Modern Mythology foundations
For more of this, check out our theory podcast Narrative Machines.
The Tyranny of the Literal
“It is only through active, ceaseless interpretation that we might catch a reflected glimpse of the human subject at the heart of literature. It is only by acknowledging artifice that one can move beyond artifice. Reading is a creative act. Unlike almost everything we are encouraged to consider entertainment, it is an active pursuit. Without this process of interpretation we cannot know ourselves.” — The Tyranny of the Literal, Autralian Book Review
Myths speak to our need of stories and images, both grand and mundane, for us to relate ourselves to. However, they’re often introduced as a childish thing that must at some point be put aside.
As a youth, who can remember staring at the television in befuddlement as documentaries would attempt to discover the supposed historic “truth” of a myth? Did giants actually walk the Earth before the time of King Arthur’s court? How did Noah manage to get every species of animal aboard a single ship?
Of course the world wasn’t literally made in seven days, of course Odin wasn’t literally suspended from a tree, …
This misunderstanding bites both ways, as literalism often dominates our religious and secular, even literary thinking. They are the wrong questions to ask, and for the wrong reasons.
In the public mind, “myth” has become the opposite of fact, something that is generally accepted but untrue; so we might say “it is a myth that reading by flashlight ruins your eyesight.”
The popular Discovery Channel show MythBusters uses this definition, attempting to disprove myths with something vaguely resembling science. The myths of antiquity are looked upon as quaint stories, despite the fact that they shaped history, how it is interpreted, even how it happened. This secular, occidental conception (which is the root of modern myth) says the myths of the past were erroneous explanations about the nature of reality — fanciful stories, which, though colorful and interesting curiosities, surely bear no particular use to our lives.
In this, we misunderstand how myths function. As has been expounded ad nauseum by an expansive list of scholars and authors, including Mircea Eliade, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Karly Kerenyi, etc., many myths do not principally intend to explain the world in an analytic sense. And even if they once did intend to serve as an instrument of science, we can put that intention aside, and find that myth is a reflection on us more than it is a reflection on the world without us in it.
Spiritual metaphors are useful inasmuch as they describe mental states, but the considerations of Model Dependent Realism should be applied here as it applies to the applicability of interpretation within the contexts of necessity and uncertainty. This view, presented by Hawkings and Mlodinow in their 2010 book The Grand Design, states that models are to be judged by their confluence with observations, but that can’t be retroactively used to demonstrate the absolute reality of the model outside the context of its use. We can certainly apply the same perspective to our understanding of narrative machines.
“Like the overlapping maps in a Mercator projection, where the ranges of different versions overlap, they predict the same phenomena. But just as there is no flat map that is a good representation of the earth’s entire surface, there is no single theory that is a good representation of observations in all situations.” — The Grand Design, Hawking and Mlodinow
Defining the Undefinable
The absolutely central role of myth in our lives shouldn’t need explanation or qualification. And yet it does, now more than ever. It will quickly become apparent why this is so.
At the outset, it’s not even entirely clear what we mean by “myth,” unless we merely play with semantics. Aren’t some stories myths while others are not? Maybe. However, the stories we tell ourselves and one another can always later become myths, in one form or another.
All we can say for certain at the get-go is that myths collectivize our sense of self, of character, of meaning, of context. It’s not good enough that you know a story, what’s important is that we both do, and can orient ourselves in relationship to our different interpretations of it. Literary interpretation has been responsible for countless deaths after all, if we include schisms over the interpretation of religious texts. Or of legal ones.
There is ultimately no static and final interpretation of any text, and the authority to hierarchize or prioritize an interpretation is the centralizing principle of tradition, and a fundamental form of social power.
Outside the arcane framework of semioticians like Roland Barthes — who approaches the subject in his book Mythologies as one might prepare specimens in a museum — it is also surprisingly hard to make a clean distinction between “story,” “narrative,” and “myth.”
Maybe stories are simply myths that have not gained mythic resonance. That’s a frequently employed, but entirely vague way to say they are stories which haven’t yet sprouted from the seed of some collective belief. Fundamentally, myths, stories and narratives, accounts, interpretations are all made of the same stuff: Stories we tell ourselves, stories we tell one another, stories we tell about what those stories mean, on and on.
We can hardly know ourselves without a myth to serve as our mirror. Myths convey meaning, or rather, are a meaning that we participate in creating, although they do not have a meaning. “Mythos” means “by mouth.” It is that which is spread, a fabric woven of memes. A “story” implies a series of events. A “narrative” feels somehow at once less and more grandiose, and might encompass either. These distinctions break down further in the hands of narrative theorists and semioticians, by level of mediation.
