Welcome

Please follow me on my social media links below:

       

       

Or, E-mail me:




MYTH: A Writer’s Tool

A myth is the story of a people carried down through history that immortalizes its heroes, glorifies their deeds, and reveals the traditions, values and social order of tribal society. In the beginning, all people were tribal. Myths gave early humans power over their lives in four distinct ways:
  •   Mystical - exploring the mystery of life and death
  •   Cosmological – defined wonderment of mysteries in the universe
  •   Sociological – identified roles and relationships for tribal order
  •   Pedagogical – passed down behaviors and attitudes necessary to keep chaos at bay and ensure cooperation among tribal members
 The study of mythology enabled Homer in 800BCE to capture the human sense of the Trojan war and excite his audiences with the travels of Odysseus. Myth aided the Egyptians in creating an advanced civilization by 1100BCE and guided the peoples of the fertile crescent and Caucuses even earlier. Myths exist for every civilization on earth, from the far East of China to Europe, from northern seas to the Atlantic coastlines, from Mongolia east across the land bridge to the American land mass.

The earliest myths exist only in stories passed down by developing cultures. Oral stories were repeated from one generation to the next, better remembered and told through beat and song, repeating key phrases to build tribal memory. Language passed first from hand to tongue around the fire, then scripted and printed for the masses

In the days of oral traditions, stories were organic, living and expanding with the retellings. From one storyteller to another, words were chosen to fit the place, shaped to fit the time and teller. By the time the monks of Ireland penned the illuminated manuscripts, stories had settled into pockets of faith formed through doctrine and belief words were vastly different from those a century before. Kings and priests owned the myths that governed men’s souls and hearts. Tribal myths were relegated to trivial truths such as folk tales and children’s stories. In this world, heroes could grow from nobility alone.

In the modern world we find our heroes in the man-next-door or the soccer mom. In a highly secular world with diverse religions and sacred places the importance of myth dies away with the advent of the heroes-next-door, the common man. The idea of a monomyth emerged as scholars tried to understand the true nature of the heroic myth.

In eighteenth century, novels heroes were being fashioned out of common folk like Goodman Brown and Hester Prynne, whereas classical heroes were being lost to popular culture. Could true heroes exist in the modern world? Scholars in the 19th century began to work on the theory that all myths held the same internal story, a monomyth. In 1949 Joseph Campbell, wrote The Hero With a Thousand Faces adding to the growing body of work on the monomyth. Today his work is lauded as the essential reference for studying the hero’s journey.