Myth

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Myth

Myths have attracted a great deal of interest among Americans since the 1960s. While many aspects of them may be fictive, myths often convey truths that stir people and compel their assent. Myths also command respect because of the close association they often have to religious rituals and other sacred events.

Myths vary from one culture to another and reflect the worldviews of particular peoples. But these world-views and the myths representing them often contain overlapping and coinciding themes that reflect more universal dimensions of human experience. For this reason, the myths of any particular culture may have wide appeal and, as in the case of Greek myths, long outlast the society that produced them.

Three basic approaches to the interpretation of myths have developed in Western thought. Since the 1960s, each of these approaches has been pursued in creative and influential ways.

Rationalist Approaches to Myth

Many scholars have tried to explain how myths come into being and how they work in the human mind. The ancient Greek philosophers understood myths as stories that provided inexact pictures of reality. Heraclitus criticized the accounts of historical events written by Hesiod and Homer for relying too much on myth. Plato resorted to myth to avoid direct answers to controversial philosophical questions. Euhemereus argued that myths embellished and elevated stories about the exploits of human beings by depicting the humans as gods.

Beginning in the seventeenth century, Enlightenment scholars bent on discovering the rational nature of the world revitalized the ancient view that myth was an inexact form of expression inferior to pure philosophy or true history. This rationalist approach found its most famous expression in the Comparative Mythology (1865) authored by Friedrich Max Müller, a German linguist who lived and worked in Britain. On the basis of comparative analysis of Indo-European and Greco-Roman mythology, Müller argued that myths were allegories about nature. Myths sacralized natural phenomena, Müller believed, and typically focused on the sun and things related to the sun, such as sky and dawn.

Since the 1960s, when more appreciative approaches to the process of mythmaking became widely known and popular in the United States, the rational approach to myth exemplified by Müller has been harshly criticized. At the same time, there have been notable efforts to pursue the idea that myths represent things that actually happened. For example, in The Short Swift Time of Gods on Earth (1994), Donald Bahr argued that myths represent memories of important events in the distant past and, more specifically, that the origin myths of the Pima Indians of southwestern North America provide important clues about the more ancient Hohokam culture and its destruction.

Many Jews and Christians in the United States approach biblical narratives in much the same way, as important accounts of events actually occurring in the past, but accounts that are inexact as a result of embellishments that occurred in the telling or corruptions that crept in over time. After World War II, the German scholar Rudolph Bultmann prompted many Americans to "demythologize" the New Testament to separate out and lift up the essence of Jesus's teachings. In a recent variant of this approach, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza argued that the distinctive thrust of Jesus's life and message was his compassion for women and commitment to their equality. According to this analysis, later editors and interpreters of the gospel injected their patriarchal bias into the New Testament and corrupted its original, feminist message.

Of course, biblical literalists reject the whole enterprise of demythologization as well as use of the word "myth" to describe any part of the Bible. Nevertheless, their insistence on the historical and scientific exactitude of biblical narratives also reflects rationalist expectations of reality associated with an Enlightenment worldview.

Functionalist Approaches to Myth

A second, functionalist approach to myth is utilized by many social scientists, especially sociologists. This approach focuses on the role that myth plays in reinforcing social status, class and group difference, and other forms of social structure, convention, behavior. This approach can be traced to the work of the French founder of sociology, Émile Durkheim, whose Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1965; original French, 1912) viewed myths as explanations of rituals that maintained social cohesion in primitive societies. In Durkheim's view, the structure of religious rituals reflected and reinforced the structure of society. Moreover, people who gathered together for ritual events experienced an exhilarating awareness of the existence and power of their society. The myths that grew up around these rituals led people to conceptualize the existence and power of their society as God. As an idealization of society, God existed only in the minds of individuals. But as an entity much larger and stronger than anyone, God commanded religious devotion.

In American culture since the 1960s, social scientists have often utilized the general concept behind Durkheim's theory—namely, that myth is an idealized manifestation of social structure that explains, justifies, and reinforces that structure. Because this approach focuses on the socially conservative function of myth, liberal sociologists often emphasize the need to break through myths that perpetuate social inequality. At the same time, sociologists such as Robert Bellah and Peter Berger, who favor a return to the more cohesive kind of society that they believe was characteristic of the United States before the 1960s, regret the weakening of myths that once inculcated social cohesion and responsibility.

Transcendental Approaches to Myth

A third, transcendental approach sees myth as an expression of the very nature of human experience and essential to both personal and cultural development. This transcendental (or intersubjective) approach has become very popular in the United States since the 1960s, especially among people who conceptualize myth in terms of a larger interest in spirituality. The transcendental approach grows out of the work of the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, and especially out of his emphasis on the constructive nature of the mind and the mind's inability to know anything outside or independent of itself. Transcendental approaches to myth are also indebted to the nineteenth-century German idealist Friedrich von Schelling, who went beyond Kant to define myth as an imaginative effort to describe the Absolute, the larger reality beyond the grasp of reason. This romantic, post-Kantian approach led to subsequent efforts to analyze myth as one of the essential phenomena (or nonempirical categories) characteristic of human experience of the sacred. It also invited psychological interpretations in which myth represented deep-seated human fears and desires. Especially through the phenomenological theories of Mircea Eliade and the psychological theories of Carl Gustav Jung and Joseph Campbell, this transcendental approach to myth has profoundly influenced American religious thought since the 1960s.

