On this episode, we dive into the podcast pillar of myth and mythos. How do old myths such as the Odyssey or the Bible inform how we move even if we’ve never read them? To what extent can we understand how myth and all that roots it arise to incline us toward certain ways of travelling? If we can readjust our sight in order to recognize the mythic ground of being we walk upon, could we then walk differently, organizing other ways of travel that serve, rather than starve the world?
Transcript
Welcome friends to Season Zero of the End of Tourism podcast. In these mini-episodes, you’ll hear short transmissions speaking to the principles of the pod. We’ll introduce you, our listeners to the themes and questions that will be woven into our conversations, a kind of primer on our politics. This episode is entitled “Myths and Mythos”
Travel has long held a central place in the mythic imagination of countless cultures. From pilgrimage to conquest, exploration to exile, travel to migration, the open road to the great beyond, such themes have captivated local understandings of home, away, the strange and the stranger, hospitality and danger. From Gilgamesh to the Odyssey, from the Crusades to Manifest Destiny, the myths and mythos that define our cultures’ travelling ways tend to define us, whether we’re aware of them or not.
Myth, to me, tends toward the incarnation in a more solid-state, storytelling kind of corpus. Myth is, to a large degree, story, that arises out of the mythos of a people. Mythos is an ancient Greek word that, according to philosopher Raimon Panikkar, means “the things we believe in without believing that we believe in them.” Mythos is the undercurrent and undertow of culture. It is the unseen understory of who we are as cultural people, waters that are often so transparent so as to be invisible.
According to Panikkar, every attempt to make our mythos tangible changes our mythos. When expressed through song, story, music, dance, art, and gastronomy – the main foundations of culture – mythos becomes myth, or even a myth. Panikkar speaks to mythos’ more well-known sibling logos, another ancient Greek term often mistaken to mean “word.” As in “in the beginning was the word or logos.” But logos is more properly understood as “expression” or more poetically, the incarnation of unknown.
Myths point toward our cultural undercurrents, taking us on often wild rides into the coded language and landscapes wherein all that has given rise to our days rests and resides. Surely there are myths that are magical, fantastic, and speak to strange worlds very different from our own. Fairy tales, folk tales, riddles and creation stories. These are often what we associate with myth, celebrated or sundered as they may be in our time. But there are other myths that people still hold quite dear, as religious as any registered denomination. These are national myths, family myths, political, social, and economic myths, racial, sexual and gender-based myths, that we often call stereotypes or worse.
It is through mythic or what some call mythopoetic lenses that we can begin to form search parties for dreams deferred, descending into the murk of mythos, undertaking underworld journeys in order to acknowledge the watery aspects of our days and especially those of our cultures that for too long have been polluted, principally by our inability to express, enflesh, to put clothes on the invisible men that mythicize and demythicize our times. It is through such mythic lenses that we might become more humble students of the worlds around us, acknowledging our myths, some that no longer serve us and others that have long been waiting to be told, sung, stretched and served.
One of the themes of the podcast is Myth and Mythos. By digging in to the mythic depths and footprints of our millennial movements, we can begin to braille and read, remember and refine, and finally redefine the myths that move us, whether via tourism, migration or other forms of travel. In so doing, we might filter the bullshit from our own mythic watersheds and our own mythic understandings. We might come to see clearly where our prejudices and biases come from, both as persons and cultures. In that way we might begin to be able to imagine, which is to say channel new stories of travel, stories of pilgrimage towards worlds whereby our footprints are recognized by strangers, perhaps descendants as people worthy of an invitation. Welcome to the end of tourism.
