Previously, I had read her Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, which was also very good, but a much harder read than Myth, and it seemed as though it could have stood a bit more editorial attention to tighten up some of the prose and avoid the occasional duplicative passage. (Admittedly, undertaking such a project at such a time, an author might feel, or presume, hostility from all corners of the prospective audience, and, accordingly, suffer from some stilted exposition trying to mollify such presumed hostility.)
Myth, by contrast, is written quite simply and clearly.
Armstrong first defines myth, with reference to earliest evidence of Neanderthal mythical considerations, as "nearly always rooted in the experience of death and the fear of extinction", "usually inseparable from ritual", senseless "outside a liturgical drama" and "incomprehensible in a profane setting", "about extremity", and referring to "another plane that exists alongside our own world":
Correctly understood, mythology puts us in the correct spiritual or psychological posture for right action, in this world or the next.Armstrong then proceeds to review the development of dominant myths, and their founding cultures' evolving notions of the role of humans (and gods?) in the cosmos, across six great ages of human historical development: the mythology of Palaeolithic hunters, of Neolithic farmers, of the earliest civilizations, of the "Axial" age (circa 800 - 200 BCE, the era of Confucius, the Buddha, the Patriarchs and Prophets of the Torah, and Hellenic philosophy), of the post-Axial age (200 BCE - 1500 CE), and the "Great Western Transformation" that arose with the period of so-called European enlightenment and the protestant reformation.
A passage (circa 19th Century):
The new Higher Criticism, which applied the modern scientific methodology to the Bible itself, showed that it was impossible to read the Bible literally. Some of its claims were demonstrably untrue. The Pentateuch had not been written by Moses, but much later and by a number of different authors; King David had not composed the Psalms; and most of the miracle stories were literary tropes. The biblical narratives were "myths" and, in popular parlance, that meant that they were not true. The Higher Criticism is still a bugbear of Protestant Fundamentalists, who claim that every word of the Bible is literally, scientifically and historically true - an untenable position that leads to denial and defensive polemic.Having brought us to the present, Armstrong insists "we need myths" and then finds 20th Century artists to be creating myths and acting as cultural shamans, in some cases probably unwittingly, in the mythical void the modern ascendancy of the logos has left us, with a brief examination of Eliot's The Waste Land, Picasso's Guernica, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Mann's The Magic Mountain, and Lowry's Under the Volcano:
If professional religions leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world.