Myth

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MYTH

The relation between philosophy and mythology can be usefully set out under three main headings. There is first the period in Greek philosophy when philosophers wanted to discard and to criticize mythological modes of thought but when they were still so close to those modes of thought that mythology recurred in philosophical contexts. Then in modern thought there is the period from Giambattista Vico to Auguste Comte, when mythology was taken seriously as a clue to the primitive history of thought, and from the nineteenth century on, when there was a variety of systematic attempts at a science of mythology. Finally, there is the role of myth in modern irrationalisms.

To this scheme three objections may be made. The first is that in discussing the Greeks what is said will inevitably be conditioned by the writer's beliefs about what modern scientific approaches to mythology have yielded. Thus, the second section should precede the first. To this objection everything can be conceded except the conclusion, for it would be equally difficult to discuss the growth of the science of mythology before anything had been said about mythology itself.

A second objection might be that no initial definition of mythology has been offered. But here the danger is that by delineating the field of mythology too sharply, one biases one's account in favor of one sort of theory. And any definition broad enough to escape this charge would be either vague or a mere catalog.

The third objection would be that the Christian era until the time of Vico appears to be neglected by this schematism. For this there is good reason, however. In that era mythologies were predominantly treated as false theological accounts, rivals to the one true theological account, the Christian.

Greek Philosophy

Greek myths, like those of other Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures, include cosmogonies and accounts of great discoveries and inventions, such as that of fire; of the founding of cities; and of the ancestry of kings, in which relationships between gods and men are codified. In different stages of the mythology, such as in the distinction between the Olympian gods and the dark, chthonic deities, one can distinguish different social origins. From the time of Émile Durkheim and Jane Harrison anthropologists have stressed the function of myths as explanations of rituals that express the social consciousness of a group. In Greek society the public ritual continued to express the life of the community long after belief in gods had become questionable.

Greek philosophy only gradually separated itself from mythology. Personification, for example, was common in pre-Socratic philosophy, but at the same time rationalist criticism of mythology originated with writers like Xenophanes, who attacked anthropomorphic representation of the gods, and Euhemerus, who argued that myths were to be explained as stories about men who had been deified. Heraclitus attacked Homer and Hesiod for their dependence on myth.

plato

Plato used myths and allegories for a variety of purposes. Perceval Frutiger draws a distinction between myths properly so called and allegories, which, for example, lack the element of story; among allegories he would include the account of the Cave in the Republic or the noble lie about precious and base metals in the souls of different types of men. He divides myths in the full sense into those that function as allegories, those that function as genetic explanations, and those that function as other types of parascientific explanations. An example of allegorical myth is Diotima's account of the birth of Eros in the Symposium ; among genetic explanations is the account of the creation in the Timaeus ; and typical examples of what Frutiger calls parascientific are the accounts of a future life and of rewards and punishments for virtue and vice given in the Republic, Gorgias, Phaedo, and Phaedrus. Frutiger sees three features of Platonic myth as outstanding: the use of symbols, the freedom exhibited in the handling of the narrative, and what he pleasantly calls a prudent imprecision. The last is important. Plato uses myth where he wishes the precise extent of his own intellectual commitment to remain unclear. Thus, Plato's use of myth helps us to understand how the break with mythological thought forms involves the raising of sharp questions about truth and falsity which the mythological forms themselves are able to evade. This throws light on certain characteristics of mythology.

The subject matter of mythological narratives is no different from that of later philosophy and science; what differentiates myth from these is not merely its narrative form or its use of personification. It is, rather, that a myth is living or dead, not true or false. You cannot refute a myth because as soon as you treat it as refutable, you do not treat it as a myth but as a hypothesis or history. Myths that could not easily coexist if they were hypotheses or histories, as, for example, rival accounts of creation, can comfortably belong to the same body of mythology. There are often gradual processes of reconciliation and of integration into a single narrative, but the discrepancies that give so much pleasure to the anthropologist are not discrepancies at all from the standpoint of the narrator.

