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Definition of Myth and its cultural ramifications
Myth and its cultural ramifications
Shared images
Each and every one of us, at some point in our lives, has probably heard about myths – in school, or at home, those are usually some of the first stories that we get to know.
Side by side with these are folktales that enrich our imagination and complement our notion that the regular backdrop of Mythology and Folklore is that the fantastical world of mythmaking has something to tell us, that it carries something that interests us somehow.
 
Mighty god Zeus.
The shared images brought forth by myths invoke cultural reliability on symbolic aspects of their fantasy world.
It works as a narrative framework that invites our set of previous perspectives towards the magical realm of storytelling as a creatively imbued cultural behavior.
Attention!
Even though the tales that work as the foundation for our storytelling capabilities are usually set in a distant unreachable past, the marks left by those stories on the skin of future writers invite them to recall how Mythology is a phenomenon that can be hardly individualized into a single worldview. It rather invites us to think collectively as cultural beings, as a group of narrators of our many stories.
The hero’s journey
Mythologist Joseph Campbell’s famous rendering of the hero’s journey in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) explains one of the many ways in which a narrative style became embedded into several different cultures providing in each of them a specific aesthetic development.
In his theory, the hero’s journey consists of a cycle, which recurrently appears throughout the world’s myths, where:
 
•	the main character of a story begins na adventure – either by answering to a call or by choice;
•	he (or she) crosses a threshold after which he (or she) begins to face their transformation;
•	the main character faces a series of challenges necessary for them to overcome;
•	he (or she) reaches the abyss of literal or symbolic death as well as their rebirth;
•	he (or she) is effectively transformed and atoned;
•	finally returning to the stability in which they had started their journey, as na undoubtedly changed person.
Sum up
It is a journey departing from the known part of the hero’s world into the ever-transforming unknown world, back into the known world of security – while gathering some kind of learning out of this unknown.
As a frequent journey into maturity and effective change in one’s personal worldview, Campbell’s concept of the “hero’s journey” can and should be understood as both na ever-changing and na ever-repeating story. That is to say, it should be understood as a narrative structure that crosses cultures maintaining its original outline, yet simultaneously readdressing cultural specificities that render each of those myths a singular event.
Another way in which Campbell refers to this structural plotline of the hero is as the “monomyth”, one that circles back, again and again, culture after culture towards the same narrative sketch.
Largely, it is due to the ideas presented by Campbell regarding the “hero’s journey” that the “regular” structure of the plot of a story became known as a three-parted composition:
Exposition and conflict
Rising action and climax
Falling action and resolution
These steps are to a great extent still used today in Hollywood scripts aiming for a safe outcome. According to Campbell’s ideas, this “safeness” would be guaranteed precisely because this plotline emerges out of our “monomyth”, the “hero’s journey”.
Example
One of the many “hero’s journey” stories constantly repeated throughout the world is the stealing of fire and its gifting to humankind to help them develop towards civilization.
That being said, its plotline could be read as one in which the hero would leave his stability as a demi-god or god, challenge his superiors (usually older gods) by the theft of the knowledge of fire, and put forward the development of humankind into civilization – attaining a new kind of stability. Extensively universal, this is one of those themes on top of which Campbell drew his theory of the “monomyth”:
 
For the Greeks, Prometheus did the job.
 
For the Norse, it was the trickster Loki.
 
For the Maori, inhabitants of the Pacific Islands, the demigod Maui brought fire from the underworld.
 
And for the Navajo population, Spider Grandmother (Hopi Kokyangwuti) was the hero to conquer the fire and offer it as a present for humans to develop.
It is not hard to comprehend that those myths carry moral undertones that at some point evoke honor and glory, but at other times challenge morality in its own ethical terrain.
The stealing of fire, for instance, brings forth a debate about the dilemma of helping humankind to develop into fire-tamers, i.e., civilized societies or leaving the ever-powerful knowledge of fire on the hands of the gods and goddesses who guard and control it.
This necessity to break with the previous status quo seems to precisely evoke, as the bedrock of its moral issues, na invitation to change – nevertheless, this change must come by means of a challenge directed both at oneself as well as those who previously established the status quo one is trying to undermine.
Interestingly enough, it is not uncommon for modern writers to undertake the toil of weaving mythical tales into their own narratives:
 
James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922).
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On the one hand, one may think of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) or Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad (2005) drawing on the mythical characters found on Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, be them the Greek Pantheon of gods and goddesses or the heroes and heroines found there.
 
