When thunder does hit — as it did spectacularly this week — it’s seen in mythology as being the gods complaining. From a Greek point of view, all this storming and lightning is what happens when Zeus protests to Helios, god of the sun. Even Olympus gets rattled sometimes.

I’m currently picking my way from London to the hills of Italy, where I’ll be following St Francis, a rather more reasonable fellow. But under the terrible glare of the sun, I’m rattled too. I peer up, thinking about our mythic relationship with that coppery beast hovering above our heads.

The sun is pretty much the first thing we started to tell stories about. On the summer solstice, well-meaning folk gather at Stonehenge and chant, dance and praise the sunrise. It’s easy to sneer at such archaic behavior, but I think it’s more instinctual than we may like to admit. It’s a sensual experience rather than a conceptual one: there’s no knotty theological issue to bend your head around. A First Nations friend of mine was once mocked by an evangelical for praising the sun in ceremony. “At least we can actually see it,” he grinned, as the pink-faced fellow jabbed his finger and ranted. My friend had a point. We are warm-blooded creatures and we love to look at beautiful things.

In Christianity, though, there’s an awareness of the difference between worshipping the creator and worshipping the created. Still, there’s a sense of a divine current that moves through this world. Whether beholding a heron lifting from the Dart river, or watching the dawn rise after an all-night rave in Shepherds Bush, it’s something to be alive to. And where I live, on Dartmoor, the old name for the sun is Belus. If you forget to praise Belus with a song or story once in a while your sheep may turn to stone.

In Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, we find an England still teeming with giants, sprites, luminous moons and rugged suns. Part of his play’s mesmeric hold is that it speaks to something we still bashfully recognize. It’s all still around if we pay attention: an earth that seeks our admiration. It’s a William Blake way of seeing, something quietly present beneath the hubbub of the World Cup and geopolitics. I walk the boundaries of my village most nights to sink into that sumptuous reality. I watch the sun come up and go down, then a pint in the Bay Horse. It’s almost too much.

Within myth, the sun in full beam is symbolic of fortune. Only last week I was in Dublin in a newsagent. I had a little time, so I let a lad in the queue before me. He looked as if he might not even have had a bank account. He promptly bought a scratch card and won half a million euros. As they say, “the sun comes out for him”. The whole shop shimmered at that moment.

That’s often the role of the sun in mythology: a life-giver. Think of characters like Helios, Greek god of the sun, who brings light to humans and gods by leathering his golden chariot across the sky. We have the Egyptian Ra, associated with the sun at noon, when heat is reaching its absolute fullness. Ra is out there encouraging things to grow, coaxing warmth from chill, sailing around the heavens in a celestial barge before heading down into the darkness to tackle serpents and demons after nightfall. The kind of thing we like our gods doing.

But that’s only one side of the picture. The Aztec deity Huitzilopochtli required nothing less than human sacrifice to keep distributing his rays. If he wasn’t charging about the heavens then he was down in the gunk and blood of battle, possessing Aztec warriors. His worshippers would take live captives so that they could sacrifice them afterwards.

It might not have been Huitzilopochtli’s doing, but a few weeks ago, Arthur’s Seat, the hill overlooking Edinburgh, caught fire. It was an apocalyptic sight. Were Arthur and his men about to erupt out of the turf and bring our squabbling nation to some kind of equilibrium? In truth, characters associated with the sun are rarely known for sagacity. They are usually hotheads.

Take Samson, whose name means Son of the Sun. He’s a judge — think a chief rather than a fellow with wig and gavel — of Israel at a moment when they have almost entirely lost touch with the best of themselves. In many ways, he represents the profundity of their lostness. He’s best known for his huge bursts of strength and his huge erotic appetite. He has a little of the Trickster about him, sometimes dispensing odd riddles before his next massacre, or making the odd quip as he holds aloft the donkey jawbone with which he slew 1,000 Philistines.

As a sun-associated figure, Samson doesn’t have a lot of obvious nuance. You probably remember Delilah, the woman who coaxed from him the secret of his strength: his long hair. Long hair has been perceived the world over as connected to both strength and the sun. The seven locks that are cut from Samson in the encounter with Delilah are often read as the seven rays of the sun.

The sun at midday, particularly today, reminds me of Samson: unrelenting. It’s a kind of strength that can incinerate but is also of tremendous power. Samson seems to arise from the lineage of the Sumerian wild man Gilgamesh, and there was a burst of comparative mythological work on him as a kind of solar deity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The village Beth Shemesh, which is referred to frequently in Samson’s story, owes its name to a “temple of the sun”. Like Heracles, Samson slew a lion with his bare hands, tore down the gates of a city, and was betrayed by a woman. It’s been argued that Delilah is Hebrew wordplay on “Layla”, which means night. With his capture, and his subsequent blinding, she functions as night.

