Myth

Myth (Gk., muthos, ‘story’). Narrations through which (amongst much else) religious affirmations and beliefs are expressed. In popular usage, especially in the media, myth has become synonymous with falsehood. Yet in religions, myths are simply the means whereby individual biographies are located in stories of a more extensive kind—e.g. concerning the nature of time, space, and place. Because many myths appear to be about putative matters of fact (e.g. about the origins of the cosmos, or of death) and are often aetiological (giving an account of the reasons why events or objects, etc., came into being), it has seemed obvious to the modern mind that, if the explanations are shown to be false, so also myths have been shown to be in error: myths are defective (category-mistaken) accounts of putative matters of fact which can now be improved upon.

The truth is far more complex. Myths are frequently distinguished from legends and folk-tales by the way in which they offer explanations. But while myths may be both intended and understood as factual, it is clear that more often they are stories which point to truths of a kind that cannot be told in other ways, and which are not disturbed if the apparent ‘facts’ of the supposed case are shown to be otherwise (so that the purported explanation strictly fails: but the value of the story does not fail with it). That is why a religion may, for example, have many myths of creation which are strictly incompatible with each other (see COSMOLOGY), without seeking to reconcile them. No matter how remote from history myths may be (though some are clearly rooted in historical events; and historical events can take on the heightened characteristics of mythology—e.g. the myth of the Kennedy era), they supply the means through which the meaning of experience can be affirmed, and through which history is converted from threat of unpredictable chaos and change to stability. In particular, myth places individual biographies and local events in a larger context which supplies them with meaning and significance. Myth endures because it engages human attention at the extremes of terror and delight; and also because it illuminates, and is illuminated by, ritual.

Myth is so pervasive and recurrent that it is clearly a human universal. In what way it is a universal and is thus able to bear, as it does, the weight of human biography, is open to widely different interpretations—of which only some examples can be given here. Perhaps most obviously, Jung was fascinated by the recurrence of stories, symbols, etc., in all ages and places. He concluded that myths arise from the universal and underlying collective unconscious, biologically inherited and born anew in each individual. These profound, brain-stored archetypes are dynamic, not passive, manifesting timeless patterns and dramas of human existence in individual experience.

Freud equally set myth in the formation of the psyche, but related it to the recapitulation of those primordial situations of conflict which made sexuality so dominant in his theory. Beyond that, he regarded myth as related to dream: in dreams, we can escape the constraints of hard reality, and become as poets or artists, for whom all things are possible. Art is a public dream, and myth is verbalized art.

Lévi-Strauss also maintained that the meaning of myth must be sought behind the level of surface-content in the universal structure of the human mind: while different circumstances may have evoked different developments and applications, everywhere particular motifs reappear in myth. To him this suggests that, although the contents of myth may seem to us to be absurd or fanciful or arbitrary, nevertheless they represent a quest for order and logic—the logic of the concrete, ‘which is constructed out of observed contrasts in the sensory qualities of concrete objects, e.g., the difference between the raw and the cooked, wet and dry, male and female’. Lévi-Strauss maintained that the elements of myth (mythemes) are chaotically meaningless if taken in isolation. They become meaningful only in relation to other elements. Structure reveals itself at many different levels, but Lévi-Strauss was particularly interested in the ways in which myths mediate the binary oppositions which arise in experience (as above).

Others, however, have felt that it is the content of myth, not some underlying structure, which reveals universal human preoccupations. For Eliade, myth places events illo tempore, ‘in that (great) time’ of primordial origins, a sacred and ideal time radically separated from the present. Myths make connection with this real and sacred time: myths are themselves sacred for that reason; they are exemplary, offering models of approved (and disapproved) behaviour; and they are significant, pointing out similarities in existential situations and exhibiting the meaning of otherwise random events. Joseph Campbell also emphasized the importance of content in understanding myth. He argued that myth serves four functions: mystical (evoking awe and gratitude), cosmological (providing models of the cosmos which are coherent with the sense of the numinous), sociological (supporting the existing social order), and psychological (initiating individuals into their own potentialities, especially in the domain of the spirit). Myth, far from returning to the past, transforms the present. Campbell also sought to discern a central ‘monomyth’ associated with the fortunes of the primordial hero which recurs in all mythologies and is available for recapitulation in subsequent lives.

In the 19th cent., the knowledge of mythology, especially Norse and Indian, was greatly extended (the term ‘myth’ was itself coined), and for some it offered a way of telling truth which lay outside the boundary and ambition of post-Newtonian science and technology. Myth was thus a positive term for Strauss; and, as the culmination of this process, Wagner sought to create (especially in Parsifal) a myth which would bear the weight of human questions beyond those which physics can answer, and beyond (though incorporating) the impoverished or inadequate myths of existing religions. Theologians can consequently talk of ‘the myth of God incarnate’ and imagine that they are giving a positive evaluation of Jesus; but to the popular mind, myth is now irredeemably associated with falsehood, so that such claims suggest a subversion of historical truth.