Thus Plato, by falling back into myth, may be deliberately avoiding too direct an encounter not only with certain philosophical difficulties but also with rival religious traditions. For myth is not theology any more than it is hypothesis or history. Indeed, the dominance of theology in later religious thought and the insistence in the mystery religions and in Christianity on treating myth as theology are as responsible for the death of mythology as is any philosophical rationalism bred by the pre-Socratics and Plato. Of course, it was not only Greek mythology that was treated by Christianity in this way. Both Norse and Celtic mythology met the same fate, although they both survived in medieval literature as beliefs and not just as a source for tale telling.

Modern Thought

The first serious modern treatment of mythology occurs in Vico's Scienza nuova. In Vico's theory of history each period has its own unity and character, and periods succeed one another in a determinate order. The beginnings of civilization occur in "the age of the gods," when men live in families and center their lives around religion, marriage, and the burial of the dead; this period is followed by the "age of heroes," in which aristocratic states arise. Only then comes the "age of men," the age of democratic republics. By the third stage rational inquiry is established, but in the early stages poetry and myth express the vulgar wisdom of a people. Only from mythology can we discover the religion, morals, law, and social life of early society. Myths are not false narratives, nor are they allegories. They express the collective mentality of a given age.

Vico's treatment of myth is far closer to that of modern anthropology than is that of his immediate successors. The Enlightenment's belief in progress and attack on superstition produced an unsympathetic climate for such interests. Even Johann Gottfried Herder, whose sympathy was awakened by seeing in primitive poetry and song the spirit of the folk, was inclined to treat myths as pardonably false beliefs. In the nineteenth century this assumption underlay the first systematic attempts at a science of mythology, but there was also a new consciousness of the widespread prevalence of mythology and a wish to apply comparative methods.

In 1856 F. Max Müller published his Comparative Mythology, in which he tried to interpret mythologies by means of principles derived from philology. All Aryan languages are derived from Sanskrit, in which originally there were certain words named sun, sky, clouds, rain, and dawn. But language became diseased, the original meanings were lost, the words became treated as the names of divine beings, and what had been accounts of the sun ushering in the dawn and ending the reign of night were transformed into myths about battles between gods, heroic quests for gold, and the like. To understand a myth, asserted Müller, discover the etymology of the names.

Andrew Lang pointed out that rival philologists would give different etymological explanations of the same myth with apparently equal plausibility. Lang himself regarded myths as survivals of earlier social norms. The classical Greeks recount myths in which cannibalism and human sacrifice occur, although they practiced neither; however, among Polynesian and African peoples, of whom Lang's contemporaries were newly aware, just such customs and accompanying myths are found. In classical Greece the custom had vanished, but the myth remained. Or a nature myth may be found with its meaning plain in its Maori form today, whereas in its Greek version the story has been so changed that the original meaning has been lost. The anthropology Lang and his school used was that of E. B. Tylor, who himself criticized Müller's theorizing by showing how convincingly the nursery rhyme "Sing a Song of Sixpence" could be explained as a solar myth in Müller's terms.

recurrent themes and comparative methods

Lang took it for granted that the "same" myth could turn up both in Greece and in New Zealand. The modern collection of mythologies has emphasized nothing so much as the strikingly similar themes and stories that recur in widely different places and times. Myths of the creation of the world are widespread; myths of the creation of humankind occur everywhere. But even in detail myths resemble one another. Clyde Kluckhohn has written that he knows of no culture lacking myths of witchcraft in which were-animals move about at night; poisons can be magically introduced into the victim, causing illness and death; and there is some connection between incest and witchcraft. Rank has discussed the common myth pattern of a hero, born of noble parents, against whose birth an oracle warns his father, so that the child is left to die of exposure; the child is saved by shepherds or animals, grows up to return, perform great deeds, avenge himself, and finally be recognized. In the Far East, among the Navajo, and in Greece, as well as in many other places, we find this pattern. What is the explanation of its recurrence? We can distinguish three main types of explanation.

