I recently attended a lecture on the myth of Hercules, which explained how the myth was indicative of Ancient Grecian conceptions of the “monstrous.” For almost an hour, the speaker struggled, with grand depictions of battles and fascinating cultural insights, to dredge her audience up from their online shopping and games of 2048. Everything changed, however, when the Disney movie “Hercules” was mentioned. Suddenly, the audience could relate—they were engaged, asking questions, contributing thoughts of their own. We often think of “myth” in terms of ancient societies, not the modern secular West. But as this (rather irritating) anecdote demonstrates, myth as a cultural force, as a canon of stories told to children that help define values, still thrives—only, it’s now in the form of movies.
A myth, as most definitions put it, is a story that helps us make sense of the world. This is accurate enough, though it often has the connotation of explaining a material reality—why we hear thunder, how a particular river or peninsula came to be. A great many myths, however, deal with moral, not physical reality—they help us make sense of our values, give us narratives that embody them, and provide us with terms and images with which to describe them. Stories like that of Cupid and Psyche obviously don’t invent the idea of love, but give us a picture of what it could look like when placed in totally alien circumstances, and a symbolic vernacular with which to express it.
The other key aspect of myths is that they are collective, told over and over, changing a bit with each parent putting their child to bed, an elder entertaining a fireside circle, or a poet crafting a story for the masses. The morals change slowly over time, to reflect the attitudes and values of the age in which they are told. A good example of this process of gradual change—called “reception” by anthropologists—can be found in Circe, a mythical enchantress in Homer’s Odyssey. In Greece, she was depicted as a more ambiguous figure, an anti-masculine recluse, who turned men into pigs (seen as a feminine, domestic animal). She transformed into a dangerous sorceress in magic-wary Rome, became a moral metaphor against greed in Christian Late Antiquity, and took on the role of evil Femme Fatale in the hypocritically prudish Victorian era.
Tolkien’s excellent essay “On Fairy-Stories,” describes the creation of these myths using the metaphor of a great soup, to which each age and teller has ingredients to add. “The Pot of Soup,” he writes, “the Cauldron of Story, has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty.” This process creates a story that is greater than the sum of its parts, the distillment of hundreds of years, a deeply human story. You can attempt to break down myths like that of Orpheus and Eurydice, or that of Arthur’s last journey to Avalon, extracting and explaining elements of it, but ultimately, the myth itself is the moral—the story makes you feel emotions and helps you understand humanity, in ways that statements about the story never could.
The role of myth, as one of children’s earliest introduction to social values and the barometer and buttress of culture, has been almost entirely overtaken by children’s movies, most notably that of Disney. The Mouse that Roared: Disney and the End of Innocence is a seminal work of scholarship in the field of film psychology. In it, the authors describe Disney as a “teaching machine” that “wages an aggressive campaign to peddle its political and cultural influence.” They conclude that “media culture has become a substantial, if not the primary, educational force in regulating the meanings, values, and tastes that set the norms.” Myths are no longer collective, no longer personal—reception has become an affair for boardrooms, storyboards, and marketing teams. There’s nothing wrong with a company making movies that appeal to children, which is, after all, itself a form of reception.
It is concerning, however, when those movies are overwhelmingly the only fairy tales children hear. Story-based value transmission, one of the most powerful influences on young children, is totally severed from the family and community, and becomes an unadaptable, impersonal business. Chesterton spoke of the onslaught of media that he feared would pour from the theaters– “a sort of congested heap of stale novelty; of revolt gone cold,” an Eliot-esque wasteland of story fragments and morals detached from the teller, the audience, and the deep history which ought to have accompanied the story.
Initially, in the era of movies like Snow White, which brought an optimistic message of joy in poverty and hard work to the Great Depression period, Disney was practicing a type of reception, adding flavors, albeit overpowering ones, to the Cauldron of Story. Today, however, Disney seems to have lost even that ideological backing, inventing “fairy-tales” like their recent movie “Wish,” a watery story with questionable morals and flaccid bits of mangled tropes drifting through it.
A myth with a proper moral will never be one that is invented to sell toys and tickets—it will be a personal one. Tolkien describes the process by which a myth teller comes to a proper moral; “Let the pictures tell you their own moral. For the moral inherent in them will rise from whatever spiritual roots you have succeeded in striking during the whole course of your life…The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author’s mind.” It is this personal nature that no corporation should ever be expected to replicate; real connection to the story you tell, and the people you tell it to.
Though Disney has recently been lauded for “increasing diversity,” to me, it seems their stories are entirely homogenized, a pale and flavorless broth reflective of the exact same values and ideas that one could find everywhere from TikTok to the university classroom. The characters continue to become more formulaic— “quirky,” “relatable” heroines alongside “supportive,” “emotionally-sensitive” heroes. The aesthetics of Polynesia or South America or Scandinavia don’t change the fact that these stories are American, through and through. If parents actually value diversity and depth of thought that can be discussed in a meaningful way, their answer doesn’t lie with a multi-billion corporation, but with the personal telling of stories that have withstood hundreds, even thousands of years of interpretation.
The simple solution to the corporatization of myth is, of course, to tell stories. No matter how roughly told, a story shared by a parent or community will always be special, forging new connections and opening avenues for discussion. It is one of the unique virtues of myth that they survive poor storytelling quite well—as Lewis explains in his introduction to his anthology of George McDonald: “If you try to take the ‘theme’ of Keats’s Nightingale apart from the very words in which he has embodied it, you find that you are talking about almost nothing. Form and content can there be separated only by a false abstraction. But in a myth—in a story where the mere pattern of events is all that matters—this is not so. Any means of communication whatsoever which succeeds in lodging those events in our imagination has, as we say, ‘done the trick’. After that you can throw the means of communication away.” The old myths are compost, as author Neil Gaiman would say, which help our versions of the story to grow—it is hard to really “fail” at retelling a myth. When we hone our skill as storytellers, we are, to return to the original definition, making sense of the world, of our values, and working to understand them better. This is surely a worthy task.
Of course, these values cannot just be kept to ourselves. Storytelling is an essential part of that informal but vital education that parents and grandparents give to their children. I think a rather lengthy quote from C.S. Lewis’ “On Stories” is worth including in full on this:
If fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by”—and told by, I might add— “adults. They will, of course, put more in and get more out than children can. Then, as a branch of a genuine art, children may hope to get fairy-stories fit for them to read and yet within their measure; as they may hope to get suitable introductions to poetry, history, and the sciences. Though it may be better for them to read some things, especially fairy-stories, that are beyond their measure rather than short of it. Their books”—and movies!—”like their clothes should allow for growth, and their books at any rate should encourage it.”
The loss of myth is unspeakably sad and gravely serious. We have lost one of the most essential human experiences, traded it for an insipid “heap of stale novelties” upon which children can sip bland broth, humming tedious songs and vaguely accepting the values of our consumeristic culture. How dull, to live in a world where unicorns and dragons are flattened out into merchandising opportunities, and where knights and queens and monsters all talk exactly like the influencers you see online—a world where we don’t tell myths.
