Myth/Mythology

“Essence” of Myth?

1. a) The ‘essence’ of myth resists univocal definition. Myth has a narrative structure; certain repeatable events are narrated that lie beyond space and time, and are deposited at certain nodal points of human existence. In a broader sense, myth is a recounted history (of gods and demigods) by means of which a body of knowledge is handed on that grows from generation to generation. Today, a distinction between myth and other narratives is regarded as impossible, and seen rather as a late construct. A further problem: the study of the cultures that have been researched only by way of their literature is more and more recognized as inadequate. Models obtained from Greek myths transmitted in writing are not transferable to non-writing cultures. This type of sacred narrative, myth as oral commentary on a ritual action, is simply absent from many cultures. In other cultures, myths are categorized with dreams, and expressly distinguished from reality. Furthermore, the notion (first found in Pindar) of myth as standing at the opposite pole from logos, or as a stepping-stone thereto, has today been abandoned. Rather, myth represents an early form of rationality; etiological myths are forms of high rationality. This aspect appears in the very history of the word: múthos is an artificial word from the early Greek epos, and originally meant the same as lógos: both mean ‘word.’ Logos is meaning-charged word, reasonable discourse; myth, even as late as the time of Sophocles, is the spoken word, or, more rarely, a hieros logos, sacred word, and finally, (untrue) narrative (fabula—Lat., ‘fable’), the saga of the gods. In German, the word is attested at the beginning of the sixteenth century, as Fabel (Ger., ‘fable’); only two hundred years later does it acquire the meaning of ‘narrative of gods.’ Today the term is popular, ever since Georges Sorel, as a timeless, methodic and scientific grasp of a phenomenon no longer existing. But this altogether contradicts ancient tradition, in which there was no ‘myth’ as continuous quantity: rather every myth was bound to a particular place and a particular cult. Since the Enlightenment, however, myth has no longer found any accepted organizing form or speech among Western people. It is precisely this removal, however, that provides the fascination of the hermeneutic universe.

Functions

b) Instead of the question of the ‘essence’ of myth, the search for the functions that mythic narratives have seems more fertile. In all tribal cultures, myth combines various fundamental functions: (1) in cult and religion, it transmits sacred truths, and decides between guilt and innocence; (2) in social history, it recounts the history of an institution, a rite, or a societal development; (3) politically, myths are the expression of a primary collective narcissism, and enable a society to present itself; finally, there are (4) the instructive or edifying function (exemplum), and (5) the aesthetic one. All of these functions have long since become disparate today; myth is the object of altogether distinct traditions of thought. There is no comprehensive history of myth as such, but only diverse concepts of myth within the specific sciences, each concept with its specific history. Today, then, we speak of an anthropological and ethnological concept of myth, a sociological one, a philosophical one, a psychological and psychoanalytic one, and one used by religious studies.

Methods

c) As important methods of the interpretation of myth, three can be classified: (1) In the functional theory, myths justify societal givens, and legitimize the status quo of the social relations in question. (2) The symbolical theory considers myth as a way of thinking, with similarities to the dream. The laws of time, nature, and society current among us are not in force. Similarities and parallels among myths from various societies suggest that they reflect universal manners of thinking (C. G. Jung). (3) The structural method analyzes myth into the elements of its content and its motifs, and clarifies how these relate to one another, so that the scholar may here have something similar to the cross-section of subterranean geological layers that reveal basic structure. A fundamental pattern found in myths is the counteraction of opposites. C. Lévi-Strauss, for example, understands myths as a composite image of opposites: nature and culture, male and female, order and chaos. In each case, our distance from myth has become unbridgeable—where we encounter myths, they are usually only ‘remnants’ (Taubes), for example the biblical myths of original sin or of the creation of the world. And the more recent (Gen 1) of the two creation myths itself represents a demythologizing vis-à-vis Babylonian myths of the emergence of the world. The myths of popular culture that arise in the modern age can scarcely be explained on the criteria used by the sciences (→ New Myths/New Mythologies).

