This was the summation of my undergrad work, my Honors capstone, presented at the EAPSU Spring 2011 conference. I remain incredibly proud of it, and want to expand upon my work one day.

As children of the burgeoning digital era, my generation has experienced a technological paradigm shift firsthand. Thus, it is with great interest that we begin to study the effects of the phenomenon that have we lived through, and attempt to prepare ourselves, or those who come ahead of us, for the next. Speaking for myself, at least, this attempted explanation found roost in the narratives of mythology.
Many today have heard of British author, J.R.R. Tolkien, and his series, The Lord of the Rings. However, most are not aware that he participated in an informal society of like-minded authors, known as the Inklings. Together with influential authors such as C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, Tolkien wrestled with issues left behind from the technological shift caused by the Industrial Revolution. Some of his first thoughts on the matter crystallized in his little-known poem, “Mythopoeia.” His thinking on the nature of myth and its recycling effect eventually culminated in the Lord of the Rings, as Tolkien sought to combine numerous myth systems into a modernized format. His efforts informed an entire culture, and have persisted in popular awareness since the late 1960s. Although they focused on different aspects of mythological lore, both Lewis and Williams also completed integrations of mythology in modern novels.
The repeated reinvigoration of myth at the foundation of a culture experiencing technological paradigm shifts is easy enough to track throughout time, and some modicum of this paper will be dedicated to doing just that. However, an awareness of myth’s transformations and transformative properties can potentially reveal much, much more. Presenting the groundwork for such an examination is at the heart of this project, as well as suggesting a possible mapping for the digital and even postdigital eras, and what may await us in their binary shadows.
But before any such bleak cyber scrying, an understanding of the importance of mythology to modern readers is critical. Myth has long been written off as fairy tales for the uneducated, perhaps as a side-effect of the modernizing force which sustains it in the first place. As a result, instead of seeing it as a culturally-defining current flowing at the base of society, myth has been written off as churlish superstition, and nothing more. That said, several theorists have identified myth as crucially important. The first of these, Claude Levi-Strauss, was a famed anthropologist. Much of his work dealt with the mythologies of native cultures, and, in his multi-volume work Mythologiques, Levi-Strauss turns his attention squarely on mythology itself as a means of embodied communication. The first volume, The Raw and the Cooked, is subtitled “An Introduction to a Science of Mythology,” and this title seems quite apt to what Levi-Strauss is attempting: to create a structuralist model for mythic narratives that is capable of connecting and mapping the transformations of any specific myth across time and region. Throughout this project, Levi-Strauss illustrates the interconnectedness of myth and society, which will provide a crucial cornerstone going forward.
Also critical to understanding the project is theorist Walter Ong. Providing a background on orality and the initial transmission of epic narratives, Ong’s Orality and Literacy describes the core changes enacted on epics that the transition from embodied, corpular communication to literate, disembodied communication forced. At the core of the matter is the conception of language itself. As Ong notes, “Language and thought for the ancient Greeks grew out of memory. Mnemosyne, not Hephaestus, is the mother of the muses.” It is worth noting the mythological reference that Ong makes. While entertaining and whimsical since Hephaestus, being male, would not have been a mother regardless, Ong’s point is not lost: if language grows from memory, it is perhaps apt that we read language as having originary content that needs to be extracted or remembered, as opposed to if language grew from the forge and was smelted by mankind with purpose. This purposeful manipulation of language is a hallmark of the industrial revolution, with its focus on capitalism and disembodied, reproducible narratives that sell well.
Now that the background pieces have been established, let’s look at the Inklings, specifically. The threshold of the 20th century brought with it rapid industrialization across most of Europe and the Americas. This industrialization, in turn, made World War I all the more disillusioning, as the stark contrast between the marvels of the World’s Fairs and the practical applications of that technology was made apparent. The aftermath of World War I led to many authors questioning then-modernity, and scrambling to recover meaning in the face of industrialized-nihilistic impulses. This led Tolkien to experiment with the concept of mythopoesis in his poem “Mythopoeia.” Having fought in World War I, Tolkien was very aware of the crisis of meaning that the Industrial Revolution brought with it. Already interested from a young age in mythology and philology, Tolkien’s notion of mythopoesis was simple enough: mythology contains kernels of spiritual and foundational truths, and mythopoesis itself is an act of understanding and reinventing those truths. This can be seen through the following lines from “Mythopoeia”:

"...There is no firmament,
only a void, unless a jewelled tent
myth-woven and elf-patterned; and no earth,
unless the mother’s womb whence all have birth.”

