Robert A. Segal (1948–2024)

This is a disappointing introduction to mythology. It is a rather plodding book that might be termed 'wikipedia plus' - that is, it is a longer general survey with more authority than you might find online but suffering from it being only one person's perspective, albeit one of the most scholarly in the field.

Ultimately it is a mere enumeration of Western intellectual responses to myth, forced into a straitjacket of being reviewed through the prism of the various disciplines created by the show more West for the West. The whole is partially built around an extremely weak and irritating attempt to test each set of theories against the Adonis myth. It lacks the narrative coherence of, for example, Glyn Daniels' excellent short history of archaeology.

The book has one, surely unintended, effect. This is the realisation that many jobsworth if brilliant thinkers, over the last two hundred or so years, have taken the limited material of the past - incomplete and whose precise context has long since been lost - and woven elaborate theories that take on a life of their own that seem to tell us little that is reliable about the human condition then or now. The spirit of Casaubon is in this book.

Most of these theories, after all is said and done, tell us more about the minds of dead white males in one rather peculiar if dominant culture than they do about myth itself - or the past in which the myth flourished.

The best that might be said is that myth has informed great literature and that many of these thinkers created myths about myth that have given indirect insights and much entertainment. They have helped to make mythology (biblical, classical, courtly) a fundament for our modern imaginative world from Oedipus and Parsival up to and including the products of Hollywood and the games industry.

The book had one positive effect. Once you have swept away the grandiloquent contributions of the Frazers and Campbells (artistically fruitful if not necessarily true) and the potty almost obsessional castles built on sand of the Freudians, then some thinkers have used myth (really, the human desire for narrative explanation) to create useful models or clues to the way we live now - and to what is core to our social being and individual aspirations rather than what is perhaps transient or unknowable.

If I read on in this field, it will be to go beyond it. The following thinkers leap out of the pages as fruitful starting points ...

1. Mircea Eliade who saw how mythic construction was a phenomenon of our time, an insight that could only come from someone immersed in the radical Right of the 1930s. No po-faced Marxist could possibly have had enough self-knowledge to understand that his scientific materialism owed more to magic than reason.

2. Carl Gustav Jung who, at the least, exposed how mythic themes recur over and over again in the deep unconscious of human minds from very different cultures. Whether you accept or not his notion of the 'collective unconscious', something is going on in the wiring of the brains that makes us humans peculiarly different from all other life forms and contributes to our peculiar creativity and our danger to each other.

3. Claude Levi-Strauss who looked at the structures of thought in myth in a more systematic and 'rational' way than Jung perhaps but came up with more evidence of deep structures, especially in regard to the natural categorisation we use to manage our perceptions and make use of the world. These too seem to be wired into the human mind though no thinker, Levi-Strauss included, appears to have created a viable grand theory of the wired mind that works for all persons in all conditions.

4. Bronislaw Malinowski who, observing myth in the modern anthropological field in 'primitive' societies, saw more clearly than most their social function and helped us to extrapolate his observations to our own world.

5. George Sorel, the radical revolutionary syndicalist, who saw myth as a practical force that binds people to action, possibly violent and sacrificial, in total contrast to the denial of many socialists, even today, that their approach to revolution and reform had mythic, even religious, elements. Sorel, not Marx, is every bourgois liberal's true nightmare.

6. D.W.Winnicott, the British child psychologist, who identified myth as a form of play that extends into adulthood and, we would add, (based on the other thinkers outlined above) into society. We humans desperately need to play to be whole. Myth gives us a tool, whether suppressed as 'literature' or acted out in fantasy.

These six thinkers, far too cursorily dealt with in the book, all have in common that they considered, or allowed us to consider, the relationship of myth to the workings of our minds and our own society.

Eliade and Sorel raise questions from a conservative and a revolutionary perspective respectively about the role of the irrational in politics, forms of play where people can get killed.

Jung and Levi-Strauss looked at myth in our minds either as intuitive response or as pre-rational analysis of our relationship with others and the world.

Malinowski and Winnicot, less generalist and more specialists in their professions, see myth as a medium for social cohesion and for individual coping through playfulness.

All these strands can be tied together by jettisoning attempts to claim to 'know' the past (though interesting work is being done under the 'new animist' banner in anthropology) and taking these various insights, perhaps alongside other philosophical and neuro-scientific trends, considering how it is that the human mind operates more successfully along non-rational than rational lines.

