What is Myth: REFLECTIONS ON MYTH by Christine Downing, Ph.d
- Feb 13
- 4 min read
REFLECTIONS ON MYTH
By Christine Downing, Ph.D.
As a countdown to the 2026 Mythologium Myth Conference, we are exploring the question "What is Myth." Our guest mythologists delve into the nuanced and encompassing ways to define myth from differing cultures and disciplines.
The Mythologium takes place March 13-15 online. You can register here.
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I need to begin with Wendy Doniger’s observation, “it's impossible to define myth, but cowardly not to try.”
So here goes.
Not with a definition – but, instead, with an appreciation.
As it turns out, I am deeply uncomfortable talking about Myth with a capital letter and in the singular, about Myth as an energy, a force. For me this is too evocative of the German Romantic (and later Nazi) glorification of the symbolic, the emotional, the irrational unconscious aspects of our human being-here- deeply appealing in a seemingly disenchanted world but dangerous when dominant.
So what interests me is myths - in the singular and lower case.
Myths as stories, as narratives.
As rooted in our human proclivity to make sense of the world by telling stories.
My emphasis on story means that I have little interest in the archetypes that intrigue many students of myth.
To me these are abstractions from myth – rather than the sources of myth.
What interests me is not The Great Mother -but the stories about Gaia and Cronos, Aphrodite and Aeneas, Demeter and Persephone (to stay within the mythology I know best.)
I celebrate how wonderfully different these mythic mothers are from one another!
What interests me is not The Great Mother -but the stories about Gaia and Cronos, Aphrodite and Aeneas, Demeter and Persephone (to stay within the mythology I know best.)
I celebrate how wonderfully different these mythic mothers are from one another!
So, yes, for me, myths are stories.
Stories about things that matter a lot.
Stories that are felt to be sacred, authoritative.
There is something sacred about telling these stories.
About listening to them.
About retelling them.
They are stories that seem to have always already been there.
There is no first telling.
They are part of an interconnected group of stories, a mythology.
They belong to a particular community.
These are our stories.
We are the people who tell these stories.
Telling and retelling them is what makes us us.
They both shape and express our sense of who we are – our values, our history, our relation to one another and to our surround.
We retell these stories to remind us of who we are.
But each retelling is a new retelling.
These stories are adaptable – they change, subtly, hardly consciously, as our historical circumstances change.
Indeed, one of the most important things about myth is that they have the power to engender new myths, to activate myth-making.
Which gives them the power to provide social continuity and to express or facilitate change,
and to provide direction, depth, and meaning to individuals.
Indeed, one of the most important things about myth is that they have the power to engender new myths, to activate myth-making.
Thus, myths, as I have been speaking of them, originate in an oral culture.
They are told and retold.
But of course, our access to preliterate oral traditions is almost always inferential,
speculative, imaginal.
(I need to make clear here that I am focusing on our access to the myths of no longer extant communities – like the myths of the Greeks of the ancient and classical worlds.).
What is available to us is usually the literary, the written, version of the mythic tradition,
the reworking, reimagining, of the stories on the part of individual authors
Actually, what we have access to are often literary versions in the plural - a variety of versions that reveal omissions, contradictions, radical shifts in emphasis.
This plurality helps to make us aware - this is really important to me - there is no one right, true version.
Nor one right, true interpretation.
For, of course, our interpretations are also stories – stories about stories – invitations for further retellings.
This plurality helps to make us aware - this is really important to me - there is no one right, true version.
And I have to admit how deeply I value the esthetic beauty and power of many of these literary retellings.
Which leads me to ask myself: Do I regard Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus or Euripides Bacchae as myths?
Yes and no.
Mythic, for sure, but not exactly myths
This is all the more the case when I consider Aeneas’s deeply moving but almost wholly original “Orpheus and Eurydice” poem or Ovid’s subtle invention of a story about Narcissus.
Mythic, for sure, but not exactly myths.
I would say something similar about the rituals, the temple sites, the vase paintings and sculptures that are clearly connected to the myths and emerge out of the same symbolic world – and not simply as illustrations or echoes.
They are not myths, but mythic
But WAIT! Did I forget to tell you that I LOVE myths!
Not only the Greek myths to which my mother introduced me when I was very young and that do, indeed, still have a special place in my soul – but Hindu myths, Norse myths, Native American myths, the list could go on and on - myths
Forty-five years ago when I wrote The Goddess I was primarily interested in how engagement with the mythic figures and stories might help me (and other contemporary women) understand ourselves in deeper and more complex ways. I was intrigued by how the myths help us know ourselves and how our lives help us understand the myths.
Now I find myself more interested in how the myths functioned and were understood in the worlds in which they arose.
Now I find myself more interested in how the myths functioned and were understood in the worlds in which they arose.
But, of course, you really can't separate the two. To understand them and their world is to expand my understanding of the human—and, once again, thereby of myself and of us. And it’s stories that make that possible.
Bottom line – myths are stories! Wonderful stories!
Register for 2026 Mythologium to explore of the power of myths.
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