Myth
A form of sacred story that illuminates the truth of the human condition.
The ancient myths were sacred stories involving the gods (and possibly
humans) and were set in a cosmological landscape outside recognisable
history. But we now regard a myth as any story which takes on a sacred or
cultic function for a particular culture or community.
Since the Enlightenment, mythic thinking has increasingly been regarded
as the opposite of scientific thinking about facts and reality. It became
fashionable in the modern period, for example, to demythologise the Gospels
to reveal the ‘factual’ Jesus beneath the various mythic stories about him. (See
‘Biblical Criticism’.) The demythologisers rather
missed the point that the
myths about Jesus were intended to reveal the truth about him and cannot be
disentangled from the more historically grounded parts of the Gospel
narratives. Jesus cannot be treated as an historical figure separate from his
mythic identity – indeed, Jesus’ mythic identity is arguably more significant
than the factual story of his life. The facts give us the details,
but the myth
tells us Jesus’ significance and sacred meaning.
This point was made very well by C. S. Lewis who, with his friend J. R.
R. Tolkein, became fascinated by the mythic dimension to the Christian story:
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old
myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the
heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history … By becoming fact
it does not cease to be myth: … We must not be ashamed of the mythical
radiance resting on our theology. We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’
and ‘pagan Christs’: they ought to be there – it would be a stumbling block if
they weren’t. We must not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative
welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoeic – and is not the sky itself a myth –
shall we refuse to be mythopathic?
(C. S. Lewis, ‘Myth Became Fact’, in God in the Dock)
The contrast between ‘myth’ and ‘history’ is unhelpful because the two
are closely connected: histories and myths both tell stories, and most
historians are shown in retrospect to be in the grip of the mythic structures of
their age. Even factually truthful histories can take on a mythic status and
function as cultural narratives that embody spiritual or moral meanings. This
is also true for the history of the Holocaust, which now has (in addition to its
factuality) a mythic status as a sacred story for our times. A myth arises when
the events and protagonists in a story/history take on a religious or cosmic
significance.
Adorno and Horkheimer argued in The Dialectic of Enlightenment that
modern Western culture had been fuelled by an attempt to eliminate
‘primitive’ mythic ideas from human thinking and replace them with a more
‘enlightened’ and scientific consciousness. But, they argued,
the idea of
‘enlightenment’ is itself just another myth: the illusion that humans can
dispense with mythic narratives.
The same point has been made by others. Mircea Eliade has argued that
modern people are as conditioned by myths as their ‘primitive’ forebears. But
our modern mythology is a poor substitute for the pre-modern myths that
evoked a sense of the sacred which Eliade believed to be fundamental to
human self-understanding. Modern myths – such as the Star Wars myth of a
Manichaean universe contested by opposing light and dark forces – are now
driven by the media.
THINKERS
Aristotle (384–322 bc) contrasted mythos or story-telling with logos or
rational thinking.
Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945): a Jewish philosopher
who saw humans as
‘symbolic animals’ who fashion ‘symbolic form’, including myths: ‘language,
myth, art, and science … function organically together in the constitution of
spiritual reality.’
Mircea Eliade (1907–86): a Romanian Christian influenced by Jung, who
argued that human beings have a natural and primary need for sacred myths.
James George Frazer (1854–1941): author of The Golden Bough, a
classic study of religious myth, which argued that Jesus was just one example
of a general myth of the ‘dying God’.
Carl Jung (1875–1961) explored the mythic content of the unconscious
and related it to fundamental and universal aspects of mythic thinking in
culture: ‘the fund of unconscious images which fatally confuse the mental
patient … is also the matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which has vanished
from our rational age.’
Claude Lévi Strauss (1908– ) analysed the
basic structure of myths in
terms of ‘binary oppositions’ – in particular, the contrast between ‘nature’ and
‘culture’. Myths are complex elaborations of the tensions between opposites.
Lévi Strauss popularised the analysis of modern culture in terms of its
mythological structures.
J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973) believed that the Christian truths were best
expressed in stories, principally the narrative of the Gospel, which he saw as
‘the greatest story of all’. But he felt that the language of doctrine was too
restricted and thin to gather up the rich and complex truth of Christianity. So
Tolkien committed himself to mythopoesis: the construction of new myths to
re-express the essence of the Christian message – hence, The Lord of The
Rings.
IDEAS
Archteype: a primitive image, motif or character in a myth or narrative.
Demytholgisation: see ‘Biblical Criticism’.
Legend: a traditional story belonging to the history or pre-history of a
culture.
Mythopoesis: the construction of myths.
BOOKS
Laurence Coupe, Myth (Routledge, 1997)
Leszek Kolakowski,
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