Myths are not only stories in books. For most of history they were spoken, sung, danced and acted out, and they still shape how nations, movements and audiences imagine themselves. This last level looks at myth in action, from ancient festivals to modern politics and the movie theater.

Myth and ritual

The Scottish scholar William Robertson Smith argued in his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889) that ritual came first in ancient religion, and that myths were often later explanations of what people already did. A circle of Cambridge scholars, led by the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison in Themis (1912), extended this into the myth-ritual theory: myths began as the spoken part of rites, or as explanations of them. Later scholars found that the theory works for some cases but not as a rule, because many myths have no known ritual, and many rituals have no myth. The anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn concluded in 1942 that the two often grow together without either always coming first.

Some links are clear. In ancient Babylon, the Enuma Elish was recited during the Akitu, the spring New Year festival, when the king's authority was renewed before Marduk. Greek initiates at Eleusis seem to have reenacted something of Demeter's search for Persephone.

The Dreaming

For many Aboriginal Australian peoples, the creative era when ancestral beings traveled across the land, shaping its features and laying down law, is called in English the Dreaming, a term popularized around 1900 by the researchers Baldwin Spencer and Francis Gillen. But the Dreaming is not only a distant past; it is an ongoing reality present in land, law and ceremony. Songlines, sung tracks of the ancestors' journeys, serve as maps and memory. Some knowledge is restricted to initiated people, and respecting that restriction is part of respecting the tradition. At Uluru, climbing the rock was banned in October 2019, out of respect for its Anangu owners, who had long asked visitors not to climb a place sacred to them.

Political myth

Modern societies make myths too. A founding myth tells a nation who it is. In the United States, the story of young George Washington confessing that he cut down a cherry tree was invented by the biographer Mason Locke Weems, who added it to his book in 1806; it taught honesty as a civic virtue. In 1908 the French theorist Georges Sorel argued in Reflections on Violence that workers needed the myth of the general strike: an image that moves people to act, whether or not it is literally true. The danger of such images became plain in the twentieth century. The Nazi regime built its rule on a myth of a superior Aryan race, using Germanic legend and invented history to justify persecution and mass murder. The philosopher Ernst Cassirer, who fled Nazi Germany, warned in The Myth of the State (1946) that modern rulers could manufacture myths on purpose, with catastrophic results.

Myth as common sense

In Mythologies (1957), the French critic Roland Barthes looked at wrestling matches, advertisements and magazine covers. In paraphrase, he argued that modern myth makes things produced by history seem natural and beyond question. A myth in his sense is not a story about gods; it is any message that makes a particular arrangement of power look like the way things simply are. Learning to spot this helps a citizen ask who benefits when something is made to seem natural.

Myths on screen

Ancient myths are also big business. Marvel's Thor and Loki, the Percy Jackson novels and films such as Moana retell old gods for new audiences. Retellings keep traditions alive, but they also raise questions. Some Pacific Islanders welcomed Moana's attention while objecting to its portrayal of Maui as overweight and clownish, and in 2016 Disney withdrew a children's costume of his tattooed body after complaints. When a living people's sacred stories are retold by outsiders, who controls the telling matters.

Worked example: a cherry tree and a master race

Compare Weems's cherry tree with the Nazi myth of the Aryan race. Both were invented, and neither was literally true. Both told a people a flattering story about itself. But the first held up a virtue that anyone can practice: tell the truth even when it costs you. The second divided humanity into higher and lower kinds of people and made some lives seem worthless.

The test that separates them is not whether a myth is factual, since few myths are. It is what the story asks its hearers to believe about other human beings. Myths that affirm the equal worth of every person can bind a people together without turning them against outsiders. Myths that deny it have been used to justify some of the worst crimes in history. Reading myths well, from Babylon to the cinema, is part of reading the world as a free and thoughtful citizen, able to enjoy a story and still ask what it is doing.