's an excellent, if sometimes over-moralistic, historian and guide." - David Flusfeder, Sunday Telegraph "Short it truly is. Armstrong has a great deal to pack into 159 pages, and it is hardly surprising that some chapters are taken at a breathless pace. (...) The first half of the book is largely uncontentious (.....) Halfway through, Armstrong's account takes an unexpected turn. The author reverts to her occupation as a popular historian of religion and shows how the world's great belief systems -- first, Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism and Greek philosophy, thereafter Kabbalah, Christianity and Islam -- spring from, then reject, the mythological element in the human imagination, preferring the abstract, the rational, the ethical: that which Armstrong defines as Logos." - Carolyne Larrington, Times Literary Supplement "Her essay here is serviceable. She relies heavily on the usual suspects -- Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Walter Burkert -- and has a lamentable tendency to make sweeping pronouncements that sound trite" - Elizabeth Hand, The Washington Post Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review 's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

The complete review 's Review :

First, it is nearly always rooted in the experience of death and the fear of extinction.

Mythology is inseparable from ritual. Many myths make no sense outside a liturgical drama that brings them to life, and are incomprehensible in a profane setting.

We need myths to help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipistic selfishness.

About the Author :

       Karen Armstrong used to be a nun and has written extensively on religion.

© 2006-2010 the complete review Main | the New | the Best | the Rest | Review Index | Links

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A Short History of Myth

“What Armstrong does in her skid over the millennia is make comparisons, connections, and contrasts in a way that cannot fail to enlighten the general reader. What myth once did, novels now do . . . Myths are narratives: as she eloquently says, we shouldn’t be done with them yet.” —Nicolas Lezard, The Guardian

• Imprint Canongate U.S.
• Page Count 176
• Publication Date October 23, 2006
• ISBN-13 978-1-8419-5800-2
• Dimensions 5" x 7.75"
• US List Price $16.00

• Publication Date November 11, 2005
• ISBN-13 978-1-8419-5716-6
• US List Price $18.00

About The Book

Karen Armstrong is among the world’s leading thinkers on human belief systems and this concise, clear, absorbing primer on the history and mani­festations of mythology has emerged as a definitive text on the subject.

Armstrong guides us from the Paleolithic period and the myths of the hunters right up to the “Great Western Transformation” of the last five hundred years and the discrediting of myth by science. The history of myth is the history of humanity; our stories and beliefs, our curiosity, and our attempts to understand the world link us to our ancestors and to one another. Myths help us make sense of the universe.

Armstrong’s characteristically insightful and eloquent book serves as a bril­liant and thought-provoking introduction to myth in the broadest sense—and why if we dismiss it we do so at our peril.

“ A Short History of Myth  is a handy stand-alone overview of the ever-evolving partnership between myth and man from Paleolithic times to the present. Succinct and cleanly written, it is hugely readable and, in its journey across the epochs of human experience, often moving.” — The New York Times Book Review

“With her succinct, thoughtfully elucidated A Short History of Myth . . . Armstrong supplies the brilliant anchor work for a vast new series. . . . The first two novels in the series . . . offer provocative mythical recastings. . . . This unprecedented undertaking is one for the ages.” —Lisa Shea, Elle

“It is hugely ambitious to try to cover the history of the Paleolithic period to the present day in a mere 150 pages but Karen Armstrong rises to the challenge with aplomb. Rich in snippets of myth, her narrative provides an overview of mythology’s historical evolution and provides a fascinating commentary on the psychological need of humans ‘to place our lives in a larger setting’ in order to make sense of our existence. . . . Armstrong issues a cri de coeur to creative writers and artists to regenerate mythology for contemporary times.” —Anna Scott, Daily Telegraph

“What Armstrong does in her skid over the millennia is make comparisons, connections and contrasts in a way that cannot fail to enlighten the general reader. She is particularly convincing on the significance and origins of Palaeolithic myth—always a speculative matter, but here handled with maximum plausibility. . . . What myth once did, novels now do; and her points about The Waste Land and Ulysses are well made. . . . Myths are narratives: as she eloquently says, we shouldn’t be done with them yet.” —Nicolas Lezard, The Guardian

“Karen Armstrong presents an informed and informative overview of the history and role of myths in human belief systems from the prehistorical stone age down to the present day. . . . A Short History of Myth is an ideal introduction for students and non-specialist general readers with an interest in the study of myth, legend, folklore, and religion.” — Internet Bookwatch

1 — What is a Myth?

