03 · Mythology / Mystery
The oldest software still running.
Stories the species tells to remember what it cannot prove — archetype as the compression of millennia.
Myth is the oldest software still running: a frightened adult talking to a listening one, encoding what the species learned before it had instruments to check. Not the opposite of knowledge — knowledge that ran in the dark, and stored its conclusions in plot.
Writing
Essays and shorter notes — proofs treated as literature, and literature treated with proof’s seriousness.
“Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.” — Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1988)
Curations
Works and minds I return to — the ones that made the abstraction feel inhabited.
Joseph Campbell
The book that named the monomyth and argued that the world’s hero-tales are one story in a thousand costumes. Read it for the pattern, then read against it for everything the pattern flattens — both readings are necessary.
Joseph Campbell
Campbell’s four-volume comparative survey, tracing mythic structure from Paleolithic caves to modern creative life. More patient and more contestable than his famous single volume, and stronger for the patience.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
The structuralist case that myths are machines for thinking through contradictions a culture cannot otherwise resolve — nature against society, life against death. Difficult, brilliant, and it permanently changed how the subject is studied.
Sîn-lēqi-unninni (Standard Babylonian version)
The oldest surviving long narrative, edited onto clay tablets centuries before Homer. It already holds the flood, the failed quest for immortality, and raw grief for a dead friend — the source code, still legible.
From the bench
A working catalog of the archetypes still executing inside contemporary life — the office trickster, the founder’s hero-journey, the recession as flood — read as legacy code we never decommissioned.