The Wisdom of Myths in a Modern Age
There was a time when humans didn’t count on the world being self-sustaining or autonomous. They held a mythologically-informed view that the world and its creatures relied on them for their continuance, and that all relationships were harmonised when they were reciprocal and mutually beneficial.
They saw themselves as custodians, not owners, in a world that was vibrantly alive, not merely a storehouse of inert and untapped resources waiting to be exploited.
An example: modern astronomy says the daily ‘rise’ and ‘fall’ of the sun happens because the sun-orbiting Earth spins on its axis every 24 hours.
But the sunrise ceremonies of earlier peoples said the rise of the sun wasn’t mere physics but the result of human prayers and ceremonies rooted in gratitude, respect and thanks. If humans didn’t do their part, the sun wouldn’t rise in the morning.
The same understanding of reciprocity and relationship is a hallmark of the rituals and myths of early human culture and some of today’s surviving indigenous cultures.
These rituals and prayers often accompanied plant harvesting and the culling of animals for their meat and fur. These were signs that people were conscious of, and grateful to, living creatures for their sacrifice — or what some called their ‘giveaway’.[i]
But there are no such rituals today in the factory farms, slaughterhouses and hydroponic farms that turn animals and plants into the products that fill our supermarket trolleys.
And few in the globalised food system — be they farmers or meat packers or chefs at Michelin-starred restaurants — show any sign of being in a respectful relationship to the creatures they commodify for our appetites.[ii] The same could be said of us — the consumers who live in ignorance of what’s done to the land, rivers, oceans and creatures we feed on.
A modern person might deride the myths of earlier times as the quaint or ill-informed fantasies of a pre-scientific age. Perhaps the bigger truth is that modern science and information technologies have made us more certain of what we know, but somehow diminished our imaginations and enfeebled our capacity for wonder.
Stephen Jenkinson offers this:
‘Wonder is the sum of life’s way of being itself, washing up on the shore of what you have known until now, leaving handfuls of treasure scattered among the small boulders of what you were sure of. You gather some of that treasure for no reason you can figure without telling anyone and stash it under the pillow of your dreams for a time not quite upon you. Wonder is a willingness, decked out as a skill, to be on the receiving end of how vast the world always is, and how unlike your ideas of how it should be, it often is.’[iii]
Old myths taught people respect and reverence for life and the natural world. Like poetry and parables, these old myths weren’t concerned with objective truth so much as being pointers to a deeper wisdom about the nature of life, love, death and the unique privileges and burdens of being human.
The myths grew from our longing and wonder. In time they became elaborately sophisticated, distilling wisdom passed down over generations from our ancestors. When these forerunners gazed into the night sky, they confected stories of hunting and love, tragedy and conquest, and the deeds of heroes, villains and gods — all guided by a belief in a pervading moral order.
These people were conscious of their mortality and they made counter narratives to infuse death with hopeful meanings. The Neanderthals, for example, buried their human and animal companions with great care, often bestowing them with elaborate ‘grave gear’ such as weapons and food and trinkets for their long journey after death.
Likewise, the Dreaming or Dreamtime of Australia’s Indigenous people is a grand narrative about life and death and the gods, and their intuition about a hidden world lying behind the physical one.
In this respect, myth-making was our attempt to peer into the unknown — into the great heart of silence — to create meaning from mystery. The perennial myth that came from wondering into the void was the story of a divine realm more powerful and perfect and whole than our own.
But mythology isn’t theology. The ancients didn’t see their gods or the divine as separate or metaphysical. They felt that gods, humans, animals and nature were inseparable, and that we were all participating in the same drama. According to Karen Armstrong, the main function of these gods was to lift humans briefly onto a more exalted plane of existence so that they could see the world with new eyes.[iv]
Enacting these myths through rituals gave people opportunities to experience themselves in ways that reminded them of their divinity. Choreographed dancing, chanting, sacrifices and pilgrimages were ways for people to recall and re-embrace their divinity — and to help them cope with the human condition.
But we’re no longer a myth-making people. Why this is so is hard to say, but in a post-religious, scientific age, one result is that we have no stories to bind or carry us on our journey to the grave and beyond.
If Eden’s story is a tale of how our unique capacity for thought separated us from nature — when Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge — then our forgotten capacity for myth-making compounds our estrangement.
We’ve become strangers in a strange land — lonely, thinking animals, living in the world but no longer fully of the world. Our separation has rendered us homeless, which makes living and dying a hard and sorry business.[v]
This an edited extract from Dan Gaffney’s new book and podcast series, ‘Journey Home — Essays on Living and Dying’, published in November 2019.
[i] Robinson, M (2014). Animal Personhood in Mi’kmaq Perspective. Societies 4(4), pp 672–688
[ii] Dargis, M (2009). Meet Your New Farmer: Hungry Corporate Giant. The New York Times, June 11
[iii] Jenkinson, S (2014). Op cit, pp 117–118
[iv] Armstrong, K (2005). A Short History of Myth. Text Publishing Company, pp 5–6
[v] Jenkinson, S (2018). Op cit, pp 196–197