The notion of myth-making as a creative process akin to birth is especially intriguing, since it flies in the face of previously established conceptualizations of mythology. Tolkien saw mythic structures not merely as long-dead archaeological remnants, but as living seeds waiting to burst forth new meaning.
Nor was Tolkien the only member of the Inklings to experiment with regenerating myth. Although initially skeptical of any value within myth, famously calling it “Lies breathed through silver,” C.S. Lewis eventually used the process of mythopoesis himself, synthesizing a variety of mythological systems into a cohesive whole to form The Chronicles of Narnia. Likewise, Inkling Charles Williams also used mythopoetic structures in his novels, focusing on occult themes instead of Tolkien’s folklore or Lewis’s Christianity. In this way, each of these three major authors infused the modern era with new meaning drawn from a different mythological source. Williams’s focus on occult themes hearkens back to the oral, embodied nightmare-stories that originated the theme; Lewis’s hybrid fusion of Christianity and heavily altered folk traditions recalls proselytizing and commercialization; which leaves Tolkien.
Before pairing him with a type of story-telling, however, digitized discourse must be examined. When I first set about this project, I wanted to explore how Tolkien’s notion of mythopoesis could be applied to the digital era. Internet culture is, of course, crawling with all sorts of references to mythic figures, doubtless spurred on by the presence of so many fantasy-themed video games. Initially, I thought that it was as simple as noticing that myth’s ebb and flow runs foundational to each new paradigm. I quickly realized, however, that the query is more complicated than that. This resulted in the creation of various terminology to suit each one, and the dividing of the work into three sections: oral, textual, and digital. The roots of this can be seen in Ong’s work, as mentioned earlier, as well as by introducing capitalism and novelization. This tripartite examination eventually aligned each of the three authors with corpular, modular, and nodular versions of the mythopoetic process, corresponding to the methods of communication used in each technological paradigm. Using running characterizations of each version such as capitalism and complexity theory, a grid was developed highlighting all of the alignments. Further descriptions, such as premodern, modern, and postmodern, shed further light on the subject, and allowed for more doors to open.
To summarize everything up to this point, then, Levi-Strauss and Ong allow for an understanding of myth as culturally foundational at an oral, corpular level. The textual revolution happens, and myth must undergo a fundamental reconstruction: due to the printing press and the increasing amount of industrialization, narratives must now serve the demands of capitalistic forces. In this modular paradigm, then, what was once bodily must now become restricted and disembodied. The Inklings, acting in response to the disillusionment brought on by the full fury of the industrial revolution and World War I, each sought to form a system of meaning in the modern era, and each turned to a different aspect of myth in so doing. This allowed for the process of mythopoesis, which is an understanding and reinvention of the truths buried within mythology itself, and generated fresh myth narratives which still have meaning in today’s world.
This brings us to the advent of the digital age, and the accompanying technological revolution that enabled it. There is a whole litany of terms that can be used to describe the digital era, with some that I have used including nodular, complex, detemporalized, social, and distributed. Returning to the question of what variety of mythopoesis Tolkien would belong to, I would propose that a third category, nodular mythopoesis, would be his proper home. If Williams represents a return to orality through corpular mythopoesis, and Lewis represents a contentedness within textuality through modular mythopoesis, then Tolkien can be seen to fall into this new, digital category: reaching for and ultimately reshaping our understanding of what a mythic structure is capable of through a nodular-based approach.
As the truest example of mythopoesis created by the Inklings amongst any of their diverse works, The Lord of the Rings uses myth not merely as a theme or motif, but actively seeks truths within the systems it is built upon, and combines multiple structures into a new whole unlike anything to come before. This is something that cannot be said of Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, for example, which stands as a folkloric rendition of the Christian narrative, with some minor additions along the way.
Of course, nodular mythopoetics itself can be used to other ends besides mere classification and literary criticism: it can transcend the boundary into a rhetoric of the machine. For example, one day, as I was looking at the mapping of terms, I began to wonder if I could use nodular mythopoetics as a base from which a postdigital paradigm could be theorized — more on this later. Coincidentally, I was turning at the time to a contemporary of the Inklings: H.P. Lovecraft. His Cthulhu Mythos cycle maps disturbingly well to a postdigital paradigm, although predating the digital revolution by several decades. It also makes several interesting connections that will be relevant later on…but I digress.
Lovecraft was another writer working in the early 1900s, and trying to restore some sense of meaning in the wake of World War I. While not reintegrating myth in a manner similar to the Inklings, Lovecraft still unknowingly utilized a mythopoetic process in the creation of his Cthulhu Mythos. Lovecraft took a rather different stance with regards to the crisis of modernity, however. Deeply pessimistic, Lovecraft’s protagonists had their sanity attacked, rather than their physical forms exclusively. Unlike the Inklings, who attempted to assert a positive influence, Lovecraft toyed with every existing concept, and shattered them. Romantic, Enlightenment, and humanist notions were all crushed by a single, revealing glimpse at the abyss ultimately at the heart of reality.
Crucial to this void were entities known as the Great Old Ones, among which Cthulhu is a high priest. The Great Old Ones are dreadful beings that exist beyond human comprehension. My favorite quote with which to explain the nature of the Great Old Ones is thus:

