Welcome to the Living Myth Podcast

with Michael Mead, where this changing world is looked at through a mythic perspective.

On this episode, Michael Meade introduces the role of myth in making sense of our complex and

challenging world, and he answers the question, why myth, why now?

This is the first of an extended series of commentaries which we're calling living myth.

And it begins with the question someone asked me,

why myth, why myth now, or how does myth make sense now? And the answer goes back to this classic

attitude you could find in ancient Greece, although it was in other cultures as well. But in Greece they were particularly clear in saying that there are two ways of thinking, two ways of accounting for what happens to the world and what happens to us as individuals in the world.

And the first way of thinking was called Logos,

which is very well known. In the modern Western world, we get logic from Logos, we get

linear thinking from Logos, we get reasoning and rationality from Logos.

And you have the part, the way of looking at the world

through in rational ways.

You have the organization of facts the linear timeline all the things

that are profoundly dominant in the world now people are always saying the fact of the matter is as if

that tells the whole story. And yet the facts never tell the whole story. As a matter of fact,

people argue about the facts on and on forever.

History is always being rewritten as people reorganize the facts, but at the same time people pretend that the facts are going to explain everything

and in a convincing way.

And so we live basically under the rule of Logos, but the ancient Greeks thought that you had to have

another away for accounting for what happens in the world, and that was called Mythos.

And the idea of Mythos is it's the opposite in a sense of Logos.

...