The Invitation to Myth

We are the stories we tell

Pagans love stories. Storytelling is a thing at events and we’re not only gifted with many talented conveyers of tales, [not to mention the music, and fire spinning and dancers!] but as a community we encourage beginners to perform. Pagan community is a nest for the arts.

I was a beginner once. My much beloved 4th grade teacher insisted that everyone memorize some poetry and recite in front of the class.

Terrifying! My mother helped me choose Walking Through the Woods on a Snowy Evening [link]. She liked it, and it wasn’t too intimidating for length. In hindsight, it wasn’t the memorization part that was hard. When I was 4 or so, my babysitter helped me memorize the 23rd Psalm. Then she got me to recite in front of various people. I was good at it until she wanted me to recite in front of the church Elders.

Those solemn-faced, black-clad people scared the bejeezus out of me. I choked up and got spanked for being uncooperative. Hence the trauma. I got through my 4th-grade assignment and didn’t think of it again for years. Despite my mother reading me poetry as a child [I did like story poems] I wasn’t a fan of poetry. In college that changed. I had an amazing teacher who would read romance poetry aloud and somehow the cadence of it… grabbed me, moved me. Suddenly I felt what was being said. He read them over and over until they started to stick in my brain like glue.

Life went on and I forgot about poetry again. Then, while I was living in California, I heard someone doing professional storytelling. It was better than story records*, better than being read to. The tale of a man riding out a wild storm in the mid-Atlantic and being touched by deity still makes the hair on my forearms stand up. I’d never seen anything like it. It was his story, and he’d shared that enchantment with us as my teacher in college had shared the spell of poetry.

Story is a spell because it is how we organize our brains. The world is filled with unlimited amounts of data. But we are limited beings and must choose how we spend our time and energy. Story is how we organize what matters. A good story is one we want to pass on to our children because it will make them better people too. Stories passed on and on become myths.

This aspect of brain function has been studied extensively by Andrew Newberg, PhD. [link to page on Amazon.] He studied human’s natural capacity to use story as a way to organize our perceptions into future action. Story is not just what we tell at the dinner table - assuming we do that. Story is far more complex.

Story is how we organize the information that comes at us and turn it into a memorable form. It is well-known in marketing that if you just drop facts on people, they won’t remember any of it. But tie it to a story, and you’ll get callbacks. Tie it to a really good story, and you’ll get sales. Data is 22 times more likely to be remembered if it comes with a story, and conversion rates increase by 30%.

Newberg’s later work examined the benefits of spiritual belief and practice. Organized religion is a story that tells us how to behave in our culture. Myths were never intended to describe the physical functioning of the embodied world. They gave cues about how to act around other humans so the chances of our individual survival increased. Myths were not created arbitrarily but passed from generation to generation like a precious heirloom. No one would have bothered to share stories that weren’t useful or didn’t speak to the people hearing them. Stories are the genes of culture, creating maps of how to behave so the structures and institutions we create [which is very hard work] can continue to serve our children.

When Augustine wrote his classic City of God, he claimed Greco-Roman religious thought [we now call it philosophy] for Christianity and declared all the myths that accompanied that thought to be lies. The stories in the Bible were of course, true. The Age of Enlightenment threw all the stories away, including the Biblical ones, and proclaimed humans were capable of anything at all.

This was aspirational, but also wholly inaccurate. Stories that are devoid of religion and religious ideas are shallow and killed millions with the ideas they propagated.

During the Enlightenment, myths were determined to be valueless because they were not literally true. At best, they were deemed fairy stories suitable for children. At worst, they were deemed lies to mislead the ignorant. But throwing out the stories by which we once ran our lives left a hole. Reason, logic, and ‘known facts’ cannot fill that hole. Facts are just… data. Without something to organize that data, they are noise.

Stories - myths - do more than help us organize information. Because words are slippery, they allow us to find meaning, understanding about what happens to us, and to make some peace with a terrifying world. The delicate ambiguity of a tale that describes another’s pain and how they dealt with it can give us the strength to move forward, both giving us the feeling that we are not alone in our suffering and the hope that things might get better.

The greater problem is we can be gamed by stories, and not all stories are created equal. We have naturally occurring biological drives that have been useful for survival at different times during our existence on Earth. Humans have occupied every environment on the planet, and these varying drives served to let our genes reproduce themselves. Some of those drives are… unpleasant. Not all stories will lead us to be the best of who we can be. Some stories hook into the less pleasant of those natural drives and tell us it’s valid to blame others for our problems instead of taking control of our lives. Such stories justify envy, oppression, and helplessness.

The stories from the Old Testament go back thousands of years. But so do the stories of Greece. The pagan Greeks produced the civilization that produced all the classic philosophers that Augustine integrated into Christianity [along with 2000 years of Judaism].

How might pagan religious thought have continued to evolve if it hadn’t been repressed?

I met my husband at Rites of Spring in western Massachusetts. He was in a band and the guitar player was in the process of forming a Heathen Kindred. Ron and I were the first outsiders they invited to one of their group rituals. It was a great honor and we were touched. Later, the guitar player started having parties with all his friends, Heathen or not, where we dressed in garb, and invited to participate in a Skaldic circle. This is when people tell a story, recite poetry, or sing, for the entertainment of the other people present. It’s an old tradition and how else did one stay sane during the long, dark, northern nights? Humans gathered together to stay warm and affirm their connections.

And tell stories. For that first party I recited The Highwayman, by Alfred Noyes [link] from memory. I did a good enough job that such things became expected in later years and I’ve done my best to oblige even if it’s only a couple times a year. If I can re-create that long-ago gift of magic and enchantment I was given when I needed it, and offer it to others, then I’ve served my gods. [I’ve learned to sing too and that also serves.] [And I still get the shakes every time.]

The father of the study of mythology, Joseph Campbell, [His books are easy to find] thought we weren’t creating any new myths.** In the sense that we make up stories to explain things that are NOT myths, he was right. But I think he may have been looking in the wrong places. Fiction, film, and art are filled with stories that have the potential to become myths. But they have to be good stories. Stories that are fragmentary, stories that don’t invite us to reach deeply into the truth of who we are, stories that blame, or twist reality cannot become the myths that guide us into being better people.

Many 20th-century Pagans have embraced stories that have led to a thread of bitterness and resentment in my community that I don’t believe any of the gods would wish for us. They have better stories for us, real myths. Stories that could make 21st-century Paganism a force for the betterment of humanity, in partnership with other religions. [Yes, even Christianity.] I believe it’s our job to find those stories and tell them.

We need stories that lead us forward into what is the best in us.

I believe the gods made us with the capacity to find such stories and to share them so we can move forward in the community of humans. If you can believe this too, then this could be your community. I invite you to sign up for emails. You can choose free, but even small paid amounts tell me that what I’m trying to do here is valid. I’ve been writing new myths and will be sharing them. Without others to read them, I won’t know if they are any good.

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*Story records are vinyl recordings of someone reading or telling a tale. My babysitter had a whole collection of Bible stories, and mom had a collection of Rudyard Kipling and other classics. They were precursors to audiobooks. [To which I am wholly and shamelessly addicted.]

**I’m fudging a bit here because what he actually said was archetypes. But archetypes are not separate from the actions they perform, the stories they act out, and those are myths.

Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. She has direct communication with her gods and they’ve always given her answers when she asks. Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. Be warned.