What Is a Myth?
‘Myth’ comes from the Greek word ‘mythos’, which translates as “story’ or ‘word’.“A myth is essentially a guide; it tells us what to do in order to live more richly.”
— Karen Armstrong
“A myth is a narrative which discloses a sacred world.”
— Lawrence J. Hatab
“Myths give us (at the first meeting) as much delight and (on prolonged acquaintance) as much wisdom and strength as the works of the greatest poets. It goes beyond the expression of things we have already felt. It gets under our skin and shocks us more fully awake than we are for most of our lives.”
— C.S. Lewis
“The key to understanding the effect myth has on us lies in the word beyond: myth pushed our ancestors beyond their everyday lives to a different reality, a higher plane of existence, the land of the gods. From there, they could look back on their own lives with a perspective that challenged them to rise above a mere animal existence and fulfill their human potential. We can still find in these myths inspiration to do the same.”
— Randy Hoyt
“Myths are not facts. They are truer than facts...”
“A mythology is a system of affect-symbols, signs evoking and directing psychic energies. It is more like an affective art work than a scientific proposition.”
“A whole mythology is an organization of symbolic images and narratives, metaphorical of the possibilities of human experience and the fulfillment of a given culture at a given time...these images must point past themselves to that ultimate truth which must be told: that life does not have any one absolutely fixed meaning.
If we give mystery an exact meaning we diminish the experience of its real depth. But when a poet carries the mind into a context of meanings and then pitches it past those, one knows that marvelous rapture that comes from going past all categories of definition. Here we sense the function of metaphor that allows us to make a journey we could not otherwise make, past all categories of definition.”
— Joseph Campbell