Two questions I get a lot are: Why is mythology still important? Why does it matter today? 

Mythology offers a rich language to view the world through. It’s layered images with individual meanings that combine with other ideas to form new meanings. 

Today we often use the word myth to mean a falsehood or describe an outdated mode of thinking. But that’s a simplified understanding. The Enlightenment emphasized rationality, logic, and qualitative data. Mythic thinking or seeing the world through metaphor, story, and feeling became irrelevant. However, we speak in a “mythic vocabulary.” Myths and their images still hold power. They still resonate with us. And we constantly recombine and reuse mythic patterns and motifs. 

Andrew Tobolowsky, a religious scholar, suggests viewing mythic elements like language. They are fluid and adaptable. Myths come from specific cultures and contexts where they hold meaning. Culture is not inherited but curated by each generation picking which elements mean the most. Myths bring with them their original meaning, but when placed in new contexts, they create new meanings (4). 

Let’s look at language for a moment. Geronimo is a name that belongs to a 19th-century Ndendahe Apache freedom fighter. Now it means a general exclamation of exhilaration. It is synonymous with bravery. People yell it as they jump out of a plane. Although the context people use it has changed, it contains multiple meanings. It draws up an image of courage, even those who have never heard of the man. Mythic vocabulary acknowledges that the individual elements of familiar myths have meanings in their original context. And they retain meaning outside of these contexts. They have meanings of their own, even without knowledge of their origin.

Mythic Vocabulary and Mythology as a Lens

Take, for example, marketing a Gillette razor for women by naming it “Venus.” This draws on the image of the Roman goddess of love. There is no picture of her, no description on the box. But someone who wants to feel sexy, by today’s standards, will associate this razor with that feeling because of the mythic vocabulary.

Another example is Starbucks. The company wanted to evoke a sense of adventure and a “connection to the Northwest and a link to the seafaring tradition of the early coffee traders.” They settled on the first mate in Moby Dick – Starbuck. With him comes an epic tale of high seafaring, bravery, and facing danger head-on, traits everyone wants their coffee to grant. 

  Mythic images bring resonance from the stories they are plucked from. These aren’t retellings. A retelling is something like the film O’ Brother Where Art Thou. It is the same story. The Honda Mini Van “Odyssey” is mythic vocabulary. New meaning is grafted alongside the ancient in unexpected ways. 

Let’s look at the Greek Myth Icarus. Icarus and his father, Daedalus, are imprisoned in Crete. In order to escape, Daedalus crafts wings from wax and feathers. He warns Icarus not to fly too low, or the ocean spray will break the wings, and not fly too high because the wax will melt. They escape, and as they fly, Icarus, enraptured by the flight, ignores his father’s warnings. He flies too close to the sun, and the wings melt, causing him to plummet to his death. 

The Roman writer Ovid pulled his selection of this story from a larger tradition. The imagery and mythic vocabulary of the story has enjoyed a long history.  In art, the story appears on a Pompeiian fresco called The Fall of Icarus (40-79 CE), Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1558), and H. J. Draper’s The Lament for Icarus (1989). Each of these pulls imagery of Icarcus, placing it into a new medium.

In literature, Marlowe compares Dr. Faustus (1592) to Icarus, and in Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part III (1591), Talbot compares his son to Icarus.

Talbot.
Then follow thou thy desperate sire of Crete,
Thou Icarus: thy life to me is sweet:
If thou wilt fight, fight by thy father's side;
And, commendable proved, let's die in pride. Exeunt.

These writers evoke the feeling of Icarus in their stories. They use the mythic vocabulary of the character to create new meanings. Other examples of Icaru’s mythic vocabulary can be found in American popular culture. In Sunlight, Hozier sings:

Each day, you'd rise with me
Know that I would gladly be
The Icarus to your certainty
Oh, my sunlight, sunlight, sunlight
Strap the wing to me
Death trap clad happily
With wax melted, I'd meet the sea
Under sunlight, sunlight, sunlight.

In the Broadway Play Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda refers to the myth in the song “Burn.” After Hamilton’s wife Eliza learns of his affair, she sings:

Do you know what Angelica said
When she read what you'd done?
She said, "You've married an Icarus
He has flown too close to the sun.

In Marvel’s movie The Eternals, one of the immortal characters is named Ikarus. Feeling guilty for betraying his comrades, he kills himself by flying into the sun. 

Each of these examples shows how creators have lifted a few aspects of Icarus from its original context and placed it into a new one. The image carries with it several meanings and is able to form new meanings. This is the power of myth.

 Mythic Vocabulary and Mythology Crosses Cultures

A contemporary, non-European example of powerful mythic vocabulary is in the K(Korean)-pop band BTS’s song Blood Sweat and Tears. The song is about losing innocence and falling to the dangers of temptation, and the music video uses multiple images from Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian mythology. Several vignettes depict how youth succumbs to temptation and loses innocence; some include Icarus imagery. 

In the opening scene, as the singers explore the gallery, Rapmon reads to Jungkook, symbolizing a teacher or Daedalus. Rapmon melts wax onto Jungkook’s finger, and Jungkook licks it off in front of the painting. In another shot, singer, Jungkook is suspended on a rope swing in front of The Lament for Icarus. Later, Junkook, hanging from the swing again, this time with white feathers floating down around him. Another singer, V, sits on a balcony behind him, Landscape with Fall of Icarus, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

 V smiles and willfully jumps out of the window. Here, we see two different versions of Icarus, the boy who was tempted too high and his wax wings melted, and the one who knew the dangers and did it anyway. Toward the end, we see V crouching, scars on his back where his wings were cut away. The music video’s mythic vocabulary draws on the stories but does not require any prior knowledge to feel the resonance of the new story being told. Icarus is not a Korean myth, but BTS invokes the myth in a new way to an audience who might have no connection to it.

Mythic images bring their stories with them into new contexts. Learning to see the world mythically opens up and offers a different kind of nuance and resonance.