For too long, the repressed culture of the 'dead white males' and our contractual, trading liberalisms have privileged reason. For the Catholic system of the late middle ages, the philosopher of record was Aquinas whose system was beautiful but based on a flawed assumption. The same might be said of Marxism's dependence on Hegelian idealism. Liberalism is based similarly on Kant's synthesis of the Enlightenment model.

All of these systems and others either presuppose something governing outside of the human condition (the environmentalists are falling into this trap as we write with their Gaia claptrap) or that some reasoning process or other is a truth rather than a tool (a model still maintained by some within analytical philosophy in the dying days of Western scientism).

The clues to one stage of human development often lie in the thinking of the previous one. The seeds of a better understanding of the human condition, involving science as much as intuitive reasoning, are in place and only need synthesis. show less

Incredibly dense examination of how myth has been treated by various theorists, in categories from Science, Philosophy, Religion and Ritual, Psychology, Structure and Politics. Known myth theorists like Frazer, Campbell and Jung make appearances but it's trying to cover such a huge umbrella each theorist only gets the briefest of introductions (you'd get more out of their wikipedia articles).

It's in the extremely short chapters on mythic patterns and myth as story it got closest to what I show more was expecting it to be. show less

Read this review, and many more on my blog October Tune!

30 Second Mythology is exactly what it says, a book where you can learn about Greek and Roman mythology in under thirty seconds (per page/paragraph of course, you won’t get through the entire book in thirty seconds). I got a similar book last year for Christmas, 30 Second J.R.R. Tolkien, and though I liked it, I wouldn’t say it was the best biography I read about the author. Same with 30 Second Mythology.

What I liked:
Everything was show more divided neatly. There was a section where they talked about how the whole mythology thing happened in the first place, the ‘Creation’. Then there was a section about the Olympians; Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, etc. A section about their enemies, the monsters, like Medusa, the Minotaur and Polyphemus. There was also a part about how the world looked like, with Olympus, the Underworld, Tartarus, and so forth. A part about the heroes; Hercules, Odysseus; and a part about the ‘tragic figures’, like Oedipus, Jason, Icarus.

I liked reading about everything, but I did find the little pieces – one page per subject – a bit too short. Of course, a book like this is not the best way of learning more about mythology, but hey, I couldn’t help it. I love mythology and I would love to read every book about it (it would probably take me years and years though). My favourite parts was reading about how everyone cheated on everyone. I think almost every God and Goddess had children with either mortals, other Gods (than the ones they were married to) and even other creatures.

What I didn’t like:
Like I said before, the passages per subject were in my opinion too short. They could have easily explained it a bit more, like in the Tolkien book, and added only small pictures. Now, there was one page where you could read about the subject, and one page filled with a large picture (of a painting, a statue, etc). That was a bit of a shame.

And also my biggest dislike about this book, is that it’s only about Greek and Roman mythology. Since I’ve watched Thor, I have been a huge fan of the Norse Mythology, and I would just love to read a book like this completely about that. Unfortunately, Norse Mythology is not as popular as Greek or Roman is, but I just hope that some day people will realise that it is awesome!

Conclusion:
I liked 30 Second Mythology. It’s a good way of learning about the most important parts of Greek and Roman mythology. Of course, it’s not the best book to be learning about the Mythologies, but it gives you a good insight of what it’s like. If you want to learn more about mythologies, and you don’t know where to start (or you don’t feel like reading a big book about it), I’d suggest you pick up 30 Second Mythology! show less

I bought this book on a whim, without checking the contents within. Now that I have looked at the contents, I am slightly disappointed. My first impression was that this book would cover all myths in general. However, now that I think about it, that would be a daunting undertaking. The editor says as much, discussing the meaning of a belief system that no one believes in. Furthermore, the editor mentions how these myths expanded into our lexicon.

There are seven chapters divided into show more categories. The book focuses on the Greco-Roman pantheon, but it mentions other faith systems and parallels between them. For example, while the book tells the reader about Chaos, the primordial state of the Universe before creation, it also mentions Tiamat and Ginnungagap.

30 Second Mythology works as a coffee table book, something you use to start a conversation or participate in one. It does not go in-depth on anything, but it is not meant to. Thanks for reading my review, and see you next time. show less