August 18, 2023

The poet Douglas LePan, one of my professors in graduate school at the University of Toronto, in an often-quoted poem title described Canada as “A Country without a Mythology.”  In an article on Canadian literature, his colleague Northrop Frye quoted from LePan’s poem and linked it to the following quotation from Technology and Empire (1969) by Canadian philosopher George Grant:

That conquering relationship to place has lefts its mark within us.  When we go into the Rockies we may have the sense that gods are there.  But if so, they cannot manifest themselves to us as ours.  They are the gods of another race, and we cannot know them because of what we are, and what we did.   (477)

The title of Frye’s essay is “Haunted by Lack of Ghosts,” adopted from another poem, by Earle Birney: “It’s only by our lack of ghosts we’re haunted.”  Frye explains, “There are gods here, and we have offended them.  They are not ghosts: we are the ghosts” (478). 

But are there gods here, wherever “here” is, Canada or the United States, the Rockies or North Royalton, Ohio?   Isn’t this sentimentalism combined with liberal guilt?  We are careful to grant Indigenous people their gods, but we have no gods.  We have killed them through technology and empire.  Well, those may be bad things, but surely science has shown us that gods are only projections of complexes in the human unconscious.  The gods, including the monotheistic God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, are exactly what Freud called them, an illusion, and an illusion without a future.  Even the theologians are on board for this: it is almost a century since the theologian Rudolf Bultmann spoke of the need to “demythologize” the New Testament, to rid it of the superstitions of mythology that turned Christianity into a cult of yet another dying and reborn god.  What used to be the conclusion of an intellectual elite is gradually becoming more general, resulting in a precipitous decline in religious belief in Europe and even in the United States, which has always been, for better or worse, the most religious country in the West.  Don’t we need to kick the addiction to mythology and learn to live in a world in which it is just us and the environment, the objective world of the “reality principle”?  In poem after poem, Wallace Stevens seems to agree, saying, in “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, that “the solar chariot is junk,” and “Phoebus is dead, ephebe.”

What is a mythology, after all?  Most discussions start from the simple—and inadequate—premise that a myth is a tale about a god or gods.  Myths originate in local cults, but have a tendency to combine and expand into an entire mythology that in turn expands into a belief system, i.e., a religion.  Religion as a belief system is in fact an ideology, a system of power and authority, and out of religious ideology comes “law,” a society’s system of morality, custom, and class structure.  In Judaism, this is the Torah, usually translated “law.”  In ancient Egypt, law was ma’at; in Hinduism it is dharma.  From stories to belief to ideology: in this developmental sequence, the ideology tends to replace the mythology, or at least uses the stories increasingly only as a pretext.  The Book of Genesis tells a story that was original a folktale about how the first two human beings lost immortality because they listened to a talking snake.  Ideology turned the snake from a Trickster figure into Satan, the principle of evil, and Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience is turned by theologians like Augustine into “original sin,” the doctrine of the complete corruption of the human will by the Fall, passed down through the generations.  Using this doctrine, the Church declared that since baptism removed original sin from the soul, it was necessary to be baptized to be saved, and, since only the Church could baptize, it was declared that there was “No salvation outside the Church,” a message clearly convenient for the institution.  It is doubtful that the talking snake had all this in mind. 

In the 17^th century, the Church persecuted Galileo in order to preserve the belief in the old geocentric cosmos.  But the geocentric cosmos was not even in the Bible.  Developed centuries after the New Testament, it was an ideological construct masquerading as a cosmological one.  The Church had adopted it, so that any challenge to it became a challenge to the Church’s claim to absolute truth in all things, empiricists literally be damned.  Christian fundamentalism may seem to insist on the primacy of the myths, particularly the Creation myth of Genesis, but in fact the myths are preserved only because they are vehicles for an ideology.   Fundamentalists cling to the Genesis story only because regarding it as a parable rather than literal truth, as the Catholic Church is willing to do, means relativizing a certain form of absolute authority.  The story is only a pretext.  It has come to stand for a certain power claim.  We have the truth, not the scientists and historians. 

