NOTICE: This front part of neoMythos is a bit defunct and is not currently being maintained. Please see my in the Shell site (my Ghost in the Shell fan site) for my "fan" work; please see jgdesignworks.com for my web/application/editing business. Thanks!


NeoMythos, as the tagline says, is a site dedicated to listing and reviewing the "new mythologies." But what the heck is that?

A background first, then we'll work forward to the answer.

Some years ago a man named Joseph Campbell, the name in comparative religion, said that the reason society seems to fall apart before our eyes is that we lack a working mythology, a working religion. Our mythos, he said, has been concretized, a thing caught in amber, frozen, dogmatic. I'm doing my own extreme paraphrase, of course, but you get the point. Religion has failed to keep up with the needs of the present-day world, present-day people, and until it or an emergent mythology does so, the will continue to live in a fragmenting, un-socially-cohesive world.

Finding this emergent mythology is like finding the exact reason your computer crashes every day at 5 P. M. sharp, like finding a way to beat the Kevin Bacon film actor matching game. Needles, hay stacks. And it may not be any one emergent mythology that becomes dominant; the hay stacks are probably full of needles, but only five needles at random are those that will work, those which form the new mythology's core.

NeoMythos is about teasing out those needles and taking a good look at them.

To that end, the mission statement, if you will, NeoMythos offers links to sites, writings, and films which may or may not embody a new mythology; some are definite links to established mythos, some are admittedly more hopeful associations with mythos-that-may-become. Eventually you will find everything from cyberspace to Celtic mysticism; you will find anime; you will find discussion boards on which you can suggest discuss whole other ideas of just what "new mythology" is. And perhaps, out of all this, we will gain a glimpse of our future.
What's New
28 December 2008-- Update for this column-- There's certainly a lot of dust to be kicked up, wandering through this front bit of the domain. Broken links, things I wrote years and years ago ... It's like looking through the mirror in David Bowie's video for "Thursday's Child."

I have completely revised the In the Shell site, modernizing it and cleaning it up. I've written sections for the movies, the manga, and the various games, along with the good old philosophy section and lots of images.

As before, the In the Shell Discussion Boards are particularly active, talking about all things Ghost in the Shell and veering off onto other anime, video games, and such like. There really is a lot going on there, so please visit!

The Penumbric and Lain sites are long gone, although I continue to have a nagging urge to re-create at least some kind of Lain site. Or maybe a Boogiepop Phantom site. Or maybe a general homage to fan sites, which seem to be fading a bit from the scene.

That's all for now! Cheers!
--Jeff

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