I had a friendly chat today with an individual who mused upon whether civilizations can survive without mythologies, and wondered if American civilization had a mythology. My first thought was to ask, "What's your mythology?" My more elaborate response was that first, all humans have their own mythology,¹ and civilizations are constructed from human building blocks, ergo, they will also by their nature exhibit mythologies. Civilizational mythologies will of course differ from personal mythologies, in that while the former are public representations, the latter are private. While the former are generally (though not always) invariant over a generation, or perhaps even multiple generations, the latter may shift and morph over the course of an individual's life. Nevertheless, there is a dynamic interaction between public and private mythologies which I believe we implicitly assume but rarely explicitly state. I believe that many intellectuals stumble upon the reality that the reaction flows in both directions and attempt to fix the causal arrow in one direction (inferring individuals character from public mythology or assuming that public mythology is simply a reflection of individual character).

Mythologies can tell you something about the self-perception of a collective body of people, because they are often expressed as depictions of the ultimate individual apotheosis of a given culture. A Gilgamesh, Herakles or Indra.² Individual mythologies can also you tell something about someone.

So I will offer the first ten personages who populate my own personal mythology (the first ten who come to mind, so it will have only a rough aproximation with "true" rank order if I repeated this exercise) . Spinoza, Darwin, Aristotle, R.A. Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane, Marcus Aurelius, Antoine Lavoisier, John Stuart Mill, Isaac Newton and Archimedes. I wil refrain from elucidating my personal mythology in any conceptual fashion (it is obvious that the names above are actors in broad expanse of my imaginings) because as a private representation it is so self-referential that I don't think that I can communicate how I perceive it to be with any degree of high fidelity beyond banal generalities which you can already intuit from the list above (or my writings as a whole).

1 - I excuse the extremely autistic or mentally retarded. Also, note that my use of the term "mythology" is rather liberal.

2 - In modern times evangelical Christian mythology tends to focus on Jesus as the apotheosis, while, not to be blasphemous, Muslims do the same to Muhammed. But this tendency is not limited to religion, Lenin was once the apotheosis of the Soviet Man, while Mao is still to some extent revered by the Chinese.