Human beings have always been mythmakers. Archaeologists have unearthed Neanderthal graves containing weapons, tools and the bones of a sacrificed animal, all of which suggest some kind of belief in a future world that was similar to their own. The Neanderthals may have told each other stories about the life that their dead companion now enjoyed. They were certainly reflecting about death in a way that their fellow-creatures did not. Animals watch each other die but, as far as we know, they give the matter no further consideration. But the Neanderthal graves show that when these early people became conscious of their mortality, they created some sort of counter-narrative that enabled them to come to terms with it. The Neanderthals who buried their companions with such care seem to have imagined that the visible, material world was not the only reality. From a very early date, therefore, it appears that human beings were distinguished by their ability to have ideas that went beyond their everyday experience. We are meaning-seeking creatures.

Dogs, as far as we know, do not agonise about the canine condition, worry about the plight of dogs in other parts of the world, or try to see their lives from a different perspective. But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.

Another peculiar characteristic of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that we cannot explain rationally. We have imagination, a faculty that enables us to think of something that is not immediately present, and that, when we first conceive it, has no objective existence. The imagination is the faculty that produces religion and mythology. Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute; we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to light and to invent technology that has made us immeasurably more effective. The imagination of scientists has enabled us to travel through outer space and walk on the moon, feats that were once only possible in the realm of myth. Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it.

The Neanderthal graves tell us five important things about myth. First, it is nearly always rooted in the experience of death and the fear of extinction. Second, the animal bones indicate that the burial was accompanied by a sacrifice. Mythology is usually inseparable from ritual. Many myths make no sense outside a liturgical drama that brings them to life, and are incomprehensible in a profane setting. Third, the Neanderthal myth was in some way recalled beside a grave, at the limit of human life. The most powerful myths are about extremity; they force us to go beyond our experience. There are moments when we all, in one way or another, have to go to a place that we have never seen, and do what we have never done before. Myth is about the unknown; it is about that for which initially we have no words. Myth therefore looks into the heart of a great silence. Fourth, myth is not a story told for its own sake. It shows us how we should behave. In the Neanderthal graves, the corpse has sometimes been placed in a foetal position, as though for rebirth: the deceased had to take the next step himself. Correctly understood, mythology puts us in the correct spiritual or psychological posture for right action, in this world or the next.

Finally, all mythology speaks of another plane that exists alongside our own world, and that in some sense supports it. Belief in this invisible but more powerful reality, sometimes called the world of the gods, is a basic theme of mythology. It has been called the “perennial philosophy” because it informed the mythology, ritual and social organisation of all societies before the advent of our scientific modernity, and continues to influence more traditional societies today. According to the perennial philosophy, everything that happens in this world, everything that we can hear and see here below has its counterpart in the divine realm, which is richer, stronger and more enduring than our own. And every earthly reality is only a pale shadow of its archetype, the original pattern, of which it is simply an imperfect copy. It is only by participating in this divine life that mortal, fragile human beings fulfil their potential. The myths gave explicit shape and form to a reality that people sensed intuitively. They told them how the gods behaved, not out of idle curiosity or because these tales were entertaining, but to enable men and women to imitate these powerful beings and experience divinity themselves.

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.

Mythology was therefore designed to help us to cope with the problematic human predicament. It helped people to find their place in the world and their true orientation. We all want to know where we came from, but because our earliest beginnings are lost in the mists of prehistory, we have created myths about our forefathers that are not historical but help to explain current attitudes about our environment, neighbours and customs. We also want to know where we are going, so we have devised stories that speak of a posthumous existence—though, as we shall see, not many myths envisage immortality for human beings. And we want to explain those sublime moments, when we seem to be transported beyond our ordinary concerns. The gods helped to explain the experience of transcendence. The perennial philosophy expresses our innate sense that there is more to human beings and to the material world than meets the eye.

