A look at mythology over the ages: The Paleaolithic Period, The Neolithic Period, The Early Civilisations, The Axial Age, The Post-Axial Age and The Great Western Transformation. It discusses different myths and how they have been shaped by the times and environment around them. Armstrong takes us up to modern time where science leads the way and discredits many myths.

I don't have too much to say about this book sadly. I thought it tried to cover far too much in too small a volume. I thought it would spend more time discussing what myth is and defining it and I also disagreed with some of the statements she made and how some of the myths and timepoints were interpreted. A very average read, maybe more suited to someone just dipping into mythology for the first time. ( )

An excellent essay exploring what myths are, how they evolved and why we need them. Of particular interest is the last section which discusses the corrosive results of modernity's commitment to logos where understanding myth is concerned, and the importance of the novel. ( )

From whence did myth come? What did they entail, explain, engender? When has a myth slipped into obscurity? Why are they so desperately needed? Will we be able to survive their loss?

Karen Armstrong engages these nigh unanswerable queries in her chronological overview of the mythos of humanity. While being a perhaps oversimplified progression of mythic time periods - progressing from the Palaeolithic stirrings of hunter-gatherers to the agrarian revolution of human understanding, stopping to investigate the budding civilization building and continuing to the Axial age of burgeoning human spirituality, dwelling upon the receding movement of the Post-Axial age, until arriving at what she refers to as the Great Western Transformation - Armstrong manages to ponder some ineffable matters within a short space. As an overview of periodic mythology, her short history is useful as a sort of guidepost, but it is the deeper questions she ponders that elevate the book beyond a typical mythologic atlas.

Of particular note are the open-ended musings she introduces that wonder whether the modern lack of a sustaining mythology can be partially or even fully abetted by the surge in art, and specifically the novel, as a form of mythic source. While she believes that for a myth to truly do its work it must be encountered within a sacred space, being rendered merely prosaic by profane settings, she also seems hopeful that art will 'step into this priestly role' and provide a way, as myth does and did, to enable us to see from a multitude of perspectives, to achieve a transcendent understanding beyond self-interest, to circumvent the ennui and lethargy that has enveloped the modern experience. Her short history was a stirring reminder to my personal mythos of how transportative myth has always been for me. ( )

A brief, beautiful, insightful book. The chapter on pre-agricultural myths is moving. Highly recommended.

This 150 page essay by Karen Armstrong serves an a sort of introduction to a series of books, each a myth retold by a contemporary author. It's an odd choice, as it doesn't provide a cultural or historical context for any of the myths in the series. Instead, A Short History of Myth provides an thumbnail interpretation of human religious thought and an overarching theory of how myth works.

Armstrong cites heavily to Mircea Eliade for the concept of the Eternal Return, that myth re-enacts the sacred continuously, rather than telling a story from the past. She also draws on Karl Jasper for the concept of the Axial Age, the notion that between 800 BC and 200BC, major world religions (including Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism, and, odd man out, since it isn't a religion, Greek philosophy) supplemented or replaced myth and ritual in their societies with internalized ethical codes. In the last third of the book, Armstrong offers intriguing interpretations of Christianity and of the development of Western society since around 1500s.

Central to her argument throughout the book is a distinction between myth, which makes statements about our psychological realities but not about historical reality; and logos, a rationalist approach that analyzes the world around us as an objective fact. I suppose in Armstrong's longer books, she probably offers more supporting details as evidence of her interpretations. This essay simply states the interpretations, and feels more like myth than logos. ( )