THE STUDY OF MYTHOLOGY

CHAPTER 1 Purposes and
Definitions
THE STUDY OF MYTHOLOGY
Why Study Myths?
The study of myths—mythology—has a long, rich, and highly contested history of
debate about exactly what myths are, what they do, and why they are worthy of systematic
study. Because of the complexity of such considerations about myths, any
short answer to the question “Why study myths?” will be, at best, only a starting
place. Yet this very complexity is one of the reasons why such study can be so exciting.
The study of myth is a field of inquiry that ranges from the earliest known
history of humanity up to and including contemporary cultures and societies and
even our own individual senses of self in the world.
Every part of this introduction (and every part of this book) should serve more
as a direction for further investigation than as a fully satisfactory explanation of settled
facts. In our view, (1) the intertwined nature of the uses of myths in diverse cultures;
(2) the myriad ways in which myths can be seen to embody cultural attitudes,
values, and behaviors; and (3) the rich rewards awaiting questioners willing to approach
myths from numerous points of view are all open-ended fields of inquiry. We
see this book as an invitation to enter into these fields, whether briefly or as a lifelong
interest. The study of myth entails discovering a way of making meaning that
has been part of every human society.
What Are Myths?
Myths are ancient narratives that attempt to answer the enduring and fundamental
human questions: How did the universe and the world come to be? How did
we come to be here? Who are we? What are our proper, necessary, or inescapable
roles as we relate to one another and to the world at large? What should our values
be? How should we behave? How should we not behave? What are the consequences
of behaving and not behaving in such ways?
Of course, any short definition, however carefully wrought, must oversimplify
in order to be clear and short, so accept this definition as a starting point only. If this
1
definition holds up under more extensive examination of myths across the world and
in our own backyards, then what a promise with which to start a book, what an answer
to the opening question, “Why study myths?”
Engaging thoughtfully with the myths in this book and with research projects
that go far beyond what space constraints allow us to present in this book will
deepen and complicate the elements of our starting definition. For example, myths
are ancient narratives. But they are not static artifacts. They are not potsherds and
weathered bone fragments. In many cases, they are living texts with which living
people continue to write or narrate or perform their unique answers to basic human
questions. This never-ending quality to myth is one reason we have included in this
book not only ancient or “primary” versions of myths but also more contemporary
tales, such as “Out of the Blue” by Paula Gunn Allen (see pages 68–75), which take
up ancient myths and refashion their constituent elements in order to update answers
to perennial questions and participate in ongoing cultural self-definitions.
Modern Native Americans, for example, who take up myths from their varied
heritages and retell them do so in a context that includes the whole history of their
people, from their ancient roots and primordial self-definitions to their contacts with
European-American culture and modern self-definitions that search for meaning in
a world forever changed by that contact. Today’s Irish poets, for another example,
who use Celtic myths as source material and inspiration and who write in Irish, a
language which came perilously close to extinction, are engaged in cultural reclamation
on a number of levels, and Irish myths, ancient and modern, are an important
part of that effort. Looking at examples of ancient and more contemporary uses
of myths introduces their varied cultural values and behaviors to us, and, at the same
time, such study helps us develop intellectual tools with which to look at and question
our own ancient and contemporary mythic self-understandings. In this sense,
studying myths introduces other cultures to us and, at the same time, provides us
with different lenses through which to view our own.
WHAT IS MYTH HISTORICALLY?
Mythos and Logos
The English word “myth” derives from the Greek word mythos and has been distinguished
from the Greek word logos, both terms having been translated into English
as word or story. In early uses of the term—for example, in Hesiod’s Theogony (approximately
700 bce)—mythos seems to have meant divinely inspired, poetic utterance,
whereas logos was more often associated with crafty “legalese” as well as
everyday, transactional discourse. The lines that open Hesiod’s Theogony illustrate
the original distinction made between the two terms.
The Muses once taught Hesiod to sing
beautiful songs as he tended his flocks
on Mt. Helicon.
And so what follows here
are the very first words [muthon]
these goddesses said to me:
2 Chapter 1 Purposes and Definitions
“Country shepherd, a disgrace to your name,
thinking only of your next meal:
We know how to say [legein] many things
that aren’t true yet seem to be,
and whenever we want, we know how
to tell the truth.”
Sincere or not, this is what Great Zeus’ daughters said
and they gave me a staff,
snapping one verdant branch from a laurel tree
—it was amazing—and they breathed into me
the breath of divine song so that I could tell
of what will happen in the future
and what took place in the past;
and they told me to praise the immortal race
of the blessed gods,
yet always to sing of them first and last.
As you can see, Hesiod’s use of the word mythos in this passage is meant to legitimate
both the Muses’ words and his own. For the ancient shepherd-poet, mythos is
breathed from the divine and, whether a mythos is, literally speaking, a fiction or a
truth, its origin is divine, its meaning sacred. Hesiod uses a form of the word logos
when he quotes the muses as declaring “we know how to say [legein] many things
that aren’t true yet seem to be.”
The Devaluation of Mythos in Ancient Times
Xenophanes and Heraclitus Like all words, the semantic meanings of mythos and
logos were not forever fixed. By the time of Xenophanes and Heraclitus (middle and
late 500s bce, respectively), Hesiod and Homer were under attack for attributing to
the gods “all/The shameful things that are blameworthy among humans:/Stealing,
committing adultery, and deceiving each other” (Xenophanes, Fragment B11, in
Lincoln 1999). Heraclitus sneered at the gullibility of the common folk (hoi polloi)
for believing in, among other things, the divine inspiration of poets. Heraclitus appears
never to have used the word mythos. Rather he focuses on the term logos,
which, according to Lincoln, “is more likely to be a discourse of written prose than
one of oral poetry, and more likely to be one of argumentation than of narrative”
(27). In general, the pre-Socratic philosophers appear to have said little about
mythos and, by comparison, a great deal about logos—a kind of discourse which
could be true or false, a means of arguing propositions, tricking someone, or accurately
describing reality. The sixth-century-bce critique of Homer and Hesiod suggests,
however, that the term mythos was, for some, beginning to mean something
like “fanciful tale.”
Plato’s Rational Myth Plato (427–347 bce) permanently complicated the definition
of mythos by treating the ancient use of the term as synonymous with falsehood;
ironically, his own use of the word, when applied to philosophical speculation about
origins and the nature of reality, reaffirmed the ancient meaning as a form of truth.
What Is Myth Historically? 3
Thus Plato created a new myth to “clarify” the traditional meaning of mythos; this
reconfiguration of terms to “restore” the vitality of myth’s claim to truth-telling has
been borrowed repeatedly by mythologists ever since. Doniger amusingly summarizes
the great philosopher’s use of the term:
Plato used the word [mythos] in both senses, to mean “lie” and “truth” . . . [he] “deconstructed”
the myths of Homer and Hesiod, contrasting the fabricated myth with the true
history. But since people have to have myths, Plato was willing to construct new ones
for them, and so he invented the drama of the philosophical soul and made it a reasonable,
logical myth to challenge the old myths of centaurs and so forth. He transformed
ancient mythic themes to make the myth of Eros and the myth of the creation of the universe,
and he actually applied the word myth (which he called mythos, since he spoke
ancient Greek) to the story of the world that he created in the Phaedo and to the myth of
Er that he created at the end of the Republic. The myths that Plato didn’t like (that were
created by other people, nurses and poets) were lies, and the myths that he liked (that he
created himself) were truths. And this ambivalence in the definition of myth endures to
the present day. (1998, 2–3)
Plato’s argument, that myths about gods, heroes, and centaurs contain irrational
and therefore false elements and that philosophical myths about origins were rational
and therefore true, was crucial to his political and philosophical vision. Leveling
a charge that has been made occasionally against art down to our own time, he
argued that poets manipulate their audiences and present them with cheap imitations
of reality which have the effect of making their hearers lazy consumers of stories
and images rather than active seekers of the truth. In Plato’s ideal political state,
poets—if not banished altogether—would be subject to philosopher-kings who
would have the power to censor the irrational and morally suspect elements of their
mythoi (mythoi _ more than one mythos). As Lincoln puts it,
The space that [Plato] assigned to [the poets] is that which lies between the state and its
lowliest subjects, where they craft mythoi, at the direction of philosopher-kings, for
mothers and nurses to pass on to their charges. . . . What others had taken to be primordial
revelations or undeniable truths now were treated as state propaganda, best suited
for children and those incapable of adopting the discourse and practice of the ruling
elite, within an emergent regime of truth that called (and calls) itself “philosophy.”
(1999, 42)
Euhemeros and Euhemerism Another early doubter of myth’s truth-value was Euhemeros
of Messene (330 –260 bce). Like many others since, Euhemeros assumed
that his ancestors were primitives who lacked the scientific method, philosophical
principles, and cognitive sophistication of the “modern” world in which he lived.
