The idea of myth

Before the invention of writing, human beings passed stories along to one another orally. Those stories that survive through time (many of which were eventually written down in the forms with which we are now familiar), often seem fantastic or implausible to our modern sensibilities. Because of intervening technological advances, it is often difficult for us to imagine how anyone could have believed many of these stories, primarily because our experiences differ so widely from theirs. We do not have to scratch our living from the soil, hunt wild beasts in the forest, build our own shelters by hand, and know the movements of the moon, stars, and planets intimately in order to know when to plant and when to harvest or when to expect the latest migration of elk. But our ancestors' intimate knowledge of matters about which we now (commonly) know little frequently led them to develop stories that still resonate with us on some level.

Many of these stories survive today as myths. The word myth comes from the Greek, muthos, which means either word, speech, conversation or tale, story, narrative--or some combination thereof. It carried with it a notion of factuality or truth, in the sense of being something said in public and held in common belief. Mythology has developed in modern times into the formal cultural or psychological study of myths or mythical frameworks, and by analyzing myths we can often begin to understand the people among whom they arose. In 1926, Bronislaw Malinowski, an anthropologist, offered an explanation for the role of myth in what he called "primitive" cultures, in contrast to the way modern (white European) people use stories:

The myth in a primitive society, i.e., in its original living form, is not a mere tale told but a reality lived. It is not in the nature of an invention such as we read in our novels today, but living reality, believed to have occurred in primordial times and to be influencing ever afterwards the world and the destinies of men. . . . These stories are not kept alive by vain curiosity, neither as tales that have been invented nor again as tales that are true. For the natives on the contrary they are the assertion of an original, greater, and more important reality through which the present life, fate, and work of mankind are governed, and the knowledge of which provides men on the one hand with motives for ritual and moral acts, on the other with directions for their performance. (Quoted in Jung and Kerényi, below, 5)

Malinowski's views of "primitive" culture are rather outmoded and reflect the imperialism of his cultural context. But he seems to come close to the core of what we call myth when he talks about the relationship between it, and the "reality lived" by people whose world is not heavily mediated by modern technologies or influenced by the heavy hand of the Western tradition and scientific thinking.

Jung's influence on the study of myth

Since many myth-narratives recount the births of gods and people and the origins of the world, it is tempting to see mythology as essentially biographical. But Carl Jung, whose psychological theories were in part grounded in a belief that human beings share a collective unconscious, argued against this temptation:

Mythology is never the biography of the gods, as often appears to the observer. This is particularly true of 'mythology properly so called': mythology in its purest, most pristine form. It is both more and less. It is always less than a biography, even though it tells of the birth and childhood of the gods, the deeds of their youth, and sometimes of their early death. The remarkable thing about these childish or youthful feats is that they show the god in the full perfection of his power and outward form, and thus really preclude biographical thinking--thinking in periods of life as stages of development. At the same time mythology is more than any biography. For, although it may tell us nothing that relates organically to a particular period of life, it nevertheless comprehends the periods themselves as timeless realities: the figure of the child plays a part in mythology equal to that of the marriageable girl, or Kore, and the mother. In mythology these too, like every other possible form of being, are manifestations of the Divine. (Jung and Kerényi 25)

For Jung, the child figure, the marriageable girl, the mother, and the god were all archetypes of figures that show up in every system of myths--in part because of what he believed to be the shared unconscious we have acquired through our experience as human beings.

Although Jung believed that the major difference between the "primitive" mentality and the "civilized" lies "chiefly in that [for the primitive] the conscious mind is far less developed in scope and intensity" and that the primitive mind does not so much think as recognize thoughts as having appeared, he saw the archetypes as forming a link between the primitive and the civilized. He used this notion as a basis for understanding psychological difficulties experienced by modern, "civilized" human beings. As I mentioned above, we no longer view less technologically sophisticated cultures as "primitive" (in fact, their brain capacity was and is the same as ours; the main differences lie in experience), but Jung's insights can provide a useful framework for analysis.

The uses of myth

While none of these or many other explanations and definitions of myth may be entirely correct or even always helpful, they do give us an idea of how compelling the notion of myths and mythologies can be. This class session is designed to provide the groundwork for a continuing inquiry into the range and importance of mythical systems. In response to Jung's notion that "primitive" and "civilized" thinking is radically different, I encourage you to read Jorge Luis Borges' tale, "The Story of the Warrior and the Captive" (from his collection, Labyrinths). To understand how myth (which we usually perceive as being less than "truthful") can provide factual evidence, we will consider selections from the Epic of Gilgamesh. To see how myths continue to inform our creative lives, we will watch documentaries on how George Lucas has used both ancient and modern myths his films. In later classes, we will encounter still more myths and mythologies; the continuing dialogue on this topic will, I hope, prove to be a useful avenue toward understanding the humanities.

Human beings tell a number of different kinds of stories, and they employ a broad range of tools with which to tell them. For example, in addition to myths, we encounter tales such as fables and parables, which are designed to illustrate moral lessons. These may have mythical elements, but they also may be made up for a specific purpose. Stories like these are different from myths, which generally arise organically out of the experience of a particular group of people, but they may also become a part of a peoples' cultural heritage, as Aesop's fables became an aspect of the Greek literary tradition.

Logos and Mythos

Plato uses the word logos to describe another kind of story, a kind of rhetorical thought experiment like the tale of Atlantis in his dialogues Critias and Timaeus or the story of the Ring of Gyges. In this sense, logos, which is usually translated as "word" or "speech" (and is the root of the word "logic"), is another example of a story told to provide a lesson. After describing the ideal society in his Republic, Plato goes on to warn of the perils that can befall human social structures by contrasting the fates of an imaginary Atlantis and an equally imaginary Athens. He may have used vague recollections of historical events like the eruption of Santorini in the 17th century BCE as background for the story, but it is fundamentally his own concoction, given the aura of myth or fairy tale by its references to, "Nine thousand years ago" and "beyond the Gates of Herakles." It is no coincidence that we are reminded of the way many tales begin: "Once upon a time, in a distant land," or even "Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away . . . ."

Oral tradition

Plato wrote his dialogues, as a kind of transcription of conversations that may have occurred among Socrates and his students (of whom Plato was one). But myths, epics, and many other ancient stories were not recorded until long after they had developed; they had existed, often for hundreds of years, before writing was even invented. The oral tradition, as we will refer to it in this class, consisted of stories told and retold, often by bards trained in techniques of story-telling (or, more properly perhaps, story-singing) that helped to preserve their form from generation to generation. Various kinds of sagas and hero-tales emerged in different cultures, and some are still told to this day. They may have been fundamentally factual, or some combination of myth and fact, but they were deemed important enough to cultural memory to be preserved and passed on. Remnants of this tradition remain in our own culture, as bedtimes stories, urban legends, scary tales told around campfires--anything we are called upon to recite from memory. Our most important stories now get written down, but a good storyteller can still make a living entertaining before an audience, just as Homer or his predecessors may have done by reciting what we have come to know as the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Sources: Bronislaw Malinowski, Myths in Primitive Psychology, London: Psyche Miniatures, 1926, and C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology, Princeton: Princeton UP/Bollingen, 1963. Plato, Republic (Internet Classics Archive). See resource links for further information.

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07.03.11