100 Books Like Myth

This will be one of my more controversial picks – there are plenty of people who disagree with Campbell as a folklorist, a mythographer, and with his depiction of the Hero’s Journey. But, what is important about Campbell is his exploration of why the elements that appear in stories have the impact they do on our psyche, and how they fit together. One may not agree with all of Campbell’s conclusions, but I don’t think there’s a writer out there who won’t benefit from his exploration of the subject. I know I did.

Geoffrey’s History of the Kings is the work that picked Arthur up from the somewhat obscure backwater of Welsh story-telling and launched him onto the European stage, in the process creating a story that had an enormous influence on how the insular past was understood across the rest of the Middle Ages. Geoffrey was writing for the new Norman elite, who welcomed a view of the past which downplayed the Anglo-Saxons and centred instead on their rivals for control of ancient Britain, the Britons. He based his magnificent new work on the Historia Brittonum, a set of Welsh genealogies and various stories, all of which he embroidered from his own fertile imagination to construct a complex vision of insular history no closer to what had really happened than modern works such as Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. 

But by tapping into political and cultural needs in… show more.

This is an early example of mythology being used for a deliberate purpose: in this case, the promotion of Christian chivalric virtue. Full of dreamlike images and allegories, it also had a great influence on early fantasy writing, even if those creating early fantasy tales had never read it. And then, of course, there’s Monty Python.

I first read this book while at university. I re-read it after touring the Langue d’Òc region of France focusing on the folklore surrounding Mary Magdalene. This book advances the hypothesis that the historical Jesus married Mary Magdalene and travelled to the south of France, where their children married into nobility and established what became known as the Merovingian dynasty. This book provided a source of information as well as support, given my subject matter and the two entwining histories: the biblical era of Jesus and the 13th C siege of Montsegur. Its extensive bibliography provided a rich source of research, including academic articles, essays, and books.

A controversial, scholarly attempt at synthesizing and organizing the foundations of world mythologies may seem a strange selection. It’s certainly an enormous task, and Witzel could be wrong, but this sweeping book tantalizes and enriches any open mind with an interest in mankind’s story on Earth: two great separate migrations out of Africa carried differing concepts of the world’s origins. The first made its way around India to Australia. In this story, the world had no origin, it always existed in Dreamtime. Mankind emerged into time and joined all creatures and their landscapes. The second migration into Europe and Asia brought the foundations of Western traditions. The story is more familiar: an all-powerful deity created the world out of chaos or primordial waters, fashioned and breathed life into human beings, and thrust them into a world of constant struggle and conflict. If for some reason that doesn't sound familiar, reread… show more.

This short punchy book is written by ex-policy advisor Alex Evans, following his disillusionment with high power international climate politics. Having worked for the British Government and for the UN Secretary-General in the 2000s, Evans realised that scientific evidence and rational arguments were not enough to change the world for the better. In The Myth Gap, he therefore makes the case to recognise – or else to create – different stories, or myths, which provide the orientation and motivation for different people groups to act out change in their own different worlds. No one story will do the job; we need many.

Wolves may be more prevalent in literature and film than they are in reality. For an ecocritical perspective on canid cameos in American narrative, Robisch examines 200 texts to understand the real and imagined wolves and their places across cultures and what that tells us about humans and nature more broadly.

GdS and HvD have assembled in this book such an overwhelming superflux of fascinating tidbits about ancient history, literature, and myth that reading it you barely notice that every conclusion they come to is completely bonkers and necessarily false.

There really can’t be any connection between ancient civilizations in Polynesia, Mesoamerica, India, and Finland—but the fact that someone dug up stories about whirlpools (!) from each place and located points of convergence among them is amazing! 
I feel like such a killjoy even bringing up my objections (that cloud doesn’t really look like a castle! that Rorschach blot doesn’t really look like your mother!) that I’ll just shut up. Hamlet’s Mill is a great work of science fiction, the most exhaustively detailed what if? you’re likely to find.

This is a short, easy-to-digest book, but what a genius book it is! While the other books are specifically about Greek myths, Armstrong deals with the question of myth across all cultures.

Her definition of a myth is one of the profoundest I have come across, and I regularly quote it: “A myth, it will be recalled, is an event that–in some sense–happened once, but which also happens all the time.” Hence why we can talk about the Oedipus complex and such-like: for they happen all the time. 

Another story we discuss in my mental health and literature class, and easily found in any collection of Dostoevsky, The Dream of the Ridiculous Man recounts one desperate and momentous night in the life of the titular depressive and proto-absurdist. His experience revolves around a faith-restoring dream in which (spoiler alert) the narrator shoots himself, is buried alive, pulled from the grave by a black angel, then flown through outer space to an alternate sun with an alternate earth where the local population is enjoying a shamelessly Edinic existence—that is, until the narrator contaminates them with his ego, causing them all to fall from grace, the description of which provides Dostoevsky the opportunity to recap the whole of human history in roughly three pages. Accurately no less. It’s a bravura performance.