The first is psychoanalytic. Otto Rank, a Freudian, explains the hero as the ego of the child who rebels against his parents. His father, on whom the child's hate is projected, is pictured as exposing the child in a box on water. The box symbolizes the womb; the water, birth. The order of the story follows a sequence analogous to that of dreams in which natural events and symbols are combined in a single fantasy. The myth is the expression of all paranoid characters who hate the father who ousted them from the maternal love and care. Because such a character is widespread, the myth that expresses it is widespread, too; in general, it is the common biological, and, consequently, psychological, inheritance of humankind that underlies the common stock of mythology.

By contrast, the Jungian approach to mythology rests upon belief in a common human access to the collective unconscious. The individual continually finds himself giving expression to an archetypal symbolism that dominates not only the mythology but also much of the sophisticated literature of the world. The same myths recur in different times and places because all mythology has a common source. Modern man, who has overdeveloped the rational side of his nature, encounters in his dreams the same figures that appear in ancient and primitive mythology.

The difficulties in the Jungian account of mythology are difficulties that confront all Jungian theory. If the existence of the collective unconscious is a hypothesis designed to explain the recurrence of certain themes and symbols in myths and dreams, then it must be formulable in a way that is testable. But if such a hypothesis is to be testable, we must be able to deduce from it predictable consequences over and above the data it was originally formulated to explain. Yet no such consequences seem to follow from the hypothesis of the collective unconscious. It seems to be untestable; it certainly remains untested. As an explanation of the recurrence of mythological themes and symbols, it is also unnecessary, for there are simpler and less incoherent explanations.

Joseph Campbell has used the Jungian theory of archetypes to interpret the story The Frog King, one of the myths collected by the brothers Grimm. He sees the frog as a small-scale dragon whose outward ugliness conceals the depths of the unconscious, in which unrecognized and unknown treasure is to be found. The frog king summons the child to attain maturity and self-knowledge by exploration of the unconscious. Fortunately, we also have a Freudian interpretation of The Frog King by Ernest Jones according to which the frog is a symbol for the penis and the myth represents the child's overcoming disgust in approaching the sexual act. Müller had, of course, long before interpreted The Frog King as one more solar myth.

In the face of these rival interpretations the need for a criterion of correct interpretation is clearly urgent, and with this need goes the need for a criterion for deciding when two myths are and are not versions of the "same" myth. The first step toward providing such criteria is the collection and tentative classification of as many bodies of mythology as possible. The most interesting work here has been done by Kluckhohn, who has systematically established not only the recurrence of plots and characters but also the existence of constant tendencies within this recurrence. For example, we can discover cases where a myth is reinterpreted to fit a new cultural or social situation. Clearly, where we can distinguish the original from the reinterpreted version, we are in a stronger position to compare a myth with similar myths for other cultures. We can study and compare not merely one version of a myth with another but the development of one myth through a series of versions with the development of another; from this it is clear that even if we wish to stress certain psychological functions of myth (Kluckhohn has thrown light on Navajo mythmaking by showing how it exemplifies mechanisms of ego defense), it is only when we put myth into a social context that we are likely to understand what the nature of mythmaking and recounting is.

anthropology

The work of Claude Lévi-Strauss is important not only because its treatment of myth does not abstract myths from the social and economic relationships of those who tell and hear them but also because by invoking a wider context he has been able to pick out hitherto unnoticed features of mythology. In Totemism, for example, Lévi-Strauss shows how a myth of the North American Ojibwa and a myth from Polynesian Tikopia both express relationships between nature and culture, between the species that provide food and the kinship system. In each case the myth helps to express both continuity and discontinuity in these relationships; both myths also stress that no direct and simple connection between the one type of relationship and the other is possible. The myths, as it were, warn anthropologists not to oversimplify.