“The secret priests would take great Cthulhu from his tomb to revive His subjects and resume his rule of earth….Then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.”

This notion of utter chaos seems rather bleak to us as readers coming from a (mostly) structured and orderly worldview. It is worth noting the crucial phrase “beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside.” Cthulhu and his fellows exist beyond current human comprehension, and although they represent absolute, abyssal evil to mankind, the Great Old Ones are in fact essentially different. To identify them with chaos, however, is probably as close as we can actually get to understanding them as beings.
Despite Lovecraft creating the character in the 1920s, Cthulhu can be seen to play a crucial role in the fledgling digital era. With the advent of the Internet, the character, and indeed the rest of Lovecraft’s fiction as a whole, has experienced a spurt of unparalleled popularity. Online representations of Cthulhu can be found on subjects ranging from demanding spellcheck to Cthulhu-for-President (after all, why vote for the lesser evil?). In his ubiquitous nature, both insofar as the literary character as well as his online persona, Cthulhu is rapidly becoming a primary figure in the digital revolution.
That said, though, Cthulhu is in fact omnipresent within this entire project. Cthulhu speaks to corpular mythopoetics through his essence as a timeless unknown, operating only on the fringes of human awareness. His presence can be felt in a modular worldview, as well, in his role as Ultimate Evil. Anti-modularity incarnate, Cthulhu defies the very order that modularity seeks to impose in the name of capitalist acquisition. This is particularly interesting, because it makes a significant connection. Cthulhu exerts a silent call on humans, luring them to perform acts in his name. He is chaos incarnate, and seeks resurrection from his death-like state in order to walk the stars once more. In short, he is capital itself. He flows throughout and operates within every technological paradigm, manipulating cults into carrying out his wish to circulate.
So, to conclude, this work traces the flow of myth from fundamentally culture-building at the oral level, through to novelization and commodification at the modular level, up to the present day nodular level, wherein myth is currently in a stage of coagulation and reintegration. There are many potential expansions upon this core, some of which I have begun to explore. Examples include: a transplantation of Gaia theory, equating myth itself to a Gaian force operating within the self-regulation of the Internet’s nodular communities; utilization of complexity theory, with an emphasis on moments of crisis and chaos as they occur throughout the process of mythopoetics; and finally an extrapolation of “the next step” — a postdigital technological paradigm, perhaps related to the notion of transfinitude and quantum computing, which may well be powerful enough to enact mythopoesis in frightening ways. And amidst all of this, Cthulhu waits, dead dreaming.