Tags
books, Buddhism, culture, Fairy Tales, fantasy, fiction, God, Homer, Life, Myth, mythology, National Geographic Magazine, poetry, Reading, religion, spirituality, The Odyssey, Walt Disney, writing, Zen
Walt Disney built a multi-million then multi-billion dollar empire crafting clever cartoons of fairy tales. Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty And The Beast, Alladin, all suffused with the dreamlike magic of poetry and myth. All timelessly introduced as ‘Once upon a time….’
Today Disney is hemorrhaging money due to failed ‘remakes’ and ‘reinterpretations’ of those timeless tales by very smart people.
Yesterday I read this National Geographic story headline:
“‘The Odyssey’ is fiction. But its monsters and magic may have been based on real science.”
No doubt given the stature of National Geographic Magazine and its ability to attract first class talent that article was written by extremely well-educated ‘experts.’
But that doesn’t make it any less doubly wrong.
First, a big one, is that the Odyssey is NOT fiction. Perhaps it is to smart people who have had their capacity for wonder and awe snuffed out by a relentless lifelong educational pursuit of facts and knowledge. But in reality it is myth, and myth is communication on a deeper vitally experiential level of being these smart people can no longer even imagine exists.
As an aside the empty meaninglessness these smart people often feel, attend therapy and fly to India to visit their fashionable guru for is precisely a result of the absence of a functioning myth in their lives.
And secondly, that “… its monsters and magic may have been based on real science.”
Really?
Confounding poetry, magic and mythology with real science gives us a glaring glimpse into the workings of these smart people’s minds, and is nothing short of idiotic. Next they’ll be giving us the ‘real science’ behind the Tooth Fairy and Little Red Riding Hood.
Science is a powerful tool for understanding the material world. But only the material world.
There is a vast vitally dynamic Living world that we are one with and that science is utterly incapable of comprehending in its wholeness and unity. It is the world of the generational Flow of Life, of reproduction, germination, birth, growth, maturity and age… and yes, death.
Here we are in the realm of poetry and mythology and it is the domain of the Shaman-Type.
And as the world is gradually realizing…
Mess with the myth at your own peril!
Omphalos Cafe 
I see fairytales, myths as truth. The real fairytales prepare us for the troubled world we are in. I do need to read the Odyssey with a good translation.
These days you may actually be able to get funding if your research project were titled “Myth And Legend And It’s Effects On Climate Change.” This post finds me in the middle of another re-read of an old favourite, W Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge. I am rambling within my cage again Jeff, what would science say of a grasshopper mind? Because drifting in as is normal is a vision of Odysseus’s encounter with the flesh-eating Laestrygonians, mirroring Leopold Bloom simply finding a place to eat lunch.