The Gods Are Still Speaking
Some pagans or polytheists try to draw a clear distinction between “myth” and “fantasy,” but I’m not sure there’s a valid basis for such a strong distinction. The myths of the ancient world began as wonder stories created by storytellers to entertain and inspire, or were based on the insights and dreams of individual visionaries. When a particular vision resonated with enough people to become one of the foundational stories of that culture, it attained the status of a myth. Another way to put this is that fantasy stories become myths when enough people perceive something true in them. Fantasy is the art of mythopoesis.
I think part of the debate about this topic, and the hard feelings associated with it, has to do with perceived status. Mythology is perceived as sacred and serious, while fantasy fiction is perceived as frivolous. I would argue that fantasy fiction is an attempt to invoke the mythic and say something true about it in a new form. Obviously most attempts at this aren’t going to be very successful, but that’s the nature of all art.
Humans have been telling stories since before recorded history, and most of the stories that we’ve been telling can be best described as wonder stories- stories in which the realm of magic and the everyday world are indistinguishable, producing a sense of amazement, inspiration and awe. In the long history of human storytelling it is fantasy that is the mainstream.
Realistic fiction about the everyday world, while it is a long-established and noble tradition, is in its infancy by comparison. The very earliest literary novel is said to be the Tale of Genji, approximately a thousand years old. Compare this to the Odyssey at about twenty-eight centuries, or Gilgamesh at more than forty. Those epics represent traditions that were already ancient by the time they were written down, whereas the modern genre of the literary novel is thought to derive more or less directly from the medieval romance, diverging from it in the seventeenth century. Only an arbitrary and unjustified prejudice could maintain the notion that wonder stories are mere “pulp” entertainment, an inferior offshoot of “serious” fiction. So if the low status of fantasy fiction is just a prejudice, maybe it’s not so important to draw a line between myth and fantasy.
Does that mean I think of the myth
s as merely fictional? No, not at all- but I don’t think of them as merely factual either. The philosopher Sallust described myth as “That which never was, but always is.”Myths are the manifestations of the fundamental mysteries. Myths are the universe expressed in poetic form- those things which are more true than the merely factual. As such they are accessible now, in the “waking world” of mundane reality, and not only in some forgotten past, some distant faraway realm, or in books of ancient mythology.
They are accessible, for instance, through art and literature, in those rare and special works that achieve mythic resonance, stories in which the power of the otherworld shines through into our own. They are accessible, also, through personal gnosis, the direct encounter of the individual with the mythic realm.
The urge to create myth is a fundamental one, a mystic impulse common to all cultures. In our own culture this takes the form of fiction, but the underlying impulse is not essentially different, whether the myth is presented in a work of fiction or an ancient epic, the statue of a god or a fantastic painting.
In the ancient world, visionaries surely must have presented new myths from time to time. It might have happened something like this: a bard or a storyteller has a dream that presents a new story about the gods or even a new god. The bard tells the story to other people, who either forget it because it doesn’t speak to them or remember it and pass it on because it does. A few centuries later, if that story is still being told, it is now a myth. People have preserved it and made it their own because it tells them something true.
That’s almost exactly the same process by which fantasy fiction achieves mythic resonance in our own culture. Most fantasy stories don’t speak to enough people on a deep enough level to become foundational stories of the culture. A few do. I don’t see in what way that is really different from a myth.
There’s a sign on a church near my home that says, “God is still speaking.” While I love and cherish the ancient myths and consider them sacred, I believe the gods are still speaking.
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