Truth in Plato

2. a) ‘Myth’ (in the singular) is a theoretical construct on the part of the European sciences. The problem of how myths are to be interpreted (philosophically) arises with the interpretation of Homer. This difficulty becomes clear as early as Plato. It is impossible, holds the latter, to speak adequately about God when the many gods of whom Homer tells have human shape and weaknesses. Accordingly, Plato replaces these myths with a reason-oriented ‘discourse upon the one divine’ (theo-logia). In the poetry criticism of the Republic, Socrates observes, in a discussion of questions of upbringing, that children are first told ‘myths’; these myths, as the ‘Untrue,’ are set over against the ‘True.’ In the Symposium, truth is of mythical origin, but is consigned to philosophy. In the Phaedrus, Plato leaves the question of truth open, but in an almost ironical tone, indicates difficulties that are anything but slight, and that recommend restraint on the part of the interpreter. Meanwhile, Plato himself has recounted myths in his Dialogues, which have no clear reference to a cult, and are logically expounded. Myths are presented in the ancient tradition in cultic manifestations, and then, in poetical variation, in tragedy, and thus philosophical truth is withdrawn from the regions of the sacred, to become accessible for everyday life.

Allegory

b) If, despite all, in Plato and Aristotle across the board, the relation between mythos and logos remains extensively undetermined, subsequently an ever-stronger reinforcement of this relationship is observable. Here the Stoa cultivated especially the allegorical method of rational reinterpretation, which saw in the gods personified natural powers. Subsequently, philosophers long held myths to be allegories of philosophical truths. Neoplatonism then sought to envelop ancient mythology with the concept that, under the Romans, myths had lost their cultic and justifying function. The primary goal was philosophically fixed and systematized thought. The philosophical exposition of myth in Neoplatonism made myth a metaphor with a philosophical function, that is, it made it allegory. This interpretation gradually destroyed it as a religious phenomenon. Until the nineteenth century, the ancient myths of the gods were interpreted allegorically or symbolically. In late Christian antiquity, which reckoned the pagan religions a distortion of the original religion revealed in Paradise, the use of allegory for the exposition of scripture remained an exception; but in the Middle Ages, processes of the presentation of scripture became differentiated. Even the Renaissance defended the value of pagan fables, appealing to the allegorical sense hidden behind them, so that it became valuable for Christians to read the works of pagan authors. Euhemerism, which supposed myths to contain a precipitation of historical events, saw human personalities behind the gods, figures that had especially deserved recognition, and that therefore had been elevated to divinity after death.

Natural Religion?

3. a) In the age of the Renaissance, and of the first great trans-oceanic discoveries, the traditional Christian image of the world underwent a profound crisis. The question of a ‘natural religion,’ lying at the basis of all religions equally, became acute, in view of the discovery of completely unknown peoples in America, and then in Japan, China, and the remote parts of India. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Christian missionaries investigated the sacred ceremonies of the ‘savages’ with the greatest attention. The myths of the other peoples were subjected to Christian Eurocentrism. The missionaries applied the principles of late antiquity, and compared Indian cults and sanctuaries with those of antiquity: thus, South American cannibalism seemed a direct descendant of the ancient bacchanalia. In the eighteenth century, ethnography broadened the horizon of a comparison of ‘primitive’ religions with contemporary forms. Accordingly, it was in the eighteenth century that the first approaches to a historical appraisal of the classical religions arose. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, the Greek gods and figures were matched with those of the Hebrew Bible (G. I. Vossius, 1641), after which, in 1724, Joseph François Lafitau saw the similarity between the Greek and Indian mythological narratives. Freethinkers set the religion of the ‘savages’ over against the Christian Church, as the pure religion of reason. For the Enlightenment, mythology belonged to the darkness of idolatry, and Greek religion was superstition. Only the loss of faith in the true, spiritual God was supposed to have led to the adoration of personified forces of nature. At most, mythology was permitted to artists, scholars, and anyone educated, as ‘useful knowledge,’ to be listed in dictionaries (Lessing, Hederich). A historical criticism of myth was by and large regarded as passé, and as a form of knowledge that had been replaced.

