1

The Evolution of Mythology: the de facto lens of Modernity

Marlee Spicer
marleespicer@my.capilanou.ca

Visual Theory and Practice
Dr. Michael Thoma, Jack Silberman and Gregory Coyes
December 14, 2020

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The audio visual bubble of myth surrounds us, the marriage between visuals and sound
created a space which humans have used to recreate the surrounding world. Myth is so prevalent
in our day to day life that it is essential in our definition of the world around us. Myth shapes our
thinking, molds our minds and twists the fabric of reality into a paradoxical myth unto its own.
Humanity relies on the cyclical nature of history, the constant repetition of events in more
modern times. This obsession with repetition, relying on the known past to direct the actions of
the now is the essence and functionality of myth. Roland Barthes argues that myth is not a
naturally occurring phenomenon and is constructed out of the desire to influence. According to
him: “(...) the very end of myths is to immobilize the world: they must suggest and mimic a
universal order which has fixated once and for all the hierarchy of possessions.”1 Our capitalist
society has transformed the act of storytelling into something to be bought and sold, it is used to
push ideals and agendas through the means of mass consumption. Film is the conduit for the
“false nature” that Barthes states we are all functioning under, throwing society headlong into the
simulacrum that Beaudrillard states “renders obsolete the idea of an original.”2 He posits that
myth is a form that confines and defines what a person can do, it pre charged objects so that the
world around us is limited to these predestined moments and choices, all “locked up under the
pretext of being eternalized(...).”3 The following paragraphs will attempt to define myth, explore
its modern application and elaborate on the paradoxical relationship to the written word and film,
how film seemed to be a predestined art form, while examining how the cyclical nature of
humanity demands the construction of a simulacrum. Through the written text of Beowulf, the
Odyssey and the Bible, the paintings in the Arena Chapel and the modeling in Pompeii, film is
1

Barthes and Lavers, “Mythologies,” 104.

2

Durham and Kellner, “Media and Cultural,” 448.

3

Barthes and Lavers, “Mythologies,” 104.

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an evolution of art that had years of mythos and technique that culminated into this modern,
ultimate form of expression. The expansion of myth propagated by the technological
advancements of the scientific revolution, that birthed film as a medium, has paved the way for
myth to become ingrained into our collective consciousness and, from ca. 2150 with the Epic of
Gilgamesh to now, the understanding of the world is perceived through the lens of the myth. This
paper will challenge Baudrillard’s “vision of a fragmented and hyperreal society”4 and venture
into the supposition that there has never been a cognizant time before mythos, rather than the
steady decline into the map of the medium, society has always functioned under the guise and
explanations of the narrative myth, film and the modern media has simply allowed for it to be
disseminated globally.
There is no culture in the world that is exempt from myth, they all had and have some
form of mythology. It is common in the West to associate myth with the ancient Greek and
Roman stories but, as written by Joshua J. Mark:
The tale of Prometheus the fire-bringer and teacher of humanity is echoed in the Chinese
tale of Fuxi. The story of Nuwa and her creation of human beings in China resonates with
another from the other side of the world: the story of creation from the Popol-Vuh of the
Maya in which humans are created who can do nothing and prove useless but, in the
Maya story, are destroyed and the gods then try again.5
These existential themes of origin and rebirth are common threads in mythologies across the
globe. Through the Egyptian story of Osiris, the Greek tales of Dionysis and Persephone, the
aforementioned Sumerian fable of Gilgamesh, we can see attempts to grasp the concept of;
where did I come from and what is my purpose, that are explored through each myth. That is
4

Durham and Kellner, “Media and Cultural,” 447.

5

Mark, “Mythology.”Ancient History Encyclopedia.

