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.

Suggested reading

How to revive mythic Britain

By Aris Roussinos

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.’

Suggested reading

Donald Trump’s ascent to myth

By John Michael Greer

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.

***

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

“Always, after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again.” When J.R.R. Tolkien wrote those words, he didn’t have the theories of his contemporary Carl Jung in mind, but the Swiss psychologist’s insights are relevant here. If your every effort to get rid of an enemy simply makes him stronger, it’s a safe bet that he isn’t merely an annoying intrusion from outside your comfortable world, but rather the inevitable consequence of your own attitudes and actions. What Jung called “the Shadow”, the sum total of everything about yourself you refuse to acknowledge, can be a political reality as well as a psychological one. Thus it’s essential to recognize, along with the hard political and economic realities that have lent strength to Trump’s movement, the inner dimension of myth that gives him his extraordinary grip on the collective imagination of our time.

It says something for the acumen of Trump’s opponents that they almost grasp this. The efforts to equate Trump to Hitler aren’t simply shrill propaganda, meant to tar him by association with the most famous name in the political demonology of our age, though of course that has always been part of it. As Jung pointed out in his prescient 1936 essay “Wotan”, much of Hitler’s power over the collective mind of Europe came boiling up out of the realms of myth and archetype. Rationalists in Hitler’s day were consistently confounded by the way he brushed aside obstacles and followed his trajectory to the bitter end. That the trajectory itself could have been anticipated by a glance at the relevant myths simply adds piquance to the result.

Of course, to speak about myth nowadays is to court thoughtless dismissal. According to one of the popular canards of our time, myths were all well and good for the crude, primitive minds of people before the modern age, but we have outgrown them. We don’t have myths, so the theory goes: we have facts. This is a very comfortable belief to those who can make themselves cling to it. Its only downside is that it’s flatly contradicted by the most basic realities of our collective life.

More from this author

The death of Progress

By John Michael Greer

Human rationality is a thin and recently added veneer, perched unsteadily over the top of a tangled mass of drives, instincts, and inborn reactions that we share with other social primates. With fewer exceptions than we like to think about, our behavior is governed by the same motives that guide baboons and bonobos; the great difference is that these relatives of ours don’t hide behind layers of self-justifying verbiage. Yet the capacity for conceptual thought that distinguishes our species isn’t just there to generate rationalizations. It also provides one of the handful of useful tools we have for seeing beneath the surface.

The ancient Greek word muthos originally meant “narration” or “story”. Later on it came to mean the stories that matter. This doesn’t require such stories to be factual in the evening-news sense. As the philosopher Sallust wrote, myths are things that never happened but always are. They communicate truths rather than facts. Grasp the underlying myth, as Jung did in making sense of the Hitler phenomenon, and you can get a much clearer sense of where things are headed than you would from the collective chatter of your time.

Nowadays, though, there’s a significant obstacle in the way of such insights — the presence and popularity of pseudomyths. A pseudomyth is a fashionable narrative manufactured by the popular culture of a given era, rather than rising from the deep places of the mind as genuine myths do. One great difference between pseudomyths and the real article is that pseudomyths don’t wear well; a few generations, maybe a century at most, and they land in history’s rubbish tip. Another great difference, which goes far to explain the first one, is that predictions based on pseudomyths are inevitably wrong.

I could parade any number of pseudomyths to address the point that needs making here. Let’s cut to the chase, though, and talk about the pseudomyth that frames too many discussions of Donald Trump. It’s especially easy to do this, because the pseudomyth in question has been given one of its classic forms in the pages of J.K. Rowling’s popular Harry Potter novels.

Consider the basic framing story of the Potterverse. There are certain people, you see, who are special. They have marvelous talents the rest of us don’t have, and so they get to live in a wonderful, magical world from which the rest of us are excluded. Most of them come from families that already belong to that world, but a few are recruited into it from outside. The core of the recruitment process is an educational system from which, again, everyone else is shut out.

There are people who don’t support this state of affairs, to be sure. Some are outside it and some within. The outsiders who dislike and distrust it are crass Philistine thugs like the Dursleys. It’s the dissidents from inside the system who come in for the real vilification, though. In the eyes of the pseudomyth, they’re evil — knowingly, deliberately evil. They call themselves Death Eaters; for all practical purposes, they might as well don t-shirts saying “GENUINE CERTIFIED BAD PERSON”. The very thought that any one of them might have a reasonable motive or an honest disagreement with the system as it exists is excluded utterly by the pseudomyth.

All this is to say that the Harry Potter stories echo, with remarkable precision, the self-aggrandizing ideology of what we may as well call the laptop class, the overeducated and overprivileged caste that monopolizes the levers of managerial power across today’s Western. Members of that caste see themselves as special in the full Potteresque sense, set apart from mere Muggles by their talents and training. Anyone from outside their ranks who dares to question their superiority can count on being treated like a Dursley — if you want to hear genuine hate speech these days, one of the best ways to do it is to get a group of laptop-class inmates talking about working class culture — but their real hatred is directed toward those who challenge their authority from within the system. I trust I don’t have to point out who they identify as Death Eaters — or as Lord Voldemort.

Central to narratives of this type is a habit I call moral masturbation. This far-from-solitary vice involves the repetitive stroking of sensitive moral clichés to produce sensations of shuddering delight at one’s own goodness and virtue. It’s a very common habit these days; Hollywood has done very little else for a decade. It has plenty of expressions in today’s official culture, but the one that matters most for our present purposes is the insistence that one side in any collective controversy can only be motivated by pure deliberate evil, and so every decent person must inevitably fall into the ranks of the other side.

