Recovering old myths

Perhaps it’s time to stop speculating over Wheel 2.0 and start looking at ways to improve Wheel 1.0, the one and only wheel, already invented but recently abandoned. Reinventing the wheel usually makes one forget what the wheel was for in the first place.

And perhaps it is time to recover old myths. It’s true, myths are never abandoned, but they lose their relevance once people stop telling them to each other.

In ancient times, the Gigantomachia was the name given to a bundle of myths having to do with the Olympian gods’ war against the giants at the start of the universe. A ‘machia’ means struggle in ancient Greek, a fight against a visible or invisible enemy, like the Psychomachia, the allegorical poem by the 5th century Latin poet Prudentius. The focus of the Psychomachia or the Struggle of the Soul is the allegorical clash of vices and virtues. A struggle within self, a sometimes ‘manual for living with defeat’, as Leonard Cohen once put it. What’s more modern than that?

There’s another gigantomachia these days, the struggle against the tech giants in respect to privacy and the tracking of our digital crumbs. We can go even further and look at the Amazonomachia or Amazonomachy, the mythical battle between the ancient Greeks and the Amazons. Our own not so mythical, (not so successful either) battle between small shops and all-powerful Amazon, joining the gigantomachy of the other warring tribes.