Well, well, well. Confession Time. My understanding of myths has undergone a great change after I began reading [**Jordan Peterson**](https://jordanbpeterson.com/).

![](https://steemitimages.com/DQmPKAmwQ4b31keMtTS5cjPrf3RhGWLBjUtwB9zuXuR4EEK/image.png)

**Carl Jung** (Swiss),  **Mircea Eliade** (Romanian) and **Joseph Campbell** (American) are sanguine about myth; **Jung** suggested that mythical stories connected individuals and societies with the “collective unconscious” in which all humans partake, and were one of mankind’s ways of interacting with the vast unseen world.

**Eliade** theorizes that myth helped individuals know how to make sense of their world and how to behave in their society. Combined with religious ritual, myth helped them connect with deep shared societal events, memories, and values.

**Campbell** (1904-1987) built on the work of **Jung**. Like **Eliade**, he argued that myth has an important function in society in four ways: it evokes a sense of awe, it supports a religious cosmology, it supports the social order and it introduces individuals to the spiritual path of enlightenment.

**George Lucas** (Star Wars film maker) and **Christopher Vogler** (a script doctor for Disney studios) were influenced by **Campbell**. 

**J.R.R. Tolkien** (author of the classic high-fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion) and his friend, **C.S. Lewis** (author of the children's classic The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) were fascinated with the power of myth.  

People who would not set foot in a church go to the movies. They share vicariously in the hero’s quest and go through a cathartic transformation. They follow the hero as he makes his moral choices and so decide (even unconsciously) that they live in a moral universe.

**Tolkien**, in his essay on fairy stories, explained that the viewer or reader of myth comes to understand that there is not only a plot and meaning to the story, but there is a plot and meaning to life, and if his life has a plot and meaning, then the cosmos has a plot and meaning, and if the cosmos has a plot and meaning, then there is Someone who plotted the story—someone who knows its ultimate meaning, because He is the ultimate meaning.



**REFERENCES**

https://home.isi.org/why-myth-matters

https://vimeo.com/91439367 [The Romance of Religion: Fighting for Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, by Dwight Longenecker, a priest who gets married]