Mycorrhizal Mythophony: Towards Black (&) Classical Myth Studies
In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas
corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas)
adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi
ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen!
My mind’s brought to speak on bodies morphed into new forms. Gods — for y‘all’ve wrought them changes — breathe over my beginnings and lead my song perpetually from the world’s first origin through my own time...
— opening lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
This past week has laid quite a bit bare around the global environmental crisis. I find it incredibly clarifying for my future as an American at least — for some reason I’m positive that in twenty years, amidst inferno, I am most likely still going to be teaching mythology in whatever form that may inevitably take in the future.
America is such a site for environmental destruction. Our ideological system has helped aid with this from the beginning (life, liberty, pursuit of property which later became happiness — the equating of environment with our emotions) and so has, I would argue, our utter lack of eschatology in this country. Being one of the most conspicuous consumer cultures in history, it seems (in contrast to the hyper conspicuous grave-goods of the past) in America we want our afterlives now. To live as gods during our own lifetimes, because there isn’t an afterlife that we’re particularly worried about.
America also is a site of creation and alternative practices from minority groups that the state has historically attempted to regulate and/or extinguish: the Indigenous communities, the Black descendants of enslaved peoples, the queer diaspora, and the disabled communities — and particularly those who have intersecting identities across those groups. Each of these groups have their own relationship to land in America through different and interrelating ways — around genocide, racialized capitalism, social segregation, and access.
As an American classicist, I have an incredibly privileged perspective of what imperial collapse looks like over time — and how intrinsic belief systems are to humans’ relationship with the environment. Thinking alongside Sylvia Wynter’s ideas around ethno-astronomy, especially in antiquity (272), I’m often thinking of how myth is one of the primary ways that we as a species have made meaning for ourselves within the cosmos. And myths in general can create surprising results — as a nascent classicist in undergrad, I was astonished at how many of my European colleagues had scarcely considered the reasons, beliefs, and myths that had led them to come to America to study the ancient Mediterranean. At this critical time, I suggest turning to the environment to understand the ways in which myth might survive into the future (and in turn, help us survive in the future).
When classicists ask “how do we attract more interest to the field?” they tend to overlook quite a large lacuna around precisely how to do that — one of the largest honeytraps for generating interest in classics in America come through Greek and Roman mythology. However, going past the undergraduate level, there is very little structural support around studying myth (and in fact, most who get into the field for that exact reason tend to be discouraged away from the broad topic, being told to specialize on specific authors instead).
Classical mythology in general doesn’t have much theorizing around it after Levi-Strauss (psychoanalysis too, but I’m not even going to touch that one). This in part may have to do with the philological side’s general discomfort with the field of anthropology, unless it is specifically offering a classical lens to consider. It also doesn’t help that the different designations around myths — fables, fairytales, folklore, legends — all blend and blur depending on time period and cultural context.
When it comes to studying ideology in antiquity, things tend to get divvied up into either Religious Studies or Philosophy. But what about myth itself, and why is it so difficult to study? And what on earth is myth tradition vs myth reception? Aren’t all myths in antiquity technically reception? What about the wildly diverging Euripidean or Ovidian interpretations of mythology make them tradition rather than reception?
These are the questions that drive me, a mythologist, as I try to understand the links between ancient mythology and how they echo into the contemporary. Considering that myths and stories are one of the primary ways that we encode information to one another, how will we use myth going forward into the environmental apocalypse? What even is myth?
After thinking about it for most of the summer, I might finally have a theory around all of this:
Myths are sounding hypha-e.
I. Sounding Mythophony
If we go back to the etymology of myth, out of the Greek muthos, our earliest instances of myths are voices across space and time. The word first appears in Homer and is oriented around authoritative speech acts (as Richard Martin has illustrated for decades) before gaining more of a traditional sense of being a fable centuries later. Most often coming in the form of music, Greek myths were tales of divine beings interacting with the known world to explain various processes of being.
