Reviewing Karen Armstrong’s 2006 book, A Short History of Myth, I’m reminded of the mistake it was for religions to take the more fundamentalist turn toward trying to literalize mythos away from its most productive avenues.
I am admittedly rather enamored with Karen Armstrong’s approach to mythology and religion.
While some people have become acquainted with her through her work as a memoir writing, I’ve known her primarily as an independent researcher and religion scholar, which, in part, should explain why this book has some occasional detractors.
It’s neither a memoir nor a heavy tome filled with extensive citations and engagement with “the scholarship.” Instead, it’s a very cursory presentation of myth and its position throughout human history. Armstrong traces myth through six time periods, simplifying and generalizing each epoch to state her case for myth’s centrality in how humans flourish.
“Mythology was therefore designed to help us cope with the problematic human predicament,” she writes. We are to understand myth as “an event which, in some sense, had happened once, but which also happen[s] all the time.” While containing historical elements, myths are a framework for understanding the challenges we face, rather than serve as scientific or rationalistic explanations for the world. In what…