In the real world, that’s never true. No matter how obviously hateful a regime appears to its enemies, it will contrive to convince a good share of its populace that it really is the morally superior option. If it fails in that task, it won’t last a week. In genuine myths, by exactly the same token, the strident moral dualism that fills so many modern pseudomyths is notably absent. The gods who contend with giants or titans or asuras to keep the cosmos from crumbling back into chaos are, by and large, no more moral than the powers against which they do battle. In the legends that reflect mythic thinking down onto the human plane, this is even more obviously true: Achilles defeats Hector, and Arjuna defeats Karna, but neither the Iliad nor the Mahabharata vilifies the champion of the losing side as evil incarnate.

This matters for several reasons, but one in particular matters just now, for a reason already hinted at. Pseudomyths lead to bad predictions and thus to failed strategies. The pseudomyth we’ve been discussing is an excellent example here. In all its endless, dreary iterations, once one side has been identified as the “Bad People”, their defeat follows with mechanical inevitability. No matter how overwhelming the power of the Bad People, no matter how absurdly small the chance that they will be defeated by whatever inadequate force the Good People can muster against them, the Good People are guaranteed total victory. The fantasies that empower moral masturbation, like those associated with the other kind, all move with mechanical predictability toward their inevitable climax.

Both these types of fantasy do very poorly when taken as descriptions of the real world. That, in turn, goes far towards explaining the flailing of Trump’s opponents during the last six months or so. They convinced themselves that events had to copy their preferred pseudomyth, and that Trump and his minions would surely be defeated once and for all. It apparently never occurred to them that the electorate would have its own view on the matter, or that Trump and his circle might have used their four-year exile to figure out how best to target the other side’s weaknesses and win one victory after another.

Suggested reading

America’s philosophical civil war

By Mary Harrington

Donald Trump is not Lord Voldemort, and the pseudomyth his opponents deployed so repetitively and uselessly against him thus deserves a rest, if not a decent burial. The question that needs to be addressed, once pseudomyths are set aside, is what sort of mythic figure he actually is, and thus what we can expect as his myth unfolds.

It must be said here that Donald Trump the man is in no way mythic. He’s an ordinary American oligarch with lowbrow tastes and an unusually robust ego. Like similar figures throughout history, he realized that it was possible to snatch power out of the hands of a senile kleptocracy by championing the concerns of those whose voices had been excluded from the collective conversation for too long. Oswald Spengler, who wrote extensively on this process a century ago, referred to it as Caesarism after one of its most famous practitioners, and the implied comparison is worth noting. Caius Julius Caesar was an ordinary Roman oligarch before he took power and made his family name a potent force in the realm of myth.

The man is not the myth. There’s a world of difference between the hardbitten Romano-British warlord who fought against Saxon invaders, and the noble King Arthur whom we created from folk memories of his career. In the same way, the mythic pattern that swept up a banal American real-estate magnate and reality TV star, and turned him into the vehicle for sweeping political and cultural transformations, has nothing to do with his personality. It comes out of the deep places of the collective psyche of our time.

The United States is still a very young culture, and many of its underlying myths still await the poets and storytellers who will give them lasting form. One pattern, though, stands out clearly in the narrative structure of our national history. Three times already, a decaying and dysfunctional governing class has been swept aside in an era of traumatic convulsions, and in each case a single figure rose through the turbulence to become the figurehead of change. None of these men were especially remarkable human beings, but you won’t learn that from their contemporary or posthumous reputations: all three were vilified in extreme terms during their lives and exalted to a secular sainthood after their deaths. I’m talking, of course, about George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

No doubt mentioning those hallowed names will cause outrage among readers. That simply emphasizes the point I’m trying to make. These three men were not pulled out of their historic contexts and raised to mythic status in the collective imagination by any unique virtue of their own. They happened to be at the right place and the right time to spearhead one of the major transformations of American history. After they were safely dead, their heirs scrubbed their reputations clean of any suspicion of mere humanity, and turned them into plaster saints. You have to go back to contemporary media to find out just how many Americans saw Washington as an ambitious scoundrel, mocked Lincoln as an ignorant bumpkin — newspaper cartoonists loved to portray him as a baboon — and savaged Roosevelt as a traitor to his nation and his class.

The thought that some similar process of posthumous sanitizing will shape Donald Trump’s legacy will doubtless upset a great many people. Nonetheless, it’s far and away the most likely outcome of the current turmoil. The laptop class — less colorfully, the professional-managerial caste that took power with Roosevelt’s New Deal — has gone the way of its predecessors, sinking into the usual morass of greed and dysfunction, and it’s being shoved aside by a rising entrepreneurial class that has no respect for credentials and no time for moral masturbation. That transformation is well under way, and Trump happens to be its political figurehead.

Trump’s posthumous canonization, probably including a gold-plated Trump Memorial in Washington DC and another face on the side of Mount Rushmore, is fairly likely at this point. As an old man holding down one of the world’s most stressful jobs, he’s also likely to die in office. This will offer cold consolation to his enemies, who will have to endure the rise of a posthumous cult freed from the often awkward realities of the man’s personality and actions. But it’s a worthwhile reminder that we don’t choose our myths. They choose us, and whether we appreciate the results or not is no concern of theirs.