In my first week on campus as a freshman, my friends and I walked past a conveyor belt in the dining hall, and I, in a moment of great fascination exclaimed, “It is crazy that things move!” Unsurprisingly, my friends chuckled at this much belated discovery of mine, and yet, I am still captivated by the idea of movement – physical and spiritual.
A story consists of motion. Motion towards, motion away, but motion, nonetheless. While this claim seems rudimentary, it has fascinated me for some time now. Why are we, as a species, so fascinated with motion? This question is partially answered in Algernon Blackwood’s essay, “Psychology of Places.” Here, Blackwood establishes the concept of the liminal zone: a space between two spaces which forces an individual to move into one or the other. This space requests and requires motion, but more importantly, it requests and requires change. A story requires a liminal zone, much like it requires motion. A story with no motion is no story; it is a description (although this distinction is not always clear… is history a description or a story? Is it myth?)
We are fascinated with motion because we are fascinated with change, and for a species so obsessed with change, we do not seem to do it very often. We are asking the same questions our ancestors asked; we are challenging the same biases that our ancestors challenged, and we are committing the same crimes that our ancestors committed. The only difference is our environment. Maybe this is why motion and change fascinates us; it feels impossible yet unavoidable.
What, then, is myth? If myth is a story, it must have some form of motion. Moreover, if we are willing to categorize various different stories as myth, they must have some unifying movement. This movement, I argue, is the movement of humanity towards Divine power. Notably, when I say, “Divine power,” I do not exclusively refer to a Judeo-Christian God. Rather, I refer to a tradition that attempts to imagine the unimaginable and explain the unexplainable. What can we constitute as Divine Power? Well, to return to our conversation on movement, Thomas Aquinas claims that the Divine is the “Prime Mover.” God, therefore, is the ultimate cause, creator, and ruler. With this in mind, it may be argued that mythology depicts humanity partaking in Divine Creation or Divine Rule. This holds true when one examines classical mythological stories, as they portray mortals who attempt to become the arbiters of justice, creators of worlds, and usurpers of the gods.
I find that I am most intrigued by the act of Creation. Humanity partakes in creation every day of our existence. Whether this be procreation, artistic creation, or building communal bonds, we are constantly creating. These acts, I argue, are mythological in nature. Each time we create something anew we are realizing our Divine ability. In saying this, we create a type of “meta-myth.” Now, both the story and the author/speaker are mythological; both depict movement from human to Divine.
I began this fellowship in an attempt to discover and define the boundaries of myth, and now it seems as if I have only blurred and extended them. But this does not disappoint or deter me. In all actuality, it is better if these boundaries move as our conception of myth does, for this allows for a much more flexible and culturally aware approach to understanding mythology. And so, I will end this with the seemingly obvious, yet possibly complicated revelation that my questioning began with: “It is crazy that things move!”