Myth, in the modern, colloquial parlance, is an explanation for something that is both monolithic and false.  This is implicit in how the term is deployed, and it is perhaps the inevitable result of how determinedly secular education systems present the entire topic of mythology (and, to a more diplomatic extent, religion, with which mythology is closely entwined).  Myths, in a standard educational setting, are artifacts from the past, bodies of fiction unique to various cultures, entirely definite in their own way, and possessed of little more significance than culturally relevant speculative fiction.  Indeed, it requires significant sleight of phrase to avoid, in this context, deeply offending active religions by catching them up in this definitional dragnet.

Myths, after all, are just the primitive tools unenlightened peoples use to explain the world before the advent of the rigors and supposed objectivity of the scientific method.  Except, of course, that science is prone to its own issues, and the mutability of scientific truth is not so different from that of myth.  The true problem of comparisons between science and myth, though, is that they serve fundamentally different purposes, with science existing to explain the physical reality, and myth existing to explain the human, experiential one.

It is tempting, and often practiced, to sort myths into definite systems with simple definitions.  This is the mindset that gives a modern idea of the Greek Gods, for instance, as squabbling, incestuous superheroes with clearly delimited “powers.”  So thoroughly is this concept presented as the truth of mythology that it wasn’t until reading Herodotus’ Histories that I began to ponder myth as something far more complex than a kind of speculative fiction hard magic system with religious dimensions.  A mythology is not a cohesive cosmology ala a shared fantasy world, whether the Marvel Cinematic Universe or Sanderson’s Cosmere, with all its stories linked together in this context.  Rather, it is a dynamic environment of storytelling with shared patterns and ideas.  A given mythology – the Sumerian, for instance – is like a genre, not the unified works of a single author.  Though similar characters, plots, and ideas may appear, the stories in a mythology, like the books in a genre, have no obligation of mutual consistency.

Definitive, static, consistent mythologies are appealing because they can be captured, reduced, and conveyed as a single telling, fossilized in textual, published form, but myth is not meant to be reduced in such a way.  If you have read even a few of the mythological works we’ve reviewed here on the site, you will hopefully have noticed this.  Myth is a way of interacting with the world via story, and is as dynamic as the people who tell the stories, whether oral, written, or in any other form (no matter what Bringhurst claims).  Stories are not themselves the myth – the myth arises from the conversation between stories set within its ecosystem.

This does not mean that all kinds of stories should be considered mythical.  The Haida storytellers made clear differentiation between myth, history, and anecdote.  Other cultures, including our own, are less explicit in this differentiation, but they nonetheless exist.  Stories become mythical, contributing to the larger, encompassing mythology, when they speak something present and true beyond the strict confines of the tale itself.  Books like the Silmarillion or Gaiman’s Norse Mythology do not capture the living nature of mythology because they attempt to, or are treated as, a single Truth, exclusive of all other versions.  Tolkien understood this, I think, which is why he did not just write events in his mythology – he wrote stories in it.  Perhaps his goal of a new mythology will be more fully realized as more stories are told in Middle Earth when the copyright expires, but it will require those stories to better grasp the nature of myth than, I suspect, many of those who will play in Tolkien’s sandbox will.

In a strange way, the speculative fiction author tends to build dozens of fragments of mythologies, each story comprising its own would-be mythological world when we are at our best, ready to be fleshed out by a thousand more stories.  Yet, at a larger, human scale, perhaps, we are contributing tales to the modern mythological emanation.  I don’t know what the modern mythology is, and putting it into a few words or paraphrases will be the job of future generations, who will fossilize the stories we collectively tell into paraphrases as “true” versions.  It is surely a wild, chaotic edifice we build, made of stories.  Those storytellers who grasp something of the larger picture, who can find the words to express those deeper ideas, perhaps they are those who would be called mythtellers.