Myths, Mythologies, and Modern Cultures

“The myths told by the [ancients] are as important as history for our understanding of what those peoples, ancestors of [modern] civilization, believed and thought and felt, and expressed in writing and in visual art.

The intelligible form of ancient poets,

The fair humanities of old religion,

The Power, the Beauty, and the Majesty,

That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,

Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,

Or chasms and watery depths: all these have vanished.

They lived no longer in the faith of reason!

But still the heart doth need a language, still

Doth the old instinct bring back old names…

And so even communities professing that quite different code of beliefs which is Christianity have, after various struggles, found it impracticable to dispense with the classical stories. Today new political systems have fabricated their own myths which Coleridge, writing those lines under the Graeco-Roman spell, had never imagined. Yet twentieth-century writers, from tragic theatre to comic strip, have continued to employ the archetypes with renewed vigour. These dramatic, concrete, individual, insistently probing ancient myths still supplement the decisions of science as clues to much in the world that does not alter.

The atmosphere to which they translate us is life-enhancing; for it gives us fresh strength by providing a route of escape. The escape is from day-to-day reality, of which, as we know, it is not possible to endure very much. Yet this is no escapism of any ordinary kind, for the road leads to another sort of reality, a more imposing sort, than the reality which dominates our ordinary lives. At times, in receptive conditions, these myths generate and throw off potent, almost violent, flashes of inextinguishable, universal truths. Those are not of course, as far as we are concerned, the religious truths which (among much else) the Greeks and Romans saw in their mythology. However they are truths that still impinge, sometimes with ungovernable force, upon the mind and feelings, illuminate aspects of our human condition.

This particular brand of enlightenment is difficult or impossible to grasp by more logical or rational means, and would elude non-mythical presentation. Yet it would be wrong to say that myths seem modern or topical; they are as relevant to our time as to any other, no more no less. That is to say, they are not specifically antique either. They are ostensibly lodged, it is true, within a certain framework of the remote past, but that does not impede their perpetual compulsive tenacity. Indeed, their relevance to life’s basic continuing situations is sharpened into high relief by this setting which, though ancient in origin and form, remains unaffected by temporal circumstances.”

Michael Grant, 1962: xvii-xviii

Myths of the Greeks and Romans