The Mythic Mind Fellowship
Pursuing Wisdom through Primary and Secondary Worlds
A Letter from Andrew
About Mythic Mind
Friends,
When the Mythic Mind podcast first aired in 2021, I had no idea what it would become. It began with episodes about Kierkegaard as I worked on my doctoral dissertation, and it followed my growing interest in fairy tales, Tolkien, Lewis, and beyond. My time with the Inklings made me realize how much I wanted a similar kind of community, and I found that many others longed for it as well. Thus began the Mythic Mind Fellowship.
Many people discover that the books, films, and games they love are not just diversions. They are places where truth, beauty, and moral seriousness still break through. Mythic Mind is for people who care about stories and ideas, and who want to approach them with intellectual clarity, Christian conviction, and good humor. Whether you are a reader, scholar, creator, gamer, cinephile, or just someone who enjoys good stories, this is a place for you.
Here we pursue wisdom through both the primary world and the secondary worlds of myth and imagination, seeking clarity about who we are, what we are to do, and who we are meant to become. Our work is more than producing lectures and podcasts, although we aim to do that well. The real aim is a living fellowship: people learning together, writing together, and keeping good conversation alive. You'll find fellowship from across the breadth of the Christian tradition, united by the conviction that stories matter as refracted images of the true Myth. Mythic Mind exists so that you do not have to love these things alone.
Whether you become a full member or simply keep following along, I am grateful for your company on the road ahead. Welcome to the hearth.
Grace and peace,
Andrew Snyder
The Shelf
The voices that keep turning up in our episodes, essays, and courses. Take one down.
Choose a spine to open its card. Press Escape to put it back.
IApology
Plato
c. 428 to 348 BC
It's all in Plato: the first lesson of the C.S. Lewis course begins with him, and the Academy reads his Phaedo beside the Stoics and Till We Have Faces.
“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
IIConfessions
Augustine
354 to 430
The Fellowship read the Confessions together in its free book club, from the restless heart and the stolen pears to the garden where “take and read” finally breaks the deadlock. In the Beowulf and Boethius course, Augustine also guides a look at time, eternity, and freedom.
“Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee.”
IIIThe Consolation of Philosophy
Boethius
c. 477 to 524
The Consolation of Philosophy opens the door to medieval cosmology, and its moving wheel of fortune keeps turning up, even in the Kierkegaard season. With Beowulf, Boethius anchors the coming course Life, Death, and Meaning.
“So true is it that nothing is wretched, but thinking makes it so, and conversely every lot is happy if borne with equanimity.”
- Episode 146Introduction to Boethius & Medieval Cosmology
- Episode 193Kierkegaard on Man's Highest Perfection
IVThe Concept of Anxiety
Kierkegaard
1813 to 1855
Mythic Mind began with posts about Kierkegaard, and he is the first guide of Exploring the Psyche: one of the great Christian explorers of the inner life, for whom anxiety and despair are finally questions about our relationship to God.
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
VAt the Back of the North Wind
George MacDonald
1824 to 1905
C.S. Lewis wrote that he regarded MacDonald as his master, and that one of his books did something to “convert, even to baptise” his imagination. A Scottish minister and writer of fairy tales, he stands near the root of the Christian imagination that Mythic Mind loves.
“For my part, I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.”
Andrew has written the introduction to a forthcoming illustrated edition of At the Back of the North Wind from A Story Told Publishing.
VIThe Silmarillion
Tolkien
1892 to 1973
One of the two writers Mythic Mind has a special love for. From On Fairy-Stories to the Long Defeat, Tolkien interweaves grand metaphysics with the particular and the heartening.
“Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that come down to us from the darkness of those days there are yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endures.”
- Inkwell essayWhy You Should Read The Silmarillion
- Episode 181J.R.R. Tolkien and the Long Defeat
- Episode 36On Fairy-Stories: Subcreation, Escape, and Consolation
VIIThe Last Battle
C.S. Lewis
1898 to 1963
The other special love, and the first course: The Fiction and Philosophy of C.S. Lewis, a 12-week study of all his main fiction with special attention to his approach to myth in relation to Christian thought.
“I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here.”
Every episode and essay also has a place in the night sky: find it in the Cosmos.
There is room around the hearth.
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