Myth Understanding

Mod­ern Myth

… some things that should not have been for­got­ten were lost. His­tory became leg­end. Leg­end became myth. And for two and a half thou­sand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge…

— Gal­adriel, from the Walsh, Boyens, and Jack­son screen­play of The Lord of the Rings: The Fel­low­ship of the Ring

Last week, I dis­cussed the rift that exists in West­ern soci­ety between our cul­ture and our dom­i­nant reli­gions. The rift mat­ters, because it means the those reli­gions can’t per­form the func­tions in our soci­ety that a reli­gion his­tor­i­cally per­formed. This has given rise to a mis­un­der­stand­ing of the pur­pose of reli­gion, and a mis­use of reli­gion within our national conversation.

It is vital to under­stand this. For rea­sons I alluded to last week, and will expand on here, it may be impos­si­ble to ban­ish reli­gion from the pub­lic sphere. If this is true, then under­stand­ing what reli­gion is sup­posed to do can help us pre­vent it from being used inappropriately.

Reli­gion is com­mu­ni­cated through its sacred sto­ries. The word “myth” has come to have a neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tion, roughly syn­ony­mous with “lies”. But it its orig­i­nal form, the Greek word μυθος (muthos) con­noted some­thing divine and tran­scen­dent. The word actu­ally refers to the things said, the lines spo­ken, as part of a reli­gious rit­ual (the actions per­formed at such a rit­ual are drama, from a Greek word mean­ing “to act”). Thus, a reli­gious rit­ual is the enact­ment of a myth, the retelling of a sacred tale.

This rela­tion­ship between myth and rit­ual is explicit in many rites that sur­vive today. The Chris­t­ian rite of Com­mu­nion, for exam­ple, is intended as a reen­act­ment of the Last Sup­per, one of the most impor­tant sto­ries of the Chris­t­ian mythic cor­pus. Sim­i­larly, the Jew­ish Hanukkah cel­e­bra­tion is a retelling of the mir­a­cle when the Mac­cabees reoc­cu­pied the Tem­ple in Jerusalem and oil which was seen as suf­fi­cient for only one night lit the lamps for eight.

There is con­tro­versy on this point. Some schol­ars claim that myths devel­oped as a way of jus­ti­fy­ing preëx­ist­ing mag­i­cal rit­ual acts; oth­ers, that reli­gious rit­u­als are devel­oped as ways of reen­act­ing the myths; still oth­ers that, though myth and rit­ual are tied together, nei­ther nec­es­sar­ily devel­oped out of the other. It seems likely the rela­tion­ships between myth and rit­ual are com­plex, not always sim­ple cause-​​and-​​effect. Regard­less, the two are cer­tainly tied together.

Myths embody the the­o­log­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal foun­da­tions of a reli­gion. Rit­u­als are the out­ward per­for­mance of those foun­da­tions. The two are inter­wo­ven, and it is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine a reli­gion that does not have both. Indeed, it can be said that a reli­gion con­sists of these two inter­twined ele­ments: its myths and its rituals.

This describes, in almost clin­i­cal terms, what a reli­gion is, but not what it does, nor what it’s for.

There are a num­ber of the­o­ries that attempt to explain the pur­pose of reli­gion. Most of them cen­ter around the pur­pose of myth. Why do peo­ple remem­ber, recite, and reen­act sacred tales?

Robert Graves

His­to­rian Robert Graves saw at least one pur­pose of myth very much as in the quote at the head of this arti­cle. Impor­tant his­tor­i­cal events were com­mem­o­rated in leg­end, then ele­vated to divine sta­tus. Heroes became gods. In this view, myths begin as a way of remem­ber­ing vital his­tor­i­cal events, and grad­u­ally become foun­da­tional tales. This idea is echoed in Gen­e­sis 6:4 in a pas­sage that is often taken as the Hebrew expla­na­tion for the ori­gins of pagan religions:

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daugh­ters of men, and they bare chil­dren to them, they were heroes of old, men of renown.

In this view, myth is pri­mar­ily a mis­un­der­stand­ing and inflated false rec­ol­lec­tion of his­tory. Cyn­i­cally, it can be taken as a way to jus­tify exist­ing social struc­tures; the descen­dants of those divine ancient heroes have a claim on sacred power, and should there­fore be given hon­ors as kings. This is the rea­son why, for exam­ple, the arch­bishop of the Church of Eng­land, to this day, crowns the kings and queens of Eng­land, as a recog­ni­tion of the divine right of succession.

This points to another impor­tant pur­pose of myth and reli­gion, not only as a way of recall­ing sacred his­tory, but as a way of struc­tur­ing and order­ing soci­ety. I stressed this last week. The tales and rites of a culture’s reli­gion serve as the glue and mor­tar that holds the civ­i­liza­tion together, for bet­ter or worse. Even in a largely sec­u­lar soci­ety such as ours, myths seem to develop of their own accord, and they con­tain and pre­serve ele­ments of value to the cul­ture or the nation.

The story of George Wash­ing­ton and the Cherry Tree is one such tale, stress­ing the ideal of hon­esty and straight­for­ward truth which stands at the cen­ter of our national iden­tity. Wash­ing­ton throw­ing the coin over the Potomac is another such tale; while it doesn’t con­vey much in the way of national val­ues, it does stress the almost god­like ele­va­tion of the First Pres­i­dent to the sta­tus of Mythic Fig­ure with super­hu­man pow­ers (“the heroes of old, the men of renown…”).

