As many of you may have noticed, I like comics. One of my favorite sites to visit for news and commentary on the world o’ comics is Comics Alliance. One of my favorite commentators there is Chris Sims. I’ve followed Mr. Sims since he ran The Invincible Super-Blog on blogger, through the move to his own domain, a podcast with a name copped from one of my favorite movies, professional work for Cracked and Heavy.com, and finally to his fulltime gig at CA. I appreciate Mr. Sims’s humor, his commitment to all things “fun” and “awesome” in comics. Honestly, his Ask Chris column each week is usually a highlight if only because it often has to do with Batman and/or My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
But.
Because there’s always a but.
A couple weeks ago, Mr. Sims did an Ask Chris about mythology in comics. As many of you have noticed, this is a sweet spot for me as well. I excitedly started reading and couldn’t wait to see where our opinions overlapped, where we agreed, where we differed, where there could be lively debate, and where there would be friendly backslapping at our own cleverness. What I did not expect was to see so much that was just dead wrong.
I was shocked to say the least. And while my audience isn’t remotely as large as Mr. Sims’s nor is there likely a lot of overlap, I can’t help myself but put together some kind of response. The subject matter is too close to my heart, the initial work is simply too lacking in insight about myth and what it was for and how it worked, and still works today. This is part one of that response.
Mythology As Education
Much of Mr. Sims’s analysis rests upon his assertion that the primary role of myth is educational. Mythology was indeed a thing used to teach all throughout the ancient world. The place where Sims takes his first wrong turn is in what precisely they were meant to teach. Sims insists that they were originally a sort of misguided attempt at science class in the ancient world.
Mythology, on the other hand, has its roots in education, rather than just entertainment. It seeks to provide instruction or answer questions about the world around us by personifying concepts into explanations people could relate to. Why does the sun rise and set? Because Apollo rides his chariot across the sky. What holds the sky up? A gigantic dude with some severe back problems. Why do spiders make webs? Because Athena’s a really sore loser.
The above is quoted from the essay in question. But sadly, this just isn’t the case. Even if there was somebody who actually thought that lightning striking you was Zeus getting pissed, they certainly weren’t the dominant mindset or the majority. Mythology’s primary purpose was never to explain how but instead to explain why. To give a meaning to the world outside the window that had absolutely nothing to do with the mechanics of how things worked.
As I’ve said too many times, mythology is the stories a culture tells about itself. Nobody who does any scholarship about myths sees them as serious attempts to explain the natural world except in the broadest, most philosophical sense. They are educational tools meant to tell someone within the culture how to behave within the culture, how to excel in the culture, and what to beware about the culture. In many ways, these myth cycles aren’t even religions in the traditional sense because while mythology certainly teaches virtues, they are virtues too deeply tied into the cultural context. In our modern worldview, we make a stark distinction between our “religious” virtues and our “cultural” ones, even when they are the same, but the ancient world simply wouldn’t conceive of things in that way.
The culture was the religion, the religion was the culture, and what the ancients did for science and philosophy are wrapped up in that as well. This is why their mythological stories are so powerful and carry so much narrative weight. To assume that these stories so full of profound cultural relevance and revelation (and constantly refilled and re-revealed for each new culture that discovers them) are just what the poor simpleton ancient people used as “science” is to miss utterly the point of them. It also makes you a bigot against everybody who lived on this world before you.
Anachronistic Elitism
A lot of people today look back on the ancients as ignorant simpletons just doing their best to get by in a world they couldn’t hope to understand. These people believe that without the aid of modern science, the world was just a swirl of forces beyond control and comprehension, at once frightening and horrible. The only way ancient cultures could deal with this situation was to give it names like Zeus or Thor or Ra or Yahweh, to personify these forces and turn them into something they could understand. This is a very popular way of believing.
It’s also total horse feathers. It’s a dangerous way of thinking that makes everyone who lived before you a lesser person than yourself simply because they lived before you. And where does one draw the line? Roughly 150 years ago it was earnestly believed by every learned man that not only his offspring but all his future progeny resided in his sperm cells. Literal, tiny people, all the future generations of his line, existed within his scrotum. We scoff at this, we might shake our heads sadly at the primitive Victorians and their silly scientific ideas. Except this is also about the time that Bell invented the telephone, Babbage invented the computer, Faraday invented the first electric engine, Darwin published Origin of the Species, and a few dozen other important discoveries besides. Goodness, they sure were idiots then.
Our post-Enlightenment world is really one of the first to suffer from this particular bigotry. We are nearly unique in it. Every other culture before us believed they had a great deal to learn from those who came before, that they might in fact have been more advanced than the current culture. This is why earlier Greek culture was adopted by the Romans when they came into contact with it, it’s why the Renaissance looked backward to the ancients for lost knowledge, it’s why Victorian England became so enamored with the obviously advanced culture of ancient Egypt. Each of them expected to learn from those who came before.
But here we are, the Enlightened ones, who now see the world as it is because of the light of our science. Never mind the fact that we, geniuses though we are, are the facile and infantile know-nothings for our offspring of a couple hundred years from now (let alone four or five thousand years).
If Classical Mythology Were More Boring, It Wouldn’t Have Survived for Thousands of Years
That’s another quote from Mr. Sims, one that I totally agree with. But he maintains that they were the primeval counterpart to Bill Nigh the Science Guy. As though mythology is merely “scientific” explanations jazzed up so the average benighted ancient man would sit still long enough to learn what passed for knowledge in those dark and irrational days.
Except that’s not really why mythology was so exciting then nor why it remains so thousands of years later. It remains exciting because they give us a window into a culture dead and gone. It remains exciting because it was so full of import, so full of the why, that it was ripe for filling with all new whys as each culture asked new questions. It remains exciting exactly because it never had anything to do with how.
And Mr. Sims finally comes around to this by the end of the essay. By the time he’s talking about comics, specifically the Fourth World which is very near and dear to my heart, he’s got a handle on what mythology is, was, and always will be about. I’ve kicked the guy a lot through this so please come for part two where I give credit where it’s due.
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