There are two areas of myth that one can study currently when it comes to classics — mythology and mythography — the latter being the practice of myth collectors who would write about the differences in mythic canon across cultures in antiquity. Both of these subfields are very attuned to the words of myth, to what I’d argue has been to a fault. The aural/oral aspects of myths have been left more on the ground, even with recent efforts to study the soundscapes of mythology (most recently I’ve been enjoying Sarah Kaczor’s excellent dissertation on Ovidian soundscapes). I would like to propose, however, a third area of myth that should be considered in the realms of classical studies: mythophony, or the voices of myth.
Phōnē, or voice, also goes through an interesting transformation of definition from its use in Archaic poetry going into the Hellenistic era — by Aristotle, it’s primarily connected with the individualistic human voice, but back in Homer it spoke of the many voices of nature interacting in their own soundscape (as Kristin Sampson has illustrated in Antiquities Beyond Humanism). I would like to focus on the au/oral aspects of myth to emphasize the sound of myth, and how myth itself sounds — a sense that tends to get left on the ground for sight when it comes to studying ancient texts, even musical ones. And to lean into the temporalities that both muthos and phōnē go through, mythophony speaks to the timeless human impulse to sound ourselves into the canons of nature.
In terms of myths sounding, and trying to look through eschatological lenses from contemporary American scholarship, I would like to lean on Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being to deploy multiple definitions of the English word “sound” to think through the ways in which myth sounds:
- Au/Orally (sonic vibrations that can be sensed through the ear, or through the sense of touch, particularly with lower louder vibrations such as that of thunder or the bass coming through a strong speaker — myths not only sonically resonate across time and space, they are also often tied to the sounds of nature either calling out to the gods or the gods themselves calling out)
- Wellbeing (as in being “safe and sound” or in a “sound sleep” — myths help secure the wellbeing of a society or ecosystem, bringing everyone into common understanding, common canon)
- Depth (as in a whale sounding down under the waves — myths dive past multiple surfaces and root themselves deeper within us, even as truth looms ever-present)
- Liquid (as in Puget Sound, where I grew up, a sound as a thin inlet of water connecting two larger bodies of water, or dividing two land masses. There is an interesting liquid quality when it comes to myths, a stickiness — as water is an incredibly sticky chemical compound — that tends to reach out and connect/encode information across different groups)
These definitions of sound create there own interesting loop around the ocean, I’ve noted. And in thinking through ecological lenses for moving forward, I find the ocean to be such an inspirational site of sounding, and not just because of the latter two definitions of sound. The roar of the tides has been one of the oldest soundscapes on our planet, and the wellbeing of the ocean has been one of the primary concerns around climate change. The ocean has also been an important motif in both ancient mythologies as well as myth-making coming out of the Black Atlantic.
For this reason it’s informed many of the ecological lenses I’ve been looking at when it comes to myth—Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals right now has been clarifying some points around oceanic sounding for me — however despite my own interests in the ocean and the moon’s relationship to life on earth, it was actually within the kingdoms of life and academic metaphor that I found the environmental lens that I was looking for.
And here is the point where I must admit — this could genuinely be my bias. I work on mostly chthonic-agricultural myths in antiquity because the commonality they hold around human experiences makes them really easy to compare: everyone has to eat and die. But there’s something around the process of chthonic-agricultural myths that gave me the answer, in that one-two-three process they tend to go through of consumption, digestion, and transformation — partly because there was a resonance I noticed around both Black ecology and the mythologies of Black folks being considered a part of the environment. Consumption and transformation in regards to myth have been picked apart quite a bit, but it was actually the middle stage that I wanted to talk about more, especially thinking through some of the fascinating ways myths help us digest information across time and space.
So I turned to the digestive tract of our planet: fungi.
II. Mycorrhizal Hypha-e
Now, when it comes to the eukaryotic kingdoms of life on this planet and their relationships to epistemology, Animalia and Plantae have more than gotten their due. Fungi, on the other hand, curiously haven’t…perhaps because they were long considered a part of botany, even though developmentally they are much closer to Animalia.
