Fairy tale 10 - New Myths for Old

One area of the forest has long been reserved for ancient myths.  Each day a different myth is played out, mainly for the benefit of the lost souls who have been overcome by a profound sense of the discordant nature of things.

On this particular day the myth being played out concerned the all-seeing power of the gods; or, more accurately, the limits to that power.

It is generally assumed that the gods can see everything in the material realm – the Christian god sees all, Yahweh sees all, Allah sees all, and so on.  The Greek gods, on the other hand, and the Hindu gods, and the Norse gods and the Quecha gods and the like, they are all rather less omnipresent.  Some of these gods have, to be sure, a broad perspective and can see entire continents and goodly portions of your soul; but many others are more narrowly focused on – say - individual trees, or particular and single emotional states.  In these mythologies, there are plenty of ways you can hide from a god.

So the myth mix on this particular day was complex, particularly given the importance of broad audience appeal.  For some lost souls, the story is doubly blasphemous: on the one hand, it implies that any and all religious belief is no more than a commitment to a particular narrative account of the nature of the human condition; and, on the other, even if god is real, the idea that a god might not know what is going on is tantamount to a rejection of the Supreme Being’s perfection.  For others, acknowledging the possibility of a unified Supreme Being – or even just being sympathetic to those that have an earnest and genuine belief in such a being – runs the risk of undermining the credibility of anything else that might be being said.

Those responsible for this part of the forest are well aware of these kinds of concerns and have had much practice in updating fundamental mythologies so as both to counter emerging concerns and to retain the relevance of myths to successive generations of peoples that consider themselves ‘modern’.  (It has to be remembered, of course, that everyone who has ever lived considers themselves – accurately – to be a member of the most advanced culture ever to have existed.)

One of the biggest challenges faced by the myth managers of late has been the idea that myths themselves are redundant.  This is a view that has put forward by many in the thrall of ‘science’.  Such folk assert that science is a new and fundamentally different mechanism for understanding the world around us.  From such a perspective, the true nature of reality is being progressively exposed by science and its methods.  It’s a sort of open-cast mining, in which the Enlightenment digger of scientific truth progressively scrapes away the layers of nonsense in which reality has long been covered, nonsense that has taken the form not of clay or soil but of stories and myths.   Humanity is emerging from the comforting fairy tales of its childhood and, armed with the precision of science and its copy of Roger Penrose, is entering adulthood.

In this part of the forest, this perspective prompts a wry and gentle smile.  Here, we are well aware that each and every human depends fundamentally not on physics but on metaphor, on representation.  Only through the medium of representation can anything be present in Mind.  There is no giraffe in your brain, for example, there is merely the representation of a giraffe.  (Is the giraffe in your brain real?) (If so, what about the unicorn?)  (These are the sorts of games that keep the people in this part of the forest endlessly entertained.)   So – they extol – no matter the authority and precision of science and mathematics, since they can only take the form of representations in Mind, they are inherently metaphorical, and they can only and must always take the form of stories.  As such, and whilst they are undoubtedly sophisticated and impressive, they are merely an updated form of myth.

Updating the myths is a constant job, of course.  But if you update too often, or too much, then you can lose the plot; or, perhaps, the plot can be lost.  It depends how much transitivity and responsibility you can handle.

The myth managers have, in recent centuries, settled on methods that rely on Characters.  Humans, it seems, struggle to handle purely abstract ideas, so it’s easiest if they can be embodied somehow.  Some Characters (or ‘archetypes’) have turned out to have quite considerable longevity; others last just a few hours.

Today, the Characters are the poet Homer, the Greek God Zeus, the warrior Achilles, Achilles’ best friend Anayonus, the overlord Mark Chuckerberg, the jungle dweller and former warrior princess Jeff Belos, three billion users of the internet, the national security apparatus of each of 195 nation states, Hans Christian Andersen and George Orwell.

It seems that Achilles’ best friend has been kidnapped, and Hans Christian Andersen has been given the responsibility of finding him.

Everyone is under suspicion, and all are paranoid.

Suddenly Hans remembers the story he wrote about a small boy who noticed that the Emperor was, in fact, naked. He clears his throat as if about to speak.

The world falls silent.  All the characters stand still.  Everyone watching empathises with someone else so as to be able to access the meaning of the story.  The forest is still.

Hans calls out: “Who is keeping Anayonus?”

And no-one knows.  Mummy and daddy have gone.