A Short History of Myth (Myths, The) (Paperback)

~ (Author) "Human beings have always been mythmakers..." (more)
Key Phrases: hunting societies, Axial Age, Mother Goddess, Sky God (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This is an pedestrian study from the noted and popular religion scholar, in which Armstrong takes a historical approach to myth, tracing its evolution through a series of periods, from the Paleolithic to the postmyth Great Western Transformation. Each period developed myths reflecting its major concerns: images of hunting and the huntress dominated the myths of the Paleolithic, while the myths of Persephone and Demeter, Isis and Osiris developed in the agricultural Neolithic period. By the Axial Age (200 B.C. through A.D. 1500), myths became internalized, so that they no longer needed to be acted out. Reason, says Armstrong, largely supplanted myth in the Post-Axial Period, which she sees as a source of cultural and spiritual impoverishment; she even appears, simplistically, to attribute genocide to the loss of "the sense of sacredness" myth offers. Armstrong goes on to relate that in the 20th century, a number of writers, such as Eliot, Joyce, Mann and Rushdie, recovered the power of myth for contemporary culture. Although the book offers no new perspectives or information on the history of myth, it does provide a functional survey of mythology's history. But a more engaging choice would be Kenneth Davis's Don't Know Much About Mythology (Reviews, Sept. 5). (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The Washington Post

The most ballyhooed event at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair was the launch of Canongate's "The Myths," retellings of classic myths by 100 internationally renowned writers, including Chinua Achebe, A.S. Byatt and Alexander McCall Smith, among many others. The first three books in the series -- fictions by Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson and an introductory volume by Karen Armstrong -- have recently appeared in 28 languages from 33 publishers (there are five English language editions) in the biggest simultaneous publication ever.

It's difficult not to recast this achievement in pop-culture terms -- Monster Mythology Smackdown! -- and just as difficult not to add one's own mythic subtext, that of David and Goliath. Canongate was established in 1973, a small Edinburgh publisher specializing in Scottish titles such as Escape From Loch Leven and Scottish Love Poems. Still, even in its early years, Canongate showed a taste for the offbeat, publishing the Glaswegian author Alasdair Gray and the first UK edition of Edward Abbey's seminal The Monkey Wrench Gang. But by the early 1990s, the foundering house was in receivership.

Enter Jamie Byng. The youngest son of the Earl of Stafford and the stepson of a former chairman of the BBC, Byng studied literature at Edinburgh University and worked as a publicist at Canongate when he was 24. In 1994, at the ripe old age of 26, he masterminded a buyout of the company. Byng has since transformed Canongate from the publisher of Traditional Scottish Dyes and How To Make Them into a powerhouse, 2003's British Book Awards Publisher of the Year. He's done this through a winning combination of prescience, irreverence and boldness. For instance, in 1998 he started releasing inexpensive paperbacks of the books of the Bible under the series title Pocket Canons, each introduced by a different author: Fay Weldon on Corinthians, Bono on the Psalms, Ruth Rendell on Romans and Will Self on Revelations.

In 2002, Canongate published Michel Faber's bestselling The Crimson Petal and the White; the previous year, Byng bought the British rights to Yann Martel's Life Of Pi. Martel's novel subsequently won the Man Booker Prize, cementing Byng's reputation as a visionary maverick. It also, presumably, lined Canongate's coffers so that Byng could begin publishing "The Myths."

Which brings us to the books themselves. These are novellas rather than full-blown novels, but Jeanette Winterson's contribution in particular feels wispy, despite its title. Weight is a retelling of the myth of Atlas. As Winterson puts it in her introduction, "I have written this personal story in the First Person . . . and this leads to questions of autobiography. Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real."

Unfortunately, Weight doesn't make good on this promise (or threat) of authorial alchemy. Despite narrative shifts from first- and third-person, and among Atlas, Heracles and the author, Weight is a fairly straightforward account of one of the 12 labors of Heracles. Atlas was "born one of the Titans, half man, half god, a giant of a giant race."

Punished by the Olympian gods for rebelling against them, he is sentenced to carry the Kosmos upon his back. Heracles has also fallen afoul of the gods, but through an accident of birth. He is Zeus's son by a mortal woman, and has long suffered the enmity of Zeus's wife, Hera. Hera first maddens Heracles so that he slays his own children, then helps engineer the Labors as atonement for his crime. His penultimate task is to obtain the Golden Apples from the Garden of the Hesperides (Atlas's daughters), guarded by the hundred-headed serpent Ladon. Heracles offers to hold up the Kosmos while Atlas obtains the fruit for him. Atlas very sensibly decides to leave Heracles with the weight, but Heracles tricks Atlas into taking the world back onto his shoulders.