In Christian thought there’s a distinction given between gifts from the Spirit and fruit of the Spirit. The gift is Samson’s tremendous strength, the fruit is what he does with it. Sun characters often have great charisma in stories, but there’s a lack of charity in what may grow from such talent.

As so often in myth, this apparent excess is part of a wider balance. In fairy tales, for example, there’s attention to three colors, red, black, and white. Think of the black of Snow White’s hair, the red of her lips, the white of her cheek. In the past decades both anthropologists and mythologists have made comparisons to the colors representing life stages.

The Red is the oomph of youth, individuation, getting ahead, being visible. It brings heat. It’s about success and causing the appropriate stir to get there. It’s dashing, heated and all about display. At its best, it’s inspirational, and at its worst it is crude and rather ruthless.

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The Black is associated with midlife, with decline rather than endless success. The Black is about knowledge of roads not traveled. It means the insight of failure and the educative power of limitation. In mythology, real cultures are defined not by endless growth but a capacity to make a covenant with limit when needed. And the White is eldership. It’s the largesse that enables you to make decisions that benefit your wider community, not just your own ends. It doesn’t abandon the drive of Red and the sobriety of Black, but instead integrates them into something approaching wise choices.

When there’s too much sun, we tend to make overheated decisions. It’s worth looking at our own leaders this week and getting a sense of what color they are speaking from. Do they need more black, or the expansiveness of the white? Maybe the drive of the red is what’s needed. But too much red leads to burnout, rashness and general chaos. Too much red is endlessly bragging, all hat and no cattle, all sizzle and no steak.

In the old stories, when things start to heat up excessively, you need to get the cool of the black into the mix, or the even-handedness of the white. Heat like this works on the irrational side of our nature, gets us muttering into our beer about the end times. As it happens, “apocalypse”, a Greek word, literally means “to uncover”, a revealing of some sort. And today, as our fractious country smolders, it feels like the curtains are being ripped down. As a mythologist I’ll be keeping a close eye on the simmering of Arthur’s Seat as well as the hills of St Francis. I’ll hope for the saint’s patient sense of wonder rather than Samson’s jagged flare-ups. When things get hot, cleave to the cool.

With even more turmoil and war than usual, even more stress radiating from our screens, could this be a moment to curate our imagination a little more carefully? What could that look like?

Too much Kronos and we have all the facts and none of the story. But Easter could be a circuit-breaker from endless doomscrolling. A time to settle into the nourishing strangeness of a story describing something impossible from a Kronos point of view. The death and resurrection of a God. It’s quite possible to get through Easter and completely avoid this gnarly old story. Just munch another chocolate egg and settle down for the afternoon movie. Maybe a day off work.

But we dig in and we find the tale: of a dusty healer from Nazareth tipping over the tables of polite society. He outrages and blesses in seemingly equal measure. His story is profoundly odd: he is born into this world as a fugitive, is butchered as an outlaw and has the audacity to return. His parables seem designed to melt our heads. Whatever game his contemporaries are playing, he’s doing something inflammatory and different. Even the Gospels can’t quite agree on the exact manner of his resurrection, only that it happened. A rock got rolled away.

Of course, Christ isn’t the first mystical character to return from the dead. The Sumerian goddess Inanna had ventured to the Underworld, been killed by her sister Ereshkigal and been resurrected by the god Enki. The Egyptian god Osiris was murdered by his brother Set and reconstructed by his wife Isis. There are tales of Dionysus being ripped to shreds and put back together. It happens. In fact it’s something of a gold standard for myths all over the world. Their capacity to reassemble in such a way is what would qualify them as a god. As a mythologist I’ve spent thirty years exploring these stories at universities all over America and the UK. The sheer variety of stories with this theme is why we are encouraged to see the Jesus story as not at all remarkable. We’ll come back to that.

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Here’s a couple of resurrection stories from outside the canon. For many years I’ve told a Siberian folktale called “The Red Bead Woman”. It involves a woman of the margins who agrees to marry the chief of the village. On the way to her wedding she’s murdered by a sorceress who gathers up her victim’s dress and pretends to be her, even succeeds in duping the girl’s husband-to-be. For a long time the body remains in the forest until a little dog turns up at the awful scene. By now it’s bones. Being a tiny little fellow, the hound finds something most wouldn’t. A little bit of her heart under her chest bone. Through snow and rain the dog carries the morsel to the very place she was born and buries it in the soil. As spring comes she is reborn and, after much to-ing and fro-ing, gets to the wedding that was always meant for her. Here we have the great Easter theme: life, death and renewal.

