Gods with Mustaches, Myth in the Contemporary World

In Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys a painfully normal man Charles accidental discovers that his father is the West African God of mischief, Anansi and he has a brother who is also a God. Charlie is a permanently embarrassed wreck and his brother is a blithe, womanizing sociopath. Friction builds as Charlie attempts to reconcile his ordinary life against the powerful forces of ancient myth that make his brother such a pain in the ass.

According to Gaiman's lore the first stories to exist were the stories by the God Tiger, now long forgotten. Tiger’s stories were distinguished by their brutality and revelry in predatory violence for survival. The trickster Anansi cunningly took the stories from Tiger and transfigured them with wisdom and guile into something else entirely. All stories now are said to be Anansi stories. As the Anansi mythology tumbles into the present it is scrutinized under modern precepts where its relevance to the contemporary world is tested.

If the Anansi stories are the progenitors of myth they are also the parents of modern narrative. But Myths are not just stories. They are the very essence of what makes us human. It would not be an stretch to say that modern civilization would not exist without myth. Myths were the very first form of figurative invention, a first attempt to quantify our situation as sentient beings in a universe. Mythmaking is the kind of activity that separates us from other animals. While the natural world was busy clawing its eyes out, myth allowed us to tiptoe up the evolutionary ladder behind. In Anansi Boys we witness the literal combat between Anansi stories and Tiger stories. This is really the primeval forces of nature pitted against the edified worldview born of myth.

 As cultures developed ancestral stories helped give meaning to life. They created a framework that reassured people that they fit in some overarching narrative, the grand tapestry of culture. This has developed into a much broader form in the contemporary world. We use myths to define our culture through expansive archetypes, for example the stories and ideas that inform the so-called American worldview (personal freedoms, pursuit of happiness, manifest destiny etc.). Myths that help define a culture also help define us personally. We form our own identities by the way we make associations with those larger cultural constructs.

We are often not aware of the influence of myth in our contemporary world. But the Anansi stories are hiding in plane sight, they are so much a part of the fabric of modern experience that they don’t even register as novel. Whatever cultural narratives you subscribe to, whether there are Gods or mystical worlds, whether those Gods have mustaches, the details are irrelevant. Those potentially mustachioed figures of myth are just whiskery vessels to transport ideas through time. Myth is the fundamental ingredient to human culture, the lifeblood of imagination and the driving force behind our interminable progression into more enlightened creatures.