This is reprinted without permission of the author. Any reference to it must be cited
accordingly.
McCutcheon, Russell. “Myth.” Guide to the
Study of Religions. Ed. Willi
Braun and Russell McCutcheon.
MYTH
Russell T. McCutcheon
Open
a newspaper, a magazine or even a scholarly book and find the word “myth.” The
odds are that the writer uses the word to convey one of two meanings. First,
“myth” commonly denotes widely shared beliefs that are simply false—as in Bruce
Lawrence’s Shattering the Myth: Islam
Beyond Violence (1998), an attempt to expose and correct stereotypes of
Muslims, or John Shelby Spong’s question, Resurrection:
Myth or Reality? (1994), or Naomi Wolf’s best-selling The Beauty Myth (1992), a critique of the way women are forced to
estimate their social and personal selves with reference to an impossible,
ideal beauty standard. Second, “myth” is used to tag apparently fictional
stories that originated in early human communities as attempts to explain
commonplace but mysterious events in the natural world. Myths, in this sense,
are understood to be aetiologies that explain the origins or causes of
something that cannot he explained by scientific accounts. Although the first
use of “myth” is harsher than the second, in both cases the word carries with
it a strong judgment about ourselves and others: either we labor under
falsehoods—unbelievable beliefs, stereotypes that disfigure those not like us.
punishing standards of beauty, and so on—or, despite our best efforts, we do
not understand the way the world actually works and so we use stories to come
to the rescue where knowledge fails us.
Despite
the fact that these two senses originated in dramatically different social and
historical contexts, as we will see, they co-exist so comfortably in the
popular imagination today because both are modernist
in character in that they are based on the premise that one can somehow
perceive and distinguish between reality
as it really is, on the one hand, and reality
as it happens to be (mis)re
presented, on the other. Without this modernist supposition, neither of
these uses of the word “myth” would make much sense at all. And it is precisely
the underlying premise of the two most common uses of “myth” that should occupy
our attention when considering the category “myth.”
Beware of
Mythmakers
The term “myth” is not of our
own recent invention; it comes to us from ancient
Plato’s
oppositional classification of mythos
and logos has become a master trope
in popular and scholarly discussions of myth As for Greek thought, however,
things were a little more complex than this. Richard Buxton (1994) has shown
that Plato’s clean, oppositional distinction between mythos and logos is not
always evident in ancient Greek literature and thus may not have been as widely
representative of Greek views on mythos
as is now customarily thought. Since Plato’s classification has been so
axiomatic in Western myth studies, representing it as the Greek view, it may have more to do with the modern European
“imaginary” Greece—among the most often used genealogical authorities for
sanctioning everything from our own classificatory language to our culture—than
with the historical Greek meaning of
mythos and logos.
In
addition to the possibility that Plato’s classification functions as a myth of
origins for modern myth scholarship, we should take into account another
provocative ambiguity. In the modern era the term “mythology” usually denotes
both a collection of a people’s myths as well as the science of studying
collections of myths. The former refers in Platonic manner to a grouping of
stories spun out of the human imagination, that is, unverifiable discourses,
while mythology as a scholarly activity connotes, in similarly Platonic
fashion, rational, demonstrable argumentation, the trading in verifiable
discourses. The scholarly mythologos,
the teller of scientific truths, thus works both in concert and in contest with
the folk mythologos, the teller of
fabulous and fantastic tales. It would seem, getting ahead of ourselves a bit,
that it is not all that clear who the mythologists really are.
We
see here one instance of the messy state of the category “myth.” Although it is
usually used as a simple classificatory term to set off one kind of discourse
from another, it turns out that the category is often intellectually committed to an a
priori clean distinction between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood,
fabulous delusion and scientific lucidity, us and them, just as it is rhetorically wielded to reinforce these
oppositions by coordinating them with a scale of moral, social and political
values. Hence the power to label someone’s story as myth, and to classify our
world-view as “scientific” over against their world-view as “mythic,” is not
only to classify stories, but people (are they gullible or intelligent?),
societies (are they uncivilized or civilized?) and cultures (are they primitive
or advanced?). The apparently straightforward distinction between false and
true tales (mythos vs. logos) is therefore loaded with social
significance and consequence.
For
example, we would be naïve to think that Plato opposed mythos with the superior rationality of logos simply out of pure theoretical interest. Despite expressing
what seems to be a sincere admiration for the talent of the poet, that is, the
story-teller (Republic 398a; see also
568a—c), Plato thought that poets are dangerous. But why?
