Pop Culture as Mythology
So, I realised I should probably reassert the actual reasons for this channel. And by channel, I mean everything really. What’s in this channel is also echoed on my blog, in my books, in my life. It’s all together, and all connected. Everything comes down to a singular core basic idea: popular culture narratives are our contemporary mythology. But I thought maybe today I’d take apart this a little more.
In oder to really dissect the idea of popular culture as mythology, we should first think about what we mean by the word myth, or mythology. Like most things in the study of people, the definitions possible for what a myth is is pretty endless. Colloquially, saying something is a myth is more often as a way to say that something is not true. Obviously, I tlak about mythology and fiction simultaneously, so something being thought of as either “real” or “not real” is not really of any kind of consequence for me.
But maybe it would be fitting to start a conversation about mythology with a story. When I was growing up, my mother had a few stories she liked to repeat, in that way that mothers do. A favourite of hers was of two Buddhist monks walking through a forest. At a river crossing, they came across a woman who needed help across. One of the monks picked up the woman and carried her acros the river - even though ouching women was forbidden for these monks. As they continued their walk, the other monk kept thinking about the transgression his companion made, until finally he broke and demanded that his friend explain why he would do such a thing. His friend said “I put the woman on the other side of the river. How long have you been carrying her?”
For some, in order for any story to be considered mythology, they have to have certain narrative elements. These are what are sometimes called “substantialist” definitions - they include aspects of a story like how the narrative must be about gods, for example. But there are a lot of cultures around the world which do not really have gods. These substantialist definitions also require people looking and studying myths to need to decide which elements are considered significant and which aren’t - typically from a standpoint outside the culture they’re studying.
In contrast, some others think of myths as being an explanation for the world - why thunder exists and what it is, for example, or why spiders exist. But what about stories like my mother’s monks? In this story, there are no explanations of how things have come to this world, or why natural cocurences are present.
E.B Tylor was a scholar who understood myth as explanation. The idea was that ancient peoples needed to have some kind of rational explanation for the natural occurrences around them. For us, in today’s world, we have science to explain these things, but before they had science, they needed something else. So they had myths.
This is a bit of a simplistic way to think of both the power of storytelling and the minds of ancient peoples. People have always had the conception of rational thought, even if they lacked some examples or knowledge. This also doesn’t truly provide a good explanation for other types of stories, such as myths focusing on a hero’s exploits, like Hercules, or more ideologically focused narratives like my mother’s Zen stories.
So what is a myth, if it’s not based on what’s inside it, or some notion of truth or explanation? For this, we turn to more functionalist definitions, or definitions that are based on what a myth is doing for those who are speaking it.
For me, for Incidental Mythology, for everything that I do, I understand myth as this: a myth is a meaningful narrative, or something like a narrative, which an individual or a community uses to understand themselves and the world around them.
For my mother, the point of her stories was to help me inherently understand the world and my place within it. I was taught, for example, that it’s worse to hold onto past grievances than to just let them go. These are important instructions that a mother feels is necessary to pass onto her daughter to survive in the world. I needed to be prepared - to know myself and the way the world will treat me. Another very Buddhist saying of my mother’s was “life sucks, and then you die” - another short, pithy saying to understand how the world will treat me when an adult. These are not sacred truths, they’re not set apart from the world. In fact, they’re inherently part of the world, they are the communication of what is entirely everyday basic truths. They explained the simple functioning of the everyday realities I would face, and often based entirely in fiction.
Okay, so we’ve seen how mythology has a complicated relationship with fiction. But I’m sure it’s easy to see how myth can also be fiction when it’s stories are of legendary heroes or Buddhist monks. But what about stories from Middle-Earth, or heroes from Hyrule? For many, it’s one thing to say that fictional stories relating exactly to religious or ideological dimensions is seen as acceptable for mythology, but not stories played out in video games or on our television screens. But to that, I think we have to think about the differences in storytelling between previous times and contemporary times. What is it that makes something like my mother’s Zen monks somehow more magical - or mythic - than, say, Game of Thrones?
Perhaps time is a big factor. Old Zen stories, or the saga of Odysseus, or legends of Thor are all very old narratives. We think of them as having a legacy, a history that reaches far back. This history is what gives them legitimisation as ‘sacred’ narratives - they are important simply because they continue to exist. And there is something important there. Many stories, even contemporary popular culture narratives, have fallen out of popular attention while others have stuck around. The staying power of certain narratives is interesting - what makes them more important or more interesting for audiences than whatever new narrative comes around?
Popular culture encompasses so much of our everyday lives: from what we watch, to what we read, to how we dress, and even what we eat. There can, obviously, be meaning for individuals outside of what is popular or even to retain that meaning when what it is is no longer as popular as it once was. But popular culture is made popular by us, by a culture or society at large, and this is of particular interest to those of us looking for meaningful narratives.