All this has led to two conclusions.  One is that of “primitivism”:  once upon a time, people were naïve and superstitious idiots, incapable of higher reason, childlike and credulous, believing in gods as children believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.  As time went on, however, an elite class of rulers and the priesthoods that catered to them learned to manipulate a naïve populace.  In short, religion is nothing but a scam, a collusion of church and state to manipulate the uneducated and unsophisticated general population by playing on their irrational wishes and fears.  William Blake described the process at length in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell:

The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could percieve…. | Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslaved the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began Priesthood.  | Choosing forms of worship from poetic tales. | And at length they pronounced that the Gods had orderd such things. | Thus men forgot that All deities reside in the human breast. 

Primitivism is no longer respectable in sophisticated intellectual circles, and for good reason.  Traditional peoples are no more liable to become possessed by an irrational belief system than, say, the Ohio doctor who this week was deprived of her license for maintaining that Covid vaccines magnetize people.  But despite its deserved bad reputation because of its use as a rationale for imperialism, which argued that “primitive” peoples were superstitious savages who needed to be ruled over for their own good, primitivism raises a troubling question.  The “poetic tales” of mythology are colorful and entertaining, but why have entire peoples fallen to believing in and worshipping supernatural beings who are no more than walking metaphors?   By rational and realistic standards, just about any mythology is bizarre, from Egyptian to Native American to the stories of the Bible, despite the efforts of cultural chauvinism to elevate the latter as “higher religion,” looking down upon a tribe who has a sacred tree while having no problem with the fact that Moses talked to a burning bush.  No, the bush was not itself a deity, but that is not the point, which is that bushes do not talk while burning without being consumed.  If an impossible event occurs in your religion, it is a “miracle” and evidence for the truth of something transcendent.  If it happens in the mythology of “those people,” it is evidence of their credulity.  But the real question remains:  why all the weird stories, believed in by people ancient and modern?  Given the fact that they invariably collide with both science and common sense, wouldn’t it be better if every country was without a mythology?   And isn’t the world moving in that direction?  There are more and more secularists living within a demythologized perspective.  The growth of various forms of fundamentalist literalism is in fact a hysterical backlash to the increasing ascendency of “modernism,” which in this context means demythologizing. 

The longer we think about it, the more the second theory, that “religion is a scam,”  looks like a variant of the primitivist theory.  The myths may be the means by which kings and priests, politicians and evangelists, manipulate the masses—but why are the masses so easily manipulated?   Why do people seem outright eager to believe six impossible things before breakfast?   It is so easy to become exasperated, to lose patience with the mass delusions of our time, to denounce the wish-fulfilment and magical thinking that are not only divorced from reality but which so often lead to scapegoating and various other forms of inhumanity.  I am the editor of the Collected Works of Northrop Frye edition of Words with Power, Frye’s second study of the Bible.  Yet at times I am uneasily aware of how much of the Bible Frye has to ignore, set aside, or read in a radically unorthodox fashion in order to argue for the Bible’s continued value in our time.  He learned his Biblical revisionism from Blake, who, despite the passage quoted above, was by no means an atheist.  In his first volume on the Bible, The Great Code, Frye explicitly disagrees with Bultmann’s tactic of demythologizing:  if you demythologize the Bible, he says, you will have nothing left.  The question becomes, is there anything about mythology, Biblical or otherwise, that remains potentially valuable, or is it basically an atavistic mode of thinking that we have been unable to throw off, a temptation to wish-fulfilment and magical thinking that proves irresistible to the weaker members of society? 

We may approach this question by asking what a non-mythologized world would be like.  In his brilliant satire Sweeney Agonistes, T.S. Eliot invents a character, Sweeney, who is what Paul called the natural rather than the spiritual man, one who lives completely in the real world.  Whatever one thinks of him, Sweeney is direct and gets right to the point:

Birth, and copulation, and death.
That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks:
Birth, and copulation, and death.
I’ve been born, and once is enough. 