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why we see such a commonality between the stories told by cultures unaware of each other, by
societies so different in tradition but strikingly similar in their attempts to comprehend the
existential. “Our culture continues to be text-based, which means that the images remain
attached to a narrative and do not exist on their own, outside of a story.”6 The collective
understanding of ancient mythos is directly tied to the visual world.
As José Manuel Losada writes: “In past ages, mythic narrative has undergone several
adaptations to new formats: from theatrical or epic representations to plastic image and the
musical sound”7 myth has survived and adapted formats over the ages. However, before diving
into the complex relationship between film and myth, it is important to establish a common
definition for myth for the purpose of this paper. José Manuel Losada proposes a definition of
myth that encompasses its power in both the modern age and times past. His definition of myth is
as follows:
Explanatory, symbolic and dynamic account of one or various personal and extraordinary
events with transcendent referent, that lacks in principle of historical testimony; is made
up of a series of invariant elements reducible to themes submitted to crisis; that presents a
conflictive, emotional and functional character, and always refers to an absolute
cosmogony or eschatology either particular or universal.8
Themes of eschatology, the end of the world or end of time, and cosmogony, the origin of the
universe or the “single act of creation,”9 are common threads that mythological stories follow.
According to this definition, myths must address either the aforementioned apocalypse, the birth

6

Zupancic, “Films, the Visual, and,” 4.

7

Losada and Lipscomb, “Myth and Audiovisual Creation,” 7.

8

Losada and Lipscomb, “Myth and,” 20.

9

Tim, “Cosmogony and Origin,” Philosophy & Philosophers

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of the universe, have a protagonist whose journey ventures into the uncanny and pushes them
into a deep, reflective conflict that connects emotionally and yet remains fully functional as an
individual, to qualify as a genuine myth.
The Greco-Roman mythology was so powerful and so omnipresent in the peak of their
civilization that the rise of the Christian Church couldn’t squash their might but rather, had to
incorporate their ideals into their own mythos. The same could not be said for the myth’s present
in the North of Europe, due to their oral tradition, the Church managed to wipe out a vast
majority of their storytelling. However, the few written pieces, such as Boewulf, persisted and
thus the Germanic Gods are cemented in the history of myth.10 Even if someone in the Western
world has not read Beowulf, they are influenced by its affluence through the days of the week.
“Our modern weekday names still show evidence of Anglo-Saxon paganism; Wednesday is from
the Anglo-Saxon Wōdnesdæg (“Woden’s day,” named for the god parallel to the Norse Odin),
and Thursday derives from Þūnresdæg (“Thunor’s Day,” for the god Icelanders called Thor).”11
This is a prime example of how mythos has interwoven itself into our everyday perception of the
world. The text of Beowulf itself is an indistinguishable mix of fact and fiction that J.R.R.
Tolkien wrote: “surpasses the dates and limits of historical periods.”12 Due to it’s message being
active and applicable to modern issues and situations. Myth has bled into every art form since it’s
conception.
Myth is present on The Palette of King Narmer, on Khafre Enthroned, in Hermes and the
infant Dionysos, in the Iliad and the Odyssey, in the the Hagia Sophia, in Eadwine the Scribe at
Work and in numerous other texts, sculptures, paintings and architecture. A great representation
10

Losada and Lipscomb, “Myth and Audiovisual Creation,” 22.

11

Seigfreid, “Digital Collections for the Classroom”

12

Seigfreid, “Digital Collections for the Classroom”

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of artwork that prognosticates the marriage of film and myth is the panel Lamentation in the
Arena Chapel in Padua done by Giotto di Bondone in ca. 1305. The Lapis Lazuli background of
wet plastered blue is present throughout the entire church, each panel telling a different part of
the story of Jesus.13 Each tied together through that blue background. This Biblical, visual,
representation of myth is so filmic in nature that it is viewed as almost the frames of a movie. It
combines the filmic editing on the frieze of the Parthenon and the modeling of the murals in
Pompeii and Herculaneum. The knowledge and understanding of light in a two dimensional
frame, or spatial illusionism, was lost with the eruption of Mount Vesuvius and was found again
during the Italian Gothic period, seen in Pietro Lorenzetti’s Birth of the Virgin14 as well as in
Lamentation. The understanding of structural integrity with stone that was used in Rome during
the construction of the Pantheon in 27 BC was lost and then emerged once again in Medieval
Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. It is this constant repetition in history, the knowledge
gained and lost in dramatic moments only to be re-learned and improved upon, that foretells the
development of film ages before it culminated into a tangible art form.
It is essential to acknowledge the patterns in history, the tessellations of human nature
that in essence define our choices in the future. “Dionysius of Halicarnassus tells us that History
is ‘Philosophy teaching by examples,’”15 his definition is supported by Frederic Schlegel who
states that “the historian is a prophet with his head turned backwards.”16 Over the course of
history, many philosophers have written that history is cyclical in nature and that is why we teach
it, so that the events of the past can be learned from as they will inevitably recur. As far back as

13

Kleiner, “Gardner's Art through,” 419.

