Myth & Culture

[The Archivist]

Phil Cousineau: Campbell writes that if you take myth and religion deep enough, they're the same.

Houston Smith: Myth is a subspecies of symbolism. Myth is the technical language of religion for accessing the higher world.

Wendy Doniger: Myth bridges the small and the great and forces us to deal with them simultaneously.

James Hillman: Myth is the patterned background to life. Religion tries to speak "in truth"; myth does not.

Each of these four people reveal different perspectives on an approach to myth. Phil Cousineau is a writer quoting Campbell who was a comparative literature professor and thus sees myth in a literary context. James Hillman is a psychologist who studied with Jung and went on to form an influential post-Jungian movement called archetypal psychology. He sees myth in psychological perspectives. Doniger and Smith both come from the fields of religious studies in which myth is actually a subset of religious studies. Each brings a different perspective to question: what is myth? From their perspective fields, each is correct. Yet, the differences are significant between them and cannot or should not be dismissed.

How do myth and culture play out in your game? How much myth and how much culture do you have in your game and how prominent is it? What place does religion have or play in your game?

[Admin Pete]

I use bits and pieces here and there but more so on a subconscious level vs deliberate intent. I am afraid I am not a deep thinker on these things.

[tetramorph]

The Archivist, I approach myth having been heavily informed in my thinking by CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and the Inklings.

So my approach is rather more "Platonic" than Jungian.

I think myths are narratives about realities that cannot be conveyed better by and for human beings in any other way.

I think that RPGaming is actually a kind of quasi-ritual activity enabling our engagement with myth, in this sense of myth.

So I don't do much in-game myth telling. I try to shape the whole landscape, dungeon, situation upon mythic patterns and archetypes.

It isn't easy, but it is fun!

[Necromancer]

Well, I certainly can turn to myth and culture as valuable sources of inspiration when creating a setting. At the time being I don't spend that much time creating internal myth for my settings nowadays, but I naturally can see the value in doing so, and I used to dabble with it more when I was younger, played more and had more time. If I was about to create a more detailed, "realistic", simulationist type of setting I would probably spend more time on it.