Class 2: Building a New Myth
Module 0: Introduction
By John Beckett
transcript by K.D. Echols
Our mainstream society has a problem with myths. Tell a story of our ancestors, particularly one of their stories about their Gods, and somebody is sure to come along and say, “That’s just a myth!” What they mean is, “That’s just some made-up story that only means what you want it to mean.” Or, they will try to be helpful and they’ll say something like, “You know, there’s a bit of truth in every myth!” as though the only value in a myth is whatever bit of fossilized data that we can extract from it.
The worst case I’ve ever seen of this was a few years ago. I overheard a conversation where some guy said, “I don’t read fiction. Fiction is a lie.” The guy he was talking to looked at him kind of funny, and he said, “It says right there these things happened. Those things never happened! That’s a lie and lies are of the Devil.” You know, there are times when I’m tempted to interject myself into other people’s conversations. This is one of those times when I was glad I didn’t have to, because I don’t know how to un-teach all of the things that guy needs to unlearn.
A quote that I’ve seen attributed from everybody from C. S. Lewis to Marcus Aurelius says, “Myths are stories about things that never were, but always are.” Myths are stories that teach timeless truths. Or, as I like to say, “A myth is a story to live by.”
We all have stories that we live by. The problem is that we don’t always know where they came from and sometimes they aren’t always helpful. Some of our myths are stories that we were told when we were very young and we just believe them because that’s what we do when we are two or three or four years old. We never thought to question them and wonder if a better myth might serve us better.
Some myths we get from advertisers who are telling us stories to try to get us to buy something. Or from politicians who are trying to scare us into voting for them. Some of our myths come from religions, including religions that we left a long time ago. Even though we no longer attend the services of certain religions, their myths may be deep inside of us, and we are still living our lives according to those stories, even though we walked away from that religion a long time ago.
A meme I see going around every now and then says, “You’re the author of your life. If you don’t like the way things are, change the story.” Now, on one hand, that’s a very powerful truth. On the other hand, it’s very hard to do. Even if we convince ourselves that our old myths aren’t true, if we don’t replace them with something better those old myths are going to come right back into our lives and fill that empty spot where they were.
It took me a long time to figure this out. It took me a long time to do it. I had to go back to the very beginning and build a new myth, to build a new story to live by, grounded in science, and nature, and the beliefs and practices of our ancestors, and my own personal experience. That let me build a new myth, a new story to live by. That’s what this class is all about.
Goals For The Course
So what are we going to do with this course? What are our goals? The first goal is to understand the role of myth in human lives and especially in our religion. To get past that idea that a myth is a made up story, that a myth is just a thing to encode bits of real truth. No, myth is how we learned real truth.
We want to understand the mythical foundations of our contemporary world. What are the main myths of this world and where do they come from? What do they reinforce? What do they lead us to do? What do they tell us about ourselves and about our place in the world.
We want to look at some alternatives, particularly alternatives that are based in science, in animism, and in polytheism.
Then we want to build a new myth, starting at the very beginning. It is not enough to simply demystify our old myths, or to say we don’t believe them, or even to find a way to take them out of our lives. We need to put something in its place. We need those stories to live by. Because if we don’t have a story to live by, we’ll grab one out of popular culture, we’ll grab one off the t.v., we’ll grab one from a politician, and we’ll be living somebody else’s story instead of our own.
What This Course Is NOT
So, let’s talk about what this course is not, because when you talk about mythology, there is always the chance that people are going to get the wrong idea.
This course is not literary studies. We’re not going to go back and look at some of the classic myths of our ancestors, the Greeks and the Romans and the Celts and the Norse and all of those folks. There is great value in doing that. That is not this class.
It’s not a class in storytelling. We’re going to build a story, but we’re not building a story to tell around a campfire. We’re building a story to live by.
It’s not a course on writing. Again, we’re trying to build a story to live by.
This is about building a new narrative for the way you see the world and your place in it. Hopefully, there won’t be anybody expecting to be a junior-level English course or anything of the like. There’s value in that. That’s not what we’re doing.
Who Should Participate?
Who should participate? Anyone who wants to take an in-depth look at the stories they live by. You will, by walking through this process, start to…you will be able to do a better job of identifying what your myths are, what your sacred stories are, what are the stories that you live by.
Especially Pagans and polytheists, of course. This class is suitable I think pretty much for anyone, but it is certainly done in the context of the kind of Pagan polytheism that I practice.
Anybody who took Course 1: Paganism in Depth and liked it, you’re probably going to like this. So, when I got the post-class surveys, the responses broke down into three main categories. About 20% said the class was really deeper and more intense than they expected. But 60% said, yeah that was about what they thought it would be. And about 20% said they were really expecting something deeper. That was a challenge as the class ended up being much larger and much broader than I expected. This class is targeted toward that middle 60%. You can’t teach to beginners and intermediates and advanced students all in the same class and do a decent job of talking to all of them. This is targeted toward that middle 60%.
