Realms of Myth

Last Week, Story Euphoria contemplated one of the greatest powers of story: the power to illuminate truth. Truth is different from fact. Truth is understood on a more intuitive level than the cerebral cortex can make sense of, and it resists definition by language. Truth is why humanity has the arts at all and why we started telling stories—in a struggle to understand, and to chart the strange roads we all must travel through life and into death. Stories are the signposts of the spirit. And from the first moment a cold, bright-eyed hominid painted the first antelope stampeding on a cave wall, we have been driven to tell stories.

The oldest stories we know of, preserved in tribal memory or graven in clay tablets, are myths—stories of symbol and the world of the unseen. And one of the oldest of these is what remains of an ancient Sumerian myth about the great goddess, Inanna, Queen of Heaven, who heard a call and went on a journey into the underworld, the place from which no traveler returns, the land of the dead. Her sister, Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, commanded that, as Inanna passed through each gate into the Great Below, she be stripped one by one of her items of power (which can be interpreted each as a me, or tablet of knowledge of civilization): her crown, the lapis beads from round her neck, her breastplate called “Come, man, come!”, and so on until Inanna entered the throne room completely naked. As the Wolkstein and Kramer translation of the epic continues:

Then Ereshkigal fastened on Inanna the eye of death.
She spoke against her the word of wrath.
She uttered against her the cry of guilt.
She struck her.
Inanna was turned into a corpse,
A piece of rotting meat,
And was hung from a hook on the wall.

Inanna has undergone the most profound transformation we know of on this earth, and she will return from it with powers obtained from Ereshkigal and the underworld. This is a prototypical story of rebirth, of loss and regeneration into something better balanced within the dualities of light and dark: the evolution towards wisdom. This journey echoes time and again throughout mythology and religion the world over.

The renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell theorizes that this journey and return theme is part of the monomyth shared by all cultures, more commonly known as the Hero’s Journey, an element of story which Story Euphoria has visited before. Often heroes embark on these journeys to acquire knowledge of some kind—to help their tribe, or to serve a cause greater than themselves, which is what makes them heroes. Heroes are sacrificed to their greater purpose.

Examples of this cycle are everywhere, and once you are aware of the pattern, you will see it in everything from old fairy tales to modern television shows, but one excellent example can be found in the figure of Odin from Norse mythology. Odin is a journeying hero figure who, like Inanna, possesses powers connected with war and creation, but above all, with knowledge and wisdom. The two ravens who sit on his shoulders and bring him news of the worlds are called Huginn and Muninn, thought and memory, and Odin is responsible for bringing poetry to mankind, which in Norse culture is synonymous with knowledge, history and spiritual power.

Odin’s doings are often motivated from what seems to be an obsession with Ragnarök, the Twilight of the Gods, when their mythic world and almost everything in it is destroyed. Specifically, Odin is obsessed with increasing knowledge and wisdom as his ideal weapons against adversity, as a means of aiding the Gods of Asgard and the Men of Midgard, and he does not balk at painful and gruesome sacrifices to achieve his goals. You can listen to one journey Odin makes as this week’s Story Euphoria podcast presents two myths of Odin—of how he left to seek the Well of Wisdom, and of the sacrifice he made to drink from it.

Whatever subconscious meaning you may find in these myths, one thing is clear: Odin and eventually all the Gods and Giants must travel the archetypal hero’s journey to achieve revelation and an elevated state of being—Ragnarök, after all, is not only the end of what was before but is also the beginning of a better world: the world we live in now. Odin—as a warrior and a wanderer—takes this journey many times in his relentless pursuit of understanding. There is the moment where, in order to possess the knowledge of runic writing, he hung himself from the world tree with his own spear plunged through him, as Odin himself declares in the section of the Hávamál poem called the Rúnatal:

I know that I hung on a windy tree
nine long nights,
wounded with a spear, dedicated to Odin,
myself to myself,
on that tree of which no man knows
from where its roots run.

No bread did they give me nor a drink from a horn,
downwards I peered;
I took up the runes, screaming I took them,
then I fell back from there.

