Wisdom of the Mythtellers

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

This could be the most important book published in Canada in 1994. It is
a book about myth, but Sean Kane’s myth is not the melodramatic
anthropology of James Frazer, the psychological systematizing of Freud,
or the literary codification of Northrop Frye. This is an ecological
myth—which means that it is a timely book but by no means a trendy
one.

Kane is concerned with “mythtelling”—a word analogous to
storytelling, since his subject is the communication of sacred story. In
the course of the book he defines it as “the human dialogue with
environment.” The myths represented include Australian aboriginal
songs, Haida myths, Irish epic tales, even the Odyssey and the so-called
Homeric hymns. Kane uses this surviving evidence in an attempt to
reconstruct a significant prehistoric wisdom that our modern
technological civilization has disastrously ignored but may perhaps be
in the process of learning to relearn.

Although Kane writes a clear, untainted prose, this is not an easy book
to read, because we have almost lost the power to understand mythic
language. This, he insists, is a “subtle language” that stretches
our imagination. Each chapter begins with a translation of one of the
sacred texts, which Kane then proceeds to elucidate so far as is now
possible in terms of the original intention rather than those of our own
later preconceptions. He is intent upon demonstrating “how the context
in which a myth is presented actually reshapes the story.”

We hear a lot nowadays about “Native peoples,” in terms either of
political and legal rights or of encouraging a “marginalized” people
to express themselves in “our” language. Kane’s approach is less
likely to hit the headlines but is ultimately more crucial to the
natural world, which we must learn to treat properly in the 21st century
if human beings are to survive into the 22nd. Kane patiently uncovers an
all-but-lost wisdom that may make the process possible. It is a lesson
that, whatever our skin color, all of us—especially politicians and
scientists—will have to learn.