That said, if you consider yourself a beginner, or if you consider yourself more advanced, you are very welcome to take this class. I think beginners can probably do ok in it. If there are things that you don’t understand, by all means ask and I’ll do my best to catch you up. Advanced students may not need it, but then again you may! That’s why we have this Module 0.
Who Should NOT Participate?
Who should not participate? People who are unwilling to examine their own myths. If you are unwilling to go back and look at those stories that you live by, the things you’ve always been told are true even though they may not be, this is not the class for you. You’re not going to get much out of it.
You shouldn’t participate in this class if you’re looking to buy a myth. A lot of people… let me back up. Our mainstream culture has any number of churches, mosques, Buddhist temples, all kinds of religious groups, religious organizations that are happy to give you a fully formed religious worldview. Just come in and sign on.
That’s not what this is. At the end of the course, very few of you are going to end up with a myth that looks exactly like mine. Most of you I think will have something that looks a good bit like mine. Some of you may have something that looks very different. And that’s fine. That’s good. The purpose of this class is for you to learn how to develop your own myths, your own stories to live by, not to adopt what I say is the truth. And there’s people who are looking to buy a myth, who want something that’s already fully formed. That’s not what this is. This is about going back to the beginning and building something from scratch.
Our Patron: Cernunnos
The patron of the first class was Lugh. The patron of this class is Cernunnos. And in a way that’s kind of ironic because Cernunnos has no myths. Or rather, Cernunnos has no ancient myths. Whatever myths that were told about Him in ancient times were not preserved into modernity. But Cernunnos has myths today! He’s the Lord of the Animals. He’s the Lord of the Hunt. He is the nurturer and protector. He’s the God of the Forests, the God of Green Growing Things. These are all twentieth and twenty-first century developments. Myths aren’t necessarily stories rooted in ancient times. Sometimes, myths come out, they’re developed later on.
In that sense, I think Cernunnos is a very good patron. But, in any case, He is a God to whom I am oathed, and my understanding of Him at this point is that He wants to be the patron of this class and so He will be, and we will be honoring Him in all of the modules.
Course Format
Course format: Same as in the first class, Paganism in Depth, there will be weekly video lessons. What do they look like? They look exactly like this.
I say the exact frequency may vary. Last time, I got every one out on Thursday morning, just I had planned. I expect to do that again this time. Should something not go quite right, they may get.. something might get pushed back a day or two, or even a week. But, the plan is for lessons to be released weekly.
They are on demand. Once I put them up, you go do them when you’re ready.
There will be homework. Less reading this time. More practice. One of the feedback points I got was that some of the homework was rather vague, not always as helpful as it could be. I paid attention to that feedback and I have some exercises that I think will be more on point and will do a better job of helping you focus on the material and integrate it into your life.
Homework Reviews
Homework reviews are entirely optional. You don’t have to do the homework. If you do it, you don’t have to turn it in. But if you turn it in, I will look it over and let you know what I think.
There will be no grades. I don’t know how I would grade this, and I’m not going to try.
As I read it, I’m looking to see – do you get the concepts? Do you understand what I’m talking about? Whether you’re taking it into the direction I intended or another direction, or some other direction altogether – do you get the concepts?
I’ll try to offer observations and suggestions. I tend to write a few lines, not a few paragraphs – not detailed analysis, just trying to point out the things that stand out to me. If I think you’re missing something, or if I think you’ve really done a good job of really nailing a point, I want to call that out, too.
What you do with the feedback is up to you. If I say, “I think you misunderstood this.” And you say, “No, I understand it fine!” that’s your call to make. If you say, “No, this is why I said what I did, and this is what I mean, and you misunderstood me,” I’d like to understand that also.
Homework reviews will continue, they will end about a month after the final module goes up. If you haven’t done it by then, you’re probably not going to. You’ve go about a month after the last one to get the last homework in for review.
Seven Modules
There are seven modules. The first is, The Story of Myths. We are going to look at the origins of myths, the purpose of myths, how myth isn’t a substitute for science and it never was a substitute for science. Science and myths do different things.
We are going to talk a little bit about Joseph Campbell. You can’t really talk about myths without covering Campbell. Campbell was really helpful to me in my early days of trying to become a Pagan. That said, there’s some problems with his work. We’re going to cover both the good and the bad of Joseph Campbell.
