Mythic Hybridity in Fantasy
- Thread starter RangerWickett
- Start date
pensiv
Explorer
Joseph Campbell's job and method was to look at the old myths and their relevance to our own world, but his lesson was that we all make our own myths and that each society gives birth to its own myths anew.
The old myths are blueprints of the human condition and, in general, the human condition does not change. What changes is technology; and technology and science are forming in themselves new myths in our own age.
The nature of myth is that a people living in a myth are not aware of it's mythic nature. People believing in such things as The Big Bang and Evolution are living according to myths just as much as they who are Creationists. Just because we call something "Science" does not take away it's mythic nature.
Myths are our way of cataloging ourselves and our relationship to the world around us. Fantasy novels don't borrow from mythology any more than any other fiction or non-fiction. It is all storytelling. Myths are stories.
What separates Fantasy/SciFi writing from other forms of literature is a departure from what we know as our world. This departure is only an illusion though, for we have only our own experiences to draw upon when crafting stories, so no matter what the names of characters or gods, or how alien a situation seems to be, we are still living in our own myths and crafting stories from them.
There needs to be no special effort to creating myths for our time, for every storyteller does it. Every communicating person does it, for myths are our own story.
"Dreams are private Myths and Myths, public Dreams." - C.G. Jung
The old myths are blueprints of the human condition and, in general, the human condition does not change. What changes is technology; and technology and science are forming in themselves new myths in our own age.
The nature of myth is that a people living in a myth are not aware of it's mythic nature. People believing in such things as The Big Bang and Evolution are living according to myths just as much as they who are Creationists. Just because we call something "Science" does not take away it's mythic nature.
Myths are our way of cataloging ourselves and our relationship to the world around us. Fantasy novels don't borrow from mythology any more than any other fiction or non-fiction. It is all storytelling. Myths are stories.
What separates Fantasy/SciFi writing from other forms of literature is a departure from what we know as our world. This departure is only an illusion though, for we have only our own experiences to draw upon when crafting stories, so no matter what the names of characters or gods, or how alien a situation seems to be, we are still living in our own myths and crafting stories from them.
There needs to be no special effort to creating myths for our time, for every storyteller does it. Every communicating person does it, for myths are our own story.
"Dreams are private Myths and Myths, public Dreams." - C.G. Jung
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tsadkiel
Legend
American fantasy settings
I run an off and on campaign set in Oz. One of the reasons why I chose the setting is that Baum wrote the Oz books, in part, as a deliberate attempt to create a uniquely American fairy tale world. And he succeeded - Oz is a fantastic mirror of early 20th century America.
I'd realy like to see a fantastic America roleplaying setting, though, with Paul Bunyan, El Dorado, the island of California, displaced Irish fae looking for work, wealthy Trow philanthropists, Chinese dragons working on the railroads (or perhaps Chinese dragons as the railroads), African spirits haunting the deep South . . . Maybe when Nyambe comes out I'll try to cook up a setting - I've got Deadlands d20 and OA already.
I run an off and on campaign set in Oz. One of the reasons why I chose the setting is that Baum wrote the Oz books, in part, as a deliberate attempt to create a uniquely American fairy tale world. And he succeeded - Oz is a fantastic mirror of early 20th century America.
I'd realy like to see a fantastic America roleplaying setting, though, with Paul Bunyan, El Dorado, the island of California, displaced Irish fae looking for work, wealthy Trow philanthropists, Chinese dragons working on the railroads (or perhaps Chinese dragons as the railroads), African spirits haunting the deep South . . . Maybe when Nyambe comes out I'll try to cook up a setting - I've got Deadlands d20 and OA already.
RangerWickett said:
I am not altogether sure that the "core belief" is really so clear and solid as we sometimes think.
When we read mythology these days, we read scholorly distillations, and genre expansions on those distillations. When writing on myth, most authors tend to go back to the same small list of such distillations. That leads to a false sense of unity - that all Greeks used the same enduring version of the Labors of Hercules. We tend to think of a particular mythology as a single set of static stories. Which, when you pasue to consider, is silly.
Look for a second at our own contemporary mythology. With all our travel, and the great unifying forces of technology, and how many different Elvis myths are there? Elvis is a saint, Elvis was captured by space aliens, Elvis is alive and well and working at a Denny's in Hoboken... If we don't have one, simple story, we should not expect it of other peoples.