Today the word “myth” is often used to describe something that is simply not true. A politician accused of a peccadillo will say that it is a “myth,” that it never happened. When we hear of gods walking the earth, of dead men striding out of tombs, or of seas miraculously parting to let a favoured people escape from their enemies, we dismiss these stories as incredible and demonstrably untrue. Since the eighteenth century, we have developed a scientific view of history; we are concerned above all with what actually happened. But in the pre-modern world, when people wrote about the past they were more concerned with what an event had meant. A myth was an event which, in some sense, had happened once, but which also happened all the time. Because of our strictly chronological view of history, we have no word for such an occurrence, but mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence, helping us to get beyond the chaotic flux of random events, and glimpse the core of reality.

An experience of transcendence has always been part of the human experience. We seek out moments of ecstasy, when we feel deeply touched within and lifted momentarily beyond ourselves. At such times, it seems that we are living more intensely than usual, firing on all cylinders, and inhabiting the whole of our humanity. Religion has been one of the most traditional ways of attaining ecstasy, but if people no longer find it in temples, synagogues, churches or mosques, they look for it elsewhere: in art, music, poetry, rock, dance, drugs, sex or sport. Like poetry and music, mythology should awaken us to rapture, even in the face of death and the despair we may feel at the prospect of annihilation. If a myth ceases to do that, it has died and outlived its usefulness.

It is, therefore, a mistake to regard myth as an inferior mode of thought, which can be cast aside when human beings have attained the age of reason. Mythology is not an early attempt at history, and does not claim that its tales are objective fact. Like a novel, an opera or a ballet, myth is make-believe; it is a game that transfigures our fragmented, tragic world, and helps us to glimpse new possibilities by asking “what if?”—a question which has also provoked some of our most important discoveries in philosophy, science and technology. The Neanderthals who prepared their dead companion for a new life were, perhaps, engaged in the same game of spiritual make-believe that is common to all mythmakers: “What if this world were not all that there is? How would this affect our lives—psychologically, practically or socially? Would we become different? More complete? And, if we did find that we were so transformed, would that not show that our mythical belief was true in some way, that it was telling us something important about our humanity, even though we could not prove this rationally?”

Human beings are unique in retaining the capacity for play. Unless they are living in the artificial conditions of captivity, other animals lose their early sense of fun when they encounter the harsh realities of life in the wild. Human adults, however, continue to enjoy playing with different possibilities, and, like children, we go on creating imaginary worlds. In art, liberated from the constraints of reason and logic, we conceive and combine new forms that enrich our lives, and which we believe tell us something important and profoundly “true.” In mythology too, we entertain a hypothesis, bring it to life by means of ritual, act upon it, contemplate its effect upon our lives, and discover that we have achieved new insight into the disturbing puzzle of our world.

A myth, therefore, is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information. If, however, it does not give us new insight into the deeper meaning of life, it has failed. If it works, that is, if it forces us to change our minds and hearts, gives us new hope, and compels us to live more fully, it is a valid myth. Mythology will only transform us if we follow its directives. A myth is essentially a guide; it tells us what we must do in order to live more richly. If we do not apply it to our own situation and make the myth a reality in our own lives, it will remain as incomprehensible and remote as the rules of a board game, which often seem confusing and boring until we start to play.

Our modern alienation from myth is unprecedented. In the pre-modern world, mythology was indispensable. It not only helped people to make sense of their lives but also revealed regions of the human mind that would otherwise have remained inaccessible. It was an early form of psychology. The stories of gods or heroes descending into the underworld, threading through labyrinths and fighting with monsters, brought to light the mysterious workings of the psyche, showing people how to cope with their own interior crises. When Freud and Jung began to chart the modern quest for the soul, they instinctively turned to classical mythology to explain their insights, and gave the old myths a new interpretation.

There was nothing new in this. There is never a single, orthodox version of a myth. As our circumstances change, we need to tell our stories differently in order to bring out their timeless truth. In this short history of mythology, we shall see that every time men and women took a major step forward, they reviewed their mythology and made it speak to the new conditions. But we shall also see that human nature does not change much, and that many of these myths, devised in societies that could not be more different from our own, still address our most essential fears and desires.