We’re going to talk about some of the myths we have in our common society, such as the Christian myth, the atheist myth, the modern Pagan myth, and the American myth. That’s probably about as close we are going to get to politics in this course. I try to keep the politics out, but you know, politics is how we express our collective values so if you talk about religion and never talk about politics, you are probably doing something wrong. But, it won’t be much in this class.
Module 2 is, The Role of Science in a Nature Religion. Science is a method, and the knowledge that method reveals. Science isn’t a religion. It isn’t a worldview. Science tells us what and why, but it doesn’t tell us what it means. You’ll occasionally see people say, “Well, we should let the science decide.” No! The science should inform our decisions. We should pay attention to science and the results of science, but ultimately we have to decide what’s best for us and for everybody else that we share this world with.
We’re going talk a little bit about the relationship between science and religion, and how historically that hasn’t been a problem. It’s mainly been a problem with modern fundamentalism, and with New Atheism. But for us, as Pagan polytheists, there’s no conflict! We are going to discuss how bad science makes for bad religion.
So, having understood what the role of science in a nature religion is, we’re going to read from the Book of Nature. (Module 3. Lessons from The Book of Nature) We’re going to talk about the myth of classical physics, and the idea of a clockwork universe that still informs our thinking even though the clockwork universe is terribly oversimplified. The Big Bang, the expansion of space and time, what happened before the Big Bang? These are important things. We literally are going to start at the beginning.
We’re going to talk a little bit about quantum physics. But mainly, we are going to talk about some of the misuses of quantum physics that I see from people in the mundane world and also from a lot of people in the Pagan community.
We’re going to talk about the origins of life and how we’re all related, and how the universe is ultimately not deterministic but probable-listic, and what that means for us and our ideas about magic.
Module 4 is, Lessons From Our Deep Ancestors. If science says we’re all related, what does that mean? What are our roots to our parents, our grandparents, our great-grandparents, our great-great-grandparents? What are our roots with our deep ancestors? What can they tell us about how they lived, and how our connections to nature, to the land, to the earth, have changed dramatically over the last 300 years, and even more so during my lifetime. We’ve lost a connection to nature. But we can’t go back. We can never go back. But, we can rebuild connections with nature, with our fellow creatures, with our fellow humans.
Module 5 is, An Inspirited Universe. If everything is related, then we can have relationships with everything. This is where animism comes in. Animism tells us that everything is not a thing but a person, a person with whom we can have a relationship with. It falls on us to make sure that is a right relationship, it’s a healthy, respectful relationship, and not an abusive or exploitive relationship.
If every person has a spirit, or maybe every person is a spirit and some spirits have bodies, what does that tell us about what happens after we don’t have a body anymore? Different cultures, different religions have different ideas about what happens after death. We’re going to talk about some of them.
Module 6 is, Gods, Spirits, and the Otherworld. In Class 1, we talked about the Gods but that was how we relate to the Gods, given that they exist. This module is about how the persons we call Gods come into our myth. So, They’re Gods. Why do we care? Now what? What do we do? What do we do about that? What do we do with that?
We’re not going to take any beliefs about the Gods directly from any culture. Our ideas are informed by what we know about our pre-Christian ancestors, and our non-monotheist neighbors. But, we are going to build something here and now. We are going to let the same Gods and spirits and natural forces, and the same human condition, speak to us as they spoke to our ancestors.
The capstone module is Module 7, Building a New Myth. If myths are stories to live by, what stories do we tell ourselves? What stories help us live a Pagan, polytheist, animist life? We’re going to look at some of the dilemmas in myths, what it means to be connected both from a positive sense and some of the challenges that brings. We’re going to discuss how these myths are the origin of all of our virtues, and look at some of those virtues and decide which ones we think are the most important. These are our timeless truths. These are our myths. How do we live them out?
Books, books, lots of books: These five books form the foundation for this class. And this is not one of those college classes that break your bank account. You don’t have to go buy all of these books. You don’t have to buy any of these books. They’re not going to be used as text books, per se. But, this is where… this the foundation that this course is built on. You may want to read one or two or possibly all of them.
References and Recommended Reading
A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking. Stephen Hawking is one of the most brilliant scientists of all time. But this book is still very readable even if you don’t have a scientific or technical background. It’s the best book I’ve ever found on the origin and nature of the universe.
The Greatest Show On Earth, by Richard Dawkins. Richard Dawkins is best known as a militant atheist. He’s a lousy theologian. He’s a lousy philosopher. He’s a really good biologist. And he’s a pretty good writer. This was an easy book to read. The subtitle is The Evidence for Evolution. He wrote it to argue with fundamentalist Christians who argue for Creationism, or Intelligent Design, or some such nonsense. But in doing so, the book provides all that we need to understand that we are related to every living thing on the earth.
