We put them in outer space. The same impulse that put the Amazons in Scythia and triple-bodied Gerion in the far west now puts savage monsters beyond the solar system. And I think it really is precisely the same impulse. Just as medieval map makers, when they got to the edge of the known world, would write in the white space beyond it, here are monsters, so we, when we get to the edge of the solar system, right in the space beyond it, here are monsters.
And we locate them there because we can’t locate them anymore on Earth. Similarly, and here I think there’s a very interesting correspondence indeed, we can no longer place our age of heroes in the remote past. History and archaeology have made that impossible. We know too much about what happened in the past to say that there was a golden age, to say that there were people who were greater, more culturally developed, more technologically advanced than we are living in the remote past. What do we do with them? What do we do with that impulse? We put them in the remote future.
We have all sorts of stories about people who are greater than we, more technologically advanced than we, and yet somehow connected to us, and we place them several centuries in the future rather than in the past. And again, in our culture, we are probably more likely to find these stories in film and in television than in books, but I don’t think that matters at all for the point I’m trying to make here. Popular television programs and movies such as the Star Trek series I think reflect precisely the same impulse that we see played out in Hesiod in his account of the Age of Heroes.
But the pattern is inverted chronologically. This race of people greater, stronger and more capable than we are still in some sense related to us, but they’re not our ancestors, they’re our descendants. And over and over again in the Star Trek series, some character will find a photograph or talk about a photograph or tell a story about an ancestor who lived in America in the 20th century, or an ancestor from the 19th century, the writers of that series very much make the point over and over again that these people are our descendants. Even Hesiod’s pessimism is not entirely lacking.
In Star Trek it is, but in other science fiction it’s not. Many of our futuristic movies portray a future that is dark and horrible. That seems to agree with Hesiod’s description of the iron race that things are going to go from bad to worse. But even in those, and this is something I find especially fascinating, even in those particularly nihilistic and distressing futures, there is usually some figure, some strong and powerful and brave figure who overcomes great affliction, such as in the Terminator movies or the Road Warrior movies. There’s some figure who arises to try to overcome the difficulties of the extremely negatively pictured future.
Now, what is the explanation for all of this? For, if I’m correct, what I’ve identified as the myth-making impulse moving towards science fiction and towards setting our myths in the future rather than in the past. What’s the explanation for the recognizable mythic themes that I think I’ve identified in modern entertainment?
Again, psychological theorists, of course, would say that the stories of fantasy and science fiction are reflections of the mythic impulse welling up through our subconscious minds and that in them we see characters who are oddly familiar and situations that are oddly familiar because they’re reflecting the archetypes or our subconscious desires or the inevitable binary working of our opposition loaded minds or some other such theory and that may very well be part of the answer but in my opinion it’s more likely that these stories and their popularity are an indication not so much of immutable realities in the human psyche as of the degree to which the patterns of classical mythology have permeated our culture.
I think that these stories and others like them tend to be appealing to us not simply because they reflect archetypes or patterns of human thought that would be the same in any culture at any time. Rather, I think a great deal of the reason for their appeal to us lies in the familiarity that comes to us because of the repetition through 2500 years of the stories of classical myth.
Those 25 centuries of repetition in other words I think have made the patterns of these particular stories familiar to us and in fact have built those story patterns into the textures of our minds so just as the Athenian myths of Theseus and his encounters with the Minotaur preserved some memory of Minoan culture despite the fact that the Athenians did not know that that was what they were doing so, too, I think many of the stories that we tell ourselves as a society, the stories that encode our hopes, aspirations, and fears, preserve the traces of classical culture and the traces of classical myth and are part of our classical legacy.
Thank you.
(Transcribed with the help of AI – S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 – Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)