It's a poignant story -- who doesn't sympathize with Atlas, especially when he's contrasted with the bullying, bragging Heracles? -- but despite occasional glints of humor, Weight is a leaden retelling of it. Only in its last pages does Winterson's book finally soar, when she introduces Atlas to Laika, the Russian dog sent into space in 1957. "Atlas had long ago ceased to feel the weight of the world he carried, but he felt the skin and bone of this little dog. Now he was carrying something he wanted to keep, and that changed everything." In this brief, sweet sequence, we glimpse a new myth being born. "I want to tell the story again," Winterson repeats at the end of Weight. Her account of Atlas and Laika made me wish she would.

Margaret Atwood's distaff take on The Odyssey -- The Penelopiad -- is more successful, if not terribly surprising. A feminist perspective on Homer from Margaret Atwood? We're shocked. Penelope has for eons been the poster girl for feminine fidelity. Intelligent, yes, but also rather dull, and slightly maddening by 21st-century standards -- she waited how long? For him? While he was sleeping with them? Atwood doesn't exactly give her a makeover, but she gives her a voice, at once plaintive and wise, as well as a long view: Penelope narrates her tale from the "gloomy halls of Hades."

"Well, yes, it is dark, but there are advantages -- for instance, if you see someone you'd rather not speak to you can always pretend you haven't recognised them."

The events dovetail with those in The Odyssey; the narrative shifts are in emphasis more than execution. So we get Penelope's curt commentary on her beautiful cousin Helen, as well as her clear-eyed assessment of marriage:

"Marriages were for having children, and children were not toys and pets. Children were vehicles for passing things along. These things could be kingdoms, rich wedding gifts, stories, grudges, blood feuds. . . . To have a child was to set loose a force in the world."

We also see Penelope's grief, well-salted with guilt, for the 12 serving maidens who were slain upon her husband's return home. In The Odyssey, the maids are hanged by Telemachus, son of Odysseus and Penelope, for the crime of sleeping with the suitors who had taken up residence in Odysseus's halls. Atwood makes them a loopily postmodern Greek chorus, with mixed results. Penelope's story is strong stuff: Introducing chapters with titles such as "The Chorus Line: Kiddie Mourn, A Lament by the Maids" gives these sections the air of a failed Monty Python sketch.

Finally, Karen Armstrong provides A Short History of Myth, an introductory volume to Canongate's series. Armstrong is the bestselling author of A History of God, Islam: A Short History and Buddha, among other titles. Her essay here is serviceable. She relies heavily on the usual suspects -- Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Walter Burkert -- and has a lamentable tendency to make sweeping pronouncements that sound trite: "In the pre-modern world, mythology was indispensable. . . . It was an early form of psychology." "People were becoming disillusioned with the old mythical vision that had nourished their ancestors." "The Neanderthal graves show that when these early people became conscious of their mortality, they created some sort of counter-narrative that enabled them to come to terms with it."

Perhaps in future volumes Canongate could give equal time to scholars such as Jack Zipes and Marina Warner, and historians like Italy's Carlo Ginzburg or South Africa's David Lewis-Williams, whose work has more provocatively explored the boundaries and evolution of myths and storytelling.

Still, these first three books are a tantalizing start to an ambitious project, with intriguing works to come: Israeli author David Grossman's version of Samson, the Russian Victor Pelevin's Theseus and the American Donna Tartt's take on Daedalus and Icarus. All mythology is a work-in-progress. New myths are being born right now, and old ones reinvented, in decaying buildings, on laptop computers, in hushed rooms around the globe. Canongate is to be applauded for serving as midwife to some of them.

Reviewed by Elizabeth Hand
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Canongate U.S. (October 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 184195800X
• ISBN-13: 978-1841958002
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 4.9 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #6,904 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

82 of 85 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Compelling, October 30, 2005

By	Edward Tsai (New York, NY United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: A Short History of Myth (Myths, The) (Hardcover)

This book is not an introduction to the mythology ... there are many other books for that. Rather, it is an essay on what role myths (and ultimately religion and spirituality) play in human life and why they remain important. Myths provide a means to connect our finite lives, bonded by our inescapably mortal condition and the fear that inevitably accompanies the knowledge of our ultimate fate, with the infinite beyond us, a connection that we feel in moments of transcendence where we literally lose our individual selves and communion with something greater than ourselves ... be that God, the universe, our antecedents or heroic examples. Myth in short gives our lives meaning and significance in an otherwise frightening and indifferent world. Myths are not to be taken literally, because to do so would take the sacred out of the realm of the sacred and make it profane. Myths inhabit the world of the sacred because they are meant to exist beyond the world of profane explanation.