So, stories — once they’ve become culturally embedded or repeated — are generalized into myths, and those myths serve as a kind of connective tissue for human societies. There may be some sense in considering myth a story that has been repeated, and solidified with that collective repetition and remembrance, which at one and the same time permutes with each retelling, in each mind.
We place ourselves within a world as defined by them. We may recognize this world as fiction or not, and it may or may not correspond to the facts. Furthermore, we may very well know the myth doesn’t correspond with facts, or we may not, and its function remains unchanged. Mayby this changeability is how “myth” came to mean simply false.
Collective fictions give us a sense of meaning and purpose. The condition we must accept when engaging with myth is that we pretend the stories we inherit or invent, the image on the screen, or the entities in our dreams represent some type of reality.
That conveyed meaning is what need they fulfill, but not what use they serve within human society — what they do.
The Function of Myths, A Paper-Napkin Sketch
Myths inform the relationships between things. In Religion, this is the Latin Religio / Reliagiare, however of course theology is just one type of myth.
Myths define who we are, define where we are in time, what role we serve, and what the nature of that role should be. They do not even need to be believed to serve these functions, as is often the case in granting social power to leaders without recognizing their Divine Mandate and so on.
The hypothetical “what if” that informs many myths are the same type of fantasies, and are informed by the same impulses as the rest of the psyche. These ideas which are drawn from and bleed back into the material world — the myths of nations, of gods and kings, have had a direct effect on human history, as the genetic and ecological future is shaped by such phantasms, whether an institution erected after the fact, or as inspirational motive.
Identity is grounded in myth. All our relationships with ourselves and with one another are composed of the stories we agree upon, or are made to agree upon. (Another form of the “social contract”).
Myths are a selector for social motility. We are tugged and pulled by them, as they are simultaneously created by us and creating us, existing at all the junctures where our worlds overlap with one another.
Myths arise as relationships, points of intersection. They present within a context, and it is in that context in which they must be understood.
All these relations are complex, and involve various open ambiguities. For example, the relationship between ritual object or work of art and an individual audience member, the relationship of creator with that object, or between audience members themselves, all occur within the conceptual framework provided by our implied and largely subconscious assumptions about those things, especially the almost inaudible but ever-present whispers of the past. Many of our most potent myths are not even known or remembered.
Finally, myths are strange attractors, the underlying structure or set of values toward which a system tends to evolve.
Myths are Strange Attractors
Renowed scientist and professional crank Richard Dawkins defined “meme” as a self-reproducing and propagating information structure analogous to a gene in biology. Various theorists have adapted the concept of memes to other domains, mythemes, narremes, and so on.
In light of amplified reproducibility online — a more fertile culture for them to grow in — this subject has also expanded from social and pop science to political and even military import. A tutorial on “Military Memetics” presented at the 2011 Social Media for Defense Summit defines a meme as, “information which propagates, has impact, and persists,” going on to elaborate that it could include “words, ideas, symbols, icons, logos, tunes, poems, catch-phrases, fashion, technological processes (e.g., making arrowheads or gumbo), fables, religion, graffiti, images, novels, movies, narratives, culture (functional or dysfunctional; national, tribal, or organizational).”
The Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) has not been alone in supporting a series of memetics-related projects with multidisciplinary teams from industry, the military, and academia. The integration of these approaches with algorithms, social media, and AI presents one of the fundamental “battle spaces” of the present, and future.
By virtue of this, analysis of myth is inherently a discussion of memetics, though the inverse may not always be the case. As much as we may want to reduce memes to silly photos shared on Facebook, these are just the tip of a very large iceberg, and as this narrative research is better wedded to information and systems theory analysis, we can be sure there will be more to come.
A meme suffices, at the very least, as a metaphor for any idea that has the potential to be turned into a social act. As with most metaphors, there are ways in which it is accurate, and ways that it is not. More importantly, what are the repercussions of this idea of the overlapping relationship of genes and culture? In other words, do myths play a role in our evolution, as a part of our mirrored relationships with one another?