He believed that the ancients, who were dominated by superstition and fancy, exaggerated
the facts of actual historical events and created imaginative explanations of
historical events because they did not have access to better forms of knowledge. Euhemeros
claimed to have taken a journey across the Indian Ocean to the land of
Panchia. There, he read an inscription which stated that Kronos and Zeus were at
one time living kings on earth. Euhemeros reasoned that the beneficence of these
kings was so great during their lifetimes that their legends lived on in the popular
imagination. Eventually, their deeds were romanticized and sentimentalized to the
4 Chapter 1 Purposes and Definitions
point that they became honored as gods—as were others after them. In short, Euhemeros
believed that myths were not true per se but that they contained the kernels
of historical truth. Today, euhemerists are those who interpret myths as primitive explanations
of the natural world or as time-distorted accounts of long-past historical
events. As Doty (2000) points out in Mythography: The Study of Myths and Ritual,
the “rationalistic anthropology of Euhemeros was not paid much heed by his Greek
contemporaries . . . [but] the euhemeristic attitude was revitalized and developed by
Roman writers. Later it became an important apologetic tool in the hands of Christian
writers who used euhemeristic analysis to demonstrate the secondary nature of
the Greek pantheon” (10).
Myth of the Golden Age
Hesiod, in his Works and Days, tells a devolutionary tale of origins that most scholars
have come to call the myth of the Golden Age. Hesiod writes of the gods on
Olympus creating mortal men numerous times (current humanity is actually the fifth
race of mortal men in this scheme). Each race of mortals is associated with a metal,
and each is a significant comedown from the previous race (with one exception).
Thus the first creation is a golden race that lived perfect, harmonious, and peaceful
lives. The second, markedly inferior but still highly honored, is silver. The third,
dedicated solely to might and violence, is bronze. The fourth, the one exception to
the devolutionary pattern, which Hesiod calls a “better and more just” race, is not
labeled by a metallic association. Finally, associated with iron, the fifth mortal race,
which Hesiod laments to be part of, is a “blend of good and bad” and will suffer
“growing cares” imposed by the gods (1983, 110 –201).
In this myth, Hesiod articulates a common motif in which nostalgia for a
“golden” past—when mortals, living in harmony with the world and with each
other, did not know suffering or care—is combined with criticism of the present
age—when children are hostile and ungrateful and adults are violent and morally
bankrupt. This hearkening back to a time when things were still warm from the divine
touch has been both a conscious and subconscious motive guiding mythologists
since the time, at least, of Plato. Impelled by quests for the original human language,
myth’s deep structure, or myth’s universal meanings, mythologists have hoped to
gain a glimpse of the world as it was when the cosmic clay had not yet hardened and
actions and words still had power to create physical law and shape human society.
As Plato knew, myth is extraordinarily powerful; how it is defined and who gets to
do the defining have far-reaching implications for what counts as knowledge and
therefore far-reaching cultural and political consequences. Thus there is a great deal
more at stake in the study of mythology than the exciting tales of heroes and their
fantastic adventures.
The rest of this chapter will show that the meaning of myth has always
been in contention. For two and a half millennia, debates over the importance and
meaning of myth have been struggles over matters of truth, religious belief, politics,
social custom, cultural identity, and history. The history of mythology is a tale told
by idiots—but also by sages, religious fundamentalists and agnostic theologians,
idealists and cynics, racists and fascists, philosophers and scholars. Myth has been
What Is Myth Historically? 5
understood as containing the secrets of God, as the cultural DNA responsible for a
people’s identity, as a means of reorganizing all human knowledge, and as a
justification for European and American efforts to colonize and police the world.
Our telling of the story of mythology will, we hope, make clear that there is a great
deal at stake in study of myths.
THE RISE OF MYTHOLOGY
Myth and Mythology
Until the Renaissance, the Platonic and euhemeristic notions that myths other than
their own were, at best, degraded forms of philosophical truth were little questioned
among the educated. This understanding of mythic truth-value did not, however,
dampen popular interest in them. Even among those who, like Plato, saw nothing sacred
in the old myths, enough intellectual reward was found in them to encourage
consideration of and debate about myth and mythology. To be clear, we will combine
our definition of myth with Hesiod’s of a divinely inspired utterance of a literary (poetic)
truth and distinguish it from mythology, which we define as the scholarly study
of myths.
Early Christian Mythology
The early church had an important role in transmitting Plato’s “demythologized”
definition of mythos down to our own day. As we have already suggested, the early
church fathers used a form of euhemerism to contrast the “false” gods of the Greek
6 Chapter 1 Purposes and Definitions
Michelangelo’s “The Creation of Adam” from the vault of the Sistine Chapel. The images,
scenes, and characters of myth frequently become the raw materials from which painters and
sculptors, poets and prophets draw inspiration. Often these secondary elaborations, which include
folktales, legends, movies, novels, and short stories, are more familiar to a people than
the sacred stories which inspired them.
Source: © Scala/Art Resource, NY.
and Roman pantheons with Jesus. Doniger tells us, for example, that Justin Martyr,
Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian developed the “Thesis of Demonic Imitation,”
which held that the demons, perceiving that Jesus would soon come, “suggested
to the poets who created [Greek] myths that they give Zeus many sons and
attribute monstrous adventures to them, in the hope that this would make the story
of Christ appear to be a fable of the same sort, when it came” (1998, 69–70). In this
doctrine, the gods of non-Christian myths are demonic deceptions and the story of
Jesus’ life was not myth at all but unquestionably fact.
In addition, the term logos, at least in the New Testament, had come to mean
something like “transcendent truth.” Thus the Gospel of John opens with the famous
claim: “In the beginning was the Word [logos] and the Word [logos] was with God
and the Word [logos] was God; and the Word [logos] became flesh and dwelt among
us” (John 1: 1). Here, logos has the divine associations of Homer’s and Hesiod’s
mythos, but there is no suggestion of an inspired poet singing his truth. Instead, the
logos exists, like one of Plato’s Ideal Forms, unchangeable and timeless, outside the
corruption and flux that characterize the material cosmos and human history. Logos
and mythos had switched connotative places. Logos now transcended the corrupting
limits known to human users of language, and mythos was mired in associations
of make-believe or, even worse, outright falsehoods designed to damn souls
to Hell. This negative Platonic/Christian definition of myth prevailed for the next
1,500 years. Only when Classical Greek and Roman texts became more widely
available during the Renaissance did the old myths enjoy a rebirth in literature and
the arts, paving the way for a later revaluation of the stories themselves.
MYTHOLOGY DURING THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Toward the end of the Renaissance, a rage for roots swept Europe, as attested by
books and essays that speculated on the primordial “Ur-language” from which all
others developed after the calamity at Babel. But there was more at stake than simply
establishing which language had been spoken in the Garden of Eden. European
scholars hoped also to name the “Ur-people” and the true location of Eden (the Urplace),
thus bringing the prestige and presumed political power of being God’s
“firstborn” to their respective nations. Olender’s The Languages of Paradise: Race,
Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century provides a detailed and readable
history of this early search for linguistic origins. In it we learn that patriotic
scholars from many nations—often using ingenious if specious linguistic comparisons—
each “discovered,” not surprisingly, that the original language spoken in the
Garden was their own.
These early, chauvinistic researches into the world’s original culture and language
were precursors of the 18th-century’s Volkish school, named after Johann
Gottfried Herder’s theory that the rural German Volk (i.e., folk, nation, or ethnicity)
still retained much of the vitality of their nation’s original character. While these
early attempts to identify the source-language and the first people might strike us today
as naive nationalism, they are important because they are provocative examples
of mythological thinking having extensive political consequences. Herder’s Volkish
Mythology During the Enlightenment 7
theories were influential in numerous settings, including the national romanticisms
of the 19th century and the racist ideologies of 20th-century fascism. Noting the
connection between Herder’s mythology and its uses by the Nazis in the mid-20th
century is not to argue Herder’s Volk theories caused the Nazis’ Aryan monstrosities.
In other places, the notion of a “folk spirit” has led to very different behaviors
and political institutions. Nevertheless, the Nazis’ use of such theories does highlight
our contention that mythology is not merely about quaint stories. In thinking
about myths, a central question should always be “What are the potential political
ramifications of this or that way of thinking about myths and their uses?”
Giovanni Battista Vico and The New Science
As late-Renaissance fascination with roots, scientific method, and classical texts
grew into the obsession for rational order that characterized the Enlightenment, a
number of thinkers began to examine what ancient myths might tell them about the
very beginnings of human history. Early mythologists sifted through myth, hoping
to peel away the layers of irrationality and error.
Stunningly original, The New Science, first published in 1725, exemplifies the
key elements of mythology during the Enlightenment and thereafter. The writer of
this work, Giovanni Battista Vico, claimed to have discovered the scientific principles
that finally could make sense of the confused histories, geographies, and linguistics
of his time. The result of his lifelong effort was an “ideal eternal history”
(Vico 1968, 12) which organized the ancient accounts in Egyptian, Greek, and
Roman classical literature and presented them in a rational order. Among Vico’s
research methods were careful attention to “hieroglyphs”—pictographic symbols
such as those found in coats of arms, carvings, and military emblems—and to etymology,
the study of word origins. Vico used these tools to theorize that languages
and cultures experience recursive evolutionary cycles. He reasoned that human society
began after the flood in a primitive state without language, moved through a
heroic phase when language was identical with poetry, and culminated in our current
stage in which language serves a wide variety of prosaic, transactional purposes.