Joshua Dyal said:
These roots runs much deeper. The evolution of myth is a gradual process with many threads reaching out and intertwining in every possible way. Myth has always been hybrid. I don't think that there is anything new about this phenonmenon.
You can go back to trace things through mesopotamia, sumeria, egypt, greek, roman, and judaic myth. They all share the same stories in different permutations. Many of the gods are evolutions and permutations of gods from other pantheons. Consider also the silk road and the arrival of concepts of Jesus and the Buddha in the world.
Things twist and turn and stories get retold over and over again until they seem to take on new lives of their own. Literature, which is deeply entwined with myth, is perhaps an easier way to trace these ties since it is done more explicitly. Trace elements like the story of Prometheus, through Dr. Frankenstein, through our staple wizard who seeks godhood (ala Raistlin). It's all the same story with permutations. The garden of eden, the great flood, these are archetypal stories that still exist in fantasy literature today - Scarred Lands for example. Here's another - he who is cast from society striking out in jealousy and anger: Cain > Satan > Grendel > Dracula.
Myth is organic and ecclectic by nature. When it becomes codified too strongly it becomes inflexible and loses touch with those who would follow it.
These are wonderful, thought provoking posts, all.
I am one of those DMs who takes myths very seriously--usually coming up with my own, but always aware that there is nothing new under the sun. I am usually trying to explore some theme or contradiction (a relic of structuralist upbringing: I tend to think of myths as efforts to deal with inherent contradictions in various cultural assumptions, a la Claude Levi-Strauss). My current campaign mythology is an attempt to explore the tension between the community and the individual, between selflessness and selfishness. I use an elf-style race (physically slight, mystically powerful, connected to the world and each other) as the source of one tradition, and dragons as the source of the other. All game world cultures derive from this basic distinction. Some cultures celebrate the hero (and tend to "worship" dragons), while others vaue some form of collective activity (and rely on a set of writings produced by the ancients). Within each goup there are tensions and disagreements. The current local plot is, not surprisingly, a religious war.
All that said, I know that that is not the only, or even the best, way to run a campaign. Quite honestly, many people have different needs from their world--they may simply want a diverse palette for backgrounds, in wich case the world-that-is-impossibly-diverse serves a useful artistic function (namely, enabling a diversity of character concepts). Forgotten Realms, as a public setting, strives to be many things for many different gamers. Even within a smaller group of actual gamers, backgrounds and levels of understanding may differ, and so suggest that an inclusive mythos would be the best way to establish a game world.
Another way to look at things would be to notice how much of modern culture is self-consciously a pastiche (from The Waste Land on down to MTV videos) of disparate elements. We moderns think of ourselves as the inheritors of all of world history, and take it as our burden to assemble coherence out of this chaos. So those of us who mix and match myths, characters, and themes are simply modeling the type of artistic/intellectual activity with which we are already famliar.
I hope your all-nighter was productive, Ranger Wickett. Keep up the good posts.
I am one of those DMs who takes myths very seriously--usually coming up with my own, but always aware that there is nothing new under the sun. I am usually trying to explore some theme or contradiction (a relic of structuralist upbringing: I tend to think of myths as efforts to deal with inherent contradictions in various cultural assumptions, a la Claude Levi-Strauss). My current campaign mythology is an attempt to explore the tension between the community and the individual, between selflessness and selfishness. I use an elf-style race (physically slight, mystically powerful, connected to the world and each other) as the source of one tradition, and dragons as the source of the other. All game world cultures derive from this basic distinction. Some cultures celebrate the hero (and tend to "worship" dragons), while others vaue some form of collective activity (and rely on a set of writings produced by the ancients). Within each goup there are tensions and disagreements. The current local plot is, not surprisingly, a religious war.
All that said, I know that that is not the only, or even the best, way to run a campaign. Quite honestly, many people have different needs from their world--they may simply want a diverse palette for backgrounds, in wich case the world-that-is-impossibly-diverse serves a useful artistic function (namely, enabling a diversity of character concepts). Forgotten Realms, as a public setting, strives to be many things for many different gamers. Even within a smaller group of actual gamers, backgrounds and levels of understanding may differ, and so suggest that an inclusive mythos would be the best way to establish a game world.