14

Kleiner, “Gardner's Art through,” 425.

15

Richardson, "On the Phenomena of,” 339.

16

Richardson, "On the Phenomena of,” 339.

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the book Ecclesiastes written between 450 and 200 BCE, a wisdom book from the Old
Testament, it is written that: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is
done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”17 This idea of
originality, panned by Baudrillard for being unattainable, brings to the forefront of this
discussion; is there such a thing as a time before myth? Myth is used to explain the
unexplainable and help the limits of the human mind comprehend the world around them. It is
easier to believe in a form of higher power than it is to come to terms with the fact that we are
alone on this rock in space, destined to be responsible for our own choices and our own fates. It
is this fact alone that seems to question Barthes supposition that myth is not a naturally occurring
phenomenon. Humans evolved and are of nature, though we have strayed far from it since the
dawn of our species, and humans created myth to understand the world around them, how can
myth not then be a naturally occurring phenomenon. It may be wise to rephrase this idea to:
myths serve as a guide to major issues of humanism that reflect the human condition and provide
a narrative pathway to reality.
It is wrong to try and differentiate between reality and myth, as myth defined above,
relates to a story, whereas the modern myth is a de facto lens through which we perceive all
things. Myth to the modern person, is a metaphor that according to Owen Barfield, has gone
through a series of evolutions that define our consciousness. He writes in his book Saving the
Appearances that “the world we accept as real is in fact a system of collective representations.”18
As a species, we entered Barfield’s participatory consciousness during the Greco-Roman, the
Hebraic and Medieval Europe periods where there was “an awareness which we no longer have,

17

Enns, “Ecclesiastes,” 1:9.

18

Barfield, “Saving the Appearances,” 20.

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of an extra sensory link between percipient and the representations.”19 It was during this time that
Iconoclasts feared the power of the image, “because they had predicted this omnipotence of
simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the conscience of man, and the
destructive, annihilating truth they allow to appear.”20 Through both the Iconoclasts and Barfield,
it is established that humanity has lost the ability to differentiate between the real and the fictive
representation of an invisible being(s). Introducing the concept of idolatry into the modern
landscape Barfield writes that “(...) the phenomena themselves are idols, when they are imagined
as enjoying that independence of human perception which can in fact only pertain to the
unrepresented.”21 It is at this point that he sheds light on the power of the scientific revolution
where “original participation was expunged from the consciousness of the modern West and
idolatry took hold in its place.”22 It places the person who has faith in the position of having to
choose between whether or not their God is a symbol of a historic figure/event as it cannot be
both. Whereas, Joseph Campbell, a man who’s life was spent studying the mythos of the globe to
define the Hero’s Journey, says:
Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, the myths of
men have flourished; and they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have
appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind. It would not be too much to
say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the
cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social

19

Barfield, “Saving the Appearances,” 34.

20

Baudrillard, “The Precession of Simulacra,” 3.

21

Barfield, “Saving the Appearances,” 62.

22

Tarnas, “When Symbol Becomes,” Becca Tarnas.

