The Christian can speak meaningfully of Christ as the ground and norm of this mythopoieic faculty and that mythopoiesis in contemporary secularity is finally judged by the mythos of Christ as both myth and myth-maker. Beginning with an observation of the mythopoieic elements in the fantasy fiction of Tolkien, Rowling, Pratchett, and Le Guin, I have attempted to contextualise their employment of and delight in a ‘mythic sensibility’ within a Christian theology of human participation in divine creativity. The implication of all such mythopoiesis into the mythopoiesis of Christ and in Christ is ultimately a seeking after God, a being-drawn into the Trinitarian return of God to God. Even when this desire has gone astray, it remains bound up in the Trinitarian procession, by virtue of God’s grace in creation, and in the redemption of the world through Jesus Christ. Our mythopoieic faculty remains redeemable because it, like all human endeavour, remains hallowed by the Incarnation and taken up by the risen Christ.

Certain stories act upon us. They shape the way that we see, encounter, and understand the world. A phenomenological approach to a narrative encounter with the world in terms of the mythic helps to illuminate a certain sensibility that mediates the world to human persons such that it is experienced as meaningful. Understanding the mythic in terms of a sensibility rather than in terms of a genre of literature or a form of cultural expression sheds light on how mythopoiesis is not a phenomenon restricted to archaic societies and the tales of either a bygone age or a culture or religion not our own. Among the most visible places of such mythopoiesis is so-called ‘mythopoieic literature’, fantasies that actively play with the sense of the possible, with narratives shaping the lives of characters, and what can be brought to the surface when meaning and being more closely and obviously co-inhere. A phenomenology of play, both in terms of the ludic fancy of the mythic and fantastic and the perception-shaping power of a game’s rules over the players, opens up the way that stories act upon our perception of the world and the meaning that we encounter.