In the view of the Romanian scholar Mircea Eliade, who taught at the University of Chicago from 1956 until his death in 1986, myth and history were opposite and antagonistic ways of understanding reality. While history represented a chronological sequencing of more or less distinct events, myth represented the underlying dynamics of human experience that human events always recapitulated. In a mythic view of the world, nothing was ever really new. Moreover, the stories told about the persisting dynamics of life were deeply tied to experiences of the sacred. Inspired by Rudolph Otto's The Idea of the Holy (1923; original German, 1917), Eliade believed that the sacred was awesome, subjective apprehension of the larger reality beyond human reason. The sacred was also a collectively shared experience, he believed, involving a transconscious plane of awareness that was part of the universal human capacity for nonrational experience.

After developing his phenomenology of the sacred through studies of Yoga and shamanism, Eliade went on to compare the role of myth in primitive societies with what he regarded as the decadent but still persisting role of myth in modern society. While primitive people were intrinsically religious by virtue of being centered and saturated in mythic reality, Eliade believed, modern people found themselves adrift in the flux of time. But the terrible sense of meaninglessness that modern people suffered could be remedied by imaginative experiences that awoke the transconscious and stimulated the archaic capacity for sacred, mythic experience.

Eliade's concept of myth exerted a shaping influence on the field of religious studies in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. As the field expanded rapidly during these years and established its independence from divinity school curricula and their predilection toward Christian thought, Eliade's theories offered a way to conceptualize religion as a universal phenomenon. Applying his phenomenology to a variety of different cultures, scholars not only produced new, interpretive accounts of various religions around the world but also argued for the existence of religious dimensions within various forms of popular American culture.

Eliade's theories were greeted with enthusiasm by many scholars in religious studies not only because they were applicable in many different contexts but also because they avoided bias toward Christianity, which the field was, in general, trying to overcome. Indeed, Eliade even blamed the Judeo-Christian tradition for originating the preoccupation with historical time that interfered with the immersion in myth that archaic people enjoyed. This anti–Judeo-Christian bias intrinsic to Eliade's work suited the counter-cultural sentiments prevalent among many academics during the 1960s and 1970s.

During the same decades, and for some of the same reasons, the psychological theories of the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung and the American mythographer Joseph Campbell became popular among an even wider American audience. A student of Sigmund Freud's, Jung came to disagree with Freud's view of religion as a form of illusion. Utilizing a transcendental approach similar to that of Eliade's, Jung argued for the existence of a collective unconscious, a realm of the mind common to all humanity that provided the underlying dynamic structure for the ordinary consciousness of each individual. Jung understood the collective unconscious to be populated by archetypes that surfaced within individual consciousness, most clearly in dreams, but also in waking consciousness through the expectations that the individual bestowed on people encountered in daily life. Myths were of paramount importance to Jung because he believed that they represented the archetypes of the collective unconscious in vivid and compelling forms.

This Jungian approach to myth stimulated a great deal of personalized, spiritual interest. Because of the connection believed to exist between the individual psyche and the myths of all the world's religions, many Americans interested in exploring the depths of their own psyches were inspired by Jungian psychology to look to the myths of various cultures for inspiration. This eclectic but highly personalized interest in myth contributed, in turn, to the strong interest in spirituality that began to sweep through many areas of American religious life in the 1970s. The Jungian approach to myth helped to fuel the tendency to distinguish spirituality, often perceived in terms of deep personal engagement, from religion, often perceived less positively in terms of institutional organizations and impersonal rules.

Similar to Jung's in many respects, Joseph Campbell's approach to myth played an even greater role in shaping American religious life after World War II. As a young man, Campbell renounced the Catholic Church for its repression of mythic play. A professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College for thirty-eight years, and a national celebrity at the time of his death in 1989, Campbell had a lifelong fascination with Native American myths and Arthurian romance. Building on Jung's theory of the collective unconscious and its archetypes, and also on the German psychologist Eduard Spranger's emphasis on the importance for myth in adolescent development, Campbell argued for the supreme importance of the myth of the hero's journey in both individual and cultural life. Although the hero had many faces and the journey took many forms, Campbell believed that all these variants resonated with one another as particular expressions of a monomyth that was universal and fundamental to the human psyche. Campbell's theory of the hero's journey contributed not only to the burgeoning interest in spirituality among Americans after the 1960s but also to renewed interest in Christian mythology, especially among Catholics, more than a few of whom returned to the church with a new appreciation of Christ inspired by Campbell's concept of the hero's journey. Campbell's approach to myth also influenced George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars film series, who based his ideas for Star Wars on Campbell's book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).