When we look into fan cultures and people who really love their bits of popular culture, we can very easily see people who gravitate to narratives because they matter to them. When we grab hold of a narrative tightly, we do so because we see something within it - we see ourselves within it, or the world we understand or comprehend. I grabbed hold of the Lord of the Rings because I saw my experiences with PTSD in its pages, I understood the experience of feeling like there was no possible way of returning back home for a happily ever after. My worldview, my understanding of my place in the world had radically shifted, and I grabbed hold of the narrative that showed me the world as I understood it to be.
When doing research into the Legend of Zelda games, I encountered a lot of similar sentiments in other people. One person I chatted to had the tattoo of a triforce - an image of three triangles arranged together in a bigger triangle - on their forearm. The triforce is an important symbol in the Zelda franchise. In the game world, it’s an object of great sacred importance, left behind by the three goddesses who created the world. Each triangle represents an important facet of a person: wisdom, power and courage. The in-game myth is that anyone who has a perfect balance of wisdom, power and courage can touch the triforce and get any wish they want granted. If they do not have this balance, the triforce breaks into three separate pieces, each piece spiritually attaching itself to someone who is the embodiment of its human facet. The person who had the tattoo spoke to me about this part of the story, and said that it was always so amazing that each game forced you to play out each element of these. Your primary character had to have a balance of wisdom, power and courage in order to successfully beat the game. They expressed to me how much this meant to them, and said the tattoo was there to help guide them through their life: to approach every decision with an equal balance of wisdom, power, and courage.
Now, this lovely participant would by no means be marking the UK census record with ‘Hylian’ as their religion. They probably don’t see their connection to this narrative as being overly sacred, or a metaphor, or a historic truth. But this narrative is an important guiding light for them, it demonstrates a way to exist and move within the world. It gave them a way to understand themselves. Playing the game was a fun experience, but it also provided them with a more nuanced understanding of the world they live in, and they continued to use the game as a narrative to better understand the world. In other words, for this player, and for myself with the Lord of the Rings, these stories in pop culture are inherently mythic.
There is a typical consideration that consumers of popular culture are somehow passive - that we wade through the world sluggish and blind, picking up whatever corporation places something in our hands. While large corporations can definitely control a lot of what we see in front of us, we have a lot of control over what we take in and what we don’t. Things tend to be popular for a reason - and it’s not always super simple.
De Certeau described audiences as poachers, meaning that we move in the fictional worlds we find ourselves in and take what we we like.[ Ibid.] His work focused more on the practice of reading, but I think it can apply evenly to other forms of popular culture as well. In fact, Henry Jenkins took de Certeau’s conception of poaching and related it to the way fans comb narratives to make them their own.[ Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans & Participatory Culture, Studies in Culture and Communication (Routledge: 1992)]
Fandom was first understood as something to be avoided. Fans were the over-enthused ‘Other’ - those strange fanatics who would love something and spread it to others and become so immensely emotionally attached that it was a psychological problem. We have luckily grown to understand that fandom is something that’s healthy, and that there are many types of fans out there, and fans for all sorts of different things. Fans are those who find solace, in some way or another, in something every day in popular culture.
Cornel Sandvoss, a scholar in the academic study of fandom, defined fandom as ‘the regular, emotionally involved consumption of a given popular narrative or text’.[ Cornel Sandvoss, Fans: The Mirror of Consumption (Polity: 2005)] These fans, therefore, are the clear indicators of how contemporary audiences engage with contemporary stories - with emotional connections and investments which have the potential to directly affect the audience on a deeper level. They are the ones who see the piece of popular culture as mythic.
Through fandom, we see emotional connections forming that influences the formation and alterations of personal identities. Through their connection to popular culture, they grow to understand themselves and also the world around them. My participant with the triforce tattoo is one of these - a fan of Zelda whose emotional attachment to the game is reflected in how they use the narrative to understand how they must move through the world.
For fans like the participant with the Zelda tattoo, it is more than just over-enthusiasm for something that is ‘just a game’. They are not psychological Others who need some kind of help. They are simply people who find solace in a narrative, and this solace allows them to better understand themselves and the social world they find themselves in. The fact that these narratives are more often fictional has no bearing on their ability to function as myths - just as my mother’s Buddhist monks could be fictional. Humans have the ability to separate the idea of mythology and fiction, seeing them as two categories which can overlap without any problem.
If we think about mythology in the sense of old stories, rather than new ones, then we would have to ask an important question: when did myths stop being told? And following that: why did we ever stop?
The answer, as we can see through aspects of life like fandom and popular culture narratives that are inherently important to the people telling them, re-telling them, and engaging with them, is that, quite simply, mythology has never stopped. We never stopped telling meaningful stories. The form they take, however, has shifted a little.
Our popular culture is our mythology, our contemporary narratives of heroes and gods and fantastical worlds. It communicates our world back to us, and we either grab it wholeheartedly or reject it completely. Like my participant with the Zelda tattoo, we mark these narratives on our skin and use them to guide us through life. It teaches us that our individual views of the world are not crazy - we are similar to others, and we can find a new life. Like my mother’s Zen stories, they are fictional but meaningful and so important to pass down to the generations after us.