Another way to look at things would be to notice how much of modern culture is self-consciously a pastiche (from The Waste Land on down to MTV videos) of disparate elements. We moderns think of ourselves as the inheritors of all of world history, and take it as our burden to assemble coherence out of this chaos. So those of us who mix and match myths, characters, and themes are simply modeling the type of artistic/intellectual activity with which we are already famliar.
I hope your all-nighter was productive, Ranger Wickett. Keep up the good posts.
Desdichado
Hero
No, there's not. However, there are certain periods in history when there was more widespread cultural sharing across broad regions than other times. Many of these mythologies sound familiar because they are based on, or influenced by, a common Indo-European mythology that had these same gods. After seperation for thousands of years, we get the differences that appear between Indra, Perkun, Thorr and Zeus, for instance: all based on the same original. There are even folks who try to triangulate this proto-Indo-European mythology as much as can be done, although I don't know how much value there is in postulating stories about Trito, or the concept of the sky-father Dyeus Pater. This is one kind of broad cultural sharing and illustrates the evolution of mythology from a geneological standpoint.
But near the end of the Roman empire, there was a particularly sharp blending of various cultural mythologies. Not only that, we have a pretty good record of what happened, which also makes it unusual.
AFGNCAAP
First Post
Boy, this is a cool thread.
Well, real-world mythology has had a certain degree of impact on my homebrew campaign deities, but more or less due to conscious choice. I was more or less trying to go for something which fit my campaign world, as well as drew upon familiar threads.
For example, the key idea behind my campaign pantheon is that there are no variant names for the gods, ala Kalamar; this is because the gods are a present force in the world. They grant spells to their clerics, they sent their servants to the mortal plane in certain times, etc. Thus, since the deities do "exist," there is little, if any, room for variance. Thus, unlike many real-world religions, there are very few off-shoots of a religion. If a faith truly strains from the spirit or intent of a deity's dogma, then their priests know it---loss of spellcasting ability, punishments, etc. IN this way, it's not like the real world. Several real-world cultures had the idea of a Sky-Father/Ruling God idea (Zeus, Odin/Thor, Indra, Dadga/Taranis, etc.), & these deities had similar traits, but they were those cultures interpretations of that deity; whereas IMC, the god states "I am the Sky-God!" & there are no differences between cultures about the god's attributes.
When I designed my pantheon, I did a fair amount of research on various real-world mythologies, & tried to look at the similaries. Then, I wound up amalgamating them to 1 degree or another, & I had a deity for my pantheon. For example, my War God is a sort of mix of Ares, Heimdall, Tyr, Nuada, & various other war gods: he lost his right hand (Tyr) but had it replaced with a silver prosthetis (Nuada); his weapon is a magical sword (Nuada; maybe Heimdall), blood red in color (War from the Piers' Anthony books); he also carries a horn (Heimdall).
However, an interesting side-effect of all this is that most of my campaigns deities are actually True Neutral in AL: mainly because they represent several positive & negative aspects of their portfolios: the War God is a god of conflict, whether wild, chaotic battle, orderly tactics, aggresive conquest or active protection. He also is a god of competition---a role he assumes frequently in times of peace. Other examples include the Sky-Father deity who destroys & brings life (the thunderbolt & the fertilizing rains), the Sun/Fire-Goddess who also does the same (bring needed heat & light which can nourish or destroy), the Sea/Water-God who both floods & fertilizes, & the Mother-Earth/Land Goddess who destroys with volcanoes & earthquakes yet provides fertile soil & minerals.
But, I also decided that theism wasn't the only viable religion IMC; I essentially had each divine spellcaster class, as well as monks, serve as the priest for a different religious belief system. Clerics, as well as paladins, serve the gods; Shamans are animists; Druids, as well as rangers worship nature as a sentient force (though not as a deity); Shugenja worship the Great Kami (a sort of deity worship that interprets the 4 most powerful elemental gods as superior spirits); Adepts worship demi-deities, celestials, fiends, local spirits, & the like; Monks, as well as sohei, follow an agnostic religion focused around self-discipline & self-improvement (sort of like Buddhism, IIRC)---out of all of them, they have the most diversity since there phiosophical tenets can vary, unlike the dogma of the deities.
