Guide
Michael Meade
Guide, Ethos Advocacy Institute
Michael Meade is a renowned storyteller, author, and scholar of mythology, anthropology, and psychology whose work explores the enduring relationship between ancient stories and the challenges of contemporary life. For decades, he has used myth, storytelling, poetry, and ritual to illuminate questions of identity, meaning, adversity, transformation, and the ways human beings make sense of their lives.
Myth, Story, and Community
Founder of Mosaic and the Living Myth Podcast
Michael is the founder of the Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to using myth, story, and imagination to address the challenges facing individuals, communities, culture, and the natural world. He is also the creator and host of the Living Myth Podcast, through which he brings mythic stories and their underlying wisdom to contemporary events and human dilemmas.
Listen to the Living Myth PodcastAn Author of Enduring Patterns
Books That Return to the Oldest Stories
He is the author of numerous books, including Awakening the Soul, The Genius Myth, Fate and Destiny, Why the World Doesn’t End, The Water of Life, and The World Behind the World. Throughout his work, Michael returns to the idea that myths endure because they contain recognizable patterns of human experience—stories of rupture and renewal, wounds and gifts, belonging and exile, courage and fear, fate and transformation.
Stories of rupture and renewal, wounds and gifts, belonging and exile, courage and fear, fate and transformation.
At Ethos, Michael brings lawyers into the deeper territory of story. His work invites advocates to look beyond the immediate facts of a case and recognize the timeless human patterns beneath them—the struggles, contradictions, transformations, and universal truths that allow one person’s story to become meaningful to another.
Michael’s contribution to Ethos reflects a central idea in his life’s work: myth is not simply about what happened long ago. It reveals what continues to happen to human beings everywhere.