Animism, Respecting the Living World, by Graham Harvey. This is the best book on animism that I’ve come across. It explains the practices of contemporary animists. It does it with respect and without judgment. And in doing so it illustrates what an animist worldview looks like. If you only have the budget or only have the time for one of these books, make it this one. And yeah, I say that even though my book is on here. If you can only do one, do this one.
The Wakeful World: Animism, Mind and the Self in Nature, by Emma Restall Orr. This is another good book on animism. Orr takes a more philosophical approach to animism than Harvey. This book is more naturalistic. It’s more non-theistic. I include it because it does an excellent job of explaining how mindedness applies to everything in the world, and not just humans. If you think I have a mind, but the mountain does not, you have a… your definition of mind is too small. And Orr does an excellent job of explaining that, in quite some detail.
And then The Path of Paganism, (John Beckett) my first book. When you combine animism and biology and physics and a lot of first-hand religious experience, and you try to congeal that all into a religion, this is what you get. If you have already read it, great, you may want to look it over. If you don’t, I hope you’ll read it at some point. We are not going to use this as a textbook like we did in the previous class. But this line of thinking leads to the material that’s in that book.
Again, not required reading! You don’t have to buy any of them. I do encourage you to read them all some time during your lifetime.
Private Facebook Group
There will be a private Facebook group. It will be the same private Facebook group that we had for the first class. It is a secret group. Only members can find the group, see who’s in it and what they post. I have to invite you to join group. So, if your Facebook name is different than the name you used to sign up for the class, let me know what it is, so I know who to invite.
It’s a place if you have questions, you can go ask your fellow students. General conversation among classmates. Participation is completely voluntary. I think about two-thirds of the participants in the first class signed up for it. I don’t know, off the top of my head, how many actually participated in the group. Entirely voluntary.
Questions
If you have questions – anything about the course, the material, its application – just ask. I’ll answer. Response format may vary. If it’s a short question, I’ll answer in email. I may ask you to take it to the Facebook group. I might write a blog post about it. I didn’t do that for the first class, but I might. Any time you have a question about the material or the course, please do ask.
I Don’t Do Casual Conversation!
However, I don’t do casual conversation. One of the reviews of the first class said that when I talked about this last time, it was “charmingly curmudgeonly”. I hope that’s what it is. I hate online chat. Don’t send me stuff and say, “Read this and tell me what to think.” Do NOT send me videos. If you need spiritual counseling, I do that on a consulting basis. But I’m not a psychologist. Again, I’ll do my best to answer questions.
Cost
The cost: the cost is the same as last time, it’s $50 for the entire course. I prefer PayPal. I think everybody paid by PayPal the last time.
A limited number of scholarships are available for people experiencing financial difficulties. The more paid registrations I get, the more scholarships I offer. The more contributions I get – last time I had several people who said, ‘Here, I want to sponsor somebody,’ – I was not expecting that. It was very nice and it let me offer more scholarships.
I’m going to do the scholarships differently this time. I’m going to take all the applications through January 16th. At that point, I will see how many I’ve got, look at the paid registrations, see how many scholarships I can offer. I’ll let everybody know by January 20th.
Signing Up
Signing up is easy. Use the contact form. Or email me at: john@undertheancientoaks.com
If you’ve already got my address in your address book from last time, just send me an email. It’s easier than using the contact form. But either way is fine.
I will send you a PayPal invoice. When you’ve paid, I’ll register you for the course.
If this is the first time you’ve signed up for a class, you will get an email from WordPress telling you that you are now a member of Under the Ancient Oaks, and telling you to go change your password. If you took the first class, you are already a member of Under the Ancient Oaks, so you don’t have to do that again. You won’t get that email from WordPress. You’ll just get one from me saying, “Yep, I got it. You’re good.”
Expect a 24-hour turnaround. If you catch me in the evening when I’m sitting at a computer, you may have a 4-minute turnaround. If you catch me during the day, it probably is not going to be until night. If you catch me when I’m travelling, it might be a couple of days. But, expect a 24-hour turnaround.
Homework
Homework for Module 0. Yes, this is the syllabus class, but there is a little bit of homework: Sign up for the class. That’s it.
Module 1 begins January 23, 2020.
And, if you are reading this and it’s 2021, 2022, 2023, the class will still be there. You can still sign up for it. You can still take it. I won’t be reviewing homework after the conclusion of this, but if it’s there, you can still take it.
And, that’s all we’ve got! It’s going to be an interesting road. It’s probably not going to be as smooth as this (photo of smooth road) all the time. This is something that I’m rather passionate about. It’s something that we don’t talk much about in our mainstream society or in our Paganism and polytheism. I think it’s something that we need to look at and I’m going to be thrilled to be walking through this with you.