However it is specifically certain fungi’s relationship to plants — mycorrhizal fungi — where I see an interesting parallel to mythology. Mycorrhizal fungi branch out and connect to different plant roots through their hyphae (their thin thread-like “roots” ) which collectively make up a mycelium. Through their networking, fungi are able to exchange (and even hoard) nutrients with plants and pass them along to other species. More impressively in recent years, it’s been learned that they also aid in plant-to-plant communication, enabling plants to send signals to each other through the networking mycelium.
Going to the broader intellectual environment, myths are something quite odd. In antiquity they touch and connect nearly every aspect of ancient study — they pop up in philology, art history, ancient warfare, the performing arts, medicine, philosophy, natural sciences, queer studies— and help support even some of the newer epistemological fields still cropping up in the academy.
I got quite frustrated trying to fit them into Deleuze and Guattari’s (I did go to Columbia after all) models of the arborescent (or tree-like, hierarchal knowledge) and rhizomatic (or root/rhizome planar knowledge) because myths lend themselves to both systems, and neither at the same time (for a recent excellent look at the rhizomatic potential of Dionysus in the Bacchae, see Maria Combatti’s dissertation on somatic landscapes in Euripides). Rather, they are the in-between, connecting these knowledge systems through au/oral-fungal means.
I was first brought to this idea by Mathura Umachandran’s keynote lecture on a “Carrier Bag Theory of Queer Feeling or Coming to Critique” at the Queer and the Classical’s 2021 conference this past March. Thinking through differences in container metaphors of storytelling — from Virginia Woolf to Ursula K. Le Guin, teasing through concepts of heroes and bottles, botulisms and stomachs — Umachandran asked, “What would a mycelial containment of personal and world narrative look like?”
It wasn’t until the start of this summer when I was working on a piece about Zora Neale Hurston’s mythological reception (an anthropologist and folklorist, again those areas that classicists aren’t very good with) and her observations around hieroglyphic sound in Black speech and thought that I could finally think of an answer to Umachandran’s question. Partly because I realized through Hurston how much myth itself reminded me of a mycelium but, again, the look of it all in the question was what snagged on my brain, and instead got me more oriented towards thinking through the sound of it all.
But to talk about the visual aspect for a moment, the hyphae of fungi look like fine spiderwebs clustered together— perhaps why they derive their name from the Greek huphḗ (web or weave). But I think it’s also worth noting that the ancient huphḗ was also most often a form of female storytelling (as the progenitor of the spider, Arachne, knows all-too-well at the beginning of Book 6 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses) in antiquity, particularly juxtaposed to male storytelling. The weaving of wool (sheep’s hair) to create beautiful sensory pictures is a metaphor used quite a bit in ancient musical myth (the research of Giovanni Fanfanni in particular highlights this). There is the weaving of voices, and of these organic hairs in different ways, that enable multi-sensory engagement with myth.
I see myths as these hypha-e (separating the a and e with a hyphen, to designate that blurring of singularity and plurality that myth often embodies, as well as creating a link to the ancient huphḗ to think of the different organic “weaves” that myths network through) that sound — in all four definitions — through different conceptions of space and time. In developing this theory of sounding hypha-e, I’m particularly interested in the acoustics of these epistemological landscapes.
III. Into Praxis
I confess, I also developed this theory because I need it, as a mythologist (or should I start calling myself a mythophonist now?) who is interested in creating tools for others to more easily study contemporary reception of ancient mythologies. I’m glad to have fabulated (to flex with Hartman for a hot second) this theory because I tend to study women and non-binary individuals in and around ancient myth— despite the written archive — so having the theory grounded in “traditionally” feminine practices of knowledge production and storytelling with the ancient huphḗ opens things up for my research in an exciting way.
It also helps to bind the three areas of myth that I study into a sort of bio-cosmic sound-system:
- Hair (weaves, hypha-e, webs, plant fibers, nets, wool, hairstyles, godhead)
- Music (the origins of myth, the dominant medium enabling myth to branch across other mediums, the sticky-catchy-earworm sound of myth)
- Synaesthetics (the experience and sensory aspects of myth, or its own poikilia as the Greeks would say, varicolored adornment as Zora Neale Hurston would say, the sounding hypha-e that bring us together and trip us out)
Because at the end of the day, our world is on fire. Classicists are fond of bemoaning the burning of the library of Alexandria (I confess, my first ever graffiti expressed this exact sentiment because, like most other classicists, I am a nerd) but like…all of our epistemological information on fire, that starts with the earth, and it’s happening now. Archives are not going to last forever, despite our best efforts. We learn this first and foremost with the archive of our own flesh.
