Myths continued

    In reflecting on the roles of myths, I have come to realize that there are progressive understandings in myths. While the "creation stories" tell children about cause and effect and the categorical tensions that exist between order and chaos, subsequent stories teach them what it means to be a "mortal" in a volatile world; the sense that one's own actions can have severe repercussions or consequences; the splendor of creation; and the terrors of existing in a world where even the gods are not necessarily "reasonable" by any stretch of imagination. Greek myths strike me as being (somewhat) the apotheosis of other religions, in the sense that their gods tend to be quite jealous and even terrible at times, and it's only later in the mythological canon that Zeus, for instance, learns that human/god relationships are reciprocal and require mercy. The progression from a justice-based to a mercy based ethics is yet another aspect of myths that make them, to some extent, parallel the maturity of human endeavors and relationships. If the goddesses and gods are not open to trying new ways of relating to mortals (and vice versa), then the powers will often only end up wiping each other out in battle.
  I am not so much interested in the "bare bones" of a lot of the Greek myths as I am about the patterns of relationships that they reveal. For example, Oedipus is a figure in Greek mythology who is so pitiably cursed by his own fate (in murdering his own father and marrying his mother), that it forces people to wonder how they relate to events in their own lives that come from themselves yet at the same time are somehow beyond their capacity to know or understand. In seeing that struggle carried out through Oedipus, something inside of us (some story that connects with our own felt experience of life)...let's just say a psychic wound is opened which we allow ourselves to safely explore from the distance of a symbolic pattern in a story. Hercules and his twelve labors is somewhat the same, echoing the "never ending" trials that people face when they are indebted to their own souls to unfold certain lessons and prove themselves through different ways. The resolution to such stories is not the point so much as it is showing people that some things we go through are inevitably part of the condition of being human. Perhaps looking at these narratives in this way can help our struggles to be manageable and more worthwhile as well.