If one did not notice the connection of these myths with foodstuffs and with kinship but simply abstracted the "story," one would certainly not necessarily conclude that the Ojibwa myth and the Tikopia myth were the same myth. The resemblances between them appear fully only because Lévi-Strauss poses certain questions about the myths. These questions are formulated in the light of his general theory of kinship systems and invoke the notion of relationships that are specified in purely formal terms. Lévi-Strauss elsewhere has analyzed other myths with a view to showing that in their structure formal properties are both exhibited and implicitly commented upon. Perhaps not surprisingly, these formal properties parallel the formal properties exhibited by kinship systems and also parallel to some extent, much more surprisingly, the formal properties of certain linguistic structures.

What emerges from these studies is the thesis that myths incorporate and exhibit binary oppositions that are present in the structure of the society in which the myth was born. In the myth these oppositions are reconciled and overcome. The function of the myth is to render intellectually and socially tolerable what would otherwise be experienced as incoherence. The myth is a form in which society both understands and misunderstands its own structure. Thus, Lévi-Strauss gives a precise meaning to Vico's contention that "The fables of the gods are true histories of customs."

This judgment is perhaps inverted in the work of Lévi-Strauss's most important rival, Mircea Eliade. The customs of men, in Eliade's view, often turn out to be the expression of their beliefs about the gods. Thus, the behavior of shamans, who in a state of trance imitate animal sounds (birds' song, for example, among many peoples) is a reenactment and an attempt to restore man's primitive, paradisal, unfallen state in which he not only did not die or have to work but also communicated with the animals and lived in peace with them. Hence, Eliade concludes both that shamanism is part of the central religious tradition of humankind, stretching from primitive African myths to Christian theology, and that it is therefore not, as it first appears to be, an irrational phenomenon. Eliade distinguishes sharply between the particular cultural and social trappings that may surround a myth and what he calls the ideology behind the trappings that is exhibited in the myth itself. Thus, where Lévi-Strauss analyzes the content of a myth in terms of what is local and particular to a given society, Eliade wishes to relate the content to general human religious interests and as far as possible divorce it from the local and particular.

irrationalism

"Myths must be judged as a means of acting upon the present," said Georges Sorel in 1908. Sorel distinguishes those beliefs that it is appropriate to characterize in terms of truth and falsity and those it is appropriate to characterize in terms of effectiveness and ineffectiveness. A myth is essentially a belief about the future that embodies the deepest inclinations of some particular social group. The myth that Sorel himself wanted to propagate was the syndicalist project of a general strike. Other socialists treated their beliefs about the future as predictions; Sorel regards this as for the most part irrelevant. The only predicates in which he is interested are self-fulfilling ones.

Yet to regard beliefs about the future in this way is paradoxical. For example, when I try to propagate a myth, I am inviting people to believe. But insofar as I do this, I invite them to treat it as true rather than false and as susceptible to truth or falsity. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that anyone who holds a view like Sorel's will fall into a form of doublethink, treating the myth as true or false in certain situations but retreating into the assertion that questions of its truth or falsity are inappropriate in other situations. Certainly, just this kind of doublethink characterizes modern irrationalist mythmakers after Sorel. They wish to avoid hard questions that philosophers or social scientists might raise about their myths, but they also wish to claim some kind of truth for their utterances. Thus, we also get a concomitant doctrine of special kinds of truth or special criteria for truth—for example, in works as different as Alfred Rosenberg's Myth of the Twentieth Century and D. H. Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent. Rosenberg's version of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's amalgam of anti-Semitism, racism, and authoritarian German nationalism is, of course, utterly different in content and implications from Lawrence's appeal to "the dark gods" and his attempt to restore an imagination violated by the wrong kind of arid rationalism. However, the difficulty with all irrationalism is that the abandonment of the criteria of rationality leaves us defenseless before the most morally outrageous appeals to emotion. In such appeals the revival of myth has a key place.