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A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong 208pp, Canongate, £12

Words are tricky enough. Words that hold within them huge and ancient ideas are even harder to grasp. Words that describe enigmatic ideas first expressed in carvings or cave paintings from the Palaeolithic become downright slippery. A myth, says Karen Armstrong "is an event that - in some sense - happened once, but which also happens all the time". This is not quite the definition of the Shorter Oxford, which says that a myth - a word first used in English only in 1830 - begins a "purely fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural persons, actions or events ... "

But such a difference would be a neat illustration of what Armstrong sees as the long battle of mythos and logos. Logos, she says, must correspond to facts, while mythos is yoked to transformative ritual. Mythos and logos coexisted uneasily long before the Greeks gave them names, but scientific logos and myth became incompatible some time in the past 400 years, much to humanity's disadvantage. Myth gave structure and meaning to ancient life, whereas logos could only offer modern medicine, hygiene, labour-saving technologies and better transport. Under assault from Western rationalism, mythical ways of thought crumbled, and gave way to "a numbing despair, a creeping mental paralysis, a sense of impotence and rage ... "

In response to the transcontinental anomie that arrived with Western science, Protestant reformers began to take the myth out of Christian ritual: after Martin Luther, the Eucharist became "only" a symbol of Christ's body and Christ's sacrificial death became "simply a memorial of a bygone event." By the time Nietzsche had got around to proclaiming that God was dead, he was speaking the truth, in a sense. "Without myth, cult, ritual and ethical living, a sense of the sacred dies," says Armstrong. Without the discipline of mythical thinking and practice, it was difficult for many to avoid despair. The dark epiphanies of the 20th century can be blamed on "the absence of a viable mythology" that could help us face the unspeakable.

And then, on the last pages, she gets to the question, by way of The Wasteland, The Magic Mountain and Heart Of Darkness: can a secular novel really replicate traditional myth, with its gods and goddesses? Can artists and creative writers step into the priestly role and bring fresh insight to a lost and damaged world?

So far, so provocative: this book is a companion to a Canongate series in which modern novelists - Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Atwood so far - take a fresh look at old myths. But somewhere in the scholarship and swift narrative, Armstrong also provokes some truculent challenges. Human capacities have changed, but human nature has not: if the gods can be so easily ignored now, how seriously were they taken in the stone age, or the bronze? People behave barbarously now, but were they less barbarous in ancient Sumer, or Rome, or China? And who says myth is dead? Many see science in mythic terms: Prometheus, for instance, or Pandora's Box. Finally, if myth really were fundamental to the human predicament, why would it be safe with Jeanette Winterson, or Dan Brown?

Atwood's version of The Odyssey - The Penelopiad - sounds great. But what else have novelists been doing these past 400 years, if not telling those timeless stories of loss, struggle and homecoming; of exile, sacrifice and redemption; of fertility, death and renewal, over and over again?

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Review of Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, in Literature and Theology 20, no. 2 (2006) 207–9.

Related Papers

Scandinvian journal of the old testament

In a 1998 paper (published in 2001 in SJOT 15:3-56) I suggested that myth is not a (literary) genre, being altogether too polymorphous to fit any such formal definition, but rather a mind-set. The opposition often discerned by biblical scholars between myth and history had led to extravagant claims concerning the non-mythic nature of Old Testament narratives, on the ground that their basis often lay in "historical fact." On the other hand, the status of history in the Old Testament has become almost as contentious in some recent scholarship. This paper raises some fundamental problems, and examines some current tendencies in both areas, and will ask whether it is possible to reach some modus vivendi, in which scholars of diverse persuasions may find some common ground, instead of continuing to talk past each other.

Vestnik Tomskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Filosofiya, sotsiologiya, politologiya

Oleg Gavrilov

Heidi Wendt

Addisalem bekele

Religion is a natural aspect of human race which grows out of human’s desire for meaning and belonging. Even if we try to get rid of one religion, we create another religion. Best or worst, humans seem to be motivated by religion. It represents a cultural and national identity. Myth’s philosophical importance is underestimated in that its role has been ignored simply because it is literary or argued as so much as window dressing by analytic interpreters of philosophy. The relation between ‘myth and ‘religion’ is an old and much-discussed topic. However, there are fewer agreements around the phenomenology of the two terms and their functional relation.