But in a way I suppose that’s what this theory is for — a way to theorize the continuation of myth in whatever strange new form it may become in whatever landscape the post-humanities looks like.
I think fungi are a start, especially as “heads” (made of stalks, gils, and caps) that communicate through their hairy woven networks without formal “bodies” (back to Sampson’s phōnē and her concept of “corporeality without body” in regards to the voices of nature) that are an intrinsic part of the natural world. They also encourage me to not give up on the strands around hair and synaesthetics that I’m trying to build around myth and music — not to mention the entire pharmacological aspect of fungi and synaesthetic experience that I’ve yet to even touch on in regards to ancient mythological sound systems (the Eleusinian holler in particular fascinates me).
For now, its a bridge between so many of the fascinating parallels I’ve been seeing between Black and classical studies — from ancient music and acoustic archaeology to Black sound studies and ethnomusicology; ancient weaving technologies with Black quilting and hair cultures; mosaics and collage aesthetics; Black ecological understandings and ancient network systems — and a way of talking about myth that doesn’t feel like it’s missing the point around reception, as well as looking at the fascinating practices of Black storytelling in America, catalogued from Hurston to Young.
And it’s a new theory — I literally came up with it this past summer — so it’s still being worked on, thought through, talked out. I’m very grateful towards those who’ve already been fantastic sounding boards around this — many thanks to Athena Chinn, Hannah Čulík-Baird, Jennifer Delanty, Noah Gokul, La Christiana Harris, Brooke Holmes, Emma Ianni, Katy Knortz, Kiran Mansukhani, Forever Moon, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Alice Sharpless, Whitney Stovall and others for letting my talk their ears off on this subject.
But there’s always room for more input — let’s get these hypha-e sounding.
Through my hair I’m still picking the hulls
Of Europe rained down in scattered handfuls
Their seed-meat shriveled to a hollow rattling
Striking this already ringing land
Resonance choked by pale tendrils shooting off
From long lost roots once locked in nature
The stubbled senses ingrown now where crusader blades shore
And donned them empty-headed beneath the bishop’s cap
Shameless scratching at the uncombed earth
Raking the godhead righteous
Silence in their wake
Silence in straight lines hanging from settler heads
Straight silence gathered, braided together, in tails
Pony, pig and whip, straight through the rumbling frequencies
Of boat bowels and cramped cabins
The species underneath each scalp identical after all
Night-tone mother and her light newborn
Curling each other flat and tight into our tangled sound
Muted howl
Song of blue flame
The brilliant headed silhouettes
Scuffling candles through a nation’s lightless dawn
Kindling fires, mass I must wake to
Fire for hot irons, pressing big-house finery wearable
Fire for railroad signals, fire in branded skin
Skin like bronze hair like lamb wool
Divisible under God
Who’s image have we been made in?
Composed for? Orchestrated by?
Our principals eye the concertmaster
Ignore the mumbling audience situating late to their seat
Or standing-room-only stance
In this stately hall built for silence
Bald bulbs blearily focus
On our loudness
Writhing out the glowing dark
Us, a priceless all toned flood rising
To nourish everybody down to the last
Stray strand
I raise my palm in praise of the symphonic nappyness
Haloing your head
I raise my palm in praise of the God-given nappyness
Haloing your head
I raise my palm in praise of the beautiful nappyness
Haloing your head
— “How To (hair)” by esperanza spalding
An edited version of this essay appears in “De-composition of it all… (une philosophie negromantique” in Coming to Know, volume 2 of the series An Archaeology of Listening, edited by Nida Ghouse and Brooke Holmes. Truccazano, Milan, Italy: Archive Books, 2022, 162–173, 175.
