Bread and circusesis a pejorative phrase, but who would give up either? The termfolkloreis often used derogatorily; but in a recent, elite university class I gotno“yeses” to this question: would a world without urban legends be a better world? And who among us is not proud, sometimes, to merge into “the masses,” or at least this or that “mass”?

The works that most epitomize the contemporary genre of popular science— books by John Barrow, Daniel Dennett, Brian Greene, or Stephen Hawking—are not read by “the masses” but instead by the proverbial “serious reader” who...

Finally, there it is.¹ Despite its monumental proportions, you approach it from above as the blast-furnace heat calls to mind Dante’s descent through the rings of Hell. It claimed ninety-six human lives. With the Great Depression and lean war years in recent memory, my parents’ low-budget honeymoon trip was a sort of early post–New Deal pilgrimage to see and, as attested by some fading photos, to stand on this symbol of hope. They purchased a Navajo blanket nearby. I do not recall the Navajo blanket ever wrapped around me, but I do recall it being draped each night, for...

Chapter 1 Considered traditional proverbial templates that offer mechanisms for converting and thus comparatively assessing everyday values; but this is just one example from the myriad ways traditional folkloric and folk-religious forms function psychologically to help individuals achieve a sense of personal coherence, direction, and effectiveness.¹ The mechanisms are legion: epic heroes provide role models; sermons, revivals, festivals, and spectacles energize; rituals and pilgrimages walk participants through life strategies; games raise verbal and kinetic skills; techniques of prayer, meditation, and confession encourage self-assessment; and practices of the sort ethnographers labelmagicalconvey enlarged visions of an individual’s ability to influence...

December 21, 2012: winter solstice and terminus of the Mayan calendar. Another day that will live in infamy? At this bottoming-out moment of cosmic time I open Pandora’s tote bag, which has rested inconspicuously on a shelf in my study since 2004. The tote bag was part of the registration packet for an extravaganza conference (in Atlanta, GA, June 2–6, 2004) called “Mythic Journeys,” sponsored by the Mythic Imagination Institute, an organization of artists, scholars, and fans of mythology (in a broad sense that includes, for example, fantasy literature and film). I came to add the moniker “Pandora’s” from...

The previous two Chapters Dealt with individuals’ dissatisfaction with themselves or the prevailing worldview of their societies and with attempts, many alluding to or inspired by “folk” remedies, to diagnose and correct the perceived defects. This chapter deals with the now broadly familiar concept of the “meme” and how this concept, too, in surprising ways, has been drawn into discourses about personal and societal pathologies and their remedies. I briefly discuss three levels at which memes are drawn into moral discourse, each of which I find highly problematic. One level is nothing less than “the problem of evil”—that is,...

In his modern classicMythologies,Roland Barthes (1995) applies the termmythto cultural-political ideologies embodied in everyday French and American middle-class popular entertainments, food preferences, social attitudes, and material paraphernalia—such as toys, laundry detergent, and magazines. Barthes’s usage is jolting and problematic for scholars who wish to reserve “myth” for grand cosmological narratives. However, the discord lessens, or at least takes a new turn, as one realizes that Barthes’s vignettes on everyday life typically implicate grand and often archaic dimensions. For example, in “The Face of Garbo,” Barthes alludes to themes of the eternal or archetypal in human...

In the late 1950s, Frank Capra, the Hollywood filmmaker best known forIt’s a Wonderful Lifeand other depictions of optimistic Americana (aka “Capra-corn”), directed four popular science films with the sponsorship of Bell Telephone:Our Mr. Sun(1956),Hemo the Magnificent(1957),The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays(1957), andThe Unchained Goddess(1958). Although both the tape-analog and digital video-recording technologies we now take for granted were yet to come, countless children viewed these films in grade school through the primitive but treasured technology of the time: the clicking and sometimes smoking film projector. Capra claimed that...

“Epiphany,” “peak experience,” “the sublime,” “Flow,” “aha moment”: these are some of the many terms—bearing a family resemblance while differing in tone and connotation—through which analytical thinkers have sought to identify and characterize moments of intense, transcendent, harmonizing personal experience. The converse is also possible: equally intense, personal glimpses of cosmic disharmony and disconnection. Because we tend to equate literary writing with storytelling, it is important to take cognizance of this exception: some of the most intense literary moments inhere not in narrative but in literarily conveyed cosmic visions—though, of course, these visions sometimes emerge as pauses...

The “Cosmic moments” Considered in Chapter 7 were built around feelings of interconnections between ourselves and the cosmos. Weinberg marked an exception in his insistence on a cosmos hostile to us; yet even he finds a meaningful, if tragic, cosmic purpose in our scientific enterprise of attempting to understand the cosmos. Intense aesthetic and moral experiences are to be had in such moments. However, another kind of intense experience is found in the opposite direction: in dramatizing the fault lines of the cosmos and elaborating its main constituents agonistically rather than integratively; Weinberg’s comment starts us in that direction.

William...

In Chapter 5, I called attention to a conceit encountered repeatedly in mythological cosmologies: the assumption that there is a sympathetic resonance between the local and the cosmic, the village and the universe. It is also not uncommon to encounter mythological cosmologies that propose more finely gradated versions of such microcosmic-macrocosmic sympathies. In these, the village is situated as the smallest within a series of embedded, enlarging circles, the most encompassing of which is the cosmos. Here, too, the relationship among the micro-, the macro-, and the various “mesocosms” is generally regarded as one of reciprocating sympathies between levels. In...

In the previous Chapters I have focused on forms of science popularizing that surround us in the present world. This concluding chapter shifts the focus in one major respect: it adds the dimension of historical time. Specifically, through an experiment in anachronistic comparison, I draw in another concern of contemporary folklorists, namely, durability. Folklorists have a complicated, if not tortured, relationship with the idea of durability because, on one hand, they do not want their study limited to old-time stuff, but, on the other, some sort of persistence is part of the all-important concept of tradition. Moreover, a growing discourse...