Eventually, Vico speculated, an upheaval will occur starting the cyclical, progressive
process all over again. Thus Vico sought to rescue myth from the clutches
of irrationality by reorganizing its chronology and meanings into a logical system—
a system, as it happened, that used history, linguistics, iconography, and a great deal
of ingenuity to align Egyptian, Greek, and Roman myths with the key beliefs of his
Christian culture.
Sir William Jones’s Science of Language
Though Vico’s work did not enjoy wide circulation, his suggestion that languages
evolve over time was reiterated much more visibly and explicitly in the late 18thcentury
work of Englishman Sir William Jones. Jones was a prodigy who, even
in his twenties, was an international authority in five languages and possessed a
respectable grasp of several others. Jones took a post in India, where he noticed remarkable
similarities among the Arabic and European languages in which he was
8 Chapter 1 Purposes and Definitions
fluent and Sanskrit, the priestly language of India. Jones began to compare the roots
of many key words among these languages methodically. Rather than attempting to
fit his observations into the predetermined conclusion that English or another European
language was the language of Paradise, Jones let the evidence take him in a different
direction, suggesting instead that these similarities could be explained by the
existence of “a common source [language],” which, he suggested, “perhaps, no
longer exists” (Jones 1807/1984, 3:34 –35).
Following Jones’s suggestion, linguists methodically demonstrated that nearly
all the languages of India, Southwest Asia, and Europe derive from a single ancestor
language which is today known as proto-Indo-European, a language existing
only in linguistic theory. This scientific approach to language study gave direction,
method, and legitimacy to the search for the original Volk from whom all European
culture and achievement emanated. As linguistic research advanced, interest
in myths intensified as well. As Lincoln shows us, a translation of the Norse Eddas
by Paul Henri Mallet, the counterfeit translation of the blind Gaelic bard Ossian
by James Macpherson, the linguistic and mystical speculations of Johann Georg
Hamann, and the books of Herder all attest to the fact that, by the middle of the
18th century, myth was widely assumed to be “a crucial resource for collective
identity” and that “myths convey historic, cultural, and practical knowledge while
also guarding a Volk’s distinctive values—and errors—against forgetfulness and
change” (1999, 53).
Herder’s Organicist Volk Mythology
Herder’s work was particularly influential. Tapping into growing feelings of nationalism
all over Europe, enthusiasm for the new comparative science of language, and
an emergent romanticism valuing irrational forces of the mind, Herder theorized an
original, divinely sanctioned unity of humanity. From this unity, Herder claimed,
humans devolved into the various linguistically, geographically, and culturally separate
Volk that we see today. While Herder saw these differences as resulting from a
fall from the original divine plan, he also affirmed the importance of modern cultural
distinctions. Like Vico, who theorized that language influenced human physiognomy,
Herder also suggested that a people’s environment shaped not only their
myths, culture, and language but also their bodies and characters. His theory of an
organic relationship between Volk and landscape had great emotional resonance not
only in Germany but throughout Europe, and with very different long-range effects.
For example, if, as we noted earlier, Herder’s Volkish theories were seized upon to
justify Nazi fantasies, in Denmark Herder’s theories fueled a romantic folklore
movement in which the idea of a “pure folk spirit” contributed to Danish resistance
to Nazi racism.
Herder’s romanticism, like that of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge in England, was founded in part on a nostalgic view of rural life in which
close connection to the soil and other natural elements produced simple, honest Volk
whose language was believed to possess a spontaneous vitality and transparency of
meaning not found among city dwellers. Indeed, myths were important to Herder
and those influenced by him in part because it was believed that they embodied the
Mythology During the Enlightenment 9
Volkish purity and simple power from which the “civilized” nations had been receding
for centuries. Or, as Lincoln puts it, “if the environment impresses itself directly
on the bodies of a Volk, it impresses itself on their customs and mores through
the medium of myths, which Völker use to reflect on their surroundings and history
and to transmit ancestral traditions from one generation to another” (1999, 53).
Rise of Comparative Mythology
Herder’s suggestion that physical environment has a direct influence on a people’s
collective disposition and body type and, indirectly, on their sociocultural values
gave impetus to three closely related mythological schools. The first group of theorists,
who came to be called practitioners of comparative mythology, sought, using
methods borrowed from linguistics, to identify myth types and trace them back to
their presumed original versions. The second group, known as the “Nature School,”
used comparative methods to identify the environmental cause of a given people’s
myths. Thus, for example, the Solar Hypothesis proposed that all myths could be referred
back to the ancients’ fascination with the sun’s waxing and waning throughout
the year. Others found that such meteorological conditions as thunderstorms or
wind formed the basis of all myth. The third group of theorists were particularly interested
in Herder’s suggestion that the various Völker had specific and defining
qualities. This group came to be known as “ethnologists.” It is a sobering and oftneglected
fact that mythology, in its most literal sense as the study of myths, was until
World War II closely and openly identified with the “science” of race. Each of
these lines of inquiry had an important influence, though often a negative one, on
20th-century mythology, and thus they merit a closer look here.
Arguably, in the 19th century the study of myths was primarily a matter of sorting
out the races according to similarities and dissimilarities in their languages and
sacred narratives. Herder’s ideas about the organic links among Volk, soil, and myth
were not, especially by the standards of the time, particularly racist, but a virulent
and racialized strain of nationalism in Germany—as well as European colonization
worldwide—fueled a widespread interest in theories accounting for racial differences.
We can perhaps most quickly grasp the racial dimension of early mythology
by taking a “core sample” of 19th-century German thought on the “Aryan hypothesis”
about race, language, and culture. Extrapolating from Jones’s theory of Asian
origins for the world’s largest linguistic group, a variety of German intellectuals
posited the existence of a strong, technologically superior race that conquered the
prehistoric world from India to Iceland, thus leaving their indelible mark on the languages,
myths, and gene pool of this vast territory. This race, which they called the
Aryans, provided 19th-century German nationalists with an ancient, heroic “golden
age” of their own upon which to base their theories of German nationhood. If, they
reasoned, Germans were actually descendants of the Aryans, then they weren’t the
Barbarians so vilified by the Roman Tacitus or the vassals of French-speaking Prussia,
but the inheritors of an ancient patrimony of conquest, superior strength, and
mighty deeds. It was, many felt, the German branch of the Aryan family’s turn—
even their destiny—to take a preeminent role on the world stage.
10 Chapter 1 Purposes and Definitions
In the midst of—and to some degree creating—this fierce search for German
national identity were a number of important figures. In linguistics and mythology,
there were Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm whose German Grammar exhaustively demonstrated
the relationship between their native tongue and the other Aryan languages.
The Grimm brothers’ famous “Fairy Tales” were one result of another line
of inquiry: the search for narratives that would demonstrate that which was distinctive
in the German character.
In music, there was Richard Wagner, whose famous Ring Cycle was a highly
imaginative operatic synthesis of various Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and other Germanic
myths about the dragon-slaying hero Siegfried. It is in Wagner that we see an almost
religious devotion to the values of the Aryan Volk. The composer asked for and received
royal patronage to build Beyreuth, which he described as a modern “temple”
wherein the Volk could celebrate this exemplary hero’s Germanic spirit. The dark
side of Wagner’s interest in Siegfried is revealed in his theoretical writings. In them,
we find his racist thesis that Jews are physically and irretrievably “other” than the
descendants of the Aryan race. For example, in “Artwork of the Future” and “Judaism
and Music” Wagner goes to some lengths to argue that, because they had no
homeland, Jews were incapable of producing any original art or music.
In philosophy, Ludwig Feuerbach, Ludwig Schemann, Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
and, early in his career, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche provide some of the
clearest examples of this racist thinking among the educated elite. Nietzsche wrote
with great emotional force about the importance of German art, poetry, myth, ancient
religions, and native soil:
We think so highly of the pure and vigorous core of the German character that we dare
to expect of it above all others the elimination of the forcibly implanted foreign elements,
and consider it possible that the German spirit will return to itself. Some may
suppose that this spirit must begin its fight with the elimination of everything Romanic.
If so . . . let him never believe that he could fight similar fights without the gods of his
house, or his mythical home, without “bringing back” all German things! (Birth of
Tragedy 23.138–39)
Nietzsche also coined the term “blond beast,” which describes the noble (Aryan)
warriors of the past as
not much better than uncaged beasts of prey. There they savor a freedom from all social
constraints . . . [and] go back to the innocent conscience of the beast of prey, as triumphant
monsters who perhaps emerge from a disgusting procession of murder, arson,
rape, and torture, exhilarated and undisturbed of soul . . . One cannot fail to see at the
bottom of all these noble races the beast of prey, the splendid blond beast prowling about
avidly in search of spoil and victory. (On the Genealogy of Morals 11.40 – 41)
Despite the complexity of Nietzsche’s work and scholars’ continuing debates about
the degree to which his personal biases and ethnocentrism affected that work, this
tale of the “noble races” and their “innocent” exercise of bloodthirsty and animalistic
power—itself a prime example of mythologists reconfiguring ancient myths to
create powerful modern myths—proved a sinister inspiration for German fascists in
the 20th century.
