Our Demigod Dream

By Martyn Pope. Martyn, 15, lives in Poole, United Kingdom. Please read his article and leave your thoughts and comments below.

Who are we? The dwellers of earth, is that enough? We can imagine aliens and monsters, doodle them in notebooks, but do we really know anything? The thing we do know is who we are. So when our imaginations look for fantasies, we see only ourselves. We look to our past; we look to our future and picture ourselves in faraway places. But why look to the future, we’ve been around for a very long time, and we don’t really have knowledge on far days past, but we can imagine…

Who’s to say King Midas didn’t have the golden touch? Who’s to say Zeus isn’t up there thundering away? There is no connoisseur of the accident days. We look back on our stories. Should they be our norms? Something we know may not to be true. There are indeed lessons to be learned. Archane, who challenged her hierarchy Athena, and was punished, there’s a myth that can even relate to modern and past day society. But should we take our marching orders form unreliable myths or even a bible? An atheist of our dwelling might say “why are you a seeker of our mystified past? Look to the future” but why should we be blind?

Our fascination of mythology is simply a way of excusing our lack of knowledge concerning our origin. We know nothing for sure of our becoming. Science and religion, the war of belief. Is mythology a concept of our creation that we can accept? What makes the big bang more acceptable than the Earth God Gaia? Of course our studies into mythology, like most other areas of interest, have a clear media interpretation.

Before media we had our own minds. Now the media has complete control over us. Our interpretations corrected, our views countered, our opinions doubted. There are many incorrect statements about mythology, that once relayed by the media are undoable. Every person watching that television program now has that interpretation. So maybe it is not science or religious beliefs that control our norms and values, but the media…

One of the most recent interpretations of mythology are the Percy Jackson Books. The bestselling Rick Riordan novels have recently been adapted into films. They are very popular, but do they really relay the concept of the original mythology? And does it really matter? If you’re an atheist of mythology and just like a good film, what does it matter? Is the true purpose of mythology entertainment? Is the purpose of the bible entertainment? Is the purpose of Peter Pan entertainment?

Our past can offer us several lifetimes of imagination. But what about the future? We can dream ahead infinite years and fantasise about the future. But we have to have norms and values, a way of life. And how can we fantasize about our future without our past? We want to know how we came to be, but do we really want to know what lies ahead…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Subscribe to our newsletter!