The
mimetic poet sets up in each individual soul a vicious constitution, by
fashioning phantoms far removed from reality, and by currying favour with the
senseless element that cannot distinguish the greater from the lesser, but
calls the same thing now one, now the other. (Republic 605c)
Readers
who are acquainted with the rest of the
Republic might wonder why, if such imitation and re-presentation by means
of story-telling should be disallowed, Plato is so free to tell his own story
that sounds suspiciously like a mythos
of origins to authorize his just state (Republic
414c—415e)? What appears, then, to be ultimately at stake in Plato’s—and
our?—distinction of mythos from logos is a contest for the right to
define the proper constitution of the state, the right to define the proper
constitution of “the good,” “the true” and “the just.” It was a contest in
which “the myths that Plato didn’t like were lies and the myths he liked ...
were truths,” as Wendy Doniger bluntly puts it (1998: 3). Plato’s mythos was not so much an innocent
classificatory term as a ‘word that he used to censure views he did not like in
the arena of public discourse and persuasion.
Turning
to a more recent example, we could demonstrate how the mythos— logos distinction
was once strategically allied to European expansionism and colonialism, an
interest for which people characterized as primitive, uncivilized and gullible
do come in handy as needy beneficiaries of European “civilization” (Bowler
1992; R. Williams 1980). If we throw in the once common view of European
writers of the early modern era concerning the dawn of a slow but steady
victory of science (logos) over mere
superstition and religion (mythos), a
dawn that must not only enlighten Europe but all the nations of the globe, we
see once again that the classification “myth” is far from an innocuous academic
label. It is instead a master signifier that authorizes and reproduces a
specific world-view.
With
all this in mind, there just might be something to the fact that an ancient
storyteller and the modern scientific study of mythology bear the same name.
When thinking about the category of myth, therefore, we must reckon with, and
not evade the possibility that
myth
is everything and nothing at the same time. It is the true story or a false one, revelation or deception, sacred or
vulgar, real or fictional, symbol or tool, archetype or stereotype ... Thus,
instead of there being a real thing, myth, there is a thriving industry, manufacturing and marketing
what is called “myth.” “Myth” is an illusion—an appearance conjured or
“construct” created by artists and intellectuals toiling away in the workshops
of the myth industry. (Strenski 1987: 1—2)
To
anticipate the conclusion of this essay, despite our apparent interest in
talking about real things—myths that are lived, told, written down,
anthologized and studied—we are continually struck by how our very judgment as
to just what is and what is not a myth betrays some generally undetected logic
inherent in our own social world and does not necessarily tell us about
something that is self-evidently inherent in data we classify as myth.
Some
Workshops in the Myth Industry
Although
the use of the label “myth” to distinguish false from true stories continues to
live on, the story of “myth” in the course of the past several centuries of
modern scholarship fortunately is richer than that. Because there are a wealth
of good resources that survey the many uses of ‘myth” (see for example Bolle
1968, 1983, 1987; Bolle et al. 1974; P. Cohen 1969; Doty 1986, 1999; Eliade
1973, 1991; Graf 1993: 9—56; Kirk 1973; Segal 1980; Vernant 1980: 203—260), we
will only briefly sketch some of the major types here.
1. Pre-scientific explanations of natural phenomena. Prominent among
a group of nineteenth-century anthropologists was the view that myths are
attempts on the part of early human beings to explain aspects of their natural
environment. This understanding of myth was articulated influentially by the
German philologist Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729—1812), though he had
forerunners (on Heyne and his predecessors see Graf 1993: 9—19). Heyne
recovered and rehabilitated the term mythos, preferring it over his
contemporaries’ use of fabula (fable)
which Heyne considered to be too tied up with notions of the fictive and absurd
to capture what he considered the serious intent of mythos (Graf 1993: 10). As with so many of his contemporaries,
Heyne believed that the key to understanding myths is located at their origin,
which he pursued by a textual “paring knife” approach (i.e., source-critical
and philological methods) on the assumption that the textualized myths
available to him had accreted to themselves many additions and modifications in
their oral and literary history. He concluded that
myth
arose in prehistoric times, during the childhood of mankind [ did not suppose
that myth was a bizarre invention of primitive man; instead, he thought that it
came into being naturally and inevitably at the moment when early man, overawed
or frightened by some natural phenomenon, first sought to explain it, or when,
moved by a feeling of gratitude toward some exceptional person, he wished to
recount and extol a person’s deeds. (Graf 1993: 10)
This view reflects a
commonplace in the scholarship of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a
view that culminates in the Intellecualist tradition associated with such
figures as F. Max Muller, Herbert Spencer, Andrew Lang, Edward B. Tylor and
James G. Frazer. As suggested above, this understanding of myth continues to
dominate today’s popular imagination.
2. Tales of heroes. For Heyne, myths were an explanation of natural
phenomena as well as a memorialization of dramatic past events or heroic deeds,
a view that goes back to the philosopher Euhemerus of Messene
(340—260 B.C.E.), who suggested that tales recounting the deeds of the Olympian
gods actually were disguised stories that glorified the exploits of real, but
long dead figures. In the modern era, this approach—sometimes called
Euhemerism—was reintroduced by one of the fathers of evolutionary theory,
Herbert Spencer. Spencer argued that the historic origins of
the belief in supernatural beings was to be found in the ancient worship
of actual but long-dead ancestors. Over time, such ancestors came to be
venerated as powerful beings (ghosts, gods, etc.), who were satisfied by means
of ritual offerings. “Ancestor worship is the root of every religion,” Spencer
concluded, and myths were both the proof for and the access to the historic
“roots” of religion.