Along the same lines, the king IMC's main nation is somewhat Arthurian---has a magic sword, is a renowned hero, believes in the cause of good, etc. There is a powerful wizard ally to the king, ala Merlin. The king's champion is a warrior of great renown, much like Lancelot (though who lacks that knight's desire for his queen). It's all there, to a degree, though I was aware of it from the get-go.
So real-world mythologies/religions have deifinitely had an impact on my campaign, but I definitely planned that from the get-go.
Well, real-world mythology has had a certain degree of impact on my homebrew campaign deities, but more or less due to conscious choice. I was more or less trying to go for something which fit my campaign world, as well as drew upon familiar threads.
For example, the key idea behind my campaign pantheon is that there are no variant names for the gods, ala Kalamar; this is because the gods are a present force in the world. They grant spells to their clerics, they sent their servants to the mortal plane in certain times, etc. Thus, since the deities do "exist," there is little, if any, room for variance. Thus, unlike many real-world religions, there are very few off-shoots of a religion. If a faith truly strains from the spirit or intent of a deity's dogma, then their priests know it---loss of spellcasting ability, punishments, etc. IN this way, it's not like the real world. Several real-world cultures had the idea of a Sky-Father/Ruling God idea (Zeus, Odin/Thor, Indra, Dadga/Taranis, etc.), & these deities had similar traits, but they were those cultures interpretations of that deity; whereas IMC, the god states "I am the Sky-God!" & there are no differences between cultures about the god's attributes.
When I designed my pantheon, I did a fair amount of research on various real-world mythologies, & tried to look at the similaries. Then, I wound up amalgamating them to 1 degree or another, & I had a deity for my pantheon. For example, my War God is a sort of mix of Ares, Heimdall, Tyr, Nuada, & various other war gods: he lost his right hand (Tyr) but had it replaced with a silver prosthetis (Nuada); his weapon is a magical sword (Nuada; maybe Heimdall), blood red in color (War from the Piers' Anthony books); he also carries a horn (Heimdall).
However, an interesting side-effect of all this is that most of my campaigns deities are actually True Neutral in AL: mainly because they represent several positive & negative aspects of their portfolios: the War God is a god of conflict, whether wild, chaotic battle, orderly tactics, aggresive conquest or active protection. He also is a god of competition---a role he assumes frequently in times of peace. Other examples include the Sky-Father deity who destroys & brings life (the thunderbolt & the fertilizing rains), the Sun/Fire-Goddess who also does the same (bring needed heat & light which can nourish or destroy), the Sea/Water-God who both floods & fertilizes, & the Mother-Earth/Land Goddess who destroys with volcanoes & earthquakes yet provides fertile soil & minerals.
But, I also decided that theism wasn't the only viable religion IMC; I essentially had each divine spellcaster class, as well as monks, serve as the priest for a different religious belief system. Clerics, as well as paladins, serve the gods; Shamans are animists; Druids, as well as rangers worship nature as a sentient force (though not as a deity); Shugenja worship the Great Kami (a sort of deity worship that interprets the 4 most powerful elemental gods as superior spirits); Adepts worship demi-deities, celestials, fiends, local spirits, & the like; Monks, as well as sohei, follow an agnostic religion focused around self-discipline & self-improvement (sort of like Buddhism, IIRC)---out of all of them, they have the most diversity since there phiosophical tenets can vary, unlike the dogma of the deities.
Along the same lines, the king IMC's main nation is somewhat Arthurian---has a magic sword, is a renowned hero, believes in the cause of good, etc. There is a powerful wizard ally to the king, ala Merlin. The king's champion is a warrior of great renown, much like Lancelot (though who lacks that knight's desire for his queen). It's all there, to a degree, though I was aware of it from the get-go.
So real-world mythologies/religions have deifinitely had an impact on my campaign, but I definitely planned that from the get-go.
RangerWickett
Legend
Well, I made my presentation today, and I think I did a fair job. I'm at work now, and I'll be going to a LONG game afterward, but tomorrow morning I'll post my notes that I used as an outline on my presentation. Basically, I was just trying to engender thought on the topic of what myths are used for in fiction, and why. It also really helps that I've been getting a lot of extra research done for my Modern Myths section of Mythic Earth (a d20 book I'm working on).
I'll post more later, but I need to handle customers. I think I'll ponder how I use myths in my own game. I think I'm a bit more 20th-century psychoanalytic now than I was a few years ago. Mind Flayers tend to do that to me.