Aleksandar Boskovic

Andrew Glynn

(c) 2017 Andrew Glynn I am, which is to say I remain, a Christian, if an odd sort of Christian. I even remain in many ways a theologian, though an odd sort of theologian, as well. The problems theology has had in terms of dealing with historiological studies of scriptural times, places and events has never been something particularly important – denying them would be silly, but I don't have any reason to regard them as all that relevant, although occasionally interesting. To think that they somehow 'disprove' Christianity seems to me to require a very naive understanding of mythos and religion, how they interact and intertwine, together with an even more naive understanding of history. I remain a Christian, and as a thinker necessarily a theologian, not from any posited ahistorical or supra-historical perspective, but precisely as historical. The individual stories, syncopes, parables etc form the history of which historiology is at best a doubly overdetermined analogy. Since, as with most people brought up in a given culture, one that is given precisely in its mythos, understanding that mythos is my only way of understanding myself historically, and thus history in its relevance to me, as something materially relevant to my present situation. However other Christians, or people who try to understand the mythos of a different culture, self-interpret their actions, I find it difficult to think that that basic sense of being-historical insofar as one understands the stories, syncopes, parables and other forms of passing on a tradition, is not the most basic reason for the fascination with mythos and the religions it both founds and at times causes to founder. The key is to think that history historically enough, as Heidegger put it. In terms of literal historiology (meaning as written) the place where historiology fails to think history historically enough is centered in the historical record. Historiology has to fail, because what it must take as valid is what is most questionable. To put it as simply as possible: • Specifically as written, the historical record is the ongoing result of a forwards and backwards projection, where the individual records that make it up were predetermined by a belief that they would be relevant to future historians, and where those historians, in trying to make sense of those individual record and determine their specific validity, are always guided by an overall sense of validity that comes from the historical record as they inherit it. • Thus as written, the historical records is an analogy that pivots a forwards and backwards projection, but the analogy itself comes from the records of bookkeepers. Bookkeepers have the factical daily task of recording trading events so that the books can be balanced and debts paid later on – there's no mystery as to why one record is relevant and another not. If the record is of a transaction that wasn't in error or canceled, it's relevant. The relevance or irrelevance of a historical event, however, is more complex and less obvious in terms of how it's determined in either projection. • As such, the historical record is doubly overdetermined. It's overdetermined in one sense in that what did determine the original decisions to record a given event and preserve it was itself the forward projection, and that forward projection arose from the rationalization of a revelatory experience, i.e. a prophecy. • In its relation to mythos and religion, though, the relations are inverted. The mythos, as what is passed on and understood as historical by non-literate peoples, who even within literate societies have formed by far the largest proportion outside of a few countries in the past

Thomas D Carroll

This is a short essay I wrote for the campus journal, The One (CUHK Shenzhen). It offers a critical analysis of the terms "myth" and "religion" and their use in the academic study of religions.

Robert D Miller II

Journal of Literature and Art Studies

José Manuel Losada

Starting with a personal definition of "myth" , this paper seeks to substantiate the claim that every myth is essentially etiological, in the sense that myths somehow express a cosmogony or an eschatology, whether particular or universal. In order to do that, this study reassesses Classical and Judeo-Christian mythologies to revisit and contrast the narratives of origin—of the cosmos, of the gods and of men—found in ancient polytheism and in Judeo-Christian monotheism. Taking into consideration how these general and particular cosmogonies convey a specific understanding of the passage of time, this article does not merely recount the cosmogonies, theogonies, and anthropogonies found in the Bible and in the works of authors from Classical Antiquity, but it also incorporates a critical commentary on pieces of art and literature that have reinterpreted such mythical tales in more recent times. The result of the research is the disclosure of a sort of universal etiology that may be found in mythology which, as argued, explains the origins of the world, of the gods, and of men so as to satisfy humankind's ambition to unveil the mysteries of the cosmos. Myth thus functions in these cases as a vehicle that makes it possible for man to return the fullness of a primordial age, abandoning the fleeting time that entraps him and entering a time still absolute.

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A Short History of Myth . By Karen Armstrong. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005. 159 pp.

