Our Missing Mythology…And Why We Need to Find It

“Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call.” – poet Stanley Kunitz

People have a great many ideas about myth: what myth is, what it means (if it means anything). It is also a value statement: mythology is fiction and therefore false. We even have “urban myths” today, which are somehow more sinister than your average every day myth.

But what myth really is should not be judged through a modern lens. And as long as we see mythology through this filter we will not understand the world of our ancestors. It’s not how we see Odysseus, or modern scholars that informs us; rather, it is how our ancestors saw Odysseus.

If I rely on my Oxford American Dictionary I will be informed that myth is:

1.A traditional story about the early history of a people or explaining a natural or social phenomenon, typically involving supernatural beings or events

2. A widely held but false belief

3. A fictitious or imaginary person or thing.

This is just scratching the surface. Regarding definitions of myth Fritz Graf observes that “there are more than we wish or care for.”[1] And the meaning has been heavily debated. As Rudolf Simek says in his Dictionary of Northern Mythology, the definition of Jan De Vries, that “Myths are tales about the gods, even if true, “still limits the concept of myth quite considerably.”[2] Because as every polytheist knows (or should know), myth also includes tales of heroes, giants, dwarfs and other beings. And much more besides. “The mythology of a people is far more than a collection of pretty or terrifying fables to be retold in carefully bowdlerized form to our schoolchildren.”[3]

Karen Armstrong informs us that humans have always been mythmakers.[4]

For its modern sense we have to look to an 18th century German Hellenist, Gottblieb Christian Heyne.[5]

Since the eighteenth century, we have developed a scientific view of history; we are concerned above all with what actually happened. But tin the pre-modern world, when people wrote about the past they were more concerned with what an event had meant. A myth was an event which, in some sense, had happened once, but which also happened all the time. Because of our strictly chronological view of history, we have no word for such an occurrence, but mythology is an art form that points beyond history to what is timeless in human existence, helping us to get beyond the chaotic flux of random events, and glimpse the core of reality.[6]

It should be clear to we moderns that we don’t see the world the way in which our ancestors did. It should be, but it’s not. Far too many people see and understand the world in a certain way and assume it has always been so, completely forgetful of the many influences brought to bear on us as people and completely unmindful of history. We understand the world through this cultural, temporal and spatial filter and assume it has always been thus. And so we misunderstand the past. And if we fail to understand where we have been, how will we understand where we are?

Obviously, if we are interested in reconstructing or reviving an ancient religion we will have to do a better job than this because myth cannot be separated from ritual. “Myth provides ritual with with a divine foundation,” says Graf. “[T]he ritual is explained, legitimated, and removed from human influence.”[7]

As Armstrong argues, “Many myths make no sense outside a liturgical drama that brings them to life and are incomprehensible in a profane setting.”[8] This is certainly news to most moderns! She recommends we think in terms of reading an opera without the accompanying music if we wish to get a sense of what it means to take a myth out of its liturgical setting.

But this is not all we must understand about myths if we are to get beyond ideas of the false and fantastical. “The most powerful myths,” she tells us, “are about extremity; they force us to go beyond our experience.” And a myth is not a story told for its own sake. Myths tell us how to behave.[9]

This is why a myth will change over time: “They had to respond to their societies’ needs and values.”

If a traditional tale were to survive, it either had to be tied to a very specific, recurrent occasion, such as a festival, or it had to adapt to ever-new conditions; presumably, it was not the most successfully adapted stories that made it into the frozen state of a written text, but rather those that offered enough semantic gaps for new interpretations that aimed at opening up the now unchangeable story to its new audience.[10]

We are very much mistaken then if we think that “myth is an inferior mode of thought” to be put aside when we reach a certain state of development. Not only is a myth not something that is untrue, but the truth of a myth is based on its efficacy, not its factual state. “If,” Armstrong tells us, “it does not give us new insight into the deeper meaning of life, it has failed. If it works, that is, if it forces us to change our minds and hearts, give us new hope, and compels us to live more fully, it is a valid myth. Mythology will only transform if we follow its directives.”

In the final analysis, “A myth is essentially a guide; it tells us what we must do in order to live more richly. If we do not apply it to our own situation and make the myth a reality in our own lives, it will remain as incomprehensible and remote as the rules of a board game, which often seem confusing and boring until we start to play.”[11]

Joseph Campbell, the famous mythologist, said in an interview:

It puts you in touch with a plane of reference that goes past your mind and into your very being, into your very gut. The ultimate mystery of being and nonbeing transcends all categories of knowledge and thought. Yet that which transcends all talk is the very essence of your own being, so you’re resting on it and you know it. The function of mythological symbols is to give you a sense of “Aha! Yes. I know what it is, it’s myself.” This is what it’s all about, and then you feel a kind of centering, centering, centering all the time. And whatever you do can be discussed in relationship to this ground of truth. Though to talk about it as truth is a little bit deceptive because when we think of truth we think of something that can be conceptualized. It goes past that.[12]

Understanding myths in this way gives us a clue as to what the priest on the early tenth-century Rök Stone was talking about when he “calls for the reader to instruct the youth in the history of various heroes of the past, detailing a list of at least thirteen pieces of sacred history that should be passed on.”[13] It is easier, in light of what myth meant to our ancestors, to understand why these myths were important and why they should be passed on to the new generation. The myths not only sustained collective unity but also taught people how to live.