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forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the
very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.23
This understanding that myth permeates the world around us informs Greenaway’s rather harsh
critique of cinema. Hollywood has taken and hackneyed the Hero’s Journey to the point that
audiences have become increasingly disenchanted by their stories and, therefore, this specific
mythic structure.
Cinema’s relationship to myth is profound, its ties to the realm of audio and video so
deeply ingrained within technological advancements that it is almost impossible to conceive a
world in which this seventh art form is not associated with the two. However, in the digital age
of mass production, myth and its dissemination have become significantly easier with mass
consumption and the distribution of digitization.24 “With the digital turn, mythical narratives not
only have witnessed an explosion of new formats, but they also had to adapt to an audiovisual
storytelling process not always thoughtful about its authentic mythical account.”25 As aforesaid,
language and the narrative are tied to the visual, as there can be no written language without the
use of an image. There is an evolution of the image that is linked with myth, it has adapted from
the Lascaux caves and Egyptian Hieroglyphs to sculpture and painting and finally to
photography and video. Peter Greenaway, a filmmaker, is of the mind that film shouldn’t have
been created and that we should have simply stuck to painting and added audio to it.26 He
ventures to say that film is nothing more than illustrated text, yet, we cannot have the written
word without an image. They are paradoxically tied to each other and so yes, his statement holds

23

Mark, “Mythology.”Ancient History Encyclopedia.

24

Losada and Lipscomb, “Myth and Audiovisual Creation,” 18.

25

Sotelo, “Testing the Resilience of,” 114.

26

Zupancic, “Films, the Visual, and,” 9.

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true that film is just the further visualization of the written word, which to him, is predictable.
Greenaway’s opinion that the audio visual form of film that has been propagated to an
individual's household, and now even to their phone in their pocket, have had a detrimental
impact on this art form. He proposes that we return to the public form, that we abolish the use of
frame within film and stray into a non-narrative production, which seems impossible as “a
signifier might always produce significance. Yet, where there is meaning, there is myth: in myth
criticism, we have been trained to watch images in order to uncover the hidden myths,
archetypes or symbols underneath the visual.” 27
Myth is so omnipresent in our daily lives that we have lost the ability to see beyond the
simulacrum we function under. As Metka writes: “The main hypothesis is that images, together
with all other domains of human creativity, from literature to fine arts and even music, carry
within them a layer, a substratum that I would call a ‘mythical charge.’"28 This mythical charge
has transcended time, cultures and revolutions. It has evolved from the oral to the written to the
visual to the media it is today. There is no world before myth or after myth, it is simply the
manner through which humanity has always understood the phenomena of the world around us.
The Gods have transformed from animals like the falcon Horace and the jackal Set, the
human-like the Greek and Roman gods, to human, like Jesus in the Bible. Myths are a universal
language, explored and studied by Joseph Campbell, so much so that the Hollywood paradigm is
dependent on the Hero’s Journey and the three act structure that is deeply ingrained in the global
history of storytelling. Myth is presented to us on the daily, we are bombarded with images that
tie into the built upon simulacra that the cyclical nature of time has compounded over and over
again until symbols immediately trigger an association to a feeling or a story. Perhaps
27

Zupancic, “Films, the Visual, and,” 9.

28

Zupancic, “Films, the Visual, and,” 4.

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Baudrillard’s assumption that we have degraded as a society from the ability to distinguish the
difference between an idealized image of something and the reality of it is accurate, but that
supposes that we have ever truly viewed reality unobstructed. The map of myth is not going to
dissipate now that more people are becoming hyper critical of their simulacrum, rather, the
continued use of myth in blockbuster films like the Avengers, Star Wars and Harry Potter will
inevitably and irreversibly spark another evolution in the expression of myth as the facsimile of a
story structure as old as humanity. Myth has been and always will be the drive to uncover and
understand the deeper meaning of our existence.

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Baudrillard, Jean. The Precession of Simulacra, 2001.
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Blackwell Publ., 2006.
Enns, Peter. Ecclesiastes. Cambridge, U.K.: W.B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 2011.
Kleiner, Fred S. Gardner's Art through the Ages: the Western Perspective. Belmont: Wadsworth,
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Losada, José Manuel, and Antonella Lipscomb. Myth and Audiovisual Creation. Berlín: Logos
Verlag, 2019.
Mark, Joshua J. “Mythology.” Ancient History Encyclopedia. Ancient History Encyclopedia,
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Comparative Literature and Aesthetics 43, no. 4 (December 22, 2020): 113.
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