Grab a snack. Maybe two. This is not a quick read— but I promise (I hope!) it’s worth it. We’re talking mythology, Mars Hill, our cultural library of stories, C.S. Lewis, and why a college student had to stop mid-speech to explain who Sisyphus was. It’s all connected.
I think you’ll find it is all connected to you… and the future, too.
A few weeks ago, I was watching a college student give his speech when somewhere in the middle of it… something quietly went wrong.
He was using Sisyphus as a passing allusion— a reference that should land in a single phrase and carry a world of meaning with it. The student was simply using the myth the way educated people have always used it: an example from a shared cultural library of stories, a language of sorts that everyone in the room should already speak.
Except no one in this room did.
I could sense when he felt the disconnect. (Blank faces clue you in pretty fast.) So he stopped— right there, mid-speech— and did something he never planned or practiced to do.
He gave a mini-lesson on mythology.
He realized that he had to explain Sisyphus before he could use Sisyphus.
So, what was meant to be a single resonant phrase became a detour… an interruption in the flow of what he was trying to say.
I have thought about that moment several times. What happened in that room was not just a student or two missing one reference. It was a small, but vivid picture of something much larger that we are losing… without fully understanding the cost.
The Losing of a Language
Every culture that has valued common literacy has shared a common story vocabulary— a set of references, images, and characters that functioned as shorthand for the deepest human experiences. Sisyphus and his boulder. Icarus and his wax wings. Penelope at her loom. Orpheus turning back. Pandora and the box. These were not just stories. They were a language. A shared imaginative atmosphere that writers, speakers, preachers, and ordinary people could draw on to say something true about ambition and futility, about grief and faithfulness, about the cost of looking back, about curiosity and catastrophe and the stubborn survival of hope.
The problem? That language is going silent. And it is going silent from two directions at once.
Some dismiss mythology as irrelevant— old stories about gods nobody believes in anymore, taking up space in our lives and brains and learning that could be used for something “practical.” Others, particularly in Christian homeschool circles, avoid it out of a protective instinct— worried that exposure to the gods will somehow endanger their children’s faith. (I have personally seen this trend vastly grow in the past 5 years or so.)
Both impulses, however well-meaning, are producing the same result: a generation stepping away from a rich heritage woven throughout literature, speeches, sermons, and education for thousands of years. The gods of Greece and Rome were not immortal, as it turns out. But their legacy in our literary world should be… and we are in danger of watching it die in our lifetimes.
Literature and Theology, Wrapped Into One
Let’s acknowledge something before we go any further: mythology was never just entertainment in ancient times.
For the cultures that produced it, myth was the place where literature and theology met. It was how people who did not know God (or did not want to acknowledge Him) answered the questions they could not stop asking. Where did we come from? Why does the world feel broken? Why do we suffer? Why does beauty exist alongside cruelty? Why do we feel the pull toward something larger than ourselves and never quite reach it?
These are not pagan questions. They are human questions. They are the questions every soul asks because every soul was made by the same God.
Every soul bears the same Image.
Every soul carries the same fracture. Feels the same ache.
The myths are what you get when image-bearers try to answer those questions without the revelation of the Creator that would complete them. They are reaches toward truth from people who could feel the shape of it but could not see it clearly. That honest reaching makes them something entirely different from what we fear they are.
The original tellers of myth are not enemy territory. They are evidence— evidence that the hunger for God does not go away simply because His name is unknown. They are proof that the questions He alone can answer will always surface in every culture in every age, regardless of whether they have the answers.
C.S. Lewis argued in his essay Myth Became Fact that the old myths were not frauds or mere superstition: they were the dreams of a race made for a truth they did not yet know. The imagination kept reaching. It kept producing stories about death and return, about chaos and order, about a golden age lost and dimly hoped for again— because it was made by a God who put eternity in the human heart, and eternity has a way of pressing through even when the name of God is unknown. The Gospel, in Lewis’s framework, is not the replacement of myth but its fulfillment: the moment the dream became a real event, the imagination became fact, and the searchers finally found what they were looking for. A Christian reader, then, is not endangered by the myths. We are the most equipped audience to receive them because we have the Answer the myths was alluding to all along.
This is exactly what Paul understood when he stood on Mars Hill. The Athenians had built an altar to an unknown God: a gap in their theology they could feel but not fill. They had gotten themselves, through myth and philosophy and the restless reaching of human imagination, all the way to the question.
