Why Read Myths?
By Cindy Zeng ‘27
Most of our favorite myths explain where something comes from. We can grill steak because Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gifted it to humanity; in turn, an eagle rips out his liver every morning. We have wars and famine and sailing (horror of horrors) because, to punish us for having fire, the gods created a woman called Pandora and gave her a box. We get earthquakes because Loki did an oopsie (premeditated murder) and, as punishment, the gods chained him up and dripped venom in his eyes. His thrashing about splits open the earth.
Thinking about these stories, we might wonder—aside from why the gods like to offload all their problems onto humanity— why we think of these explanations, and not others, as myths. Why do we not think of the Big Bang, the formation of the moon, or string theory as myths when they too attempt to explain the world around us? Our scientifically rigorous explanations often feel more sterile and a lot less enchanting than their mythic counterparts, as the universe contained in a corpus of myths is not the physical, scientific world but a spiritual world that reflects human desires, human fears, human prejudices, and human ideals.
Christopher Nolan’s most recent movie, The Odyssey (2026), for example, adapts and refocuses the story of Odysseus around one pillar: the violation of Xenia. It is what Nolan calls “Zeus’ Law” in the movie—the law of reciprocal hospitality where the host is obligated to protect and provide for the guest, and the guest respects the host. When Odysseus breaches the walls of Troy in the Trojan Horse disguised as a divine offering, he topples the first domino in the collapse of the Bronze Age. By doing so, he becomes a member of the violent, seafaring people that foretell catastrophe. When taken in the context of Nolan’s previous film, Oppenheimer (2023), we have in front of us two films that contemplate the annihilation of civilization from two different angles: one ancient, fantastic, and mythical, the other modern, scientific, and historical. The verdict that Nolan lands on in both The Odyssey and Oppenheimer is that apocalypse comes when we lose sight of what we owe each other. In the former, Nolan chooses a myth, the myth of Odysseus, to emphatically make his point.
Just as myths can reinforce our understanding of the world, they can also fail and thus reveal how far we have digressed from our origins. Consider, for example, the idea of a national myth, specifically King Arthur and the Round Table, meant to illustrate the romanticized ideal of chivalry. During World War I, Britain invoked Arthurian chivalry to frame their attacks against the Ottomans as a war against barbarism. A writer and a paid government propagandist during WWI, John Masefield described Britain’s failed efforts to take Gallipoli in 1916 as “glory forever… deeds of heroic unhelped men” against the “invariably filthy” Ottoman trenches. However, anyone trying to match the horrifying cruelty of WWI, trench warfare, and mass slaughter to the Arthurian ideal that the British government championed would find the comparison steeped in irony. Chivalry has become incongruent with the world order. When our national myths fail us, we are forced to confront exactly who we have become. Tear away the entertaining candy wrapper of Zeus’ nonstop cheating on Hera and Thor’s dressing up like a woman to steal his hammer back, and we may see that myths grant us the vocabulary to describe ourselves and our world in relation to the past.
If you have made it to the end of this article, I would encourage you to do this one thing: reread your favorite myth you read as a child, then make it your own by telling it to your friends, imagining a campfire in the long, cold, endless winter nights of the Norse or the sun crinkling on marble next to the Aegean Sea. We tell myths to preserve the world
Source: Wikipedia