3. Expression of mythopoeic mentality.
Another line of European thought focused on the emotive or expressive sources
and functions of myth. Rather than understanding myth as an attempt to explain
the natural world, it could he taken a the spontaneous
expression of what many label the “mythopoeic
mentality.” For instance, Bernard de Fontenelle
(1657—1757) regarded myths as the evidence of a so-called “primitive
mentality,” a form of pre-logical cognition and rationality that pre-dates
logical and scientific rationality in the evolutionary history of the human
mind. Fontenelle then drew a direct link
between ancient human beings and contemporary “savages” (e.g., Iroquois,
Laplanders, Kaffirs), a link that allowed him to make
inferences about ancient people by studying the emotional life of his “savage”
contemporaries. In this tradition of myth scholarship we could also place the
early twentieth-century philosopher Ernst Cassirer, a
key figure in focusing attention on the fact that what sets humans apart from
other members of the animal world is our ability to traffic in symbols. In the
words of Percy Cohen (1969: 339), for Cassirer
myth-making
can no more be explained or explained away than can the making of poetry or
music: myth is one way of using language for expressive purposes, through the
symbolic devises of metonymy [ one thing stands in for another] and synecdoche
[ a part stands in for the whole] and myth-making is, in some respects, an end
in itself.
For yet others, the “savage”
was an appealing figure in its own right. Johann Gottfried Herder (1744—1803),
for cxample, thought that the more “savage” a group
was, the more spontaneous and alive they were. Valorizing
immediate “experience” and its raw expression, Herder and other
nineteenth-century Romantics evaluated myths positively as “repositories of
experience far more vital and powerful than those obtainable from what was felt
to be the artificial art and poetry of the aristocratic civilization of
contemporary
4. Social dreaming. In some psychology-based theorizing, myths
function on the social level much as dreams, nervous habits or slips of the
tongue do in the life of the individual. That is, myths are thought of as the
disguised expressions of anti-social but completely natural desires and wishes.
Sigmund Freud (1913; see Segal 1996: vol. 1) painted a picture of the human
condition as one in which individuals attempt to fulfill their private needs
for pleasure (e.g., sex, food, power) while simultaneously attempting to secure
their place in a larger social unit where such wish-fulfillment is rarely
allowed for the sake of maintaining the social unit (e.g., to preserve family
harmony few of us actually tell our family members what we really think of
them). Freud theorized that to be human means one is caught in a catch-22 of
the worst kind: we are stuck with completely natural wishes that we have no
choice but to suppress and internalize for the relative harmony of social life.
Such suppression, however, creates anxiety. Sooner or later this repression-induced
anxiety builds to such a point that the repressions must be let out, but only
in a disguised form (since we can never actually act on the real desire),
thereby giving vent to the anti-social desires but in a more socially
acceptable manner. As a cruel footnote to this state of affairs, the guilt
associated with acting out disguised desires, that is, expressing desires inauthentically,
produces new anxiety and the cycle is endlessly repeated.
To he human, therefore, is to be neurotic to varying degrees, and
myth is a narrative mechanism, a kind of collective therapy of neurotic desire,
that allows social groups to act out their desires and fantasies while allowing
them to remain a coherent social unit. For instance, what better way is there
to fulfill ones love—hate relationship with authority figures (based on desires
of incest and patricide) than by telling and retelling, acting and living out
tales of children rising up against parents and siblings battling each other?
Be it the ancient Greek myths (e.g., Hesiod’s tale of
the origin of the gods in the Theogony), biblical stories (e.g., the fratricide in
the Cain and Abel story, or the sacrifice of Jesus, the supposed son of God) or
modern movies, novels and soap operas, this view sees them all as narrative
vehicles for projecting and momentarily resolving the inevitable and
never-ending anxiety associated with social existence.
5. Expressions of the collective unconscious. Other psychologists see
myths not as mechanisms for venting and coping with anxiety but as symbolic
messages projected from ourselves and directed to ourselves. Following Carl
Jung, these scholars understand myths as the means whereby aspects of our
personality that are banished to our unconscious are given symbolic voice in
the forms of certain archetypes (e.g., the Wise Old Man, the Earth Mother, the Innocent Virgin). We therefore ignore the messages of
myths to our own peril, for they are the expressions of our full potential and
true personality (Hudson 1966; Segal 1998). In our time, the late Joseph
Campbell is perhaps the best known advocate of this viewpoint. Following a
number of anthropological theorists before him,
6. Structuralism. For modern scholars of myth, the challenge generally
is to see these apparently illogical and fantastic narratives as very much
ordered and therefore understandable. Following the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss
(1972b, 1975—78), himself influenced by the structural
linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, some scholars
study myths much as one studies language: structured public evidence of the
order of human cognition itself. Myths are structured in a fashion similar to
the structuredness of human language which is
functional and meaningful only because of the complex inter-relationships among
its basic units such as letters, phonemes, words, sentences, and so on. Structuralists thus study myths not in terms of their
historical development and change (the Euhemerist approach), nor as evidence of
a pre-scientific rationality (the Intellectualist approach), nor as expressions
of some raw emotional or mystical mentality (mythopoeic
analysis), nor by artificially isolating one of their many elements in an
allegorical hunt for archetypes (Jung). Rather, structuralists
think that the message of a myth results from how its elements relate to each
other as part of a coherent structure (Gordon 1981; Leach 1967, 1976).