What Armstrong does very well is to explain how advances in the material and economic condition of human civilization throughout history and prehistory interacted with this basic human need to transcend his immediate condition to create various epochs of myth. She goes beyond myth to explain the competitors to myth, be it ritual without mythology (i.e., Confucianism) or logos (i.e., Greek rationalism) and how they had their roots in myth and why they are linked still. Her explanations are lucid and her prose is clear. For such a short book, she packs a lot of information in and, more importantly, compelling ideas.

The only shortcoming I felt was the last chapter on Armstrong's view of the future in the West, which seems to rely too heavily on literature. When was the last time your average joe picked up Joyce's Ulysses for spiritual sustenence? I would have liked to see something more about the reemergence of Islamic and Christian fundamentalism and even something about Falun Gong in China. These are all important developments which tie directly into what Armstrong's essay discusses. But this is a very very minor complaint. The book otherwise is a compelling guidebook both to our spiritual past and to the inner maps of the human soul. I think it will serve well as a reference for those anxious about the future.

32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Myth-ing in Action, January 22, 2006

By	mrliteral - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

This review is from: A Short History of Myth (Myths, The) (Hardcover)

Karen Armstrong, an adept writer about religious history, takes a bit of a breather with this short book on the role of myth in society. Not that this book is missing her typically astute writing, just that it's brief, almost more of an extended essay than an in-depth look at the subject.

Armstrong follows the development of myth from prehistoric times to the present. Myth, as she describes it, is a fundamental part of human development, and similar stories can be found from culture to culture. The use of myth is a way for people to connect with the unseen forces of the universe. In the earliest days (the era of the hunter-gatherers), everything seemed to be imbued with this supernatural force: rocks, animals and the sky. With the development of agriculture and civilization, new myths developed and eventually, there would be a rebellion against myth.

In fact the concluding portion of the book revisits the ideas Armstrong presented in greater detail in The Battle for God. Namely, when there is a conflict between myth and reason, a backlash will occur (taking the form of what we would consider fundamentalism).

As with other books of Armstrong's that I have read, this is written with a sophisticated audience in mind and will not be an easy read for everyone. In addition, the more religiously orthodox may be offended by some of her writing, which treats the stories of the monotheistic faiths as mythical as the tales of Zeus or Odin. But with these caveats in mind, this is a good, insightful book that will provide perspective on the role that myth has played in human development.

39 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Drives home her themes, November 16, 2005

By	David E. Levine (Peekskill , NY USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: A Short History of Myth (Myths, The) (Hardcover)

In reading other works by Karen Armstrong, a recurrent theme is the dichotomy between mythos and logos. Mythos implies myth and wonderment. Logos, on the other hand, seeks to make sense of reality through scientific and historic reason. In "A History of God," Armstrong, by examining the development of the three major Western religions, shows the progression from mythos to logos. In that book, it was unclear to me whether Ms. Armstrong, a former nun, believes that this progression is ultimately a good or a bad development. However, here, in "A Short History of Myth," it is clear that Ms. Armstrong decries the disappearance of mythos.

Throughout the ages, myth has developed appropriate to the society of that time, whether it be early hunting societies, later agricultural societies, urban societies or modern society. The early mythology was understood to be mythology. Mythology is a way to get at the truth. I had the opportunity to speak briefly to Ms. Armstrong at a booksigning when I purchased this book. I told her that I believe in God but, I do not view God anthropomorphically. I related to her that God is unimaginable to me but that I nonetheless pray to anthropomorphic mythological images of God because I cannot pray to an abstraction. Ms. Armstrong (to my great pride and delight)heartily endorsed my viewpoint. The tragedy today is that so many people have no appreciation for myth. They either do not believe in any sort of divinity and only accept what can be proven logically, historically, and scientifically or they take an opposite view which also denies myth. This opposite view is that everything in the Bible actually happened and can be proven through reason; that everything is scientifically and historically true and not a myth. A religion that states that you must accept certain doctrines as historically true and accurate or you will not be saved is an example of this type of denial of myth. The view is that the doctrine is historically true and verifiable and that to think otherwise is a sin.

Ms. Armstrong notes that mythology was never meant to be historically and scientifically accurate. Rather, in combination with logos, it is a legitimate way to understand the world around us. Ms. Armstrong notes that in the arts, there are secular myths that have arisen. Nonetheless, she believes that spititual mythology is healthy and necessary. She states, "We must disabuse ourselves of the ninetheenth century fallacy that myth is false or that it represents an inferior mode of thought." She states that we "need myths that will help us identify with all our fellow human beings, not simply those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe." I highly recommend this book as a fine, succinct history of the development of mythology throughout the ages and as a cogent defense of importance that myth holds in a healthy society.