American Gods and the Power of Myth

In Neil Gaiman's masterpiece, American Gods, he portrays a world where gods, mythological beings, and cultural icons are brought to life through the belief of mankind. While the main plot is concerned with the battle of America's new gods -- the media, the internet, cars, and other such -- against the old gods of European mythology (and contains a tacit but definite critique of our tendency to discard the old in our eagerness for the new), the book also examines the way in which our society has deconstructed and almost destroyed the very idea of myth and story, to our great detriment.

Myths and legend are the oldest forms of story, our most primal mode of communicating ideas. They connect to something deep within us, slipping past our modern cynical defenses to speak to something more basic. They fulfill our need for magic in everyday life, our desperate search for something more than just what we see with our eyes. The mythologies we study in school today -- Greek, Roman, Norse, Celtic, even American -- have been passed down through generations, refined by innumerable storytellers until they have grown great in both wisdom and power. The stories we have today are the ones that have been strong enough to survive centuries; no mediocre efforts could last so long. These stories are entertaining, yes, but they have lasted so long because they are also true, in a way much deeper than just the factual. Some of these stories have historical basis, some do not, but it matters not a whit to their ability to move and inspire us.

These days, however, we are in danger of losing our stories. In its commendable dedication to truth in history, our society has forgotten the value of fiction in myth and legend. We now demand that all portrayals of persons and events be purely factual, and even take great joy in pointing out the inaccuracies in our previously-cherished tales of our forefathers. We are quick to declare that Washington never chopped down a cherry tree, John Chapman (a. k. a. Johnny Appleseed) never traveled over the countryside wearing his cooking pot and planting trees, Christopher Columbus never admitted to finding a new world, and a hundred other things we loved in our stories never really happened. We are eager to bring our heroes down to the level of mere men, and so we viciously attack the stories that have grown up around them, believing that we have gained truth, when in the end, maybe all we have gained is fact. We have sacrificed magic for accuracy, and lost our souls in the process; we have confused our storybooks for our history books, forgetting that the two can coexist, demanding that one destroy the other.

The modern world little knows how to deal with living story. The written word, while preserving a tale just as it is told, also in a way kills it. Myth grew to such great power through constant retelling, and retelling inevitably leads to change, no matter how many precautions are taken against it (the ancient Celtic bards were required to learn their sagas by heart, word for word, and swore never to change a single one, but change they did). Again, modern society views this malleability with great suspicion, and warns against believing in such twice-told tales (look at the glee many take in debunking urban legends). But stories that cannot change with the times, that have no room for adaptation or improvement, quickly die, and rarely do they attain the heights of power scaled by the older myths. (It is ironic that J. R. R. Tolkien was very concerned with a filmmaker altering his books for the sake of a movie; surely he, of all people, should have known that myths -- even man-made myths -- change with the telling, and that this is a good thing.) Once again, the modern world's obsession with "fact" (in this case, the "fact" of the text of a story) threatens to destroy the soul even as it bolsters the mind.

Accurate history is a good thing; there can be no question. But myth and legend and story are not history; they affect us on a different, more primal, level. But if we insist that the latter become the former, then we will forever destroy one of the great transcendent experiences of life, and the world will become a darker place for it. We need science, but we also need magic.