Mythology During the Enlightenment 11
As reprehensible as we now find anti-Semitism, in particular, and racism, in
general, it was nevertheless a fact that respected artists, intellectuals, and academics
wrote extensively about the fundamental differences in spirit and kind between
Jews (and other non-Aryans) and the “Nordic tribes” descended from the great
Aryan race of warriors. Even today, when such overt racism or ethnocentrism is no
longer the norm, we may notice that a lingering academic bias in favor of Greek, Roman,
and Nordic myth continues to influence mythology texts and course reading
lists. More subtly, and to varying degrees, the writings of such eminent 20th-century
figures as Sir James Frazer, Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell carry
forward the 19th-century bias against the “primitive” races who still believed in
their myths. That such understandings were not merely the accepted thoughts of the
times is made evident by the fact that another major thinker on these same issues,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, explicitly appreciated non-Western societies and systems of
thought. Lévi-Strauss’s The Savage Mind is, for one example, an effective and powerful
argument against the dismissive attitudes too common in the works of the writers
mentioned above.
Even though the Aryan hypothesis was a central concern of comparative mythology
in the 19th century, there were other, less insidious lines of inquiry as well.
One of Nietzsche’s early influences, Adalbert Kuhn, for example, was Germany’s
most enthusiastic proponent of the Nature School of comparative mythology. Kuhn
took Herder’s earlier ideas about the integral connection between a Volk’s values,
history, culture, and practical knowledge and their natural surroundings seriously.
From this starting point, Kuhn borrowed the principles and discoveries of comparative
linguists to posit an Aryan Ur-myth from which numerous cross-cultural variants
emanated.
Kuhn determined that the structural features of this “original” myth were a division
between earth and sky and a protagonist who mediated between these two
realms by stealing something from the gods and bestowing it upon humanity. Sometimes,
as in the case of Prometheus, the stolen gift was fire; sometimes it was the
elixir of immortality. In all cases, Kuhn saw these variants as allegories of natural
phenomena—particularly the rainstorm that bestows fire in the form of lightning
and the life-giving elixir of rain which makes all life possible. Many others in Germany,
France, Denmark, Switzerland, and England employed Kuhn’s methods to
uncover the basic plot of the Ur-myth, often reaching significantly different conclusions.
Some preferred to see the Ur-myth as an allegory of the phases of the moon,
others argued for the sun, still others found that prevailing winds or other meteorological
conditions formed the archplot.
In England, Friedrich Max Müller was the Joseph Campbell of his time—a man
of immense learning, tremendous charisma at the lectern, and a single idea about
myth that he vigorously promoted long after others had found it intellectually suspect
to do so. Müller argued that myth was “a disease of language” through which
poetic descriptions of such meteorological features as the sunrise and the thunderstorm
became distorted into the bewildering array of deities, rituals, and superstitions
one finds in the world’s myths. Müller’s concept of mythic language echoes the
devolutionary elements of the Golden Age myth. In his view, the pristine language
of Paradise fell from an original unity between truth and language into the confu-
12 Chapter 1 Purposes and Definitions
sion of multiple and competing versions of the truth. Müller’s ideas also resonate
with Euhemeros in that both believed that the ancients lacked the scientific and religious
sophistication of their own enlightened day and, as a result, twisted reality
into the irrational pretzel-logic of myth.
The Decline of Comparative Mythology
By the middle of the 19th century, mythology was dominated by a single methodology.
Whether focusing on the Aryan homeland, the relationships between environment,
Volk, and myth, or the Ur-myth from which all myths arose, each specialist
employed the comparative method. Comparative mythology, as practiced by the
mid-19th century, was a matter of locking oneself in a library and reading. Comparative
mythology could be cross-cultural, with the scholar comparing a story’s Indian,
Arabic, German, and Celtic versions; it could also specialize in the stories of
a single Volk. Mythology relied on insights from linguistics, archaeology, and art
history, but the myths themselves were regarded as static cultural artifacts from the
primitive past.
Beneath the apparent methodological unity of 19th-century mythology, however,
a fundamental contradiction had begun to make itself felt. On one hand, a profound
longing for a simpler, more organically unified Golden Age manifested itself
in the revaluation of myths and search for the Ur-Volk. On the other hand, an equally
profound euhemerism worked in the opposite direction, manifesting itself in a
nearly universal view that myths and mythmakers traded in the irrational and
crudely primitive. Part of the growing rift among mythologists amounted to a debate
over answers to what Segal, in his Theorizing About Myth, calls the “three major
questions [that] can be asked of myth: what is its subject matter, what is its origin,
and what is its function?” (1999, 67). Primarily, the comparatists were interested in
origins and content, and they were not particularly interested in how myth functioned;
or, rather, they saw explanation of natural phenomena as its sole function.
Toward the end of the 19th century, as Segal demonstrates, early anthropology’s
view of myth emphasized function above all else. Interest in this functional approach
to mythology led to the breakup of the largely bookish and tendentious study
of literary myth. What emerged were various approaches toward myth driven by disciplinary
concerns within anthropology, psychology, literary criticism, and the history
of religions.
MYTHOLOGY IN THE 20TH CENTURY
Early Anthropology
The Golden Bough The first of these disciplines, anthropology, came to view
myth as primarily a living, oral, culture-preserving phenomenon. Led by such pioneers
as Edward B. Tylor, Andrew Lang, Franz Boas, Sir James George Frazer, and
Emile Durkheim, emphasis switched from textual comparisons and blood-and-soil
Mythology in the 20th Century 13
interpretive theories to discovering the ways in which myths function in living societies.
Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough is the best-known and remains the most
widely read example of the early versions of this anthropological work. The Golden
Bough, which grew to 12 volumes, depicts the widely dispersed stories of dying and
resurrecting gods as literary transformations of primitive, magical-religious rituals
in which “sacred kings” were slaughtered in hopes of ensuring agricultural fertility.
Frazer approached myth and culture from an evolutionary perspective, assuming,
not unlike Vico, a progression from the “mute signs” of primitive magic (e.g., rituals
believed to create desired effects) to the largely allegorical use of ritual in primitive
religion (e.g., the substitutionary death of a “scapegoat”) to the abstract symbolism
of civilized religion (e.g., the doctrine of transubstantiation).
Frazer also assumed that myth was “primitive science,” which attributed to the
will of deities, people, or animals that which modern science attributes to the impersonal
functioning of various physical laws and biological processes. While
Frazer shared the new anthropological science’s interests in myth’s function in living
cultures, he nevertheless did not completely break with comparative mythology’s
armchair approach.
The “Myth-and-Ritual” School Frazer’s quasi-anthropological work had wide
influence and inspired, at least in part, the also quasi-anthropological “myth-andritual”
school. This relatively short-lived branch of mythological research was intensely
functionalist in its approach, caring little for the origins of myth and looking
at content only as a means of demonstrating the contention that myth is a script
from which early religious rituals were performed. As Fontenrose puts it in the preface
to The Ritual Theory of Myth: “Some . . . are finding myth everywhere, especially
those who follow the banner of the ‘myth-ritual’ school—or perhaps I should
say banners of the schools, since ritualists do not form a single school or follow a
single doctrine. But most of them are agreed that all myths are derived from rituals
and that they were in origin the spoken part of ritual performance” (1971, n.p.).
Modern Anthropology
Another of Frazer’s admirers was Bronislaw Malinowski, whose fieldwork in the
Trobriand Islands contributed much to the evolving methods of modern anthropology.
In a 1925 lecture given in Frazer’s honor, Malinowski lavishly praised the elder
writer and then proceeded to outline what has been taken, until recently, as field anthropology’s
gospel:
Studied alive, myth . . . is not symbolic, but a direct expression of its subject-matter; it
is not an explanation in satisfaction of a scientific interest, but a narrative resurrection
of a primeval reality, told in satisfaction of deep religious wants, moral cravings, social
submissions, assertion, even practical requirements. Myth fulfills in primitive culture an
indispensable function: it expresses, enhances, and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces
morality; it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the
guidance of man. Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle
tale, but a hard-worked active force; it is not an intellectual explanation or an artistic imagery,
but a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom. (1926/1971, 79)
14 Chapter 1 Purposes and Definitions
Malinowski’s outline of anthropology’s view of myth contains several crucial
remarks. First, the anthropologist states emphatically that myth is not an “explanation
in satisfaction of a scientific interest.” This view contrasts sharply with the
euhemerism of Frazer, Tylor, and the comparatists, who believed to one degree or
another that myths are little more than primitive or mistaken science. Second, Malinowski
saw myth as profoundly “true” in the sense that it had a visible role as
“pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom.” He also saw myth as real
in the sense that it could be observed by the field researcher in the form of oral performance,
rituals, and ceremonies, and that it visibly influenced a living people’s sociopolitical
behavior. As his later fieldwork makes clear, Malinowski’s views are
considerably broader than those of the myth-ritualists, who would have limited
myth’s functionality to religious ritual only.
