What is a myth?

Among the most common are that myths are stories about gods, myths are sacred stories, myths are stories that explain the way the world is, or myths are simply traditional stories that hand on collective knowledge or experience.

Writers from various disciplines and intellectual movements have interpreted myth in different ways. Myths have been seen as a “disease of language,” as garbled memories of historical events, as a mode of prelogical thought, as expressions of the subconscious mind, as symbolic descriptions of the natural world or symbolic statements about the social order, and as the spoken part of ritual.

Geraldine Pinch, Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt (2002)

This is how Geraldine Pinch’s book on Egyptian Mythology starts, and this is the first reflection I want to bring to you, as I’m collecting a pool of organized feedback from sensitivity readers on my novel and I wait to undergo what I hope will be the final round of editing. A while ago, we went through some of the Seven Basic Plots from Chrisopher Booker’s acclaimed book on storytelling and tropes: we talked about Monster vs Temptation, about the Dark Power, Overcoming the Monster, The Rebel, and the Descent to the Underworld. There might still be a couple of interesting things to expand upon, in connection to the story I’m writing, but I believe we have exhausted much of the interesting points.

This is why I’m turning to the tropes we can find in myths.

Whatever myths are, whether they’re just stories or attempts at explaining (super)natural phenomena, I always like to take a look at them and find a way to use them in support of my alternate history. Whenever myths are connected to the underworld, darkness, life and blood, death or the stars, I try and find a way to tie them together and explain them in the light of what I’m writing. It’s surprisingly easy, sometimes, and I suspect this is why pseudo-science has such an easy life in justifying all sorts of bullshit connected with ancient mythology. Let us be clear: mine is simply a narrative effort, and shouldn’t be taken too seriously. You can take me seriously when I talk about the necessity of rebelling against an unjust establishment, or how much family can suck.

G.S. Kirk, in his fundamental text Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures published in 1970 by the Cambridge University Press, proposes three main categories of myths:

1. a myth that tells a story, basically told for entertainment purposes, that can be a variation of the same myth that gets used in rites and ceremonies, only amended of the more secret elements and enriched by the same stuff we put in stories nowadays: action, romance, humour;
2. operative, iterative or validatory myths: these are defined as stories that are believed to have the power to transform the real world and were usually repeated regularly during ceremonies, rituals and formal occasions. The counterpart to these myths are charter myths, equally ritual but thought necessary in order to maintain the status quo.
3. explanatory or speculative myths, etiological in nature and meant to explain the origin of an object or an animal, the nature of a specific natural feature or, in stories such as creation myths, how the world came to be.

Just as stories are often considered to be pertaining just to the first category, myths are often relegated to the third category and dismissed as superstitions. In fact, all it would need is a closer look at those stories to understand that there is so much more than “primitive people” believing the sun was created by a giant scarab.

Some myths seem to acknowledge that these questions may be unanswerable but provide strategies for coping with the sorrows and contradictions of human life.

Geraldine Pinch, Egyptian Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Goddesses, and Traditions of Ancient Egypt (2002)

In taking a closer look at some myths and stories, I hope we will be allowed a deeper reflection on how we tell stories and what is the purpose of the stories we tell. I for one really hope to be telling something akin to an iterative myth, and that people will be encouraged to see modern charter myths when they see one.