Scan barcode
dreaming_ace's review against another edition
5.0
A really interesting history of how we as humans have responded to and understood myths. I found it provided me some context for my own searchings and questionings around faith traditions, the role of faith, and how these are bound together with our current cultures' loss of myths and mythic thinking.
bittersweet_symphony's review against another edition
5.0
I am admittedly rather enamored with Karen Armstrong's approach to mythology and religion.
While some people have become acquainted with her through her work as a memoir writing, I've known her primarily as an independent researcher and religion scholar, which, in part, should explain why this book has some occasional detractors.
It's neither a memoir nor a heavy tome filled with extensive citations and engagement with "the scholarship." Instead, it's a very cursory presentation of myth and its position throughout human history. Armstrong traces myth through six time periods, simplifying and generalizing each epoch to state her case for myth's centrality in how humans flourish.
"Mythology was therefore designed to help us cope with the problematic human predicament," she writes. We are to understand myth as "an event which, in some sense, had happened once, but which also happen[s] all the time." While containing historical elements, myths are a framework for understanding the challenges we face, rather than serve as scientific or rationalistic explanations for the world. In what will rub fundamentalists the wrong way, she argues, "Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion."
She argues against the notion that myths are worldviews for pre-scientific or primitive minds (a view resonant with Aristotle and Plato). Myths are more about encouraging us toward practices and rituals that embody our values and beliefs in a way that helps us to better cope with our environments. Myths are intended to empower individuals—as has become popular with Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey"—and bond members of the community together in meaning-making. Myth is well understood as an earlier form of psychology as well as a form of religion, as I see it, that can remain palpable to a more humanist or secular mind in the twenty-first century.
She repeatedly highlights why myth (and adjacently, much of religion) shouldn't be taken literally. Mythos is separate from logos. Logos, in contrast with myth, "must correspond accurately to objective facts. It is the mental activity we use when we want to make things happen in the external world." It seems to follow a certain type of mechanics or techne. It's necessary and enables us to produce a wild variety of worthwhile technologies, but in a world that has idolized logos, we find ourselves alienated from a profound source of wisdom and guidance.
Among those practicing religions today, it's the mystics and less logos-obsessed faiths that receive the highest praise from Armstrong. She embraces uncertainty, reminding us of the destruction that can come from rigid ideologies and taking mythology too literally (i.e. Holy War, the Crusades, social stigmatization, bad epistemology, etc.). She emphasizes how some of the mystical traditions, like Jewish Kabbalists, Sufis, and early Christians, avoid these pitfalls. Citing Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa (225-395), she reminds us that he understood that the "Father, Son, and Spirit [the Trinity] were not objective, ontological facts but simply 'terms that we use' to express the way in which the 'unnameable and unspeakable' divine nature adapts itself to the limitations of our human minds." There's plenty of theology that fumes under the surface of this claim, but I personally find it more tenable than a literal or fundamentalist view of the Christian Godhead.
Armstrong's approach to myth will anger some religious folks while offering an enlightening and hopeful salve to others. Regardless, A Short History of Myth is a reader-friendly overview of a complex, confounding, and potentially nurturing way of viewing the human experience. Many of us have lost interest in myth, or had it taken from us by sterile metaphysicians and rationalistic theists, but if "professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world."
While some people have become acquainted with her through her work as a memoir writing, I've known her primarily as an independent researcher and religion scholar, which, in part, should explain why this book has some occasional detractors.
It's neither a memoir nor a heavy tome filled with extensive citations and engagement with "the scholarship." Instead, it's a very cursory presentation of myth and its position throughout human history. Armstrong traces myth through six time periods, simplifying and generalizing each epoch to state her case for myth's centrality in how humans flourish.
"Mythology was therefore designed to help us cope with the problematic human predicament," she writes. We are to understand myth as "an event which, in some sense, had happened once, but which also happen[s] all the time." While containing historical elements, myths are a framework for understanding the challenges we face, rather than serve as scientific or rationalistic explanations for the world. In what will rub fundamentalists the wrong way, she argues, "Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion."
She argues against the notion that myths are worldviews for pre-scientific or primitive minds (a view resonant with Aristotle and Plato). Myths are more about encouraging us toward practices and rituals that embody our values and beliefs in a way that helps us to better cope with our environments. Myths are intended to empower individuals—as has become popular with Joseph Campbell's "Hero's Journey"—and bond members of the community together in meaning-making. Myth is well understood as an earlier form of psychology as well as a form of religion, as I see it, that can remain palpable to a more humanist or secular mind in the twenty-first century.
She repeatedly highlights why myth (and adjacently, much of religion) shouldn't be taken literally. Mythos is separate from logos. Logos, in contrast with myth, "must correspond accurately to objective facts. It is the mental activity we use when we want to make things happen in the external world." It seems to follow a certain type of mechanics or techne. It's necessary and enables us to produce a wild variety of worthwhile technologies, but in a world that has idolized logos, we find ourselves alienated from a profound source of wisdom and guidance.
Among those practicing religions today, it's the mystics and less logos-obsessed faiths that receive the highest praise from Armstrong. She embraces uncertainty, reminding us of the destruction that can come from rigid ideologies and taking mythology too literally (i.e. Holy War, the Crusades, social stigmatization, bad epistemology, etc.). She emphasizes how some of the mystical traditions, like Jewish Kabbalists, Sufis, and early Christians, avoid these pitfalls. Citing Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa (225-395), she reminds us that he understood that the "Father, Son, and Spirit [the Trinity] were not objective, ontological facts but simply 'terms that we use' to express the way in which the 'unnameable and unspeakable' divine nature adapts itself to the limitations of our human minds." There's plenty of theology that fumes under the surface of this claim, but I personally find it more tenable than a literal or fundamentalist view of the Christian Godhead.
Armstrong's approach to myth will anger some religious folks while offering an enlightening and hopeful salve to others. Regardless, A Short History of Myth is a reader-friendly overview of a complex, confounding, and potentially nurturing way of viewing the human experience. Many of us have lost interest in myth, or had it taken from us by sterile metaphysicians and rationalistic theists, but if "professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world."
kcrouth's review against another edition
4.0
This is a great summary of the history of mythology. I enjoyed the overview, and am looking for some more detailed books to follow with. I especially liked the last chapter "The Great Western Transformation" which discusses the place of myth in our modern society and religious teachings. A favorite quote, related to the modern era in which we live: "It has been writers and artists, rather than religious leaders, who have stepped into the vacuum and attempted to reacquaint us with the mythological wisdom of the past." How true, how true. I really enjoyed this short but information filled volume.
saaraa96's review against another edition
4.0
کتابش داستان اسطوره ها نیست. بیشتر میگه چرا اسطوره وجود داره.
اومده بود دوره های زمانی رو از هم سوا کرده بود(از نئاندرتال ها تا امروزه) و گفته بود چه چیزایی رو اسطوره سازیشون تاثیر داشتن.
خیلی سطحی راجع به خود اسطوره ها میگه.
arthurian's review against another edition
2.0
i know this says a short history but i wish it was more narrow in scope and did not attempt to cover currently existing religions and anything after the early medieval period by opting for focusing on western* (*european and white north american) history of religions because it ended up just glimpsing over so many things and lacking any depth once the chapters covered the paleolithic and the neolithic periods.