A Short History of Myth

Karen Armstrong, a scholar of comparative religion, traces the evolution of mythology from the earliest human societies to the present day. She argues that myth is not a primitive or inferior mode of thought but a vital, meaning-making activity essential to human survival, and that the modern West's abandonment of mythical thinking has left a dangerous spiritual vacuum.

Armstrong opens by defining myth. Human beings, she contends, are meaning-seeking creatures who fall into despair without stories that place their lives in a larger setting. Drawing on Neanderthal burial sites containing weapons, tools, and sacrificed animal bones, she identifies five essential characteristics of myth: It is rooted in the experience of death; it is inseparable from ritual; it addresses extremity; it prescribes correct behavior; and it speaks of an invisible, more powerful plane of reality alongside the material world. She introduces the "perennial philosophy," the pre-modern belief that everything visible has a divine counterpart. A myth is true not because it conveys factual information but because it is effective, forcing changes in hearts and minds and compelling people to live more fully. She distinguishes logos (logical, pragmatic reasoning) from mythos (intuitive, narrative thinking), arguing that pre-modern humans understood both were necessary.

Turning to the Palaeolithic period (roughly 20,000 to 8,000 BCE), Armstrong argues that mythology was as essential to early hunters as their weapons. She draws on Indigenous peoples such as Aboriginal Australians, who experience "Dreamtime," a timeless sacred realm of archetypal Ancestors, and the widespread myth of a lost Golden Age. She introduces the shaman, the chief religious practitioner of hunting societies, who through trance could travel to the celestial world. A central tension was that people felt kinship with the animals they hunted and surrounded hunting with elaborate rituals to cope with the guilt of killing. The cave shrines at Lascaux and Altamira served as early temples and likely sites for initiation rites involving symbolic death and rebirth. From the experiences of hunter, shaman, and initiate, Armstrong traces the origin of the hero myth: a figure who leaves the familiar, endures trials, and returns with gifts for the community.

Armstrong then examines how mythology changed with the Neolithic agricultural revolution (roughly 8,000 to 4,000 BCE). Farming became a sacramental activity, with the germination of seeds experienced as divine energy and the earth venerated as a living womb. This sacred energy became personified as the Mother Goddess: Inanna in Sumer, Isis in Egypt, and Demeter in Greece. Neolithic mythology forced confrontation with death: The consorts of the Mother Goddess, such as the storm god Baal and the Egyptian king Osiris, were torn apart and killed before rising again with the crops. Armstrong recounts key myths: The Syrian goddess Anat destroys Mot, the god of death, by treating him like grain; Isis searches for the murdered Osiris; and Inanna descends into the underworld, shedding all defenses and dying before being rescued. In each case, the emphasis falls on the inseparability of life and death. The Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone, connected to the mystery cult at Eleusis near Athens, taught initiates that accepting death's inevitability could strip it of its terror.

With the rise of early civilizations (roughly 4,000 to 800 BCE), city-building brought writing, accelerated change, and increasing separation from nature. Armstrong analyzes the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, in which the god Marduk defeats the primordial sea goddess Tiamat and splits her body to create heaven and earth. Chanted during the New Year festival, the myth reflected the ongoing struggle to maintain order against chaos. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, after his companion Enkidu dies, King Gilgamesh seeks immortality but learns the gods will no longer suspend natural laws for humans. He returns to his city Uruk to find secular immortality in building and writing. The gods were beginning to seem remote, and a spiritual vacuum was emerging.

Armstrong identifies the Axial Age (roughly 800 to 200 BCE), a term coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, as the most enduring spiritual revolution in history. In four regions, sages developed systems that still shape religious life: Confucianism and Taoism in China, Buddhism and Hinduism in India, monotheism in the Middle East, and Greek rationalism. All shared acute awareness of suffering, emphasis on internalized spirituality, and compassion as a central ethic. Confucius promoted ren ("humaneness") and formulated the Golden Rule. The Buddha redefined karma from ritual actions to inner intentions. The Hebrew prophets proclaimed Yahweh as the only god. In Greece, tragedians such as Aeschylus and Euripides subjected ancient myths to critical scrutiny while teaching compassion through katharsis (emotional purification). Plato and Aristotle favored logos yet acknowledged myth's necessity for matters beyond rational discourse.

In the Post-Axial period (roughly 200 BCE to 1500 CE), Armstrong narrows her focus to Western monotheism. St. Paul transformed Jesus into a mythical figure, not pejoratively but to make his death and resurrection a timeless event accessible through baptism. Practitioners of Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, devised new mythologies, including Isaac Luria's 16th-century story of divine mistakes and cosmic disaster, which became a mass movement after the 1492 expulsion from Spain. When Muslim and Jewish philosophers tried to rationalize religion using Aristotelian logic, the effort failed to inspire devotion. By the 11th century, Muslims concluded that philosophy must be wedded to spirituality, and Sufi mysticism became normative Islam; Jews turned from rationalism to Kabbalah in times of crisis. Western Christians, however, rediscovered Greek philosophy just as those traditions retreated from rationalism, seizing on the rationalizing project with lasting enthusiasm.

Armstrong's final chapter argues that the Great Western Transformation (roughly 1500 to 2000) produced an unprecedented rupture with mythical thinking. The Protestant reformers reduced the Eucharist, the Christian communion ritual, from a timeless reenactment to a mere memorial. The printing press turned the Bible into a privately read source of factual information. Nicolaus Copernicus and Isaac Newton revolutionized understanding of the cosmos but made mythical thinking seem primitive. The Enlightenment treated logos as the sole path to truth. Yet Armstrong argues this produced a dangerous void: The Witch Craze, mass hysteria during the First Great Awakening in New England, and the rise of Protestant Fundamentalism all revealed irrationality erupting where myth had been suppressed. Friedrich Nietzsche's 1882 declaration that God was dead reflected the consequence of reducing divinity to a purely rational proposition. The 20th century vindicated these concerns through catastrophe after catastrophe, from the world wars to Auschwitz, the atomic bomb, and the September 11 attacks.

Armstrong concludes that purely rational thought cannot address deep human fears and longings for transcendence. She warns that destructive modern myths lacking the Axial spirit of compassion have fueled violence and genocide. She calls for new myths that foster identification with all human beings and reestablish reverence for the earth. Writers and artists, she argues, have already begun this work: T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Pablo Picasso's Guernica, and novels by James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and Thomas Mann draw on mythological structures to confront modern spiritual emptiness. The novel, she suggests, can replicate myth's function by projecting readers into another world and teaching compassion. If religious leaders can no longer instruct people in mythical wisdom, artists and writers may step into this role.