7. Myths as truth. The theories of myth surveyed so far obviously
arise from diverse number of disciplinary fields (anthropology, philosophy,
psychology, etc.). Drawing on these and other theories, a group of scholars in
the history of religions school (a designation that translates the German Religionswis senschaft,
literally “science of religion”) has developed an approach to the study of
myths that is particular to much scholarship on religion. From this viewpoint,
myths are stories that convey, in some veiled, encoded or symbolic form, a
social group’s deepest personal and social values. Although programmatically
exemplified in the works of Mircea Eliade (1959b, 1960, 1963a, 1974), myths as
veiled, deep truths is the operative assumption in most current scholarship on
religion. Here is a representative sampling:
Myth
is above all a story that is believed,
believed to he true, and that people continue to believe despite sometimes
massive evidence that it is, in fact, a lie . .. [ a myth is is a story that is sacred to and shared by a group of
people who find their most important meanings in it; it is a story believed to
have been composed in the past about an event in the past, or, more rarely, in
the future, an event that continues to have meaning in the present because it
is remembered; it is a story that is part of a larger group of stories. (Doniger 1998: 2)
The
governing function of myth is to reveal exemplary models for all rites and all
meaningful human activities. (Eliade 1991: 4)
Myth
is an expression of the sacred in words: it reports realities and events from
the origin of the world that remain valid for the
basis and purpose of all there is. Consequently, a myth functions as a model
for human activity, society, wisdom, and knowledge. (Bolle
1987: 271)
Myth
is a narrative of origins, taking place in primordial time, a time
other than
that of everyday reality. (Ricoeur 1987: 273)
Myth
is a distinctive expression of a narrative that states a paradigmatic truth.
(Long 1987: 94)
Myth is the first form of intellectual explanation
of religious apprehensions. (Wach 1951: 39)
Encoded in these tales (i.e.
tales “dating” from when the gods walked the earth, so these authors might
argue) are the abiding values that help to form and maintain a social group.
For example, myths told and acted out in ritual reinforce the value that humans
are at the center of an orderly, created world, or the value that despite being
a unified whole society is a complex hierarchy and all of its members have
their own particular duties and responsibilities. Regardless of how reality really is, the view of myth as veiled
communication of the true constitution of the world and humanitvs
place in it suggests that in studying myths the modern reader can learn how
past or distant societies believed reality—and their place in it—to have been.
At
the heart of the “myth as truth” approach evidently is the attempt by scholars
to celebrate myths as containing some sort of profound truth that “cannot be
expressed in simple propositions” (Sharpe 1971: 43 “Mythology,” to quote the
late Italian historian of religion Raffaele Pettazzoni, “as the
science of myth, must quit its traditional anti-mythicai
attitude. It must be livened by the spirit of humanism, by an attitude of
sympathy towards the myth as a mark and a document of our human. estate” (1954: 36, emphasis added). Studying myths thus
amounts to divining our deepest human “estate” (essence), for all myths are
generated by that estate and cot vey it, if only we
apprehend the mythic narratives rightly. According to this view, the proper use
of “other people’s myth” means recognizing that “their myths have always been
our myths, though we may not have known it; we recognize ourselves in those
myths more vividly than we have ever recognized ourselves in the myths of our
culture” (Doniger-O’Flaherty 1986: 224). With this
sympathetic turn in myth scholarship, the distance between the liar and the
truth-teller has disappeared, as has the distance between the mythmaker and the
myth analyst. For, insofar as we are all parts of social groups we all have
myths, myths we live by (to echo a phrase of Joseph Campbell). If the academic study of religion is understood as
something other than the practice of
religion, then this sympathetic turn (and it is, rightly put, sympathetic rather than empathetic) has
profound implications for whether it is possible to study religion in an
academic sense.
Redescribing Myth as
Something Ordinary
Despite certain differences,
the approaches I have outlined are unified in that all see myths either as a
terribly false or as a deeply true narrative object to be read and interpreted.
Common to all these approaches is the assumption that “myth” is the product,
the effect or an evidentiary trace of some absent, forgotten, distant—that is,
not immediately apparent—phenomenon or human intention. Thus the mission of
myth scholarship has generally been construed as a reconstructive and
hermeneutic labor bent on ferreting out the truth or falsity of myth, on
decoding and then recovering obscured meanings. In short, common to all
approaches has been the view that myths are signs of such personal or interior
causes and intentions as (1) a mentality, (2) an emotional or psychological
“experience,” (3) a universal human “estate” such as Human Nature. Given the
utter difficulties of studying such interiorized dispositions and
mentalities—after all, scholarship can only examine that which is public,
observable and documentah]e—is there another way of
defining and tackling the issue of myth? Can the category “myth” be redescrihed and the study of myth he rectified?