We are the poorer without our myths. Sure, we still have some of them. But it is as if they’re cryogenically frozen, in stasis, awaiting thawing and refuse. As H.R. Ellis Davidson says, “God and goddesses appear in popular mythologies in a fossilized and static form.”[14] They’re simply there, on paper. We can read them, but reading them really isn’t the point is it? If myth and ritual go together, a myth without ritual is somewhat like a prayer divorced from sacrifice. We have to embrace our myths, and find meaning and inspiration in them.

The problem is reconnecting:

We cannot hope to get evidence at first hand, and even if we could, it is all too likely that we would find it confused and contradictory.[15]

“Traditions and customs,” as H.R. Ellis Davidson reminds us, “are remoulded along with changing ways of life, as it abundantly clear from the study of folklore…”[16] Our myths are there; we are here. What meaning they had to our ancestors is largely lost. Yet they resonate with us still. We need to find a way to reconnect with them but to do so we must embrace them as our ancestors embraced them, not simply as stories to entertain, but as lessons to live.

If we assume that our ancestors believed literally that these events took place, I think we will be off on the wrong foot. Even though a true event or a historical person might lie at the heart of the myth, so that there is some historical basis to it, a myth is not simply history in a chronological sense.

Armstrong argues that creation stories “had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion.”

The new Higher Criticism, which applied the modern scientific methodology to the Bible itself, showed that it was impossible to read the Bible literally. Some of its claims were demonstrably untrue. The Pentateuch had not been written by Moses, but much later and by a number of different authors; King David had not composed the Psalms; and most of the miracle stories were literary tropes. The biblical narratives were ‘myths’ and, in popular parlance, that meant that they were not true. The Higher Criticism is still a bugbear of Protestant Fundamentalists, who claim that every word of the Bible is literally, scientifically and historically true – an untenable position that leads to denial and defensive polemic.[17]

We have lost so much along with our myths. As Armstrong says, “Our modern alienation from myth is unprecedented.” Polytheism is not incompatible with science, but just as religion cannot replace science, so science cannot replace religion. We are left with a wasteland and deconstructionism leaves us with a knowledge of nothing. “[P]urely linear, logical and historical modes of thought have debarred man of us from therapies and devices that have enabled men and women to draw on the full resources of their humanity in order to live with the unacceptable.”[18]

As Armstrong argues, “We cannot completely recreate ourselves, cancel out the rational bias of our education, and return to a pre-modern sensibility. But we can acquire a more educated attitude to mythology.” All is not lost. And perhaps fiction offers us a way home. After all, “the novelist and the artist are operating at the same level of consciousness as mythmakers.”[19] Anyone who has read a stirring, thoughtful novel has some insight into what has been lost. Like a myth, a novel can teach us to see the world in a different light.

I think therein lies the value of a modern myth. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is a modern myth. So is a story like Star Wars, and in that light I can understand to a degree the attraction of a Jedi religion. These people have perhaps connected to the story in a way that most movie-goers have not. Perhaps they should not be despised and laughed at, but envied.

It is a manufactured myth but it is also recycled myth. We can go back to what Graf said about adapted stories. Tolkien has taken a great many things out of Heathen Norse mythology and passed it along to us in a new form. His story is not just entertaining as fiction; it is also useful as myth in that we can take hope and meaning from it. And we can learn – to value friendship, steadfastness, the value and meaning of an oath, among other things. We can take some of the same lessons from Star Wars.[20] I don’t think anyone would argue that these stories can or should replace our old myths, but if we can understand them on that level, then there is hope for us in rediscovering a lost but valuable part of ourselves.

Notes:

[1] Fritz Graf, “Myth” in Sarah Iles Johnson, ed. Ancient Religions (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 45-58.
[2] Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology, tr. Angela Hall (Cambridge, 1993), ix.
[3] H.R. Ellis Davidson, The Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (Penguin 1964), 9.
[4] Karen Armstrong. A Short History of Myth (Canongate, 2005),1.
[5] Graf (2007), 45-46, 47.
[6] Armstrong (2005), 7.
[7] Graf (2007), 51-52 “Rituals and myths often are connected: countless etiological stories explain the origin of a ritual or a festival.”
[8] Armstrong (2005), 3.
[9] Ibid, 3-4.
[10] Graf (2007), 50.
[11] Armstrong, 8-10.
[12] Mythic Reflections, an interview with Joseph Campbell by Tom Collins http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC12/Campbell.htm
[13] Thomas A. DuBois, Nordic Religions in the Viking Age (Philadelphia 1999), 42.
[14] H.R. Ellis Davidson, Myths and Symbols in Pagan Europe (Syracuse 1988), 196. See also idem, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe (Penguin 1964).
[15] Davidson (1988), 197.
[16] Ibid, 198.
[17] Armstrong (2005), 130-131.
[18] Ibid, 134.
[19] Ibid, 135-136.
[20] Joseph Campbell in Episode 1 of The Power of Myth (aired in 1988) mentions Star Wars as a metaphor, and in fact, George Lucas has said that Campbell’s work directly influenced his creation of Star Wars.