All right, Eliot is a Christian apologist, and so biased, but is Sweeney really wrong about what life is without all the moonshine?  And aren’t there many people who find this sufficient, who have no need of all the fairy-tale stuff?  It could easily be the lyrics of a punk rock song.  Sweeney really is the “natural man”—Eliot calls him “apeneck Sweeney,” and his mode of life is that of the animals.  But what is wrong with that?  Shorn of our pretensions, we are no different from the animals, and maybe all of the fancy stories are just ways of making us feel that we are special, the center of divine attention, the object of a divine plan.  There is a type of student, the kind that is a drag on a teacher’s morale, that seems to share Sweeney’s attitude.  They have no use for this liberal education stuff, and are in school entirely to be prepared to make money to buy the forms of hedonism that Sweeney leaves out.  What is supposed to be “higher” in higher education seems to them to be, well, just mythology.  They would be content with birth, copulation, economic security, and death, and sometimes rather resent those who look down upon them for it.   Wordsworth clearly knew this type.  In a famous sonnet, he says, “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. / Little we see in nature that is ours.”  We are back to contemplating the Rockies.  Where Indigenous people might find gods, we find a pile of rocks and wonder whether we could manipulate the government to permit mining.  Wordsworth exclaims, “I’d rather be / A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,” so that he might “Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea.” 

The Sweeney type is not only anti-intellectual but vulgar.  But in a celebrated statement, Freud said that science has been a triple blow to human narcissism, in the form of a triple blow against mythological thinking.  The Copernican revolution in physics destroyed the old cosmology and the old Creation myth; the Darwinian revolution destroyed the old Chain of Being with its fixed species ranging from matter to spirit; and the psychoanalytic revolution undermined the myth of the hero by showing that the heroic will is subverted by the animal drives of sex and aggression in the unconscious. Hamlet claimed that art holds the mirror up to nature, but in Freud’s view it is really science which does that.  In Civilization and Its Discontents he called art a narcosis, an addictive form of wish fantasy without the bad side effects. Science is the true quest for the disillusioning truth, the one nobility that Freud would grant to human nature.   But what truth does science reduce reality to?  Birth, copulation, and death.  Just preferably not with your mother.  Oh, Freud spoke of something called “sublimation” which is supposed to “rechannel” the animal drives and thus create culture, but he was never really able to articulate what made sublimation more than a sophisticated form of illusion.  The “discontent” Freud spoke of is discontent with a life stripped down to the old joke about “Life’s a bitch, and then you die.”  When civilizations decline, the sublimated illusions of “culture” wear thin, repressions lose their effectiveness, and the sexual and aggressive drives rear their disruptive heads. 

However, many people are discontented by the reductive choice between a life on Sweeney’s unthinking animal level and an elite skepticism that is by no means confined to psychoanalysis.  The various postmodern and post-structuralist forms of philosophical, literary, and social theory in the second half of the 20^th century likewise exemplify what has been called a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” and orthodox academic thought in that period was resolutely anti-mythological, those who found a positive value in mythmaking being regarded as mavericks.  Joseph Campbell was one such maverick, more or less dismissed by orthodox academia these days.  Campbell insists that the mythmaking impulse is genuinely creative, not an illusion-generating machine.  It is in fact basic to human nature to the extent that we cannot live without it.  He adopts Géza Roheim’s metaphor of culture as a second womb, necessary because, Sweeney notwithstanding, we cannot live directly in nature as the animals do.  The real second womb is in fact mythology, out of which culture is created.  At various places in his work Campbell lists what he sees as the “four functions of mythology,” when mythology is a living process and has not been kidnapped by ideology and its will to power.  To paraphrase, the second, third, and fourth functions of mythology are cosmological, social-moral, and individual-psychological.  Cosmologically, a mythology usually provides a Creation myth that is far more than an explanation of how things came to be.  A cosmology is a vision of reality as a meaningful and beautiful order—that is in fact the root meaning of the word “cosmos.”  The great theoretical physicists often accepted that their work was mythological in this sense.  Einstein in his essays on religion was willing to use the word “sacred” to evoke the feelings of wonder that the mathematical order of nature inspired in him, and Erwin Schrödinger could wax downright mystical.  In book after book, historian of religion Mircea Eliade laid out how the “sacred” manifested itself in traditional cultures as a meaningful order, not only in the heavens but in human life, in which cities were seen to radiate from a sacred center.  There was a transcendent order, symbolized by the gods, but “As above, so below”: that order was also brought down and established on earth. 