Recall
the definition of myth offered by Doniger: “what a
myth is is
a story that is sacred to and shared by a group of people who find their most
important meanings in it” (1998: 2). Most scholars of religion would accept
this definition as straightforward and uncontroversial, hut attention needs to
he focused on two words: “sacred” and “important.” Both words convey
socially-based value judgments. After all, the word sacred comes from a Latin
root that means “to set apart.” It seems that deeming myths as sacred, true,
essential, paradigmatic or important is somewhat circular, for what makes
something sacred or true in the first place? Thinking of Eliade’s
understanding of myths and rituals as the apolitical containers of primordial
truths—truths that are repeatedly made manifest in retellings and
reenactments—we can reply that “primordiality does
not emerge out of natural givenness, but is an
essentially fragile social construction which—like every social
construction—needs special rituals and communicative efforts [
in order to come into existence and he maintained” (Eisenstadt
and Giesen 1995: 78). Taking this view makes yet
another part of Doniger’s definition stand out: she
noted that “a group of people ... find their most important meanings in [myth]” (1998: 2, emphasis added). Might it not he that a group
of people fabricate their most
important meanings by means of myth?
Instead
of perpetuating the view that myths are self-evidently meaningful things
(whether true or false, oral or written or ritually performed) that can be
learned, retold, recorded, interpreted and studied, I would like to suggest
that we redescribe the term “myth.” Let us think of
it not so much as a kind narrative identifiable by its content (e.g.,
traditional tales of the gods or ancient heroes) as a technique or strategy.
Let us suppose that myth is not so much a genre with relatively stable
characteristics that allow us to distinguish myth from folk tale, saga, legend
and fable (Bolle et al. 1974: 7 Graf 1993: 6—8) as a
class of social argumentation found
in all human cultures. Let us entertain the possibility that myths are not
things akin to nouns, but active
processes akin to verbs. Instead of saying that “a people’s myths reflect,
express, and explore the people’s self-image” (Bolle
et al. 1974: 715), or that the contents of myths act as a “pragmatic charter of
primitive faith and moral wisdom” (Malinowski 1926),
a shift in perspective allows us to suggest (1) that myths are not special (or
“sacred”) but ordinary human means of fashioning and authorizing their lived-in
and believed-in “worlds,” (2) that myth as an ordinary rhetorical device in
social construction and maintenance makes
this rather than that social
identity possible in the first place and (3) that a people’s use of the label “myth” reflects, expresses,
explores and legitimizes their own self-image. To build on Malinowski,
we can say that myth is the vehicle whereby any of a variety of possible social
charters is rendered exemplary, authoritative, singular, unique,
as something that cannot be imagined differently.
Redescribed
in this manner, the study of myth becomes not just the domain of historians of
religion conversant with long dead languages and cultures—their data understood
by them to he “an autonomous, hermetically-sealed territory” (Buxton 1994:
14)—hut the domain of a far wider collection of scholars who study the ways by
which human beings the world over construct, authorize and contest their social
identities (on religious studies as a domain within culture studies, see
Fitzgerald 1997, 1999). No longer would myths be considered unique, symbolic,
religious narratives, identified by the fact that they are “specific accounts
of gods or superhuman beings involved in extraordinary events or circumstances
in a time that is unspecified but which is understood as existing apart from
ordinary human experience” (Bolle et al. 1974: 715).
Instead, scholars would query just what it is about these tales—and what it is about many other modes of public discourse—that leads people, including
scholars, to boost them into the realm of the extraordinary in the first place.
After all, for the scholar in the human sciences, the data of human behavior is
ordinary (which does not mean simple or simplistic) to begin with in the sense
that it is human behavior. Myths thus
are utterly mundane and assigning them an “extraordinary” status as a
precondition for studying them rightly is to begin our study with a mistake
that deflects us from a more interesting and productive scholarly aim:
undertaking the difficult study of the mechanisms whereby societies create the
extraordinary from the everyday. Pierre Bourdieu
(1998: 21) puts the issue properly:
There
is nothing more difficult to convey than reality in all its ordinariness.
Flaubert was fond of saying that it takes a lot of hard work to portray
mediocrity. Sociologists run into this problem all the time: How can we make
the ordinary extraordinary and evoke ordinariness in such a way that people
will see just how extraordinary it is?
While the study of specific
types of stories—stories with gods set at the beginning or the end of time, for
example—is indeed fascinating and well worthwhile, would it not be far more
interesting to study the mechanisms whereby just these and not other stories
became important or sacred to begin with? Taking for granted the importance,
the sacredness or the extraordinary character of certain stories only puts off
asking what I take to be a more basic question: how is it that individual human
beings accomplish, in part by dealing in myths, the all too ordinary but
fascinating trick of coming together and acting collectively over great spans
of time and space?