 
Anansi character from American Gods series (2017).
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On the other hand, the African, Norse or Indigenous Pantheon of gods and goddesses have proven just as rich and complex resources where to draw from, as it happens in contemporary narrative sagas such as Marlon James’ Dark Star Trilogy, particularly its first installment Black Leopard, Red Wolf (2020), and also on well-established fantasy novels such as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001) and Anansi Boys (2005). 
 
This recurrence of myths throughout various storytelling practices allows us to dive into other theoretical approaches akin to Joseph Campbell’s concept of the “hero’s journey”.
Myth criticism
Another one of the theories based on the shared cultural practice of mythmaking can be found in the writings of Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye.
In his 1957 book Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye argues that literary history, in general, works as na enclosed system repeating the same basic symbolic myths over and over again.
This interpretative key organized literature in na ever-recurrent cycle of themes, stories, and character types. Nevertheless, Frye was not the only defendant of this theory. His ideas emerged out of the context of New Criticism, a school of thought that understood literary criticism as a systematic discipline, objective and scientific. That is to say, it aimed at analyzing narratives as self-contained objects – thus, enabling the systematization into structural shapes, such as Campbell’s “monomyth”.
Frye departed from psychological and anthropological concepts about myths and rituals to organize his theory, usually referred to as Myth Criticism.
Attention!
According to Frye, myths would be the cornerstone of human imaginative development. Therefore, the worldwide cultural habits of mythmaking would work as one of our shared resources to culturally organize human existence as a meaningful phenomenon.
If literary history is, then, a system of recurrent patterns of storytelling, argues Frye, it is possible to depict its core as a set of narrative motives which would be the emerging shape out of which every story is created.
Therefore, Frye ends up dividing literature into four essential genres:
Romance
Tragedy
Irony/satire
Comedy
Those wouldform, according to his sketch, a central unifying myth.
Frye’s understanding of this shared cultural core can be associated with psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s archetypal readings of the psyche – Frye’s genres are means by which one can structure the various world’s stories towards four basic outlines. Unsurprisingly, then, what he calls “romance” has been largely drawn on Campbell’s “hero’s journey”.
Classical myths
Ovid’s Metamorphoses
 
Latin poet Ovid.
Further on, it is important to understand how specific narrative renderings of some myths contributed fundamentally to the development of English Literature.
 
There is no surprise once we refer to Ovid (43 BC – 18 BC), the ancient poet, as one of the most prolific myth writers of all time.
 
His famous book Metamorphoses has been extensively pointed out as one of the major classical influences throughout the Western literary world.
Metamorphoses is a very long poem compilating a series of different mythical tales depicting transfiguration as their connecting link. Directly influenced by Greek and Latin mythology, the poem travels throughout this pantheon of heroes and heroines, gods and goddesses collecting repeating instances of shapeshifting, be them imposed or voluntary.
 
Apollo and Daphne , Piero del Pollaiuolo, probably from 1470 until 1480.
Its first verse English translation was written by Arthur Golding in 1567, since William Caxton – the important Elizabethan printer – had already published a prose translation of the French text of Metamorphoses known as Ovide Moralisé, in 1480. Nevertheless, it is Golding’s rendition of Ovid’s book that became widely famous in England and was eventually read by many Elizabethan poets such as Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare.
Ovid’s depiction of the Greek myths as short stories which challenge the imagination was largely influential not only in the imagery it provided for such poets, but also with its many plotlines directly appropriated by Shakespeare in his plays.
Myths are stories just as shapeshifting as they are recurrent. Different literary genres have attempted to provide their different contributions to the story of each myth, but not all were successful in provoking a meaningful impact on their readers.
From poetry to drama, mythology works both on the level of the story as it does on the level of plot structures. Nevertheless, not all myths come from the classical world of Greeks and Romans.
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Definition of Myth and its cultural ramifications
Myths as part of national identity
Literary manifestations of Irish Folklore
Since our discussions of myth have been surrounding mostly the influence of Greek or Latin tales, in this last part of the first section we are going to turn our eyes towards Irish Folklore and its influences throughout English-speaking literature.
For that purpose, the Irish historical context will prove to be a helpful resource that must be accessed together with one of its major literary monuments, the poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, William Butler Yeats (1865 – 1939).
This man’s journey into folklore and myth came at a time when the reassessment of Irish legends, as well as their Celtic roots, was becoming one of the main political claims within the Irish nationalist movement.
 