But Paul? He had the answer.
He did not distance himself from their stories. He completed them.
That is the model. And it only works if we know the stories well enough to step into them.
Pandora’s Box and the Echo We Might Miss
Let me go back to a myth I alluded to earlier: Pandora. I find her story to be one of the clearest examples of myth doing its deepest work.
Let’s recap her story: a woman is given a box (a jar, in the oldest tellings) and warned not to open it. She opens it anyway. Everything held inside— disease, sorrow, envy, cruelty, every form of suffering— escapes into the world. She slams the lid shut, but it is too late.
When she, with trembling hands, opens it again to see what remains, there is only one thing left at the bottom.
Hope.
Now, if you have been formed on Scripture, something in that story should feel deeply familiar— but not (just) because the Greeks copied Genesis. But because fallen human beings tell stories across centuries and cultures that keep reaching toward the same terrible and beautiful truth. They sense it in their bones even when they cannot name it.
A woman was warned. She did what she was directly told not to open. She didn’t open a box, but bit a fruit— and the world came undone with her. Sorrow entered. Suffering entered. Separation entered. The easy fellowship between the human soul and its Creator fractured in ways that have never stopped echoing.
And yet.
At the bottom of it all, in both stories, something remains that cannot be destroyed. In Pandora’s jar it is hope. In the garden, it is a promise— whispered into the wreckage before the couple is led out. A vow that the serpent’s head would one day be crushed, that the fellowship would be restored, that the world and our souls would not always be broken.
The Greeks did not know His name. But their imagination, reaching through myth for something it could feel but not fully see, landed on hope. And they knew hope was the right answer.
This is precisely what Lewis meant in Miracles when he wrote that the story of Christ is a myth— but a myth that is also fact. The Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection carries all the imaginative power and beauty of myth— and more, because it is The Greatest “Myth” that actually happened. The Greeks felt their way toward hope through Pandora. The Hebrews received it as promise in a garden. And then, in the fullness of time, Hope put on skin and walked into history— not as a story told around a fire, but as an event that split our Timeline into two.
If the myths are the long dream, Jesus Christ is the waking up in the morning.
That is not a coincidence of storytelling. That is the imagination of a fallen race that still remembers, somewhere beneath everything, that the world was not supposed to be this way and will not always remain so.
A child who knows Pandora’s story is a child whose imagination has already been tuned, however faintly, to that frequency. When the Gospel arrives in its fullness, it will not feel foreign. It will feel like the answer to a question the myths were always asking.
The Losing of a Friend
C.S. Lewis wrote something in The Four Loves that I have a returned to several times in my life when relationships have shifted and when grief has stepped in. He observed that when you lose a friend, you don’t only lose that person— you lose the parts of your other friends that only that friend could draw out. So if you have three friends, and Friend B leaves or dies… Friend A and Friend C don’t just grieve Friend B. They grieve the versions of themselves and in each other that Friend B saw and summoned. Those parts go quiet. Maybe forever. So instead of grieving just one person, we actually grieve all three.
I propose that myth works the same way in our literary life.
When we lose mythology— when we stop teaching it, stop reading it or treat it as optional or dangerous or simply irrelevant— we don’t just lose the myths themselves. We lose every thread of meaning that runs through every other work that uses them. Homer loses texture. Dante loses half his architecture. Shakespeare loses allusions that his audience caught in an instant. Milton becomes nearly impenetrable. These losses don’t just work backwards. They compound forward: every modern writer who reaches back for that vocabulary now speaks to readers who cannot understand what they are saying.
The books haven’t changed… but what the reader can receive from them does. What’s truly tragic is that the reader doesn’t even know what they are missing. They might be confused about a reference, but if they aren’t curious about it… the reference can and always will be lost. And the richness of the work is lost right along with them.
I mentioned before about a growing resistance over mythology over the past few years and I will be honest with you, it worries me. Not because I think parents are bad or foolish. But because I think the fear underneath the resistance reveals something about how we have begun to think about education itself.
The concern, as near as I can tell, is this: if my child learns about the gods, something bad will happen to their faith. They will be confused. They will be tempted. They will somehow absorb paganism through the reading of it.
