Henrietta Hay's Column

When I was young, the word "mythology" meant Ulysses bound to the mast of his boat as he sailed past the coast of the Sirens, or Zeus hurling thunderbolts. Mythology was simply the collection of stories of the Greeks and Romans trying to understand the universe. Somewhere along the way I learned that mythology is the universal language used by all cultures as they try to understand and explain how they got to be what they are.

Being pretty much of a pragmatist, I have approached the importance of myth with some skepticism, not unlike the agnostic's approach to organized religion. I'm dubious but I don't want to say anything definite just in case somebody might be listening. Besides, all my friends who are science fiction fans spend their leisure time reading the mythology of the future.

Joseph Campbell popularized the whole subject in his books and in his TV series with Bill Moyers. He inspired a little paperback book written by Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox, called Your Mythic Journey: Finding Meaning In Your Life Through Writing and Storytelling. According to the authors, "Once upon a time in the childhood of the race, people told stories, lived within a rich horizon of myth, punctuated their lives with rites of passage, celebrated the changing seasons with rituals, entertained themselves with tales about the antics of gods, goddesses, foxes and crows. But now we have come of age and outgrown such childish superstitions. We have left myth behind and entered the age of enlightenment." Or have we? The authors go on to say that our lives would be much richer if we would reach back and find our own myths, tell our own stories.

Actually, most of us have our own myths. We just don't recognize them as personal mythology. They give meaning to our lives; help explain why we do what we do. I can still hear my father's voice exhorting me to tell the truth, even when it hurts. Especially when it hurts. I suppose his father taught him that way, and I passed it along to my kids. I just never thought of it as myth.

Recently some friends and I have been discussing modern mythology and what it means to us. We've been telling and sometimes writing stories about our childhood. One question that I found especially interesting was the extent to which we were influenced by the part of the country in which we grew up. Several of us grew up in the west, which a New Yorker would define as anyplace west of Albany, but which I think of as anything west of Kansas. Our parents were here because they or their forbears had pulled up and left more settled areas to start new myths. So we tend to be more independent and less tradition-bound than our eastern and southern cousins. Our mythology is more casual. If we go west even further we come to Southern California, where the mythology becomes thoroughly laid-back and just about anything goes. We haven't investigated the mid-Pacific area yet.

To some people the myth is the land. One person remembers the wonderful black earth of Illinois. Others of us find our strength in the mountains we loved as children. Many in this area identify with the desert.

I have become addicted to "Star Trek: the Next Generation." A recent episode had some universal things to say about myth. Worf, the Klingon warrior, had come to a distant planet on which the Klingons and their mortal enemies the Romulans had succeeded in compromising their differences and were living together in harmony. This horrified Worf, who believed that the very essence of being a Klingon was being destroyed. He tried to teach the young men the forgotten art of the hunt. "The hunt is a ritual. It tells us where we came from. Our stories are not being told." In the end he could not abandon his myth and returned to Starship Enterprise. But the people who stayed created their own mythology, one that worked for their society. Myths change.

Probably the stories of our personal myths will not last as long as those of the Greeks, but the myths themselves will define our futures and our children's futures. Maybe our lives would be richer if we had the mything link.