The image of Odin on Yggdrasil has been compared to the image of Christ on the cross, both of which might also be compared to the Buddha sitting under the bodhi tree, where he decided to meditate until he died or found enlightenment. Certainly, on the mythic level, these moments tell of a similar journey: the hero must travel through death, symbolic or actual, and be willingly stripped of all material assumptions and assertions in the ultimate transformation of self from the finite thing who does not know to the cosmic hero who has obtained the answer, to the benefit of the world he left behind.

The Makings of a Timeless Classic

In the short story collection, You’ve Got to Read This, John Irving introduces A Christmas Carol by relating a story from a time he spent living with a circus in northwest India. One afternoon he was having tea in the ringmaster’s tent when he was surprised by an overheard snatch of English dialogue from a nearby TV. He at once recognized the voice as that of Jacob Marley’s Ghost, crying out against Scrooge’s compliment on his business skills: “Business! Mankind was my business.” He wandered over to the television to find a troupe of child acrobats seated on rugs, glued to the TV. He was surprised by their fascination, as he writes, “If the principal point of A Christmas Carol is that Scrooge reforms—that he learns ‘how to keep Christmas well’—these child acrobats had never kept Christmas at all; moreover, they never would keep it. Also, they spoke and understood little English, yet they knew and loved the tale.”

Mistaking Irving’s bemused curiosity for unfamiliarity with the tale, one child attempted to explain who the characters were and what was happening. Irving tried to convey his own understanding when he replied to her, “A Christmas Carol.” But the words didn’t seem to mean anything. Then the ringmaster, also not a man who kept Christmas, explained to him, “The children’s favorite ghost story.”

Indeed, A Christmas Carol is a ghost story. It is also a Christmas story. It is both and it is more than either of these things, or how else to explain the popularity the tale has achieved globally, with translations extant in every language group and countless adaptations to stage, opera, film and television. Dickens’ novella has been credited with popularizing the expression, “Merry Christmas,” and of course gave us, “Bah! Humbug!” When Thomas Carlyle, a Calvinistic thinker of the times, read A Christmas Carol, he was, rather out-of-character, “seized with a perfect convulsion of hospitality,” according to his wife. Indeed, so wide is the influence of this little ghost story that it has never been out of print since it first appeared in 1843.

How to explain it?

It helped that A Christmas Carol appeared in a perfect storm of conditions. Victorian England was undergoing a rejuvenated interest in old Christmas traditions, as well as introducing new traditions like the Christmas Tree, providing fertile soil for this tale to blossom. Furthermore, Dickens was already a popular writer and had a veritable mob of loyal fans who would insure the work was not overlooked. Yet these factors alone would not be enough to catapult the novella into the status it enjoys today as a Timeless Classic. After all, if it was just about Christmas Irving would not have had that charming experience in the circus tent, and none of Dickens works is nearly so ubiquitous, though equally loved by his fans, past and present.

I think it comes down to the fact that this tale is a warning, as Marley tells us in the very first “stave,” which all humans, regardless of culture or era, cannot help but heed. Scrooge’s adventure shows us clearly and believably that the greatest wealth is derived in equal proportion to our capacity for sympathy and generosity, and the cost of not cultivating these gifts is to die unmourned and unloved. Interestingly, Dickens conveys all of this through use of the prototypical hero’s journey.

Joseph Campbell, philosopher and mythologist, popularized the theory that all myths across time and culture share common elements, and in particular he thought hero myths exemplified this “monomyth” tendency. Campbell summarized the cycle of the hero’s journey in his 1949 book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces: “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.”

The infamous Ebenezer Scrooge—a geriatric and antisocial “old sinner”—may seem like a bizarre choice of hero, but the elements of the hero’s journey play out to the letter! If Campbell is correct that all cultures have such stories, then it is no wonder the Hindu children in the circus tent loved the tale as much as Christian children in the West. Like all of the greatest stories, A Christmas Carol speaks to the most basic human fears and desires, and furthermore, it offers hope that even the nastiest members of our species can change.