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Eric Ziolkowski, A Short History of Myth . By Karen Armstrong. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2005. 159 pp., Literature and Theology , Volume 20, Issue 2, June 2006, Pages 207–209, https://doi.org/10.1093/litthe/frl018

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A s advertised on its jacket flap, this book heads its press' ‘series of retellings of international myths by authors from around the world,’ including Chinua Achebe, Margaret Atwood, and others of renown. The present volume shares its titular formulation as A … History with three of Armstrong's numerous and popular earlier volumes: A History of God: The 4000-year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam (1993); A History of Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths (1996) and Islam: A Short History (2000). The title A Short History of Myth , like A History of God , is provocatively oxymoronic. Just as God, traditionally considered by monotheists to be eternal and infinite, would seem beyond the scope of any finite, temporal ‘history,’ so is myth generally construed as timeless and antithetical to history. As Armstrong puts it, ‘mythology’—a term she unfortunately never distinguishes from ‘myth,’ but uses almost interchangeably with it—‘is not an early attempt at history, and does not claim that its tales are objective fact’ (p. 8).

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A Short History of Myth (Canons)

Description.

As long as we have been human, we have been mythmakers. In A Short History of Myth , Karen Armstrong holds up the mirror of mythology to show us the history of ourselves, and embarks on a journey that begins at a Neanderthal graveside and ends buried in the heart of the modern novel.

Surprising, powerful and profound, A Short History of Myth examines the world's most ancient art form - the making and telling of stories - and why we still need it.

The Myths series brings together some of the world's finest writers, each of whom has retold a myth in a contemporary and memorable way. Authors in the series include Karen Armstrong, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, David Grossman, Natsuo Kirino, Alexander McCall Smith, Philip Pullman, Ali Smith and Jeanette Winterson.

About the Author

Karen Armstrong is one of the world's leading commentators on religious affairs, and has been described by the Financial Times as 'one of our best living writers on religion'. She spent seven years as a Roman Catholic nun in the 1960s, before leaving for a career as a writer and broadcaster. Armstrong is the best-selling author of over 20 books and a passionate campaigner for religious liberty, and has addressed members of the United States Congress and the Senate and has participated in the World Economic Forum.

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A Short History of Myth

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Patrick O'Shaughnessy: "Mythology is one of my big passions because myths are the original self-help guides."

A Short History of Myth

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“Human beings have always been mythmakers.” So begins best-selling writer Karen Armstrong’s concise yet compelling investigation into myth: what it is, how it has evolved, and why we still so desperately need it. She takes us from the Paleolithic period and the myths of the hunters right up to the “Great Western Transformation” of the last five hundred years and the discrediting of myth by science. The history of myth is the history of humanity, our stories and beliefs, our curiosity and attempts to understand the world, which link us to our ancestors and each other. Heralding a major series of retellings of international myths by authors from around the world, Armstrong’s characteristically insightful and eloquent book serves as a brilliant and thought-provoking introduction to myth in the broadest sense—and explains why if we dismiss it, we do so at our peril.

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The history of myth is the history of humanity; our stories and beliefs, our curiosity and attempts to understand the world, link us to our ancestors and each other. Myths help us make sense of the universe. Armstrong takes us from the Palaeolithic period and the myths of the hunters right up to the 'Great Western Transformation' of the last 500 years and the discrediting of myth by science. Armstrong's typically insightful and eloquent book serves as a brilliant and thought-provoking introduction to myth in the broadest sense - and why we dismiss it only at our peril.

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About the author

Karen armstrong.

Karen Armstrong is the author of numerous other books on religious affairs-including A History of God, The Battle for God, Holy War, Islam, Buddha, and The Great Transformation-and two memoirs, Through the Narrow Gate and The Spiral Staircase. Her work has been translated into forty-five languages. She has addressed members of the U.S. Congress on three occasions; lectured to policy makers at the U.S. State Department; participated in the World Economic Forum in New York, Jordan, and Davos; addressed the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington and New York; is increasingly invited to speak in Muslim countries; and is now an ambassador for the UN Alliance of Civilizations. In February 2008 she was awarded the TED Prize and is currently working with TED on a major international project to launch and propagate a Charter for Compassion, created online by the general public and crafted by leading thinkers in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, to be signed in the fall of 2009 by a thousand religious and secular leaders. She lives in London.

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