Rewilding Mythology

For most of human history, myth was a durable mode of knowledge transmission, kept alive and resilient by the breath-laced web of communal storytelling. But the rise of empire depended on the deracination of mythologies. Just as landscapes were stolen and terraformed so were whole pantheons uprooted from their social and ecological contexts. How can we reroot, rewild, and retell?

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Myths are alive and resilient. They have held practical information about survival and sustenance, nested within compelling narratives that prized the epic stories of multi-species communities over the monologues of human individuals. Surviving through most of human history, they were refreshed and adapted to new conditions each time they were retold. Most importantly, they were contextual. Just as mycorrhizal fungi map the relationships in a forest, so do myths map the specific relationships of a community rooted in place.

The rise of empire brought with it a violent uprooting of myths from their context, and from the renewing respiration of communal storytelling. These stories ossified into abstraction and reinforced the anthropocentric hyper-individuality and colonial capitalism of today.

It is time to reroot, revitalise, relate, rewild. Rejecting the antiseptic impulse of the dominant culture’s bent on exterminating alternative epistemologies, let us compost our favourite myths, folklore, and narratives with ecology, science, somatics, and poetry.

Let us glimpse into the inner worlds of lichen, fungi, rainforests, and songbirds.

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How can we reroot these myths in their original environments to recover the ecological wisdom they were built to transmit? How can we understand that science and mythtelling stem from a similar impulse to cultivate understanding and intimacy with the natural world?

Rejecting the antiseptic impulse of the dominant culture’s bent on exterminating alternative epistemologies, let us compost our favorite myths, folklore, and narratives with ecology, science, somatics, and poetry. Hijacking the tools of material reductionism for our feral creations, we can glimpse into the inner worlds of lichen, fungi, rainforests, and songbirds, understanding that the most important stories right now are always more-than-human.

Finally, let us retell cultural myths and personal stories knowing that, like an ark, they may carry our most precious relationships and seeds of practical wisdom, through the floodwaters and tectonic shifts of tomorrow.