But we can also see from Malinowski’s remarks that he did not entirely part
ways with his mentor. Even though the younger man claimed to have also disputed
the older’s evolutionary theory of culture, it is significant that he nevertheless discusses
myth’s role in the “primitive faith” and in the “primitive psychology” of his
research subjects. It can be argued that Malinowski and his contemporaries were not
explicitly dismissive of “primitive” societies, that they were even respectful of the
“face-to-face” nature of such societies when compared with more institutional and
“impersonal” developed ones. Yet the effects of ethnocentric assumptions make it
extremely difficult to avoid such hierarchical valuations, even if there is some question
about the motives or intentions of the researchers.
Nevertheless, folkloric and anthropological methodologies profoundly influenced
20th-century mythology. For example, anthropological and folklorist approaches
to myth emphasize field research and have thus underscored the importance
of the real-world conditions in which myths perform their functions. As a
result, those working in other disciplines have come to respect myth’s functions
as cultural charter and socializing agent. In addition, anthropology’s correlation of
myths to the material, social, political, and economic facts of living cultures helps
those interested in the myths of extinct cultures to understand some of the obscure
references and actions in the stories they study. Moreover, the insistence of anthropologists
and folklorists on examining the function of myths in living societies demonstrates
how ignorant the 19th century’s armchair mythologists had been of what
so-called primitives actually do understand about the physical world and the degree
to which they are and are not naive about the truth-value of these narratives. In short,
anthropology and folklore have encouraged all mythologists to relate their theories
about myth to the lived experience of human beings.
The Rise of Psychology
About the time that Frazer and the early anthropologists were beginning to turn the
focus of mythology away from questions of racial identity and to replace the comparative
method of the Nature School with theories of social functionalism, psychiatric
pioneers Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung had begun to investigate the relationship
between myth and the unconscious. Freud and Jung believed that mythic
symbols—both as they are encountered in religion and as they manifest themselves
Mythology in the 20th Century 15
in dreams and works of the imagination—emerge from the deepest wells of the psyche.
Although their conclusions about the landscape of the human mind differed,
both men shared a belief that our gods and other mythic characters, as well as our
dreams and works of fiction, are projections of that which the unconscious contains.
For Freud, “the unconscious is the true psychical reality” (Complete Works 1953–
1966, 612–13), but our conscious minds censor our impulses, desires, fantasies, and
preconscious thoughts because they are too raw and dangerous to face unmediated.
Freud saw the images that appear to us in dreams and in such imaginative works as
novels and myths as tamed projections of the unconscious’s ungovernable terrors.
From this point of view, myths are the conscious mind’s strategy for making visible
and comprehensible the internal forces and conflicts that impel our actions and
shape our thoughts.
Jung’s view is similar to but not identical with Freud’s. Jung viewed the unconscious
not as the individual’s personal repository “of repressed or forgotten [psychic]
contents” (1959/1980, 3). Rather, he argued, “the unconscious is not individual
but universal [collective]; unlike the personal psyche, it has contents and modes
of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals” (3– 4).
Jung defined “the contents of the collective unconscious . . . as archetypes” (4). Just
exactly what an archetype is psychologically is far too complex to discuss here, but,
briefly, Jung defined them as “those psychic contents which have not yet been submitted
to conscious elaboration” (5). Indeed, Jung and Freud believed that we never
see the unconscious and its contents; rather, we see only projected and therefore
refined images that symbolize the things it contains.
Jung and his followers argued that such mythic archetypes as the Wise Woman,
the Hero, the Great Mother, the Father, the Miraculous Child, and the Shadow are
aspects of every individual psyche, regardless of gender, culture, or personal history.
The healthy mind, they reasoned, learns to view the contradictory impulses represented
by these archetypes in a balanced pattern, or “mandala.” Those with various
neuroses and psychoses, however, can’t balance these impulses and are overwhelmed
by the unconscious’s self-contradictory forces. Jung saw the universalized
symbols and images that appear in myth, religion, and art as highly polished versions
of the archetypes lurking in the collective unconscious. Therefore, Zeus, Yahweh,
Kali, and Cybele are their respective cultures’ elaborations of universally available
psychic material. Jung called these elaborations “eternal images” that
are meant to attract, to convince, to fascinate, and to overpower. [These images] are created
out of the primal stuff of revelation and reflect the ever-unique experience of divinity.
That is why they always give man a premonition of the divine while at the same time
safeguarding him from immediate experience of it. Thanks to the labors of the human
spirit over the centuries, these images have become embedded in a comprehensive system
of thought that ascribes an order to the world, and are at the same time represented
by . . . mighty, far-spread, and venerable institution[s like] the Church. (1959/1980, 8)
Joseph Campbell: Literary and Cultural Critic
Whereas in the 19th century what passed for literary criticism of myth was largely
a matter of antiquarians, classicists, biblicists, and specialists in dead languages
reading myths and theorizing the linguistic and cultural events that explained and
16 Chapter 1 Purposes and Definitions
connected them, in the 20th century literary approaches to myth grew more sophisticated.
Important literary critics interested in reading myths include Robert Graves,
author of The White Goddess and Greek Myths, and Northrop Frye, whose Anatomy
of Criticism makes the case that four basic motifs corresponding to the seasons
(spring– comedy, summer–romance, autumn–tragedy, and winter–satire) give
shape to all literature. Many scholars wrote extensively about myth and were
influential in their disciplines, but Joseph Campbell achieved a much broader popular
following.
Campbell was the best-known mythologist of the 20th century if for no other
reason than because he was able to present his ideas on television. His six-part series
in the1980s with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth, reached a wide audience
eager to hear about “universal human truths” in an age of increasing social fragmentation.
At first glance it might seem odd to highlight Campbell’s television success
here, but in terms of general awareness of myth in America today and in terms
of the argument that myth has powerful resonance even in today’s modern world,
Campbell’s television success is precisely to the point. His first book, The Hero with
a Thousand Faces, continues to be widely read, and, according to Ellwood, “George
Lucas freely acknowledges the influence of reading . . . [it] and [Campbell’s] The
Masks of God” (1999, 127–28) on his science fiction epic, Star Wars. Campbell
wrote voluminously throughout his life, but the ideas he lays out in Hero form a core
that changed little during his career—even when criticism and discoveries in other
fields urged the necessity to revisit them.
Campbell openly acknowledged the influence of Jung and Freud on his work.
Yet he never seems quite at home with Jung’s collective unconscious. Rather, the
American mythologist always saw myth as the story of the rugged individual who
realizes his true nature through heroic struggle. Archetypal symbols and universals
there may be, Campbell seems to say, but mythology is ultimately and always the
vehicle through which the individual finds a sense of identity and place in the world.
Like Jung and Frazer, Campbell sought to present the master theory through which
all myths could be understood. In his view, there was a single “monomyth” organizing
all such narratives. Ellwood summarizes Campbell’s Hero with a Thousand
Faces in this way:
The basic monomyth informs us that the mythological hero, setting out from an everyday
home, is lured or is carried away or proceeds to the threshold of adventure. He defeats
a shadowy presence that guards the gateway, enters a dark passageway or even
death, meets many unfamiliar forces, some of which give him threatening “tests,” some
of which offer magical aid. At the climax of the quest he undergoes a supreme ordeal
and gains his reward: sacred marriage or sexual union with the goddess of the world,
reconciliation with the father, his own divinization, or a mighty gift to bring back to the
world. He then undertakes the final work of return, in which, transformed, he reenters
the place from whence he set out. (1999, 144)
Campbell arrived at his theory of the monomyth by synthesizing insights from
psychoanalysis, methods from 19th-century comparative mythology, and analyses
typical of literary and cultural criticism. Hewas not amember of the newwave of anthropology
and folklore that searched myths for references to material, political, and
social culture. Nor did he seem particularly interested in questions of translation, of
Mythology in the 20th Century 17
variants, or in the possible social, religious, and ritual contexts of the myths he used.
Rather, Campbell promoted what he called “living mythology,” a nonsectarian spiritual
path through which the individual might gain a sense of spiritual and social purpose
and through which society might be returned to simplicity and moral virtue.
Claude Lévi-Strauss and Structuralism
At the other end of the spectrum from Campbell’s individual-centered mythology is
the work of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose search for “deep
structure” in myth had a profound influence on anthropologists and literary critics
alike. Lévi-Strauss’s search for the skeletal core of myth—and the related searches
for organizing principles in literature carried out most famously by Vladimir Propp,
Tzetvan Todorov, and Jonathan Culler—came to be known as structuralism. The
influence of structuralism on the mythologies of the 20th century would be difficult
to overstate, and structuralism as a critical model can be applied far beyond the
boundaries of mythology or literature. It is the search for the undergirding steel that
holds up the buildings of all human artifacts and endeavors, including those of
meaning-making through myth and literature.