Inso­far as some myths are based on his­tor­i­cal events or his­tor­i­cal per­son­ages, the imag­i­na­tive aspects of the tales are not mere errors or mis­takes. They are there for a rea­son — to con­vey an idea or a value, to stress the impor­tance of a thing or a place or a per­son or event. It is exag­ger­a­tion with a purpose.

Joseph Camp­bell

This is what scholar Joseph Camp­bell called the Soci­o­log­i­cal Func­tion of myth. Through the tool of myth, reli­gions teach infor­ma­tion vital to a cul­ture. When a soci­ety and its religion(s) are in har­mony, myths teach infor­ma­tion that indi­vid­u­als need in order to func­tion and thrive within that soci­ety. When they are not, the reli­gion and its myths are seen as archaic irrel­e­van­cies at best, and destruc­tive dis­rup­tions at worst, because the infor­ma­tion con­tained in the myths is not use­ful to the people.

A related idea is the Ped­a­gog­i­cal Func­tion. This less to do with soci­ety, and more with per­sonal ful­fill­ment, the idea of find­ing one’s sense of self-​​worth and pro­vid­ing ways to nav­i­gate the pas­sages of life — teach­ing chil­dren, com­ing of age, being a mature and self-​​motivated adult, fac­ing the chal­lenges and pains of life and death, and so on. In the absence of a reli­gion that seems mean­ing­ful, peo­ple are dri­ven to solve these chal­lenges in other ways — self-​​help classes, moti­va­tional sem­i­nars, even street gangs, all these are attempts to find mean­ing and pur­pose. If reli­gion doesn’t sat­isfy these needs, the needs remain and must be filled through other avenues.

Camp­bell described two other basic func­tions of myth — Cos­mo­log­i­cal and Mys­ti­cal. The first is per­haps what peo­ple usu­ally imag­ine today when they think of the pur­pose of myth or of reli­gion. The Cos­mo­log­i­cal Func­tion fur­nishes an expla­na­tion of the world, of how it came to be, and why it is as it is.

Within bib­li­cal tra­di­tions, the cre­ation story in Gen­e­sis (sto­ries, actu­ally — Gen­e­sis 1 tells a very dif­fer­ent cre­ation myth from what is in Gen­e­sis 2) don’t really describe the world as we know it to be. The bib­li­cal tales don’t describe a uni­verse of hun­dreds of bil­lions of galax­ies, nearly four­teen bil­lion years old, held together by sub­atomic par­ti­cles. As with the Soci­o­log­i­cal and Ped­a­gog­i­cal aspects of this reli­gious tra­di­tion, the Cos­mo­log­i­cal imagery and metaphors are out of step with the world as we now know and expe­ri­ence it.

Yet humans need cos­mol­ogy. In a polit­i­cal sphere, the George Wash­ing­ton myths that I men­tioned before — the Cherry Tree and the Potomac inci­dent — help to serve Cos­mo­log­i­cal func­tions, as they are cred­i­ble (or nearly so) for being in this world, and they pro­vide mythic imagery that helps to explain (and in fact, to shape) the nation as we under­stand it.

Campbell’s final mytho­log­i­cal func­tion is per­haps the most dif­fi­cult for mod­ern Amer­i­cans to relate to — the Mys­ti­cal. As I described last week, myths in their proper con­text often take the form (for exam­ple) of telling how a par­tic­u­lar god or god­dess taught our ances­tors how to make this or that bit of tech­nol­ogy — a spear or a loom per­haps. This means the objects we use in our every­day lives were, lit­er­ally, gifts of the Gods. This imbues them with inher­ent mean­ing and sacred­ness. It means we live always within our myths. We touch objects that have been touched by the Gods. It is as if we live always within a cathe­dral, and every aspect of our lives takes on mean­ing and purpose.

This, too, is some­thing we seek to recap­ture if our reli­gion doesn’t give it to us. How many Amer­i­cans are con­sumed, at one time or another in their lives, with the need to find a pur­pose, a goal, a deeper sense of the Mean­ing of Life? If our reli­gious myths don’t sup­ply it, we’ll cre­ate sec­u­lar myths that do — Man­i­fest Des­tiny, Amer­i­can Excep­tion­al­ism, some image of being part of an Amer­ica that is spe­cial and sin­gu­lar — because God is on Our Side.

The roles that myth and reli­gion have always played still impact our lives and our pol­i­tics. They can’t not affect us. These needs seem to be hard­wired in the cir­cuitry of our brains. With a reli­gious tra­di­tion divorced from our cul­ture, we have to look else­where. Deny­ing the need will accom­plish nothing.

Nature abhors a vac­uüm. Myths will be gen­er­ated; his­tory does become leg­end, and leg­end becomes myth. The func­tions that myth serves will be filled, whether by acci­dent or intent, and some­times by con­scious manip­u­la­tion. We need sto­ry­tellers we trust to help shape the sec­u­lar myths of our cul­ture, lest they be con­sciously shaped for pur­poses and goals that are less than noble.

Related arti­cles

• “A rit­ual is the enact­ment of a myth. And, by par­tic­i­pat­ing in the rit­ual, you are par­tic­i­pat­ing in…” (vimoh​.co)
• Mythol­ogy and the New Feu­dal­ism (jonathantur​ley​.org)
• Myth, Rit­ual, and Social Con­sen­sus (geopol​i​crati​cus​.word​press​.com)
• The Secu­rity Blan­ket Con­cept of Reli­gion (psy​chol​o​gy​to​day​.com)