Of men and myths

As long as I can remember I have been interested in myths. I recall vividly finding a copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology when I was in grade school, and just staring at the image of the cover of a man riding a winged horse (Bellerophon on Pegasus, I would soon learn) it was the first time I had that glorious feeling the best books engender: this thing held secrets, it held wisdom and all I had to do was crack it open.

When I was a kid, I was interested in the world the ancients created, the myths were fascinating stories filled with interesting characters and I wanted to know all of them in the same way a different, probably more popular, child wanted to collect all the Pokémon. There was Zeus, who was married five times, once to his aunt, once to his older sister. He even ate one. There was Hephaestus, the crippled smith god, hideously ugly but married to the goddess of love. There was Atalanta, the happy huntress, duped into marriage by the wily Hippomenes. I wanted to know them all, not just Greek and Roman but Egyptian and Norse figures too. They had names like Osiris and Freya, Apollo and Demeter and they lived in places like Olympus, Aaru and Valhalla.

I was obsessed with the bureaucracy and machinations of Hades' underworld with its multiple tiers and its fascinating and terrifying judges. In contrast to the Catholicism I was learning in school with its unambiguous promises of rewards for good behavior (and certainly punishment for bad), myths were more complicated, less clear. There was always a cost, every wish had a price, every gift had a catch. Gods could not be counted on to do the right thing, heroes were either killed or lived long enough to become decrepit and evil. It was Hercules who murdered his wife and children (albeit under the influence of a god), Thor's arrogance led to the end of the world and even my favorite Bellerophon was crippled and embittered after falling from Pegasus attempting to fly to Mt. Olympus. There were no purely good people in myths nor purely bad. There is never a happily ever after. The figures were perplexing and fickle and didn't conform to an internal logic. They felt real.

Of course, this was the oversimplification of a child. Christian theology is incredibly complicated and rewarding but I wasn't yet ready to dig beyond the facile Sunday School version. Besides, I was drawn to the ingeniously devious trade-offs myths presented. When Zeus was to marry Hera, he announced a global contest for the finest gift, the winner would have a wish granted of their choosing. Creatures and beings the world over presented all kinds of spectacular inventions and creations but it was Melissa, the humble honey bee, that won the prize with her delicious offering of sweet honey. When asked what she wanted she begged the king of the gods to give her a weapon to defend herself against the predators who upset her work. Offended that she would use her one chance for divine largesse on such violence Zeus scolded her. "I will give you your weapon, alright," he boomed. "But using it will kill you." And, of course, a bee's barbed sting rips out its guts when it's deployed, making good on Zeus' promise. And who could forget Oedipus, who so badly wanted only to learn his future—an understandable human desire—who discovered it was his fate to marry his mother and kill his father, so he left his kingdom and made his way to another where he, because he was secretly orphaned, unwittingly married his mother and killed his father. I spent many a night twisting in bed thinking about how if he never had learned of his future, he would never have caused it.

My fascination followed me to college where I started my studies as a Classics major. I abandoned that tract because I discovered there was something I was even more fascinated by: making money after college. Still, my love of those stories easily evolved with my new-found love of the meaning of language and philosophy. Homer refers to the sky as "bronze" and the sea as "wine-dark," which confused linguists for decades. Perhaps ancient Greek retinas hadn't evolved to the point that they could see blue. Perhaps 9th century B.C. Ionia had a smog problem akin to mid-90s Los Angeles. The problem is puzzling because colors are so central to our understanding of language, they are often the first set of words we learn when practicing other languages (to this day, roja is one of the precious few Spanish words I know) but the truth is ancient Greeks thought of color in terms of brightness, not shade. So a bronze sky shines bright like a polished shield and a wine-dark sea is rich and full. This isn't uncommon. There are nearly 900 languages spoken in Papau New Guinea and many of them have no words for colors outside of light and dark. Current-day Welsh has no word for brown.

In Miloš Foreman's brilliant Amadeus, there is a scene where Mozart must persuade the king to allow him to set Beaumarchais' The Marriage of Figaro to music. The play is an incendiary indictment of the upper classes and has been banned but Mozart wants to depoliticize the story for comedy. The composer is frustrated that he must always choose the classics for material and is losing his argument among the twits on the court.

"Why must we go on forever writing only about gods and legends," the exasperated genius cries.

"Because they do," says one of the stuffed shirts. "They go on forever."

Of course Mozart wins the day, his Figaro is one of the enduring masterpieces of music and helped break the monopoly of opera seria, a lofty style that focused exclusively on lofty themes while rarely examining them for contemporary meaning. However, the stuffed shirt wasn't wrong. The stories that the earliest civilizations created offer lessons we are still learning today. We like to think we are more sophisticated than the ancients and that post-modernism has put to bed the earnest simplicity of the myths but what are the dominate stories of modern culture—from Harry Potter to Star Wars—if not extensions of the ancient myths? What are superheroes if not our modern gods? How many times can we retell the story of Icarus? Of Orpheus? How much do the lessons of Pandora inform Parasite or Jurassic Park? Myth was designed to help explain the contradictions of the world. Who among us no longer needs that help?

That feeling of potential I felt when I first held Mythology in my hands was underlined by the fact that many of the stories offered a lesson about the limits of knowledge, or of overreaching for facts. Yes, a book holds wisdom and that makes it exciting but it also makes it dangerous. Too many figures of antiquity learned that lesson harshly. It was Prometheus, the titan who turned against his kind to help Zeus overthrow them, who gave man fire. The insurrectionist Zeus knew all too well that a race that feels it is on the same level as its creators poses a threat and was furious that the building blocks of civilization were given to the mortal rabble. He chained Prometheus to a rock to have his regenerative innards eaten by birds every day for eternity. Before you discard this as a dusty old ghost story, a fairy tale, consider that very soon we as a species have a decision to make in regards to artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning. Are we to be Zeuses, hamstringing our creations, or will we be Prometheuses, and imbue them with the consciousness to compete with (or overcome) us?

There is something human about the refusal to accept the lesson of Prometheus, Pandora, Icarus, et al. We never learn because we will always choose learning. We will always open the jar, always visit the next planet, always create the monster. How can we claim to be beyond myth as the Perseverance rover takes pictures of new worlds to explore? I mentioned Jurassic Park earlier, is there a better summing up of the message of most myths than Ian Malcolm's line of "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should?" We are a species that will always choose can over should. "Facts are to the mind what food is to the body," said Edmund Burke. We have to feed the mind, even if some of the food makes us choke. The mythmakers understood this. They knew it was in our natures to push, to overreach, to wonder. It's not a mistake that the first man in Norse mythology is named Ask.