In a Russian story I tell called “The Firebird”, a young hunter jumps into a cauldron of boiling water and for twenty minutes is not seen. The surface bubbles and, in some sense, the hunter has clearly died. But keep looking at the water. Finally a man emerges from the waters, not a boy, and he is so beautiful they say it was as if he was burnished in gold. He has been resurrected from an ordeal so awful his former life is long gone. This and Red Bead Woman cheer us in the inevitable scuffs and betrayals of our own life. For in our lives we know something of the Easter cycle. Nobody is quite the same character they were 20 years ago. Things pass away, others are born. These are what I would call Kairos stories. They abide in the myth-time. But something different happens at Easter. Something even more mysterious.

Easter is where Kairos crashes into Kronos, causing the shockwaves of what we call the Christian experience. The timeless and the timebound actually meet in this strangest of stories.

Jesus arrives on a donkey to Jerusalem for the great harrowing we call the Passion. Not on a mighty stallion or cloaked in rubies and pearls. This odd, underestimated figure takes himself to the temple and steams into the money lenders. This begins the process that will ensure his terrible butchering. Jesus is the dog that God has in the race, and that race is now reaching its terrible and extraordinary accomplishment.

C.S. Lewis was once known to have said that anyone who calls the Gospels a myth clearly hasn’t read many myths. I think he’s referring to this extraordinary collision of time signatures. This most essential theme of myth lands in the dust and pain and wonder of the life of Jesus. Suddenly myth has a postcode. No fairytale reads like the Gospel of Mark. It’s rough, startling and feels an awful lot like reportage. It’s no longer happening “long ago, or in some other time” but right here in Kronos time. We even started counting modern time — A.D. — from this moment.

I think the story of Easter is not a tired retread of the older myth cycles but the formidable accomplishment of everything they hinted at. The martyrdom of the early Christians is not something accomplished by simply “a really entertaining story” but by an event so utterly life-changing that people were prepared to die for its reality. Fables are a beautiful education in the most profound of truths, and, for Christians, Easter is when this most profound of mythic truths reveals its hand in a lived reality. As C.S. Lewis claims, this is the arrival of the “myth made fact”.

Whether we are religious or otherwise, Easter is a moment to ask real questions about our own lives. What in us is ready to die, what’s looking to emerge? It may seem trite, but there are few more important questions. What do I wish to serve? In the mania of individuation it’s an oddly radical step to make decisions of moral strength, to have a lintel overhead that is not dependent on our own fluctuating emotional state.

Easter. We only have to look out the window to see how the pattern of life, death and renewal chimes with the movement of the seasons. As I write to you, here in the wilds of Dartmoor I glimpse the confirming sight of daffodils jutting defiantly out of cold dark soil. The innate poetry of this rhythm is inescapable. There’s a point in mid-January when we’d be forgiven for thinking such a redemptive sight most unlikely. But there it is, the daffodil, year after year. After a long winter it’s a sight we never get sick of. So what can we, as modern people, do with Easter?

I’ll start with Lent. Traditionally, Lent is a time to give something up. In a society addicted to feasting we attempt to become a culture conversant with fasting. It can be surprisingly difficult. For some friends, their Lenten sacrifice is not turning their phones on for an hour after waking, or only checking the news once a day. For others I know, it’s a return to writing longhand for forty days, strengthening their much neglected penmanship. Less keyboard tapping. Preparing for Easter is a time to become keener in spirit, more vigilant to habitual indulgence, and more open to renewal.

Even amongst the grit of Easter, in the end there is much to celebrate. The story is heading somewhere extraordinary. Somewhere wonderful. Easter is a dimension of what the mythologist Mircea Eliade called The Myth of the Eternal Return. Through ritual, music, story, prayer we step out of what he called profane time into the sacred. We all have our version of that.

But I’d like to finish by giving attention to the moments that are rather less glorious. Christianity is a religion that certainly understands, and gives enormous room to, the experience of suffering. Easter shows us that in the most terrible moments the door to mercy can still be open.

In our combustible climate there’s much nationalistic bluster about apocalypse, holy wars and the imminent return of Jesus amongst the missiles, but we seem to neglect the sorrowed places he says he’ll always be. Wandering the bomb shelters, refugee camps, tending the wounded, sitting with the dying and the desperately lonely. We should stop gazing zealously to the skies for redemption and bring our Kairos attention into the Kronos.

That is the Easter reality. That is Jesus’ legacy. To make the mud and smoke of our own lives luminous for a moment.