I'll post more later, but I need to handle customers. I think I'll ponder how I use myths in my own game. I think I'm a bit more 20th-century psychoanalytic now than I was a few years ago. Mind Flayers tend to do that to me.
Eosin the Red
First Post
RW - Thanks for a well crafted and thought provoking thread.
The Thread is full of long, intelligent posts and has so many possible sub-threads that could be taken and ran with.
Mythology and the lore of the hero has always intrested me. Many of the previous posts get to the heart of the matter, from a retrospective POV. The nature of our myths will not change much in the future tellings. The dressing of the story may change, but the Tale remains the same. The Matrix, SW, Babylon5, and a list of modern lit to long to address here are perfect examples of this.
I stepped away from divinity in my home game and brought in a little sci-fi. The basics are an alien race fleeing the destruction of their life and worlds crossed a great stellar void in search of the proginator. The journey took several thousands of years, allowing divergent myths about the proginator to develop.
At the end of the void was a planet inhabited by humans - barely more than cave men. One cult of "aliens" and their servants remained, believing that this was the promised paradice. They have become the flawed gods of my game. Another opposing cult has returned to the planet and makes an opposing but non-violent pantheon. Additionally, a few outsiders that are very similar to the two divine aliens have brought messages claiming to be from the proginatior. Finally, the great threat that destroyed the previous worlds of the gods has found them and is coming.
All of that creates a "core" to my games. I can make myths of nearly any nature. The most terrifing are the myths of the gods themselves. There is an elvish analog - the gods became nearly immortal but also infrertile during the long voyage across the void. They have breed with the humans to create a hybrid race.
One of the cults is based on a western-christian structure, with schisms and sects. The other is more unified but more demanding - it is a amalgamation of some eastern-islamic type of doctrines.
The enemy is the ultimate modern western villain - the Borg. Complete subsuming of individuality. The loss of individuality occurs during infestion with negative energy, instead of mechanization.
This whole thing began with deliberate construction to avoid - the FR delima. I tried to figure out what the moral of the story was, and then pulled elements from that point of view. I think deliberate inclusion and melding is what is seen in some of the better examples listed above. If I had the talent, I would love to see if I could create something as enduring as JRRT's parable of creation in the Sil. Alas, I barely have the talent to effectivly communicate on these boards.
Dang, I don't even know if this was on topic.
The Thread is full of long, intelligent posts and has so many possible sub-threads that could be taken and ran with.
Mythology and the lore of the hero has always intrested me. Many of the previous posts get to the heart of the matter, from a retrospective POV. The nature of our myths will not change much in the future tellings. The dressing of the story may change, but the Tale remains the same. The Matrix, SW, Babylon5, and a list of modern lit to long to address here are perfect examples of this.
I stepped away from divinity in my home game and brought in a little sci-fi. The basics are an alien race fleeing the destruction of their life and worlds crossed a great stellar void in search of the proginator. The journey took several thousands of years, allowing divergent myths about the proginator to develop.
At the end of the void was a planet inhabited by humans - barely more than cave men. One cult of "aliens" and their servants remained, believing that this was the promised paradice. They have become the flawed gods of my game. Another opposing cult has returned to the planet and makes an opposing but non-violent pantheon. Additionally, a few outsiders that are very similar to the two divine aliens have brought messages claiming to be from the proginatior. Finally, the great threat that destroyed the previous worlds of the gods has found them and is coming.
All of that creates a "core" to my games. I can make myths of nearly any nature. The most terrifing are the myths of the gods themselves. There is an elvish analog - the gods became nearly immortal but also infrertile during the long voyage across the void. They have breed with the humans to create a hybrid race.
One of the cults is based on a western-christian structure, with schisms and sects. The other is more unified but more demanding - it is a amalgamation of some eastern-islamic type of doctrines.
The enemy is the ultimate modern western villain - the Borg. Complete subsuming of individuality. The loss of individuality occurs during infestion with negative energy, instead of mechanization.
This whole thing began with deliberate construction to avoid - the FR delima. I tried to figure out what the moral of the story was, and then pulled elements from that point of view. I think deliberate inclusion and melding is what is seen in some of the better examples listed above. If I had the talent, I would love to see if I could create something as enduring as JRRT's parable of creation in the Sil. Alas, I barely have the talent to effectivly communicate on these boards.
Dang, I don't even know if this was on topic.
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