The Myth of the Matter.

Do fairy tales and mythology still have appeal? For most of us in the western world, our first experience of our culture’s classic stories—Snow White, Cinderella, —Bible come through images that we learn about our culture’s foundational stories. Jack Zipes, the dean of academic fairy-tale studies traces the origin of storytelling back to a primal past: “the fairy tale was first a simple, imaginative oral tale containing magical and miraculous elements and was related to the belief systems, values, rites, and experiences of pagan peoples. The fairy tale evolved from unknown origins into a gigantic cultural juggernaut, and survives by digesting every new medium, from print to films to the internet. The reason they survive to this day, Zipes suggests, is because the classic fairy tales — mythology and holy books, are perfect examples of “memetic” engineering. Drawing on the notion of the meme coined by Richard Dawkins, Zipes imagines the elements of fairy tales competing for mental space over generations of cultural evolution, until only the fittest and cleverly marketed books survived. And what makes a tale “fit” is that it has the power “to determine and influence social practices,” beliefs, faith and to shape the way human beings live together. If “fairy tales and holy books came to be contested and marked as holy, relevant, and real,” he writes, it is because they gave voice to the powerless—children, women, the poor and the hopeless. What draws believers is a certain piety about the act of the story itself. So much of the appeal of these stories, in a preliterate, premodern culture, must have been simply in their demonstration of the power of words to defy the laws of nature. In the Harry Potter stories, the formula of the fairy tale is inverted: magic, like miracles performed in the holy books, becomes an accessory to what is essentially a parable about growing up, which may be why the Potter books appeal to older readers as well. Philosophy is born when this kind of storytelling begins to acknowledge that the world never does grant our wishes or prayers, and that the stubbornness of things is ultimately more satisfying to hear about than their mutability. Never ending Myths –Adam Kirsch.