Maybe every time we do Jesus has, in fact, returned.

Happy Easter. 

To a degree I’m sympathetic — I am, after all, a professional storyteller. Chaotic times create a desire for innovation, to “think” our way out of our problems. But some of that chaos has very deep roots. And for the first time in my life, I’ve been thinking that we are exposed to too many stories. Stories that sell counterfeit directives, tales to seduce not to court.

Ours is sometimes called a “Hermian Age” — you may remember Hermes is the Greek god of the storytellers and instant communication between people. But, friends, draw closer. We’re not addressing the fine print in Hermes’s contract. His connection is only successful soul to soul. If the soul is not roused, Hermes is simply not present. We are living in a facsimile of that rapidity. Our ears are filled with story — but the stories we need now are not new stories, but the old stories, the ones that turned up about 3,000 years ago. Myths. Over 30 years of telling and teaching folklore and writing many books on the subject have convinced me of this.

Here’s a story about a story. I’m driving a man I know, Gary, back to his house on a Plymouth council estate. He’s off drugs, off servicing men behind the bus station, out of the gang his brother runs. But only just, these things being a magnet he keeps floating towards. Sometimes he wants to talk to me about his life, sometimes not, and the change can be in a fraction of a second. Last time we did he threatened to hurl himself into the fast-moving current of a river we were passing. But today’s different, today he wants a story.

I tell him a tale about a girl leaving a village for good, and not one pair of eyes is on her wishing her well. At this he moans for a bit, rocks a bit, then makes a grab for the gear stick, tries to uproot it from the stem and bring the car off the road. I pull over and he starts pummeling his own head. “Get it out of my head,” he says. “Get the story away from me, it’s in me, I don’t like it, what have you done?” This from a young man who watches horror, porn, and plays violent video games on an almost hourly rotation.

A tiny folk tale has unearthed something in its terrible simplicity that’s gone straight to his heart. “That’s me, the girl is me, no one, no one, is looking out for me.” I hug him for a moment and tell him, I am. To get to you, they have to come through me. Whoever they may be. He cries then opens the car door. It’s January, and it’s dark. A great blast of freezing air gallops into the car. For a moment he’s lit up under a streetlamp before darting into the shadows. I will never see him again.

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There’s no one in this whole wide world that isn’t carrying a story. You could be a president, a yoga teacher, a junkie, and you have this one completely unique thing in your pocket. Your story. And myths help us to move a mere story — an account of something bad that happened to us — from the confessional to the majestic, from persona to presence. Tristan and Isolde is still playing itself out in fraught love affairs, Beowulf is called forth in the sheer guts of trying to piece yourself together after a rough divorce.

I see it as my job — my civic duty, my privilege — to track the myth hanging onto the wingtip of the personal anecdote. When we use myth in this way, we make connections with the little I and the big We — and in doing so, shrug off a little unnecessary loneliness. In place of isolation, we now have the camaraderie of situating ourselves within a bigger story.

This is no small thing we’re doing, anchoring ourselves to the most extraordinary sources of wisdom. Myths are north stars to any culture deserving of the name — culture coming from the Latin, colere, which means to till the ground. To make a culture you dig down into a story. That story needs to be robust enough to explain a few things while also accommodating mystery. Myths hold together heaven and earth, they are a crossroads between the timeless and the timebound. Myths are the connecting tissue between us and the universe. Myths can be the words that underpin a ritual, or actually are a ritual themselves. They often explicate our origins, the gods, the visible and invisible worlds. They have images so emphatic and nourishing that humans can organize their philosophies around them. They afford dignity and purpose to the reactive experience of living. They intrigue us, they excite us, they deepen our understanding of the ordinary. They make luminous.

Myths are the original ecstasies: tales ground down by the gleaming teeth of wolves, containing the whispers of a Ghanaian grandmother; fulsome with the blue longings of the moon. Such stories shouldn’t behave or play nice. They slip the trap of allegory and pad off over the snow, leaving us baffled and delighted. When they fulfill this mystical mandate, you get what could be called a “Sacred Story”. It’s a tale that’s not transactional but transformative, that takes rupture and gives it rapture. It’s what we’ve always done. From the very beginning of things, we’ve tended to imagine in story. Thousands and thousands of years before cuneiform tablets, we stuffed wild, useful ideas into stories so they could be passed from generation to generation.

Of course, everything has its darker aspect. These days we most often associate myths with fiction — a myth is another word for a fib, a lie. For me this is a thin and inaccurate reading. This is modern advertising aggressively selling stories with the aim of possessing your imagination — a toxic mimic. For more on that kind of thing, seek out Roland Barthes, sipping his coffee and scowling at trees.

