Howdy everybody! In fifth grade, we took a week-long field trip called “Outdoor Ed,” where we learned about nature and our local environment. We slept in dorms that week, and at night, I would use the light peeking through the door to read a series my older brothers had recommended: Percy Jackson and the Olympians. I burned through the first book, finishing it long before the trip was over, and I have since read that series around ten times. I developed a love for mythology of all kinds, and I could go on at length about that love, but I will spare you the details.
The next year, we started to learn about ancient civilizations in my social studies class. Needless to say, I was ecstatic to be able to use my knowledge of Greek myths for something. I was even more excited when the project at the end of the unit was to create our own ancient civilization (my friend and I created Lostica, an Atlantis-inspired sunken Greco-Roman civilization), where we had to, among many other things, craft a myth (we chose the creation of a fictional berry we gave religious significance due to its golden color). This project still sticks in my mind as one of my favorite assignments I’ve ever done.
Studying myths since then has only grown my appreciation for such stories and assignments. Learning about the tropes present in specific myths as well as tropes commonly assigned to different gods (and the roles those gods play in their pantheons) shows what a culture values and how a society operates. Looking at our real-world myths provides amazing insight as to what a culture is like, showing how intelligence or strength might be viewed, or how certain natural phenomena are associated with life or death (for example, water may mean life in drier climate societies but death in locations prone to flooding and tsunamis).
Creating a myth allows you to take these same insights about your own society. Looking at the subject matter of modern myths shows the sorts of things we think about. How are animals treated? How do the economics of the myth’s story work? What are the social repercussions of the characters’ actions? All of these reflect the society of the author. My specialty is myth-making for fictional worlds, which is not only proven by Lostica’s existence but by a personal project I have worked on for eight years now: Temera. Temera is the world where I set most of my creative writing endeavors, and making its myths has allowed me to flesh out its history and society (especially because the gods of this world are demonstrably real, so myth can BE history). You can find out more about this world at www.dragonsoftemera.com.
All of this to say, studying and writing myths is an amazing exercise in studying history, literature, sociology, and anthropology. The way a myth is written reveals so much about a people, but being able to read that closely requires a strong foundation in literary techniques, tropes, and criticisms. These myths also have strong rippling effects as easy references in more modern pieces, so it is important to know these myths and their purposes to understand our stories today as well. As a future educator, I hope to use mythology to help my students understand the world around them, just as people who believed in these myths used them to explain the world around them.