Part of the order was thus social and moral, not just physical, and the third function of mythology is to provide a moral system of good and evil beyond the raw will to power.  There has been much debunking in our time of the idea that morality has any sanction beyond the rule of the strong, but the later work of Northrop Frye attempts to make a crucial distinction.  Insofar as morality has been kidnapped by social ideology, it is indeed corrupted to become an instrument reinforcing social power relations.  Good is identified as what serves the class or caste system, or as a “proper” repression of human desires and needs for the sake of social order.  But ideological concerns are “secondary concerns.”  There are also primary concerns that are not culture-dependent but universal.  Life is better than death, safety is better than danger, food and drink are better than starvation, love is better than hate, freedom is better than slavery, for all cultures whatsoever, whatever ideology says.  And the expression of primary concern, often in the teeth of ideological conformism, is an abiding function of mythology.  Although myths can be kidnapped by ideology, they are only effective instruments promoting ideology insofar as they relate ideological concerns to the primary concerns of survival and the fulfilment of basic needs and desires.  Finally, a functional mythology provides what so many in our society lack, a psychological guide through the states of life, with their rites of passage.  The psychological function of mythology has been most deeply explored by C.G. Jung, whose “process of individuation” is really a mythological quest on an inward and psychological level.  

We have said that myths tend to unite into a mythology, and a mythology has a tendency to expand into an imaginative version of what the physicists call a “theory of everything,” a comprehensive—or “encyclopedic,” to use one of Frye’s favorite terms for it—vision of all reality, human life, and human destiny.  The Christian myth managed to do this in the high Middle Ages and early Renaissance, achieving a cultural unity and a cultural efflorescence that has been yearned for nostalgically ever since.  Myths are embodied in sacred writings, scriptures, and re-enacted in rituals.  Literature is born in the attempt to recreate the mythology in new and contemporary terms for each age.  In particular, epic inherits the scriptural task of providing the encyclopedic vision, as we see in the Divine Comedy, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost.  And in both Greek and medieval culture, drama is born as a recreation of ritual in secular terms.  These are communal forms, and become a focus for a community, in conjunction with the visual arts and music—the encyclopedic iconography of the great medieval cathedrals and the music of a composer like Bach.  It is not often observed that this encyclopedic universalism is related to Christianity’s aspiration to be a “world religion” rather than the religion of a chosen people.  Insofar as it is not corrupted by ideology, the universal vision, what Blake called the “Everlasting Gospel,” represents the full flowering of primary concerns. 

However, it would be hard to point to any myth, Christian or otherwise, entirely uncorrupted by ideology and the will to power.  For ideology also has a tendency to expand into a total system, one that is aggressively “totalizing,” a term that literary and cultural theory have made into an ominous term akin to “totalitarian.”  True mythology is a creation of the imagination, but it is always tempted to serve the purposes of ideology, which ultimately means to become the servant of empire.  Greek mythology remains decentralized and polytheistic because the Greek city-states never managed to turn themselves into an empire—or rather, they only succeeded in the long run by failing.  The would-be imperialistic Peloponnesian wars, driven by power-crazed ambitious men like Alcibiades, weakened Greece and prepared it for its role as the instrument of Alexander the Great, whose empire quickly collapsed, as empires do.  The Roman republic imploded and out of it was born the Roman Empire, which began declining and falling from the moment of its birth.  On the Biblical side, God failed to reason the Israelites out of their desire for a king, and thus for an empire so that they could—they thought naively—play in the big leagues along with the likes of Babylon and Assyria.  The dream of the Messiah as a spiritual redemptive figure—a universal one—was confused with the idea of the Messiah as a charismatic cult leader who would make Israel great again, a delusion that is at the present moment driving the far right in Israel to the brink of destroying Israel as a democracy. 

The United States began as 13 ragtag, underdog colonies who defeated the British Empire as early Greece had defeated mighty Persia.  But by the late 19^th century it began to give itself up to imperial ambitions, disguised as “American exceptionalism,” ending in the quagmires of Vietnam and Iraq, and domestically in the quagmire of Trumpism.  Germany’s patchwork quilt of small states was united into a militaristic regime by Bismarck, and we know where that ended.  Russia sold its soul to become the USSR, imploded, and is going to be resurrected by Putin as an empire again even if he has to destroy Russia to do it.   Again and again we see the megalomaniacal national ambition, embodied in the figure of a megalomaniacal cult leader.  I lived all my earlier life during the Cold War, a contest of “superpowers” possessed of grandiose ambitions.  Mythology, in the form of established religion, is always pressured to identify its universal vision with the imperial ambitions of the state.  If it refuses, the state will persecute it as the Roman Empire persecuted Christianity.  Sadly, the Empire struck back when Constantine turned the Empire Christian, which meant turning Christianity into a temporal power structure, one that promptly began persecuting both other religions and “heresies.”  Empires are the result of what Jung calls “inflation,” the possession of the ego on a mass basis by forces from the unconscious.  Socially, this produces Antichrist figures who demand to be worshipped as incarnate gods, and who frequently are. 