Darwin’s basic insight was that animal and plant species are the cumulative result of a process of descent and modification. Later on, however, scientists came to realize that any variable replicator (not just genetic replicators) coupled to any sorting device (not just ecological selection pressures) would generate a capacity for evolution. —DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History
The “best” in terms of survival depends in large measure on the conditions of the environment and all the possibilities that can be defined within that space. Sorting is taking place when we are attracted to one book and not another, or one song and not another. Although it is a prosaic example, think about the sorting and matching occurring when we recognize we’ve both seen the same movie, how we compare mutual reactions to the story, and how it might affect far more than mere entertainment. Shared referents are social currency. This is not, at the same time, a top-down sort of brainwashing, nor is it entirely fixed and embedded in indelible biology; it is instead the fluid pre-existing conditions that structure social life.
Sexual attraction recapitulates an inherent biological imperative to produce offspring; yet humans have in various ways circumvented or sublimated that drive, and so the “children” that can be born from the co-mingling of our ideas needn’t be physical or literal. Power structures are navigated and codified through externalizations of “sex” and various types of commodity value, often implicitly, and often in a sense which has no direct connection to sexual reproduction or intercourse. Artists are inherently mythically promiscuous. Nevertheless, the ideas that are most compelling to us, the art that attracts and changes us, seems to operate on the same principles that determine a mating selection process.
As will be discussed in much greater depth in later episodes, this is part of the central role aesthetics plays in our lives — in politics, in identity, in religion, in economies, and so on.
Selection processes, sorting mechanisms, and other systemic relationships apply to the ways myths replicate, spread, feed, and die. Concurrently, these play a fundamental role in shaping social dynamics. They are a part of these feedback mechanisms.
Richard Dawkins independently realized that patterns of animal behavior (such as bird-songs or the use of tools by apes) could indeed replicate themselves if they spread across a population (and across generations) by imitation. -DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History
This has clear repercussions in the study of the diffusion of language and culture. No matter how many layers of regress are added here, it is the relationship formed by a myth that gives it a defining motive. Here we see the undercurrent of all forms of human representation, a collective shadow that looms over societies, which we’ve taken to refer to simply as “myth.”
In Ed Yong’s book I Contain Multitudes, the ecological structure of both microbiomes and ecosystems are laid out, and it is further observed that they behave according to similar self-determined rules. That is, the context of an ecosystem is dependent on every other component element of that system, and vice versa, and the same is true of the microbiome of our body and the billions of organisms that live within us, or we might more accurately say, which are a part of us. We are “always a we, never a me.”
The same point holds for myths. An analogy can be drawn between the relationship of the two (microbiomes and mythologies) in a manner of scale, emulating the Gnostic motto, “as above so below.” The observations drawn in the world of biogeography might be applied to the behavior of narrative as a part of an ecosystem. As the Internet further acts as a representation of social networks, analysis can be assisted through elaborate real time modeling and analysis of the global narrative machine. That should be as terrifying as it is fascinating.
Theorizing With A Light Touch
A body plan defines a space of possibilities (the space of all possible vertebrate designs, for example) … The formal study of these possibility spaces is more advanced in physics and chemistry, where they are referred to as ‘phase spaces.’
Their structure is given by topological invariants called ‘attractors’, as well as by the dimensions of the space, dimensions that represent the ‘degrees of freedom’, or relevant ways of changing, of concrete physical or chemical dynamical systems. …
In the biological and social sciences, on the other hand, we do not yet have the appropriate formal tools to investigate the structure of their much more complex possibility spaces. — A New Philosophy of Society, Delanda
Tools of literary, psychological, and social analysis can all be applied to this approach to myth, acknowledging that it reaches far beyond purely academic considerations. Additionally, neurological and mathematical-linguistic models such as LLMs will undoubtedly continue to play a role, integrating diverse interdisciplinary perspectives. This open discussion benefits as much from cognitive psychology’s insights as it does from literary analysis or the direct experience of shamanic rituals. While this endeavor is not a science in itself, it does not make our aims any less valid; in fact, science can provide some of our most meaningful metaphors.
As we will be exploring in-depth on this site and our podcasts, introducing elements of game and the uncertainty of collaborative real-time interactions is an equally valid source both for generating new collective stories, and as a sample social dynamic.
What we uncover in this domain may never achieve absolute certainty within an academic framework—numerous challenges arise when attempting a comprehensive systems theory approach to myth—but pursuing such an endeavor remains essential. Not only in the hope of understanding ourselves and our narratives better, but more troublingly, because these semantic and sentiment systems are already at work in our social-technological ecosystems, our media, our political systems, our markets, all as a part of the ever-evolving web of language darting around the globe and bouncing off our satellites.
This opens up the door for new approaches to mythic study which go far beyond what can be explored here, but we are hopeful that more work will continue in this direction in the future.
