Classical mythology also is in our language. I’ve mentioned some examples already in the course. Tantalize, narcissism, that sort of thing. Are these the only reasons it’s still important to us that we find it as images in our literature and our art and as the occasional metaphor in our language?
Most of the theorists we surveyed at the beginning of this course would say that myth is important to us for deeper reasons than merely its influence on our culture. They would say, for instance, that myth taps into some deep structure or some psychological tendency in the human mind to mediate binary oppositions, to express our repressed desires, to link us to the archetypes, whatever.
And they may be right about that. I don’t claim to know whether they are or not. But this would leave unanswered the question of why classical myth in particular is so congenial to us. That perhaps requires a little bit of explanation. In my experience, in the experience of most people I have talked to, classical myth is congenial in a way that the myths of many other cultures aren’t.
People who have turned from reading classical myth to reading the myth of, say, Navajo culture or ancient African cultures or many other cultures find that there is a kind of familiarity to classical myth that makes it immediately congenial in a way that the myths of other cultures are not.
To some extent, that may simply be a matter of familiarity, as I just said. These stories are common in our culture. We already know them. We recognize them as familiar. But that doesn’t seem to me to be quite adequate to explain not just the appeal of classical myth, but the alien-feeling nature of myths from other cultures.
I think what’s going on here is that classical myth’s presence in our culture represents much more than just a borrowed set of literary and artistic tropes and images. I think, and perhaps here I’m agreeing more than I realize with the psychological theorists, I think that classical myth resonates for us on a deeper level than simply being a convenient set of metaphors that we plug in whenever we need a comparison, in the stories of greco-roman antiquity, I think we have inherited not just stories but a whole cast of mind now I’m certainly not trying to say that we agree with those cultures in every particular quite obviously we don’t.
But I think we do have access in their myths to an entire cast of mind to an entire world view that perhaps has more influence on a still than we often realize. I think furthermore that literature and when I say literature here I’m including other forms of entertainment that have to some extent superseded books in our culture such as movies and television programs. I think that literature does much more than merely entertain us.
I think it’s more important than that that it interacts with other areas of human endeavor to shape our entire world view and that therefore classical myth has to some extent helped in shaping our world view, in shaping our culture, just as it helped in shaping the cultures that developed it. One final question that I’d like to address in this lecture, before we leave classical mythology and mythology in general, is to look at the question of where the myth-making impulse has turned in our own society.
If classical myth still serves us as a set of traditional stories that we can draw upon, what about the myth-making impulse? What about the impulse that creates myth in any culture? What about the traditional stories that we developed ourselves rather than the ones that we inherited from another culture?
As I said in the very first lecture, all cultures have myths, but it can be very difficult to analyze and identify myths from within a culture. In fact, I even suggested that myth is a category that really only exists when you’re outside a culture looking in, that when you’re inside the culture, myth tends to be seen as true descriptions of the way things really are.
I still stand by that statement, but if myths are stories a culture tells itself that encode its aspirations, anxieties, beliefs, and fears, as I’ve suggested is a working definition of myth, then I think we can identify at least one strong mythic tendency in modern American culture. Even if this doesn’t yet have quite the full status of myth in the senses we’ve looked at in this course, I think we can identify at least one strong tendency towards what may yet become myth, one strong myth-making tendency.
And what I think this is, is the whole complex of stories, word of mouth accounts, and widespread beliefs in visitors from extraterrestrial cultures that we see in modern American society. I think there’s several reasons why those stories are so common now, not just in word of mouth accounts, but in our entertainment. Why so many movies in particular deal with space travel, with aliens, with the whole genre that we call rather misleadingly science fiction. Why would those appeal to us so greatly?
We can no longer place our monsters and our bizarre creatures at the edges of our own world. We know what’s at the edges of our own world. We know that our world has no edges. We’ve seen pictures of our world from outer space. We know what’s here. We can’t any longer put monsters at the far-lying reaches where nobody knows what’s located there, really. So what do we do with them?