Modern thinking is predominantly anti-mythological because myth is regarded as the instrument of ideology and its collectivizing tendencies.  But myth begins as something quite different.  In the passage quoted above, Blake was quite clear about this already in 1793.  Myth turns into ideology only when it is believed literally, when the gods are projected as objective facts.  Humanity then begins worshipping, and obeying, figures it has itself created, choosing forms of worship from poetic tales.  A projected mythology is really an instrument of the will to power, as the various fundamentalist movements of our time, including the “Christian nationalism” of the United States, abundantly prove.  A projected mythology is not just a rational error, however, but rather a mass delusion.  Trying to argue with a cult member and trying to argue with a delusional psychotic are variations of the same experience.  Both are futile: logic and evidence mean nothing to true believers, who need to believe, no matter what. 

But Blake, although he lived at the end of the Enlightenment, was neither a rational atheist nor even, like Voltaire, a Deist, believing in a God who created the world but whose relationship to it since then has been that of a detached spectator watching reality TV.   Blake rejects literal belief in the poetic tales, but he does not regard them as mere fictions, good only for entertaining children and the childlike.  We have not yet discussed Campbell’s first function of mythology, the “mystical,” which is to provide not just an awareness but an experience of a mystery that lies beyond the boundaries of ordinary experience.  Sweeney knows nothing of the mystical, and to intellectual skeptics it is an irrationalism to be “demystified.”  When Moses speaks to the burning bush, it is the kind of experience that Mircea Eliade called a “hierophany,” a revelation of the “sacred,” a word closely akin to the “spiritual.” The spiritual is a reality other than natural reality, yet not really “beyond” it.  Rather, like the air, it is omnipresent, yet invisible.  In The Great Code, Frye points out that the words for spirit in all the Biblical languages are the words for air:  Hebrew ruach, Greek pneuma, Latin spiritus.  Spirit is in fact less another place than another mode of experiencing, one that reverses the split between subject and object that Blake called the “cloven fiction,” the basis of ordinary experience.

When mythology is kidnapped by ideology and literalized, for all the talk of love and Jesus in your heart, God or the gods are figures of alienation, power figures saying “Thou shalt” and “Thou shalt not”—and also “Those are your enemies” and “Those people are perverted and evil.”  As we have seen in previous newsletters, the split between subject and object, I and not-I, is inherently paranoic, and from paranoid fear arises paranoid hate and authoritarianism.  Truly spiritual experience, experience of the sacred, moves in the opposite direction, uniting subject and object, so that mythology’s Big Picture, the map of its “theory of everything” reveals a world in which everything is totally united with and identified with everything else.  Humanity, nature, and God or the gods form one universal identity.  In Frye’s view, not to mention Blake’s, this is the real meaning of the word “apocalypse,” which means “revelation.”  What is revealed is a universal identity of all things united in a vision of order, love, and beauty.  Whereas in the literalist view, apocalypse means the day that our group gets its revenge watching God and his angelic army whup all our enemies big time and throw them into hell. 

The crisis of modernity began in Blake’s time, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason.  A complex of influences—science, humanism, individualism, democracy, capitalism—converged and discredited all the old mythologies, including the Christian one, at least insofar as they were based on literal belief.  The old myths were simply not believable any longer, and, as they became obsolete, so did the authoritarian ideologies that used them as their rationale.  The Expanding Eyes podcast has just finished discussing Shakespeare’s Richard II, the tragedy of a king who learned the hard way that ever fewer people believed that the king was “God’s anointed” and that a divine providence oversaw the course of history.  That old medieval view was being replaced by new theories of power politics by writers such as Machiavelli. In the later 19^th century, Nietzsche proclaimed that “God is dead,” even though few people knew it yet.  But Nietzsche was shrewd enough not to look forward to a secular humanist utopia.  When the news that God is dead, that the myths can no longer be believed, hits the level of the streets, he said, there would be mass hysteria, and the 20^th and 21^st centuries have shown that view to be prophetic.  The vast, collectivist, authoritarian movements that swept away the Victorian world and are threatening to sweep away the modern democratic states are really reactionary mythologies, enormous cults that suck in millions of people terrified of life bereft of a mythology that will make life meaningful and worthwhile.  The modern crisis is, in short, a crisis of mythology. 