Myth in ‘Art Religion’

b) Around 1800, myth could mount neither a religious claim nor a moral one; but it survived as poetical existence. The notion of myth as a poetical process is unimaginable without the antecedent phenomenon of Giambattista Vico. In 1725, in contradiction with the Enlightenment to follow, Vico stressed the independence of the aesthetic and graphic principle vis-à-vis the logical and discursive one. For him, the discourse of myth corresponded to the discourse of poetry. He saw in the mythic process an independent interpretation of reality, and developed the idea of a mythological world dictionary. In mythology, Vico saw an autonomous and, despite its primitive character, legitimate path to reality and to transcendence. With his view of myth as a testimonial to the cultural history of the first peoples, as the initial poetical awareness of humanity, Vico ensured the vitality of myth throughout a Renaissance age hostile to myth, and laid the groundwork for a reception of myth on the part of the German classicists, especially in Romanticism. Influenced by Vico, Herder then definitively withdrew myth from the Enlightenment criticism, elucidating it as graphic poetical discourse. Herder was no longer concerned with a definition of myth and truth, but only with poetical application—in short, with the rescue of the honor of myth as a poetical tool. With Herder as his point of departure, Christian Gottlob Heyne laid the foundations of the modern concept of myth; Friedrich August Wolf, Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Creuzer, and Wilhelm von Humboldt were his auditors. For him, myth is a form of conceptualization and expression of the childhood of the human race. Myths have definitively lost their allegorical or religious function. Nineteenth-century attempts, such as that of Creuzer, to see the religious phenomenon in myth once more as primary, were doomed to destruction from the outset; the same holds for Richard Wagner. In the introduction to his Götterlehre (1795), Karl Philipp Moritz expressly disallows any allegorical interpretation of the Greek world of the gods. With the Greek myths, holds Moritz, it is a matter of ‘artistic literature,’ and this literature must be “regarded as a discourse of fantasy.” For him, only aesthetic, not ethical criteria, do justice to mythic literature: the presentation of the gods takes place “over and above all concepts of morality.” Mythology, then, is neither simple allegory, nor the precipitant of an ancient history, but artistic literature. Only in their aesthetic function do mythological functions have a right to existence. The supreme end of mythology is beauty: the doctrine of the gods becomes aesthetics. This aesthetic interpretation of the world of the Greek gods is as near Goethe and Schiller as it was an influence on Schelling and August Wilhelm Schlegel (→ Art Religion).

The New Mythology

c) It is especially (German and English) Romanticism that renders myth altogether freely available for modernity, as may be demonstrated by the cases of William Blake and Novalis. The idea of a ‘new mythology’ must overcome the allegorical reduction of the mythical, and call into being the artwork of the modern age across the board. This ambition was programmatically executed in the so-called “The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism” (1797). Against the allegorical and euhemeristic interpretation, in the nineteenth century Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling stands out: his Philosophy of Mythology (1842) discards all Enlightenment interpretation of mythology, holding that the latter seeks philosophically to demonstrate the possibility of a real intercourse of human beings with personified principles. Walter F. Otto (1874–1958) took up again in the twentieth century the tradition of Romanticism, which had been interrupted with Schelling. Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945), as well, embraced Schelling, although he went far beyond him with the development of a new theory of consciousness, namely, the teaching of the symbolic forms. Myth, for Cassirer, appears as part of a form of life. After his emigration to the United States, Cassirer devoted himself to the investigation of myths in relation to today's societies; the fruit of these efforts toward an appraisal in terms of a critique of ideology is his last work, The Myth of the State, in which he investigates “the technology of modern political myths,” in order to understand the genesis of the National Socialist state. Here there is a link with Sorel, who, it is true, more or less cynically, recognizes the fictive character of myths, but nonetheless had justified their use as an instrument of political and social control. An alternative conception was developed in the chef-d'oeuvre of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Ger., “Dialectic of the Enlightenment”; 1947). In this work, prehistoric myth survives in the modern age, in at first indistinguishable transformations, but ancient myth itself represents a primitive form of emancipating rationality: “Myth itself is Enlightenment, and: the Enlightenment collapses in mythology.” The concept of myth laid down here as the correspondence of an overpowered and repressed (and thereby fearful) nature, and the theory of civilization that appeals to that concept, is increasingly called into question today. Hans Blumenberg's Arbeit am Mythos (Ger., “Work on Myth”) is intended as a response—as a polemical answer to the Dialektik der Aufklärung. Blumenberg holds that myth makes possible a disempowering of archaic fears. Overcoming certain life situations and fears, myth acquires a first distance, and is incipient rationality. This work of myth can only be realized in a never-ending work on myth. Kurt Hübner attempts to reconcile myth with rationality (and indeed that of the modern natural sciences). According to Ricoeur, we cannot transpose myth into our era, but we can transform it into symbol, and analyze it in terms of what it offers us by way of material for thought. Following the later Heidegger, literature and poetry (especially Hölderlin) seem to vouch for the continued effect of myth (Bröcker, Liebrucks, and others).

