Myth-Represented, Myth-Led, and Fundamentally Myth-Guided
by and published in Edition Five of Pomegranate
What is a myth?
Easy question, surely. Anything with three-headed dogs in it is a definite candidate. Stories about people whose names end in –us or –es. Gods at war with each other, gods at war with monsters, unscientific explanations for the shape of the moon. And some myths are more myth than others: the creation stories of the Norse and Greek pantheons are, for most of us, clearly just stories and therefore definitely myths, while an uneasy question mark hangs over the ‘living myths’ of the major religions. If millions of people believe that the creation story given in the Bible is word-for-word truth, does it cease to be mythical?
What is a myth?
The Greek word muthos just means ‘story’. I think this is one thing people always overlook when they talk about something as ‘mythical’. For us, after all, the word has implications of great antiquity and seriousness. You can buy books that explain in dry and dreary detail exactly what happens in the Theseus myth, or the mythical significance of the Harpies. We see the myths as old, unchangeable, dead. But to the people who made them, they weren’t these untouchable monoliths. They were just stories. They were important stories, certainly, they were stories that got told again and again, but they also changed in the telling. They were omnipresent: they were universally understood: they were the Ancients’ pop culture.
‘Art holds a mirror up to nature’: stories don’t exist in a vacuum. Stories are a way of looking at the world, a way of dealing with the world. A mythology, then, is a kind of uber-story, a way of linking the world together through a set of commonly understood associations. And so for centuries the twin gargantuan mythologies of the Classical world and the Christian one supplied the framework for the stories Europe told itself and told about itself. When John Milton set out to ‘explain the ways of God to man’ in Paradise Lost, he did so by writing a Homeric epic on the subject of fallen angels.
These days, the power of invoking Homer and Jehovah has faded to the point where nineteenth-century novels require a plethora of notes pointing out this Biblical reference, that classical one: and when a myth is no longer an instant invocation of a set of linked understandings in the reader’s head, it’s dead. The power of classical mythology as living stories may be said to have died – only a few still retain their old power as symbols (the Icarus myth is probably the strongest survivor.) The Christian myths look to be going the same way. Talk about the conflict between light and darkness and people are more likely to hear a Star Wars reference than a nod to Isaiah.
But this isn’t answering the question. What is a myth?
A myth is, in its simplest form, a story. But not just any story: a myth is a story that is, or has been, ‘alive’: universally known, universally understood. A myth is common property.
Myths do not have to be religious – plenty of myths centre around great heroes, not gods – but they has to be powerful. Myths are usually simple, but people who want to use them as starting points for more complicated stories can. Myths never need to be original, and in fact myths from different cultures often follow similar lines. Think of the great mythical male friendships of Eurasia, Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Achilles and Patroclus, David and Jonathan. The lesser half of the pair always dies in the end.
In this issue of Pomegranate, we have plenty of poems that take advantage of the power of some of the ‘dead’ myths, the classical myths. I’ve written plenty of poems that use them myself. But I think it’s also important to hunt for ‘living’ myths, to write poems that take advantage of today’s common-property stories and use them. Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, Superman and Marilyn Monroe: these are modern myths, modern stories and icons that have grown bigger than their creators. From their writing poets sometimes seem to be living in a world devoid of DVDs: we should remember that just as the mythology of the ancient world was also its pop culture, so our pop culture is also our mythology.
Emily Tesh
Emily Tesh is first mate to Char’s captain and the oldest member of the team. As befits someone of such advanced years, she likes very old poetry e.g. Ovid, Catullus, Sappho and Homer, although she has been known to read poems written as recently as 1963. She therefore had no choice but to study Classics, which she is doing at Trinity College, Cambridge. Emily is a Londoner and her poetry has been published in Mimesis and Magma. She also designed the Pomegranate logo.