As Robert Scholes discusses the application of these ideas to literature (and, in
fact, to any written text), structuralism sought “to establish a model of the system of
18 Chapter 1 Purposes and Definitions
Still from Star Wars IV: A New Hope. According to Campbell, the hero’s quest occurs in three
phases: the separation, the initiation, and the return. As the hero separates himself from his
home, he often encounters a helper that guards and guides him through the trials that initiate
him into the true nature of reality. When he achieves mastery, he may return home to enrich his
former community.
Source: Everett Collection.
literature itself as the external reference for the individual works it considers” (1974,
10). As such, structuralism can be seen as a reaction against 19th-century comparatist
and literary approaches to myth and classical literature, especially to their subjective,
even idiosyncratic, interpretations of these stories. What Lévi-Strauss and
others sought was an objective way of discussing literary meaning. By borrowing
from linguistics such structural notions as syntax, grammar, phonemes, and morphemes,
the French anthropologist attempted to develop a model that would describe
how all myths worked—and do so in a way that any literature specialist could
duplicate without resorting to his or her personal impressions and imagination. With
its focus on discovering an unchanging core of patterned relations giving shape to
narratives of all kinds, structuralism promised to put literary criticism and anthropological
investigations of myth on the firm ground of empirical science.
A quick way into the issues that structuralism wanted to raise would be to look
at the work of one of Lévi-Strauss’s contemporaries, Vladimir Propp, who worked
almost exclusively on the Russian folktale, attempting to distinguish between constant
and variable elements in that genre. After studying more than a thousand stories,
he concluded that the characters in fairy tales change but their functions within
the plot do not. Propp argued that fairy tales have 31 functions. For examples,
Propp’s folktale structures begin with (1) the hero leaves home, (2) an interdiction
is addressed to the hero, and (3) the interdiction is violated. The 31 total possible
plot functions include (12) the hero is tested, interrogated, attacked, which prepares
the way for his receiving either a magical agent or helper, (17) the hero is branded,
(24) a false hero presents unfounded claims, (30) the villain is punished, and (31) the
hero marries and ascends the throne (Scholes 1974, 63– 64).
Lévi-Strauss, like Propp, gathered and analyzed as many versions of certain
myths as he could find, hoping to penetrate their myriad surface elements and see
into a basic grammar of meaning. Working among the natives of South America,
Lévi-Strauss took inventory of the various references found in each myth. Ultimately,
he determined that mythic structure reveals itself through a limited number
of codes. For example, “among South American myths he [distinguished] a sociological,
a culinary (or techno-economic), an acoustic, a cosmological, and an astronomical
code” (Kirk 1970, 43). Lévi-Strauss further determined that these codes
embodied polar opposites, or “binary oppositions.” Thus, within the culinary code,
as the title of one of his most famous books puts it, one finds the binary of the “raw
and the cooked.” Within the sociological code, one would find such binaries as married
versus unmarried, family versus nonfamily, and the people versus the other.
Lévi-Strauss concluded that myths mediate the tension created by these alwayspresent
oppositions, whether individuals within a society are aware of it or not. Indeed,
Lévi-Strauss discusses the codes and structures that manifest themselves in
myths in much the same way that Freud and Jung discuss the unconscious. Whereas
the psychologists described the unconscious as the hidden source from which individual
consciousness arises, Lévi-Strauss viewed the structures of myth and language
as the hidden bedrock upon which narratives are built. In fact, he sounds more
like a metaphysician than a scientist when he claims that the deep structures of narrative
exist—like Plato’s ideal forms or St. John’s logos—in a realm beyond and untouched
by actual stories and storytellers. As Lévi-Strauss writes in The Raw and
Mythology in the 20th Century 19
the Cooked (1964), “we cannot therefore grasp [in our analysis of myth] how men
think, but how myths think themselves in men, and without their awareness” (1990,
20). In other words, people don’t think myths into existence; mythic structures inherent
in language do a people’s thinking for them, expressing themselves when
people use language. Ultimately, he reduced the codes and the patterned relations he
discovered among South American Indian myths to a kind of algebra, a symbol system
intended to express that which was always true of these stories, regardless of
such surface details as plot, character, and setting.
Mircea Eliade’s Time Machine
Mircea Eliade has been described as “the preeminent historian of religion of his
time” (Ellwood 1999, 79), and his ideas about the essential connection between
myth and religion remain influential among students of myth. As a young man
Eliade invested himself in nationalist politics. Believing in the power of myth to give
a downtrodden people the courage and vision necessary to stage a spiritually motivated
political revolution, Eliade became involved with a proto-fascist group called
the Legion of the Archangel Michael.
Recent criticism of Eliade’s political associations has begun to erode his reputation
as a mythologist to some extent. However, it is important to contextualize his
sympathy with a political ideology that fused, in its early days, a Christian commitment
to charity for the poor and outrage at injustice with a myth of a Romania that
had a special destiny to fulfill. Like so many of the 19th- and early 20th-century mythologists
who explored the connection between myth and Volk, Eliade looked to his
people’s Indo-European heritage for stories that would impart a spiritual authority
to a people’s revolution.
In his Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return; The Sacred and the
Profane; Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries; and Myth and Reality, Eliade demonstrates
his own brand of structuralism. Space, time, and objects are perceived by the religious
imagination, he argues, in binary terms, as either sacred or profane. Thus such
objects as icons and religious utensils, such places as temples and special groves,
and such times as religious festivals are designated as sacred. Only certain limited
activities can properly be performed with or within them. The profane, on the contrary,
are those things, places, and times available to people without special ceremony
or ritual.
Another important binary in Eliade’s mythology is the distinction he makes between
“archaic” and modern man. In his view, archaic peoples are more attuned
than modern, history-obsessed peoples to the sacred and express this understanding
more clearly in their relationships to nature and in their myths. Eliade’s mythology
proposes yet another opposition—that which exists between cosmic time, or the
time of origins, and human history. From his perspective, moderns live in unhappy
exile from the Paradise of cosmic time in which a vital connection to the sacred is
natural. Myth, for Eliade, provides moderns with a vehicle through which they can
periodically return to the time of origins and thus begin their lives anew. This timemachine
function resembles the myth-ritualists’ view that sacred narratives facili-
20 Chapter 1 Purposes and Definitions
tate the putting to death of stale, profane consciousness, restoring the participants to
the virgin possibilities of creation. Thus we can see that from the perspective of religious
studies—at least insofar as Eliade still represents that discipline—that myth
has a religious function. Like going to confession, fasting on Yom Kippur, making
animal sacrifice, or doing penance, myth permits human beings, who are continually
contaminated by exposure to the profane, to wipe the slate clean and make a
fresh start.
Considering 20th-Century Mythology Critically
Our overview of 20th-century mythology has so far described the lenses through
which myth has been studied in the past 100 years. One could easily imagine that
the history of mythology presented here has been leading up to a happy ending: at
last, we come to the end of the 20th century and the curtains will part to reveal stateof-
the-art mythology. After millennia of deprecating myths as child’s prattle and the
fevered dreams of savages, after centuries of romanticizing the simplicity of our premodern
past, after decades of trying to make the square peg of literature fit into the
round hole of science, we have finally gotten it right. Surely we have a mythology
that fairly and objectively examines the object of its study, that is methodologically
but not blindly rigorous, and that duly considers history, custom, material culture,
and sociopolitical and religious institutions without turning a story into a code to be
cracked or a “to-do” list. But the fact is that no such mythology exists.
None of the mythologies of the past century has had it quite right—and it is instructive
to see why not. Clearly, 19th-century comparative mythology was deeply
flawed in its search for irrecoverable Ur-languages and highly dubious speculations
about the German or Italian or Indian or Jewish character. The nature, ethnological,
and myth-ritual schools, like Procrustes, made theoretical beds and then stretched
or lopped off evidential limbs in order to achieve a perfect fit. While we owe the
comparatists and their literary descendants gratitude for the thousands of myths they
collected, and while we should not deny that natural environment and ritual, for example,
are an important part of mythic content, we should also learn the lesson that
no universal theory “explains” myth.
And we ought to ask ourselves what is to be gained from reducing all myth to a
single “pattern.” If we read all myths as allegories of the seasonal cycles of fertility
and infertility as, for example, Frazer and Graves did, what is to be gained? Are we
content to read the story of Jesus’ birth, ministry, and death as one of many instantiations
of the “year spirit”? Here’s death and resurrection! A seasonal pattern! Is
this label enough to satisfy our desire to understand mythic meanings and functions?
Similarly, are we content to read all myths, as Campbell does, as yet another version
of the hero’s passage from home, through trial, through apotheosis, and back home
again? Surely this plot line accounts for some significant events in myth, but are we
content to reduce even myths of creation, fertility, and apocalypse to the story of an
individual’s separation, initiation, and return? What do we say after we identify, as
Eliade does, the basic alienation that exists in myth between human beings and the
sacred? A one-trick pony, even when the trick is pretty good, is still a one-trick pony.
