What cave is available to moderns wishing to follow the heroic path? Where is the Sacred Way to Eleusis where I can experience the vision of Persephone Sophocles and Cicero commended as life-changing? As Armstrong admits, the secularist and rationalist modern age lacks a body of belief to which mythology might be grafted. Pilgrims - young hunters undergoing an initiation rite (perhaps) - crawled (probably) into the tomblike darkness to commune with the sacred pictures and emerged from the earth's womb initiated It was here that "the myth of the hero was born". The caves, Armstrong tells us, are a birth passage to a new life, telling " us what we have to do if we want to become a fully human person". In the Palaeolithic age she focuses on the numinous cave-paintings of animals, shamans disguised as animals and hunters with spears. Armstrong traces the emergence of myth to our Neanderthal ancestors, whose gravegoods imply the existence of "counter-narrative" that helped them "come to terms with" mortality. Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth is a general introduction to the series.
Such a cursory summary is bound to be synoptic, thin on detail and inadequately nuanced. Armstrong has provided a valiant and readable account, clearly and concisely written, though as woolly in its methodology as the woolly ponies it describes on the walls of the Palaeolithic subterranean caverns of Altamira and Lascaux. The language of psychotherapy murmurs around the narratives, viewing myth as therapy for our godforsaken age. Bruno was burnt by the Inquisition. The current renaissance courts the oblivion of Lethe rather than the fires of Hell.
But Icarus fell to his death: the Renaissance fully understood the hubristic character of its enterprise. In grafting classical myth on to Christian "Truth", humanists like Bruno and Ficino experienced the nervous elation of the over-reacher. Yet the traffic, as this book proves and others surely will, can profitably run both ways.. "What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba,/ That he should weep for her?" Hamlet's question concerns the universality of Homeric myth Mythic consciousness has long deserted us. Who's Hecuba anyway? Should I know her? The Scottish publishing house Canongate has proposed to restore myth - or to provide the materials for its regeneration - in a grandiose project akin to the epic revival of classicism in the European Renaissance, which liked to compare its labours with those of the gods and heroes of classical mythology.