The other position — shared by cultures across continents — is that myths arise when you go walkabout. When you take off — and shake the civilized off you. If you walk long enough, a mountain may say something to you, a bird may sweep by with some gossip, you may lie down by a river and get dreamt. Humans weren’t the center of the imagining — but we were awfully good at picking up the news. It was the Earth that thought in myth, and we used to have the smarts to interpret that heavenly braille. A myth worth its salt was more than just human. It, in some tangible and mysterious way, spoke across species. A storyteller wasn’t just an entertainer, they were in touch with the ineffable.

Storytellers know that there are many types of time too — indeed, one of the powers of myths is that they pull us out of our hurried sense of time, our sense of not having enough of the stuff. There’s the kind that glows on your phone, the kind that pings and tells you that you have a Zoom call in 10 minutes. The Greeks call that “Kronos” time, and it has its function. But there’s another type — “Kairos”, which lifts us into the dimensions of a myth. The stories we tend to remember have some transformational rather than transactional at their core. As I often say, a combination of the timeless and the time-bound. Too much of the former it can feel perennial but not urgent, too much of the latter it lacks the dignity of the great themes.

Myth is about connotation not denotation; it’s about symbols not signs. People are snooty these days about metaphors, but I’d say that’s nonsense. A metaphor is a symbol that doesn’t tell you quite what it is, allowing an indefinite number of associations to flood in. It’s how poems work. It’s how we find something to nest within when we fall in love. We need wiggle room for our imagination. I could tell you that myth is a beautiful lie that tells a deeper truth; I could tell you that myth never was and always is; I could tell you myth is truth without the use of facts, but actually, no, even those diminish it, make it smaller somehow. After replying thousands of times to the question I will just settle with this: ‘Myth is a Sacred Story.’

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Some of the most sacred of those stories circle around the tale of a dying and resurrected king — a king who carried a great burden for his people and turned that burden into an extraordinary act of love. And some of us believe that the most sacred story crash-bang-walloped into the kind of time we can all register: ours. This is where myth collides with history. I’ve long held the strange idea that the arrival of Christ begins in the middle of Homer’s Odyssey. When Odysseus visits the Underworld, Achilles tells him: “Sooner be a slave to a poor man than King of the Underworld.” The game is up for the old order. With these words, from the greatest of Greek heroes, the world turns. Kleos — imperishable glory — is the deepest ambition of a warrior. When Achilles says it is without meaning down in Hades, something utterly new is being announced. A shield is hurled on a stone floor. A fresh consciousness. Yeshua, the God-Man is coming. The last shall be first.

So where to begin with the kind of myths I think we need? I want to bring in an idea that I’ve worked with for years as a wilderness guide. We could call it the Old Idea. That idea is that our soul — or most of it — lives outside our body. This is a big break with the Western notion of interiority as the primary poetic truth. Less of the therapy couch, “my truth,” the interior franchise of fairy tales, me, me, me.

This is not the same thing as an ad campaign for Nike telling us we can be anything we want. No. Myths tell us we are to be something quite specific.

In the simplest terms they tell us that we are profoundly connected to the stuff of Earth — storms, roosters, oaks, pomegranates — but that a great withdrawing has taken place. A divorce. It seems the price for commercial expansion is a certain kind of imaginative pulling back, a concerted withdrawing of the wider, wilder, world-soul. With this in place, less consciousness and then less conscience is required from our actions.

I’m not suggesting abandoning science and psychology — but I am sure that our senses are hinting at something bigger. We are meant to take up more spiritual space. Matthew Arnold in his poem “Dover Beach” lamented this evacuation by comparing a melancholy, roaring tide leaving the shore. But, of course, tides come back. In a pre-Copernican world, everything was interior; we viewed our gods in star formations, even our very fates were writ large and circling over our heads. We were enclosed in soul. To see a grizzly bear at the water hole was to encounter a spirit; when thunder boomed it was because our heart was broken — obviously. Everything out there was telling us about in here. Our body was the beautiful, lonesome crossroads between the two. We don’t have unique access to our soul; it rests in condor nests and gambling dens in Russian villages, slipping back into our body with kohl-streaked cheeks just seconds before we wake up. It’s not entirely human.

Far from being untruths, myths have traditionally been forefront in the shaping of human beings. They show us what to defend, what to care about, the need for pluck, sacrifice, and generosity. In the writ-largeness of their narratives we can locate our own stories, like a river finding the sea. They are a home for us. Some say they are our very bones.

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Liturgies of the Wild is out now. Buy tickets to Martin Shaw’s upcoming UnHerd Academy talk on mythology here.