Mythology in the 20th Century 21
But anthropology and folklore, despite the fact that they have done mythology
an inestimable service by grounding it in observation-based science, are not quite
the answer either. Following Malinowski, anthropologists have, to greater and lesser
degrees, illuminated the relationships among myths, religion, custom, sociopolitical
behaviors, and material culture. Working within this discipline, Lévi-Strauss and
Propp attempted to create a completely objective typology of narrative functions
through which all myths could be analyzed. To some degree, particularly in Propp’s
work on the morphology of the folktale, structuralism succeeded. Any student of
myth can examine any number of fairy tales using Propp’s model and will find that
the Russian folklorist’s functions are indeed present and in the described order.
Yet, for all that anthropologists and folklorists have contributed to the study of
myth, their disciplined focus on the function of myths within a nexus of material,
social, political, and economic phenomena has come at a considerable cost. Such
concerns, as important as they are, are only partial, and they ignore the pleasures and
power of narrative per se for us here and now as well as for the myth tellers and their
more immediate audiences. And structuralist anthropology does not and really cannot
answer one of the most important questions: So what? Once we have learned
Propp’s 31 elements of the folk tale, the various codes in creation myths, and the binary
oppositions Lévi-Strauss claims they suggest, what do we really have? From
our point of view as professors of English, anthropology’s tight focus on the functionality
of and within myth diverts attention away from the fundamental fact that
myths are stories. We need only think of Lévi-Strauss’s algebra of mythic functions
or Malinowski’s search for references to food, clothing, shelter, and political relationships
in the myths of the Trobriand islanders to realize that something vital is
lost when myth is cannibalized for its references to the “real” world. We can ask anthropologists,
as we asked literary theorists, whether reducing myths to lists of material
culture items or to a set of narrative functions isn’t as distorting as reducing all
myths to allegories of nature, the year spirit, or the hero’s quest.
While anthropology and folklore focused on myth’s functions and 19th- and
early 20th-century literary criticism preoccupied itself largely with myth’s contents,
psychological approaches have contemplated those dimensions of myth and suggested
a theory of psychic origins as well. Psychological approaches to myth, therefore,
have been generally more holistic than others. After all, whatever else can be
said about them, myths proceed from the human mind if for no other reason than the
mind needs to understand “the self” in relation to the larger cosmos. For this reason,
many in the latter half of the 20th century assumed that Freud’s or Jung’s views
about myth are fundamentally sound. And the psychological approach to myth has
been powerfully suggestive. Jung’s archetypes, for example, offer a potent interpretation
of widely distributed symbols, images, and plot lines. There’s a satisfying
symmetry to the notion that each individual contains and balances oppositions such
as elder and child, male and female, sinner and saint. Innumerable mythic characters
embody these and other human qualities. And although Freud overstates his
case when he claims that myths are nothing other than the working out of the complex
interrelationships among identity, sexuality, and family relationships, a great
many myths do feature incest, rape, infanticide, and parricide. Myths are about re-
22 Chapter 1 Purposes and Definitions
lationships among the irrational, the rational, and the individual’s responsibility to
society, or, in Freud’s terms, among the id, the ego, and the superego.
However, a principal weakness of literary, psychological, and structuralist approaches
is that they are ahistorical; they don’t consider the specific material and
social conditions that shape myth. Indeed, most of the major mythologists of the
20th century cared little for the cultural specifics of how living myths function in
the day-to-day lives of the people who told them. They cared little for cultural distinctions
that might explain why one version of a myth differs from another; and, in
the cases of Jung, Campbell, and Eliade, they seemed interested in myth only as far
as familiarity with its presumed “core” might provide the modern individual with
a return to Paradise lost—to a sense of self closely connected to the soil and fully
at home in a homogeneous sociopolitical order. Thus, while the mythologies of the
early- and mid-20th century demonstrated considerable genius, their lack of concern
for historical and cultural context and their insistence on reading myths through analytical
schema that dispensed with all but a story’s most rudimentary plot structure
perpetuated most of the significant shortcomings of their 18th- and 19th-century
predecessors. Now, at the beginning of the 21st century, awareness of these shortcomings
has bred approaches to myth that insist on the importance of context, particularly
where gender, cultural norms, and the specifics of the performance events
are concerned. Moreover, much like this chapter, modern scholarship has increasingly
focused on mythology rather than on myth itself. We conclude with a brief
survey of several of the most recent and important contributions to the study of
myth and consider, even more briefly, what uses these new ideas might have for the
classroom.
MYTHOLOGY TODAY
William Doty’s “Toolkit”
Doty’s Mythography concludes with a number of appendixes for “furbishing the
creative mythographer’s toolkit.” Among these tools are “questions to address to
mythic texts.” Embedded in these questions is a comprehensive methodology that
urges students of myth not to choose a single approach to myth but to use as many
of the questions and concerns of various mythological schools as possible. Doty’s
questions arise from five central concerns: (1) the social, (2) the psychological,
(3) the literary, textual, and performative, (4) the structural, and (5) the political
(2000, 466 – 67). As the term “mythographer’s toolkit” implies, Doty’s approach to
the subject is profoundly practical. Above all he is concerned with methodology and
principles of analysis, and he has distilled the concerns of many fields, including sociology,
anthropology, psychology, and literary criticism into a systematic series of
exploratory questions and research procedures that are well within reach of most
non-specialists. The questions that Doty poses for each of the five areas of concern
just mentioned are particularly congenial to the kinds of thinking, discussion, and
research performed in the classroom.
Mythology Today 23
Bruce Lincoln’s Ideological Narratives
As suggestive as Doty’s questions are, other approaches to myth have been advocated
recently. Lincoln, whose Theorizing Myth is an important contribution to the
current study of myth, would define myth and mythology as “ideology in narrative
form” because, as he says, all human communication is “interested, perspectival,
and partial and . . . its ideological dimensions must be acknowledged, ferreted out
where necessary, and critically cross-examined” (1999, 207, 208).
Ultimately, Lincoln advocates making modern mythology the study of previous
mythologies. This scholarly endeavor would revolve around “excavating the texts
within which that discourse [mythology] took shape and continues to thrive . . . [explicating]
their content by placing them in their proper contexts, establishing the
connections among them, probing their ideological and other dimensions, explicit
and subtextual” (1999, 216). How students should approach myths other than those
told by scholars about myth Lincoln doesn’t say—though it seems plausible that his
approach would be approximately the same for myth as for mythology.
Wendy Doniger’s Telescopes and Microscopes
Wendy Doniger, in her The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth, argues
for an updated and recalibrated version of the kind of comparative mythology that
the Grimm brothers and Sir James Frazer practiced. Among the ways Doniger suggests
improving the comparative mythology of the 19th century is, “whenever possible
. . . to note the context: who is telling the story and why”; and, she argues, that
context could also include—indeed would have to include—“other myths, other
related ideas, as Lévi-Strauss argued long ago” (1998, 44, 45). Doniger advocates
stripping individual myths to their “naked” narrative outlines—to symbols, themes,
and similarities in plot—in order to manage the amount of detail that the comparatist
will have to analyze. Unlike Lévi-Strauss, Doniger wouldn’t reduce myth to a
level where all myths look alike. Context would still matter. Accordingly, she says,
we could include in our comparison the contexts of myths. Attention to the sociopolitical
and performative contexts in which myths occur would, in Doniger’s
method, “take account of differences between men and women as storytellers, and
also between rich and poor, dominant and oppressed” (46). Doniger would also have
students of myth learn how to switch back and forth between the “microscope” of a
single telling to the “telescope” of the world’s numerous variations on a mythological
theme.
Thus Doniger’s comparative mythology respects the integrity of a single myth
as a unique story and, at the same time, enriches our understanding of that story
through comparisons with other stories with similar plots, characters, and symbolic
imagery as well as through comparisons with other mythic stories with similar contexts
of telling. For one example of this last sense of comparison, we might be enriched
by considering myths specifically told by women even as we would likely be
rewarded by comparing myths with women or goddesses as central characters.
24 Chapter 1 Purposes and Definitions
Robert Ellwood’s “Real Myths”
Robert Ellwood, who, like Lincoln, was one of Eliade’s students at the University of
Chicago in the 1960s, suggests yet another approach in The Politics of Myth: A Study
of C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell (1999). Ellwood argues that
what we call “myth” does not exist. Or, to put it more precisely, modern students of
myth do not study mythos, in Hesiod’s sense of a poet “breathing” the divinely inspired
utterance. Rather, what we call myth “is always received from an already
distant past, literary (even if only oral literature), hence a step away from primal
simplicity” (174). This is an important point for Ellwood and other modern mythologists
because “official” myths like The Iliad and Odyssey, The Theogony—or
the Bhagavad Gita or the Bible—“are inevitably reconstructions from snatches of
folklore and legend, artistically put together with an eye for drama and meaning”
(175). But “real” myths are, like one’s own dreams, “so fresh they are not yet recognized
as ‘myth’ or ‘scripture,’ [and] are fragmentary, imagistic rather than verbal,
emergent, capable of forming many different stories at once” (175).