Myth as Enlightenment

4. a) In current discussion, the value of philosophical mythology lies in the possibility of a broadened motif of explanation of the essence of rationality, and ultimately of human culture as such. Myth becomes a sign of self-criticism on the part of modern philosophy, and the concepts of rationality that are its vehicle. To an extent, this critique issues in an anarchistic revolt against reason, equivalated with rule (‘post-modernity’) and itself issuing in the attempt to reach totality and immediacy. Feminism sharpens the problem to the antithesis between matriarchal myth and patriarchal reason (following Bachofen). Here as elsewhere, myth becomes an instrument for certain political interests. A further important tendency in current discussion is the stronger attention to anthropological and paleontological findings, and a regard directed toward other cultures. Anthropologists point out that the determination of myth in terms of the relation of tension between logos and mythos should be surrendered, in order that the profound difference between oral and writing cultures may lie open to description. The danger in concentration on the written fixing of myth consists in the dissolution of myth from its social and cultural environment. Myths of a given society can be meaningfully interpreted only contextually.

Return of Myth in Religion

b) The ‘savage thinking’ (pensée sauvage, Lévi-Strauss) of descriptive anthropology becomes the leading science for other sciences as well—astonishingly, in the case of large parts of today's theology, which is once more entering upon a study of myth. These attempts of the new theology at a rehabilitation of myth (as seen at the Sixth International Congress of Theologians, Vienna, 1987) are especially astonishing in view of the fact that, three decades before, with his reduction of theology to philosophy and hermeneutics, Rudolf Bultmann had broken with a tradition that—since the end of the eighteenth century—following Heyne, had systematically applied a rhetorical analysis of myth to the exegesis of the Hebrew Bible and, shortly thereafter, of the New Testament. Bultmann's program of ‘demythologization’ was only the negative side of his existentialist interpretation of the Bible. The goal of this interpretation was Jesus's ‘kerygma,’ his preaching, and not his miracles. Bultmann's leading science was (explanatory) natural science. Today, exposition with commentary, exegesis, has become narrative, and embraces Hebrew Bible and New Testament alike.

Unmanaged Myth

c) The meaning of myth for life—the function of myths in the present—is still broadly unexplained today. Kolakowski has made the first allusions to this serviceability of myth for life. His concern was the integration, into a comprehensive outline of the world, of the non-rational grounds controlling our activity, as these grounds manifest their urgency in the problem of death and love. It is a matter of the transformation of the coincidental (contingency) into something necessary for our biography. Our highly disenchanted, reified, rational life is ruled by mythical structures that only have other names. Does the ‘rationality’ of myth not contain certain essential elements that can be replaced only imperfectly, if at all, with the idea of an interpretation of the world through the sciences? Are these essential elements concealed, for example, in → art?