Myth as
What-Goes-Without-Saying
To begin answering this
question, we can appeal to Roland Barthes who
examines the process of “mythification,” or even
“mystification,” a term that might he more appropriate than “myth.” For when he
identifies myths he examines not stable stories but networks of actions,
assumptions and representations—what other scholars might term a discourse.
Like Bourdieu after him, Barthes’
interest concerns the manner in which the ordinary is made to stand out, is set
apart (made sacred) and made to appear extraordinary. Barthes
therefore problematizes the “‘naturalness’ with which
newspapers, art, and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even
though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history” (Barthes 1972: ii; see also Moriarty 1991 and Saper 1997). For Barthes, then,
myth “is not defined by the object of its message, but by the way in which it utters its message: there are formal limits to
myth, there are no ‘substantial ones’” (1972: 117; emphasis added). He departs
from the traditional way of defining myth with reference to its unique
substance or content and opts, instead, to see myth as a particular type of
human endeavor displayed in hut not limited to storytelling. Breaking away from
some long-held notions, Barthes answers his own
rhetorical question: “Everything, then, can be a myth? Yes, I believe this” (1972:
117).
Within
the field of religious studies we find a related sense of myth as human
activity—this time the active process is aptly renamed “mythmaking”—in the work
of the scholar of Christian origins, Burton Mack, whose most recent book is
subtitled, The Making of the Christian
Myth (1995). For Mack, the art of mythmaking “turn the
collective agreements of a people into truths held to be self-evident” (1995:
301). As noted by the French scholar of ancient
I
can think of no better example of such practices than the familiar words used
in the U.S. Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to he self-
evident.” There is a rhetoric embedded here that generally passes by unnoticed.
These words do something, but what?
The opening of the Declaration effectively removes readers from the
tug-and-pull of the contingent, historical world and places them in an
abstract, ahistorical realm where such things as
truths are obvious, enduring and self-evident. Through this rhetoric of
self-evidence, then, the long European history of philosophical, political and
social debate and development which eventually led to this document—and the
nation-state founded upon it—is completely obscured, as if the Declaration, and
later the U.S. Constitution as well, spontaneously arose from the ground fully
formed. After all, self-evidences do not have a history, they leave no trace
and they are nor manufactured. They simply appear and
announce their existence.
Although
lost on the masses of people, these so-called self-evidences were perceived by
a privileged class of “Constitutional framers.” Within such texts, then, there
is also a rhetoric of discernment—only some of us have
“eyes to see and ears to hear.” Just as the pre-existent Veda was heard only by
the Indian rishis
of old, the pre-existent Qu’ran was heard only by
Muhammad, the pre existent voice of YHWH prompted a response only in some
listeners, and the Christian “Word” (logos)
which pre-existed creation itself was truly heard by only a few, so too the
content of the Declaration benefits from (i.e., is authorized by) not just a
rhetoric of self-evidence but by the privileged status of those wise or lucky
enough to have discerned it. To push this a little further, it is wholly
misleading to talk of the document being authorized, for this document cannot
exist apart from the social world from which it arose and which it supports.
Therefore, the all too real world of its framers and users is what ultimately
gains legitimacy. Considering the manner in which many “founding fathers” of
the
Mythmaking
and Social Formation
Reconceiving mythmaking as the ongoing process of constructing,
authorizing and reconstructing social identities or social formations would be
to create a “catalog of strategies for maintaining paradoxes, fighting over dissonances, and surviving [ recovering from] breakdowns”
(Lease 1994: 475)—breakdowns in so much as social identity is not eternal.
After all, despite the success of certain ways of producing social identities,
people today do not identify themselves as Roman citizens—unless, of course,
one recalls how Mussolini and the Italian fascists tried to “recover” the
glorious Roman past in their attempts to forge a new Italian social identity in
the mid twentieth century.
Such
a catalog of strategies would amount to a map of the many social sites where
tales, behaviors, institutions, clothing styles, even architectural details are
used to generate and defend (and sometimes to overthrow) authority (
Social
formation and mythmaking are group activities that go together, each
stimulating the other in a kind of dynamic feedback system. Both speed up when
new groups form in times of social disintegration and cultural change. Both are
important indicators of the personal and intellectual energies invested in
experimental movements . . . Social formation and mythmaking fit together like
hand and glove.
This reciprocal relationship
between social formation and mythmaking was made clear as early as Emile Durkhcim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1995
[ 425).
A
society can neither create nor recreate itself without creating some kind of ideal
by the same stroke. This creation is not a sort of optional extra step by which
society, being already made, merely adds finishing touches; it is the act by
which society makes itself, and remakes itself, periodically.