What students of myth study in mythology classes, then, are usually the literary
product of many hands over the course of many generations. Even if a name like
Homer or Hesiod gets attached to myths when they finally achieve their final form,
they begin as folktales and campfire stories, as religious precepts, images, and rituals,
as mystical revelations, and as entertaining fictional and speculative explorations
of how the cosmos came into being and continues to operate. Over the generations,
in the hands of gifted storytellers, a narrative capable of combining and
artistically organizing these fragments and themes emerges. By the time a society
officially authorizes a story as scripture or myth, the events it describes have slipped
so far into the past that they can be believed—anything could have happened in the
beginning—or disbelieved. Myth represents human truths in a variety of ways, few
if any of which depend on mere plausibility of character or event. “To put it another
way,” as Ellwood says, “myth is really a meaning category on the part of hearers,
not intrinsic in any story in its own right. Myth in this sense is itself a myth”
(1999, 175).
READING MYTHOLOGY
Ellwood, like Lincoln, doesn’t explicitly articulate a methodology by which students
can analyze myths for themselves, but his suggestion that myths, like those contained
in this book, come down to us in literary form suggests a well-established
methodology: close reading and a consideration of how literary conventions inform
and enable various levels of meaning.
Doty, when speaking of Müller’s and Frazer’s euhemerism, remarked that not
only these two but “many other 19th-century [and 20th-century] scholars regarded
myth almost exclusively as a problem for modern rationality” (2000, 11). Müller
and Frazer, the myth-ritualists, the sociofunctionalist anthropologists, and the psychoanalysts
have all attempted to “solve” the problem of the mythic irrational and
to articulate in authoritative terms what myths “really” mean. Their efforts were not
Reading Mythology 25
entirely wasted; they were simply too one-dimensional, too unable to engage with
myth in a holistic sense. Our book takes the view that myths are not codes to
be cracked or naive and mistaken perceptions that must be corrected. Rather, myths
are literary truths told about the mysteries and necessities that always have and always
will condition the human experience. These truths, these mythoi, have made
sophisticated use of symbolic imagery and narrative strategy, have created unforgettable
characters that continue to typify for us abstract realities such as love, bravery,
wisdom, and treachery, and have enacted as compellingly as any modern novel
the humor and horror, the ecstasy and anguish, and the fear and hope of the human
drama.
One of the great strengths of the literary approach to myth is that one needn’t
dispense with the methods, concerns, and insights developed through other mythologies
in order to pay appropriate attention to such features of narrative as plot, point
of view, characterization, setting, symbols, and theme. Indeed, our understanding
and enjoyment of myths is enhanced if, as Doty would say, we furbish our mythographer’s
toolkit with as many tools as possible. For example, by using such structural
approaches as those developed by Campbell, Lévi-Strauss, and Propp we can
sharpen our focus on such basic plotting issues as the events that constitute the rising
action of the story, the precise moment at which the turning point is reached, and
the events of the falling action that resolve the conflict or tension that gives the story
its narrative energy. Yet, literary analysis offers students of myth more than charts
and formulas because it also equips us with a conceptual vocabulary and specific
language to understand and describe how the arrangement of a story’s action and its
setting affect our emotions and intellects. How, for example, are we affected by the
opening lines that introduce the action in the Maya’s Popul Vu?
Here follow the first words, the first eloquence: There is not yet one person, one animal,
bird, fish, crab, tree, rock, hollow, canyon, meadow, forest. Only the sky alone is there;
the face of the earth is not clear. Only the sea alone is pooled under all the sky; there is
nothing whatever gathered together. It is at rest; not a single thing stirs. It is held back,
kept at rest under the sky. Whatever there is that might be is simply not there: only the
pooled water, only the calm sea, only it alone is pooled (see Chapter 2, page 93).
How do we feel about the difficulty the narrator seems to have expressing a state
of existence that is simultaneously nothing and yet contains a primordial sea with
sleeping gods shining in its depths? What questions does this paragraph raise for us?
What expectations are created and what words and phrases create them? Literary
analysis of such details invites us to consider the personal connections we develop
to a story and encourages us to reflect upon how a gifted storyteller (or generations
of gifted storytellers) can utilize and refine language to create thought-shaping, lifedefining
images, ideas, and feelings within their hearers and/or readers.
Similarly, consulting the methods and insights of the comparative and psychological
approaches to myth can increase our sensitivity to the universality of certain
character types and to a deeper appreciation of the motives, values, and actions of
the various protagonists and antagonists that people the world’s sacred narratives.
Through close reading of myth, we can make the crucial distinction between characterization
and the more ambiguous notion of character. The characterization of
26 Chapter 1 Purposes and Definitions
Heracles (Hercules in Latin), for example, utilizes certain stock phrases that emphasize
his strength, resilience, and resourcefulness. While pinpointing precisely
the language through which storytellers have depicted characters has rewards, it can
be even more rewarding to articulate and debate the psychological make-up of this
Greek hero’s character. For instance, does Heracles’s alienation from his divine father,
with all the rejection and confusion that such a separation implies, create in him
the determination necessary to accomplish his famous twelve labors? Are Heracles’s
many mighty deeds motivated by an obsessive need to prove his worth to a distant
father whose fame and influence far outmatch his own? While these questions
are clearly speculative and center upon a fictional entity, they nevertheless take us
to the heart of literature’s mysterious power over us. How fascinating that people,
places, and things that may never have had a literal existence off the page, can nevertheless
live in our minds as vividly as any of our flesh-and-blood acquaintances!
Likewise, we can borrow from early anthropology its insights and raw data
about the prevalence of certain themes in myth. Preoccupations with such matters
as the seasons, fertility, and disastrous consequences of intimate union between
gods and mortals abound in myth and some anthropological studies supply us with
a vast wealth of cases in point. We can also follow the lead of more recent anthropological
study and generate lists of material culture items, social strata, customs,
and technologies and our understanding of some of myth’s most obscure references
can be illuminated by this discipline’s focus on the ritual and performance contexts
as well as the socio-political functions of myth in living cultures.
Literary analysis, however, urges us also to consider how a narrative’s uses of
various material goods, social arrangements, and technologies work as symbols and
icons. Returning to the Popul Vu, we notice that the creation of human beings is the
culmination of four successive attempts, a creative process that is successful only after
the correct material—maize—is used. While the scientist might view this reference
as evidence that the Maya cultivated corn from earliest times, making similar
observations about the tortilla griddles, domesticated dogs and turkeys, pots and
grinding implements the story also mentions, the literary critic would likely emphasize
the symbolic value of corn to the story. The gods’ spoken word vibrating in
the air, mud, and wood all prove inadequate materials for producing beings capable
of intelligible speech and rational thought. However, the premier product of settled
living and scientific observations about soil conditions, seeding, and the seasons is
the perfect medium.
And then the yellow corn and white corn were ground, and Xmucane [Grandmother of
Light] did the grinding nine times. Corn was used, along with the water she rinsed her
hands with, for the creation of grease; it became human fat when it was worked by the
Bearer, Begetter, Sovereign Plumed Serpent, as they are called. After that, they put it
into words: the making, the modeling of our first mother-father, with yellow corn, white
corn alone for the flesh, food alone for the human legs and arms, for our first fathers, the
four human works. It was staples alone that made up their flesh (see Chapter 2, page 98).
When the narrator places maize at the pivotal moment in the story when the
gods’ at last perfect their creation, it suggests not only were human beings the
pinnacle of the creation (the fourth time is the charm!) but that the Maya viewed
Reading Mythology 27
themselves as literal children of the corn. While such archaeological evidence as
carvings of corn stalks, farming implements, and the ruins of granaries and farms
are sufficient to indicate that the mastery of agrarian technology supplied the nourishment
and wealth necessary to build and sustain the Maya empire, those attending
to the symbolic value of corn in their mythic charter know the degree to which the
Maya themselves were aware of this fact.
Like an onion, a myth has many layers. Thus we urge students of myth to familiarize
themselves with the methods and assumptions of each mythology and to
combine them with the methods and assumptions of literary study. Euhemerism
permits us to remove one layer of the myth-onion, the comparative method another,
the structuralist and functionalist approaches further layers, and psychological and
literary analyses still others. We should resign ourselves to the fact that, after all our
efforts, we will find at the core, quite literally, no-thing, no single all-encompassing
explanation of myth. But, those who exert the disciplined effort to peel away and examine
the social, political, historical, psychological, cultural, functional, and literary
layers of the myth-onion will certainly become permeated with its distinct
essence. Given the fascinating subject we study, that is reward enough.
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS
FOR FURTHER READING
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28 Chapter 1 Purposes and Definitions
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Works Cited and Suggestions for Further Reading 29
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30 Chapter 1 Purposes and Definitions
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Works Cited and Suggestions for Further Reading 31