NOTICE: This front part of neoMythos is a bit defunct and is not currently being maintained. Please see my in the Shell site (my Ghost in the Shell fan site) for my "fan" work; please see jgdesignworks.com for my web/application/editing business. Thanks!
NeoMythos, as the tagline says, is a site dedicated to listing and
reviewing the "new mythologies." But what the heck is that?
A background first, then we'll work forward to the answer.
Some years ago a man named Joseph Campbell, the name in
comparative religion, said that the reason society seems to fall
apart before our eyes is that we lack a working mythology, a working
religion. Our mythos, he said, has been concretized, a thing caught
in amber, frozen, dogmatic. I'm doing my own extreme paraphrase,
of course, but you get the point. Religion has failed to keep up with
the needs of the present-day world, present-day people, and until it or
an emergent mythology does so, the will continue to live in a
fragmenting, un-socially-cohesive world.
Finding this emergent mythology is like finding the exact reason your
computer crashes every day at 5 P. M. sharp, like finding a way to beat
the Kevin Bacon film actor matching game. Needles, hay stacks. And it
may not be any one emergent mythology that becomes dominant; the hay
stacks are probably full of needles, but only five needles at random
are those that will work, those which form the new mythology's core.
NeoMythos is about teasing out those needles and taking a good look at
them.
To that end, the mission statement, if you will, NeoMythos offers links
to sites, writings, and films which may or may not embody a new
mythology; some are definite links to established mythos, some are
admittedly more hopeful associations with mythos-that-may-become.
Eventually you will find everything from cyberspace to Celtic
mysticism; you will find anime; you will find discussion boards on which
you can suggest discuss whole other ideas of just what "new mythology"
is. And perhaps, out of all this, we will gain a glimpse of our future.