In keeping with the Durkheimian tradition of sociological studies on religion
and myth, we could say that a social formation is the activity of experimenting
with, authorizing or combating, and reconstituting widely circulated ideal
types, idealizations or, better put, mythifications
that function to control the means of and sites where social significance is
selected, symbolized and communicated. It is this tradition of scholarship on
mythmaking to which Gary Lease contributes when he speaks of religions as
totalized systems of meaning, or J. Z. Smith when he thinks of ritual as
exercising an “economy of significance” and of myth as a “strategy for dealing
with a situation” (1982c: 56; 1978a: 97). I place Roland Barthes
in this tradition as well, for he speaks of the ways myths authorize contingent
History by re-presenting it as necessary Nature. Because this is a tradition
that sees mythmaking as an ideological activity, we also find Bruce Lincoln
here. Over a decade ago (1986: 164) he noted that
an
ideology.., is not just an ideal against which social reality is measured or an
end toward the fulfillment of which groups and individuals aspire. It is also,
and this is much more important, a screen that strategically veils, mystifies,
or distorts important aspects of real social processes.
Mythmaking is a species of
ideology production, of ideal-making, where “ideal” is conceived not as an
abstract, absolute value but as a contingent, localized construct that comes to
represent and simultaneously reproduce certain specific social values as if they were inevitable and
universal.
Social
formation by means of mythmaking, then, is explicitly caught up in the
ideological strategies of totalization, naturalization,
rationalization and universalization. With Benedict
Anderson we could say that social formations are based on mythic “ontological
reality [ is portrayed as] apprehensible ... through a
single, privileged system of re-presentation” (Anderson 1991: 14). Accordingly,
Durkheim’s thoughts on the creation and authorization
of “some kind of ideal” find their modern equivalent in the works of the
authors just named. Social formations are the ongoing results of mythmaking
activity (where I see mythmaking as a discourse involving acts and institutions
as well as narratives), an activity that unites into a totalized system of
representation what Mack refers to as the epic past, the historical past, the
historical present, the anticipated historical future and the hoped-for epic
future in one narrative, behavioral and institutional system (on the production
of history see Braun 1999). Where but in religions and forms of nationalism do
we see this happening most effectively?
We
should not forget that despite attempts to construct a past or future long
removed from the present, mythmaking takes place in a specific socio-political
moment and supports a specific judgment about the here and now. Myths and
rituals, therefore, do not simply project consensual agreements that have been
reached; they do not merely communicate some specific substance so much as give
shape and authority (i.e., significance) to this or that system of judgments
and messages. Myths present one
particular and therefore contestable viewpoint as if it were an “agreement
that has been reached” by “we the people” (a phrase that is part of a powerful
mythic rhetoric common in the history of the
Evidently,
this view of “myth” differs significantly from the suggestion that, because “mythlike ideologies” such as capitalism and communism have
taken on greater prominence in recent time, “the word ideology might indeed be
replaced, in much contemporary discussion about politics, by the term
mythology” (Bolle et al. 1974: 727). The tradition of
writers I have surveyed would hold just the opposite position: by means of
mythmaking local, symbolic worlds of significance are authorized and
naturalized by being (mis)taken for or actively
portrayed as universal, literal ones. This is the role of ideology in human
affairs.
Because
one of the premises of all social-scientific scholarship is that all human
doing is contextualized within historical (social, political, economic,
gendered, etc.) pressures and influences, we must therefore understand all such
doings partial and linked to specific temporally and culturally located worlds.
“There is no primordium,” as J. Z. Smith reminds us
(1982a: xiii), “it is all history.” Or, as Marx and Engels
put it, “social life is essentially practical.
All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their
rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of human practice”
(1970: 122). Acknowl edging this ensures that
we do not lose sight of the fact that mythmaking allows a sleight of hand; it
is the art of manufacturing, from raw materials which are by definition only
part of the whole, total symbolic systems. Because social values, truths and
ideals are hardly universal, because, as Durkheim
noted, the “mystery that appears to surround them is entirely superficial and
fades upon closer scrutiny ..., [ one pulls] aside the
veil with which the mythological imagination covered them” (1995: 431), there
is an inherent contradiction embedded at the core of social formations—a point
taught to us by Marx long ago. Accordingly, there is much at stake for members
of a social formation to maintain the mythic status of the system of
representation and signification— their very self-identity is continually at
stake! As Lease comments concerning the inherent contradictions of all
totalizing practices, “a society cannot live without [
practices], nor can it live with them” (1994: 475). It is precisely the
mythmakers (theologians, politicians, teachers, pundits and, yes, even and too
often scholars of religion) who develop discourses that obscure and thereby
manage these contradictions (see further McCutcheon 1998c).
“Pay No
Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain”
Mythmaking, then, is the
business of making “particular and contingent world views appear to be
ubiquitous and absolute” (Arnal 1997: 317). Social
formation by means of mythmaking is nothing other than the reasonable response
to the inevitable social disruptions, contradictions and incongruities that
characterize the ordmary human condition. Systems of
social significance, encoded within narratives of the epic past and the
anticipated plenary future, coordinated within behavioral and institutional
systems of cognitive and social control, characterize our responses to the
various incongruities and disruptions that come with historical existence:
“myth both unites the group and provides an interpretive framework for coping
with the exigencies of, and threats from, the natural world” (Giddens 1984: 265). Mythmaking might even be the preeminent
means for creating cognitive and social continuity amidst the discontinuities
of life. As J can Baudrillard suggests, it is our way
of maintaining our accumulative culture by way of “stockpiling the past in
plain sight” (1994: 10). Or, as the scholar of early Christianity Ron Cameron
puts it: “Religion as mythmaking reflects thoughtful, though ordinary, modes of
ingenuity and labor” (1996: 39).