The old mythologies are dead or dying, forcing people into various coping mechanisms.  Those in frightened denial are drawn into the demonic mythologies of various conspiracy theories that promise the security of authoritarianism.  In that sense, all countries and individuals should aspire to be without a mythology.  Some do their best to become Sweeney, apenecked and unthinking: “Mythology, what’s that shit? Real men don’t need mythology.”  Many of the educated elite take refuge in radical skepticism.  Yet a return to the root experience from which all mythologies spring is always possible, and it is that message that the positive myth theorists—Frye, Campbell, Eliade, Jung, and the like—attempt to spread.  Both Frye and Blake identify the spiritual mode of vision with the imagination, which is a name for the mystery that Campbell speaks of.  All deities reside in the human breast because the imagination is inward, the kingdom of heaven that is within us.  Yet it is not just another way of speaking of the unconscious, at least insofar as the unconscious is personal, the part of subjectivity that we have forgotten or repressed.  Both Frye and Jung agree that the spiritual quest in our time seems to be a descent quest, downward and inward, to recover the original experience that the old mythologies, now ossified into ideologies, have not only forgotten but actively repressed. 

If the quest succeeds, however, what might result is not merely introverted but circumferential.  The kingdom is all around you, and you do not see it, Jesus says in one of the Gnostic gospels.  Seeing it would not be the same as ordinary perception, though.  As the title of Frye’s last book, The Double Vision, indicates, Moses’ talking bush was not “there” as a hallucination would seem to be “there.”  Neither, perhaps, was the resurrected Christ whom the disciples witnessed.  It will come as no surprise by this point that Frye’s title is derived from a poem by Blake:

For a double the vision my eyes do see,
And a double vision is always with me:
With my inward eye ‘tis an old man grey;
With my outward a thistle across my way. 

I do not think Blake is either delusional or else saying that he is just pretending to see the old man.  The old man is a real apparition, and so is the thistle—at the same time.  Neither negates the other. 

A return to mythology’s source in the imagination does not imply some new world mythology, according to Campbell.  In a modern world that is multicultural, diverse, and egalitarian, the mythological impulse must be individualized, what he calls “creative mythology.”  Jung likewise speaks of the process of individuation.  Frye wrote two books on the Bible because he thought, like Blake, that Christianity might still be a living mythology if recreated by being liberated from the ideologies that have corrupted it.  But there is no missionary impulse.  The Bible is the taproot of Western literature and culture, but it is not for everyone in a diverse society. 

The film Oppenheimer shows us that all of humanity, not just one scientist, is in the position of Prometheus.  We have stolen the divine fire, and we can either save or destroy the world with it.  Where did the fire of the bomb come from, in a test ironically named Trinity?  Not from uranium.  From equations, from constructs of the human imagination put to use by one man.  We are not all Oppenheimers, yet each of us has the responsibility to come to an awareness of what myth we are living, as Jung put it, and possibly to recreate that myth rather than merely conforming to it.  No good to say we have no right to play God, to make a new mythology out of our own experience.  That is a cowardly evasion.  Milton profoundly understood that Christianity was not a counsel of blind belief and blind obedience.  Again and again he showed that God puts humanity in the position of “playing God.”  He put a piece of fruit in Eve’s hand and gave her power, saying “Choose.” In Paradise Regained, a fully human Jesus is asked to choose, over and over.  In Samson Agonistes, Samson must choose between his own despairing passivity and self-pity and listening to the still, small voice within him that told him he could still rock the world.  Each of these cases is a kind of Creation myth, because each of the choices creates the world the character will thereafter live in.

We have always made our own myths and lived by them.  The only difference now is that we know we are doing it. 

Reference

Frye, Northrop. “Haunted by Lack of Ghosts.” In Northrop Frye on Canada.  Edited by Jean O’Grady and David Staines.  Volume 12 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye.  University of Toronto Press, 2003.  472-92.  Originally published 1976.