Hi, Angie!
I have two main reasons for wanting my older children to have some exposure to pagan mythology.
1. Literary allusions. There are SO MANY allusions to mythology in literature! Even magazine articles today. I see them everywhere! You’ll be forever “out of the loop” and not understanding the author’s intent if you have no idea what “Achilles’heel” means. Or what a “siren song” is. Or a “Pandora’s box” These are pretty obvious ones, but there are subtler ones. What does an author mean when he accuses someone of “flying too close to the sun”? You miss a lot if you cannot get the meaning from these. Fortunately you can look up some of the obvious ones if you have to, and also fortunately, you really don’t need to immerse yourself in the stuff to get a lot of meaning from these allusions. But I think it’s worthwhile to understand them. The influence on literature has been so profound that I think it foolhardy to totally ignore it.
2. Worldview. Older children are often ready for deeper discussions of worldview. I owe my understanding of this to Michelle Miller, the author of the Truthquest guides. But the pagan mythology stories aren’t simply random stories. They illustrate so much of who the Greeks, the Romans, the Scandinavians, were, and what they believed and felt. And given the deep and profound influence of these societies on Western civilization, it is a worthwhile study to try to figure out what these stories say about these people, and why God’s Word is vitally different. What does it say about Greeks that their chief god, Zeus, was a womanizing beast, and his wife was a jealous and spiteful shrew? Worth pondering and discussing with older students.
That said, everyone has to decide what is right for their own children. I’m trying to send mine off prepared to critically evaluate and confront our current culture, and mythology has a lot of bearing on this.