I want to sit with that concern before I push back on it. I do understand the protective instinct. I share it. I am also a mother who thinks carefully about what I place before my children’s eyes and imaginations.
But consider Pandora.
If we refuse to teach that story, we lose more than a myth. We lose one of the most quietly powerful pre-echoes of Genesis in all of ancient literature. We lose a story that a Christian reader— and only a Christian reader— is fully equipped to receive, because we know what the Greeks were reaching for even when they didn’t. We lose the opportunity to sit with our children and say: do you see it? Do you see how even in this old broken story, the imagination of mankind kept arriving at hope?
We lose the chance to discuss Common Grace. To show them that truth has a way of announcing itself— even through imperfect vessels, even through stories told by people who did not yet know the whole of it.
Beyond that, though, Pandora’s box is one of the most frequently referenced mythological images in modern life. It shows up in political speeches, scientific debates, journalism, literature, film. The phrase alone carries a world of meaning about the dangers of releasing what cannot be recalled. A child who does not know the story will hear that phrase and receive nothing from it. A child who knows it will understand immediately— and will be equipped to think carefully about whatever argument is being made with it.
Being able to understand the whole of a message when it is being given is not a small thing to give up in the name of protection. How else will they know how to give an Answer for that hope that lies within them?
We can even see modeled in Scripture.
Paul was extraordinarily well-educated in the literature and mythology of the Gentile world and he used that education deliberately, strategically, and beautifully in his preaching. Some of the lines Christians quote as Paul’s own words are sometimes him actually quoting pagan poets and philosophers— reaching into the shared vocabulary of his audience to open a door for the Gospel.
He did not avoid that vocabulary because it came from outside his tradition. He mastered it because he understood that you cannot speak to people in a language they do not know. He trusted that truth, when it arrived, would announce itself as truth— regardless of the vessel it arrived in.
That is a model worth recovering. Not syncretism. Not compromise. But the confidence that a mind formed on the full range of human story and myth is not a weaker Christian mind— it is a more equipped one. It is a mind that can stand on Mars Hill, look at the altar to the unknown God, and say: let me tell you who He is.
The Literary Ladder We Cannot Afford to Lose
Every ladder has rungs. Places to put feet and pull up. In the literary ladder, myth and fairy tale are among the first, foundation rungs. They are not so simply because they came first. They are foundational because nearly everything rung above them uses them, too. Homer is in Dante. Dante is in Milton. Milton is in nearly every serious English writer who came after him. And Homer… well, is full of the myths.
But it isn’t just “old” writing that finds myth woven in: the fact that so many of the most beloved and enduring children’s books of this last century were written by Christians who were deeply formed on mythology is not a coincidence. Lewis, Tolkien, MacDonald, L’Engle, Cooper— they did not avoid the old stories. They were steeped in them. And that formation is inseparable from the depth and resonance of what they created.
If you skip those early rungs, I’ll be honest: the climb above them doesn’t become impossible, just like one can go up a real ladder with rungs missing. But it does become harder than it should be, in ways the reader cannot fully explain. The allusion lands but doesn’t resonate. The reference registers but won’t really work. The writer reaches for a shared vocabulary and the reader receives only the literal word, not the world behind it.
This is what we are handing our children when we strip the myths from their reading lives. Not a safer ladder. A harder one— with the most important rungs already gone.
The Language We Are Responsible to Keep
We are stewards of a literary heritage that took thousands of years to build.
The myths are part of that heritage— the allusions, the vocabulary, the shared imaginative atmosphere. They allow a speaker to say one name — Sisyphus — and have a room full of people feel the weight of futile, unending labor without a single further explanation.
That kind of shared story— where one word unlocks a whole world— is a gift. One we are losing.
Let’s deliberately decide to keep it.
Teach the myths. Read the old stories. Give your children the full ladder, rung by rung, and trust that a mind formed on the full range of human story is not a mind in danger— it is a mind being prepared…
Prepared to read well.
Prepared to think clearly.
Prepared to stand on whatever Mars Hill their generation puts them on and recognize the altar to the unknown God when they see it.
Our world is still building those altars. It is still asking the questions. It is still feeling its way, through story and longing and the restless ache of the human heart, toward the Answer it cannot quite name.
Our children can be the ones who know His name, and can point our world to Hope that doesn’t reside in the bottom of a jar… but deep inside of themselves.
embracing essentialism 