Fans pick 100 books like Primitive Mythology

I love Carl Jung’s ability to see into the nature of consciousness and make the connection between the experience of being a being on Earth and the true nature of our being. He is one of the first scientists to describe the near-death experience and to see it as another trick of the dualistic world.

Jung explains how, during his heart attack, he died and was transported above the earth to a doorway guarded by a cosmically dangerous spike. Jung’s observations as a scientist and doctor about what makes us tick are a foundation for people realizing their true nature through people like David Bingham today.

Of seminal importance to an understanding of the world is the conception of a collective unconscious grounded in inheritable archetypes. These evolve: how could it be otherwise—everything in nature evolves. And that means that our consciousness, too, evolves. Its evolution is, in a sense, teleological: from the less conscious to the more consciousness. This is to say that the evolution of the archetypes permits the increasing distillation of consciousness from the vastness of the collective unconscious. I believe that language, which is indivisible from consciousness, did not begin to materialize until about 10,000 BC. I may have been virtually alone in this view, but computerized models of evolutionary linguists today suggest that the key to language capability may have been enfolded in our make-up from our earliest beginnings.

At about 10,000 BC, there appeared in Mesopotamia female statuettes, clearly privileging fertility. They came to be associated with the bucranium – the head and horns of the wild bull aurochs, and, over time, the pair took on the unmistakable stamp of a goddess and her consort, a bull.

Jacques Cauvin, who conducted their excavation, was able to link the pair with the birth of agriculture, and in so doing he found that the individual came, for the first time, to stand in a worshipful posture toward an other-worldly existent – bringing about for humanity thereby an entirely new cultural orientation. Indeed, the pair bore “all the traits of the Mother-Goddess who dominated the oriental pantheon, “right up to the time of the male-dominated monotheism of Israel” (p. 31).

Cognitive neuroscientist Merlin Donald posited that, at the most fundamental level, humans have a hybrid mind, one that consists of a gene-based mammalian, analogue brain, onto which is grafted a culture-based, symbolic brain. The former, the primitive mammalian brain, is a space where “the lines between consciousness and the mind’s inaccessible unconscious modules are drawn very deep in the sand” (p. 286).

As to myth, Donald noted that virtually all hunter-gatherer societies observed in the modern era have or had elaborate mythological systems, all structured along the same lines, in which myth informs every aspect of life: “myth permeates and regulates daily life, channels perceptions, determines the significance of every object and event in life. Clothing, food, shelter, family – all receive their ‘meaning’ from myth” (p. 215).

I'd heard a lot about Norse myths on social media recently, but I was unfamiliar with them. 

The idea of Gaiman weaving his narrative magic through the tapestry of these ancient tales intrigued me, and it surely made for an exciting read.

Even if you're unfamiliar with Norse mythology (as I was), this retelling will awe you with the strangeness and wonder of these ancient tales. Norse Mythology is more than a book; it's an invitation to a hypnotic world inhabited by gods, giants, undead goats, betrayals, a mischievous squirrel, elves, dwarves, and Valkyries.

This collection is an enthralling journey through a selection of Norse myths, narrated with Neil Gaiman's trademark wit and simplicity.

I first learned about Penelope Farmer’s Beginnings: Creation Myths of the World while reading Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From. In her short book, Farmer has compiled fragments of myths from around the world, and she organized these brief excerpts into sections that describe the beginning of the world, the origin of the earth and Man, flood and fire mythologies, the origin of death and food plants, and the end of the world. To see such different (and, sometimes, intriguingly similar) mythologies from diverse cultures sharing fundamental interests is inspiring in itself, and for such a quick survey of our world’s origin stories, the book is cosmic in scope and a wonderful jumping off place for additional research.

This gorgeous book is both metaphoric and literal. A young boy learns about dragons (and himself, his grandmothers, and life) on a mythical bedtime story-walk to find two very different paths.

I love the message here (and that it isn’t too in-your-face message-y; the story is really primary). But the art is so gorgeous that I could dive back into it over and over again for that alone. 

Greek mythology that reads like a storybook.

I never thought I would enjoy reading Greek mythology. But how Fry wrote it is really amazing. Now, when I go to a museum and see an ancient painting depicting Greek Mythology, I am often able to explain what is visualised in the artwork.

In the book, Zeus and the other Gods get a true character and the fights they have are depicted in a way that you still want to read it till the end, even if you know what the end will look like. 

Of course, the characters in this book are the stuff of legend: King Arthur, Guinevere, and the narrator of this tale, Lancelot.

But I think what is great about Mr. Kristian's approach is that he makes them all completely and recognizably human, with all the frailties and failings of ordinary people who are forced, by world events, to rise to the extraordinary.

Men who will be myths are, at heart, only men. A beautifully realized setting, a credible and incredible world for one of the great stories to play out against.

If you try to learn about the cultural history of the sacred female cross-culturally, you are likely to encounter the attitude in our patriarchal society that Goddesses couldn’t really have been widespread or ever been very important. A handy refutation can be found in this book, which contains information on over 11,000 Goddesses, nymphs, spirits, and deified women around the world. Grouped according to geographic regions, each entry gives you not only the translation of the Goddess’s name but also her story. That is, it’s a biographical dictionary because it gives the characteristics and the mythology associated with each Goddess. If you read through the entries for any one region, you will become immersed in a deeply poetic sense of the resonant cultural history underlying later developments.