We
should thus expect that mythmaking is a highly political affair, that
“mythmaking is an everyday practice which permeates the discourse of political
communicators” (Flood 1996: 275). As Flood goes on to say, when redescribed in this fashion,
there is
no need to consider myths as variant expressions of psychological archetypes.
There is no need to posit a special form of consciousness or to situate the
process of mythmaking within a consciousness or to situate the process of
mythmaking within a psychopathology of the irrational. There is nothing strange
about mythmaking There is nothing wrong with it. It is
an entirely normal way of making political events intelligible in the light of
ideological beliefs.
Classifying and studying
so-called myths of origins, end-times, tricksters, and so on, as if these tales
express some deep, abiding truths that require some kind of deep, abiding
appreciation on the part of scholars, leaves this entire form of political
analysis untouched—a point brought home with sharp clarity in Graeme MacQueen’s critique of Alan Dundes’
(1984) collection of essays by myth theorists, most of whom understand myths as
essentially apolitical.
The
implication of all this for scholars of religion is that if we take for granted
the already established meaning and unquestioned authority of “myth”—myth’s
sacredness—we too may have come under its spell and, as a consequence,
perpetuate a politics of which we may be unaware (Cady 1998; McCutcheon 1997c,
1998d; Murphy 1998). In so doing, we miss out on asking: What is going on when
we constantly dress up our own creations in “decorative displays” to make them
pass for what Barthes calls “what-goes-without-
saying”? How can the descriptive “is” so smoothly
become the prescriptive “ought”? If anything, I presume that Bolle’s use of the phrase “expressions of the sacred in
words” would attract Barthes’ interest in
demystification just as much as does professional wrestling, the striptease and
even margarine, only to name a few cultural goodies that occupy his attention (Barthes 1972). Where historians of religion are often
content to employ a purely descriptive, supposedly value-free phenomenological
method simply to determine what people hold to be sacred, exemplary and
paradigmatic, Barthes’ and Mack’s critical methods
identify the strategies that construct the set-apartness of various
conventions, beliefs and practices in the first place.
The gain
of this redescriptive turn in myth studies is its
applicability to all human efforts to construct a place beyond criticism, then
to equate a particular instance of human society and culture with the “place
beyond criticism.” After this redescriptive turn,
myths are no longer merely stories. Rather, myths are the product and the means
of creating authority by removing a claim, behavior, artifact or institution
from human history and hence from the realm of human doings. A rectified study
of myths thus turns out to be study of mythmaking. Despite my disagreement with
much scholarship on myth, I think that Bolle, Buxton
and J. Z. Smith were on the right track when they suggested that “a myth has
its authority not by proving itself but by presenting itself” (1974: 715). In
attempting to manufacture an unassailable safe haven for the storage of social
charters and “worlds,” mythmakers, tellers and performers draw on a complex
network of disguised assumptions, depending on their listeners not to ask
certain sorts of questions, not to speak out of turn, to listen respectfully,
applaud when prompted and, in those famous lines from The Wizard of Oz, to “pay no attention to that man behind the
curtain.”
Suggested
Barthes, Roland
1972 Mythologies.
Annette Layers (trans.).
Bolle, Kees W., Richard G. A.
Buxton and Jonathan Z. Smith
1974 “The
Nature, Functions and Types of Myths.” Encyclopaedia Britannica.
15th edn, Vol. 24, 715—732.
Cohen, Percy
1969 “Theories
of Myth.” Man, September, 337—353.
Detienne, Marcel
1991 “The
Interpretation of Myths: Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Theories,” pp. 5—10
in Yves Bonnefoy (ed.), Mythologies,
vol. 1.
Doty, William G.
1986 Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals.
Eliade, Mircea
1991 “Toward
a Definition of Myth,” pp. 3—5 in Yves Bonnefoy (ed.), Mythologies, vol. 1.
Lincoln, Bruce
1986 Myth, Cosmos, and Society: Indo-European
Themes of Creation and Destruction.
1989 Discourse and the Construction of Society:
Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification.
1994
Authority:
Construction and Corrosion.
MacQueen, Graeme
1988 “Whose
Sacred History? Reflections on Myth and Dominance.” Studies in Religion / Sciences religieuses 17: 143—157.
Segal, Robert A.
1980 “In
Defense of Mythology: The History of Modern Theories of Myth.’ Annals of Scholarship 1: 3—49.
Sienkewicz, Thomas J.
1997
Theories
of Myth: An Annotated Bibliography.