By the time Yeats was born, Ireland had been struggling for a while with its recognition as a nation with its own historical and cultural relevance, instead of simply being na extension of England. Besides that, the Irish nation faced a long religious conflict dividing its population into a Roman Catholic majority and a Protestant minority.
Nevertheless, the dominant political ideology of the 1800s in Ireland was Irish Nationalism, which developed to the extent in which, at its apex, the movement had its own representation as a major Parliamentary party within the Parliament of the United Kingdom at Westminster. Their political relevance was such that they even made a campaign demanding self-government – which was partly achieved in 1921, when Ireland was divided in two.
During the early nineteenth century, Ireland – its historical past and folkloric imaginary – was the stage and source material for what would turn into the literary movement called the Irish Cultural Revival.
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By that time, Gaelic (understood by nationalists as the original Irish language) was dying out as a spoken language. English was the official national – and literary – language as far as anyone could tell. However, the nationalist movement reclaimed Gaelic as na important language since most of Irish’s Ancient literature needed to be translated from Gaelic.
Philologists’ research on the topic revealed heroic and mythical narratives particularly Irish dating from before the year 900. This was fundamental for renewing the interest in Irish literature and history as na autonomous cultural heritage, independent from the British cultural past. Within this context, many were the Anglo-Irish poets who explored the rhythms and legendary imagery found in those ancient texts, attempting to echo a mythical past true to Ireland’s history.
 
Young Cu Chulainn , May Yeo.
Yeats’s profound interest in Irish cultural nationalism was largely due to his love for the country’s old verses, folklore, and legends. In 1891, after collaborating three years with the collection Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), Yeats stated about his writings that “I have na ambition to be taken as na Irish novelist, not as na English or cosmopolitan one” (HOWES, 2006, p. 5).
Attention!
In this book collection to which Yeats contributed, mythological Ireland was less present in the form that Ovid chose to organize his Metamorphoses – that is to say, tales of wonder from a past in which gods and goddesses walked across the Earth – and rather like a series of accounts of the encounter between actual inhabitants of rural Ireland with beings from another realm of existence.
Not many readers were satisfied with this approach to Irish folklore. Thus, Yeats’s next attempt into Irish folklore, now rendered in the form of poetry in 1889 and called The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, a reunion of poems that dealt with the Fenian Cycle characters of Irish mythology.
Interestingly enough
Yeats spent over 24 months writing its title poem (The Wanderings of Oisin), and it eventually became one of his favorites throughout his life.
The woven elements in that poem, where the supernatural mingled with the poetic rhythmic characteristic of old Irish tales seem to have given Yeats a particular insight about his writing.
The poem begins in a conversation, depicted as such:
 
The dream of Ossian , Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, 1813.
“S. Patrick. You who are bent, and bald, and blind,
With a heavy heart and a wandering mind,
Have known three centuries, poets sing,
Of dalliance with a demon thing.
Oisin. Sad to remember, sick with years,
The swift innumerable spears,
The horsemen with their floating hair,
And bowls of barley, honey, and wine,
Those merry couples dancing in tune,
And the white body that lay by mine;
But the tale, though words be lighter than air.Must live to be old like the wandering moon.”
(YEATS, 1889, BK. I)
In the poem The Wanderings of Oisin, Yeats structures the narrative in a circular shape. Oisin’s debate with Saint Patrick opens up the first of its parts and closes the poem at its third and final part. Its middle part is interested in Oisin’s three-hundred-year quest, largely drawing on the mythical past of the Fenian Cycle.
That being said, the legend’s rendering into poetry, organized into a circular narrative largely structured as a conversation provides once again a new framework in which to tell these ever-repeating narratives of myth.
Myths, therefore, are a fundamental part of a nation’s identity as well as many of its stories’ cornerstones. If for Yeats the Irish mythological past was both a politically imbued literary source and apassion, its rich imagery and narrative plotlines became frequent supply storage for other contemporary writers.
Irish folklore structures and informs artists who want to tell their tales while simultaneously recognize their cultural inheritance.
On myths
How important are myths? How do they find their way into literature and even films? In this video you will learn how myths are structured and how relevant they are to English literature.