Musings on History and Mythology

So on this website we talk a lot about the role of mythology, mostly in and around pop culture but also in a more general sense. In order to understand how contemporary pop culture is contemporary mythology, it makes sense that we have to understand mythology more generally: the structures of it, the definition of it, and why it matters.

One of the colloquial uses of the word myth is a sense that something is untrue. Someone may ask if something has happened, but then the response will be “oh, that’s just a myth” - meaning it’s not real, not accurate, not true. However, the idea of truth and reality are a lot more complicated than that. We’ve already talked a little about that in terms of other elements of storytelling, like monsters and even mythology more generally. Reality and truth are not always as clear-cut as people like to think it is.

One example of this is in the relationship between history and mythology. Again, we think of mythology, typically colloquially, as things that are not true. On this website, we spend a lot of time thinking about mythology in relation to fiction, which doesn’t help to continue the argument that mythology isn’t necessarily tied to untruth. But we should think, again, about our base definition of mythology.

As is important to remind ourselves every so often, our definition of mythology is as follows: a myth is a narrative, or something akin to a narrative, that a community or an individual uses to understand ourselves and the world around them. This means that truth or untruth isn’t always necessarily tied to what a myth actually is. Truth can be many things - historical accuracy isn’t always one of them.

But then we have this question of what historical accuracy actually means. Things happen, or they don’t happen, but I guess it can also come down to the cliché thought game: if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? If something happens in this world and there is no documentation for it, is it actually history?

Because history isn’t what has actually happened, its what’s recorded as actually happening. And these are not necessarily the same thing. History being recorded by the victors is definitely a very real thing. And these words are often used by a society to better understand themselves in relation to their world. When other histories are presented to us, we strongly want to reject it, to fight against it, because these stories are not necessarily what happened, but what we think of as the basis of us.

History is in itself a type of mythology, a form of storytelling and narratives that are woven around self and communal definitions and understandings. History and mythology are not opposed to one another, but intimately connected. Because, like mythology, history is always not necessarily true, but it can be true in other ways. This makes things really difficult when it comes to the interactions of different cultural or social groups. Different groups of people can have different histories - not because different things happened, but because perspective can completely alter a narrative.