Myth

K. K. Ruthven

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351630382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1976, this book provides a helpful introduction to the study of myth as a concept and its relationship to literature. It examines historically some of the leading theories concerning the nature and origins of myth and, with reference to a wide variety of texts, illustrates the relevance of these theories to literature. It also considers the different ways in which myths have been perceived over time, both positive and negative, and the effect this has had on the production of new mythologies. It concludes with an assessment if the problems created by the presence of myth in literature and its use as a tool of literary criticism.

1

Introduction

What is myth? ‘I know very well what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked and try to explain, I am baffled.’ So wrote St Augustine in his Confessions (xi. 14), grappling engagingly with that elusive category called time, and anticipating the predicament of anybody who is pressed for a brief and comprehensive definition of myth. It is the question itself, we come to realize, which is at fault, for we have no direct experience of myth as such, but only of particular myths: and these, we discover, are obscure in origin, protean in form and ambiguous in meaning. Seemingly immune to rational explication, they nevertheless stimulate rational enquiry, which accounts for the diversity of conflicting explanations, none of which is ever comprehensive enough to explain myth away. Myths partake of that quality ascribed to poetry in Wallace Stevens’ meticulously evasive aphorism: they appear to resist the intelligence almost successfully. This is why they attract systematizers who reassure us that the mighty maze is not without a plan, because myth is nothing more than primitive science, or history, or the embodiment of unconscious fantasies, or some other solvent currently in favour. Evidence adduced in support of each claim often convinces one that certain myths must have arisen exactly as the systematizer describes: his skeleton-key undoubtedly fits a certain type of lock. But systematizers are not content to contribute one more mythogony to the existent stock, nor to aspire towards that condition of pluralistic tolerance advocated by Melville and Frances Herskovits (1958, p. 121); on the contrary, they are out to discover a comprehensive mono-mythogony of their own, some universal key to all mythologies. George Eliot caricatured their mentality in the person of Casaubon in Middlemarch (1871–2), but it would be wrong to deride their single-mindedness, for each of them is the inventor of one of those possibilities which now constitute our range of choice. Resolutely monistic in their approach (and ever prone to the pars pro toto fallacy, the hypostatizing of a method into an absolute, and other text-book errors of logic), they avert their gaze from those very exceptions and anomalies which will command the attention of the next investigator, or the one after that. Yet their initial insights are strokes of genius.

Mythogonies are invented by people who cannot bring themselves to accept Malinowski’s view that myths simply mean what they say (1926, p. 79). On the contrary, mytho-gonists habitually assume that a myth conceals a ‘real’ meaning beneath its apparent meaning. They are generally innocent of the possibility that any tale may have purposive meanings which do not coincide with the purposeful intentions of the teller; and so they regard the intended meaning as the real meaning which their method (and their method alone) is capable of uncovering. They have equally little time for the simplistic view that myths are intended to elicit wonder. Mythogonists, like Poundian exegetes, are much more at ease when unscrewing the inscrutable. What a myth really means, they tell us, may have been lost accidentally through the hazards of oral transmission; or it may have been hidden deliberately by mythmakers reluctant to tell all they know; or it may have been tampered with by political or religious revisionists who produce what Robert Graves calls ‘mytho-Tropic’ versions of stories originally quite different in meaning (1961, p. 219). Alert to such possibilities, they probe the hidden depths, hoping (like all deep-sea divers) to avoid the hallucinations consequent upon nitrogen narcosis.

It was Voltaire’s opinion that the study of myths is an occupation for blockheads. Anybody who studies the study of myths, as I do here, must accordingly tremble to know precisely what qualifications he should bring to the task. Is one expected to be able to survey the field with magisterial superciliousness and compile a mythographic appendix to the Earl of Dorset’s Faithful Catalogue of Our Most Eminent Ninnies (1683)? Or is it enough to prove oneself a superlative blockhead in being willing to undertake such a useless investigation? Hopefully neither. Mythology is a subject in its own right, although not recognized as such in our educational system. Nobody ever gets a B.A. in Mythology. Instead, we assume it to lie within the province of a variety of disciplines such as classics, anthropology, folklore, history of religions, linguistics, psychology and art-history. Each looks at mythology in the light of its own preoccupations, which means that an inquisitive outsider who drifts promiscuously from one to another is likely to conclude that the various specialists are not really talking about the same thing at all, but about different things under the same name. Simply to catalogue the nuances of the word ‘myth’ and its cognates (mythos, my thus, mythologem, etc.) would be a major undertaking; and although White (1972) has made a c reditable attempt to produce working definitions of some of these terms for the benefit of literary critics, it is unlikely that others will respect his distinctions, for people engaged in literary studies seem to resent having their terminology refined to several decimal places. I have not made it my business here either to respect the autonomy of mythology (in whatever form it may be thought to exist) or to reconcile with one another the various theories concerning it. I offer instead a partial view of a vast and amorphous topic, and treat mythology as being important primarily on account of its associations with literature. This book is intended for those who are more familiar with English than with any other literature, but who recognize that because English literature is made by people who read other literatures and absorb ideas from a variety of disciplines, it is sometimes necessary to look far afield in order to understand what goes on at home.

But enough of all this. Let us be guided by J. A. Symonds’ somewhat frivolous remark that myths are ‘everlastingly elastic’ (1890, p. 147) and look now at some of the major theories concerning their nature and provenance. And let us remember that nearly all these approaches have at one time or another seemed so very plausible as to influence the ways in which writers themselves have treated myths in their own poems, plays and novels. Whatever their intrinsic value, therefore, these theories merit attention through having left indelible imprints on our literature.

2

Myths and Theorists

Euhemerism

Some time in the fourth century B.C., a Sicilian called Euhemerus wrote a Sacred History in which he describes a visit to an imaginary island called Panchaea, somewhere in the Indian Ocean. Here he learns from an inscription inside the Temple of Zeus that Zeus was a Cretan by birth who travelled in the east and was acclaimed a god there before returning home and dying in Crete. The whole of Euhemerus’ novel has not survived in the original or in the Latin translation by Ennius, and the account of it by a fellow Sicilian of the first century B.C., Diodorus Siculus, is also lost. What we know of Euhemerus derives mainly from the Historia Ecclesiastica which Eusebius completed early in the fourth century A.D. Attempted reconstructions of Euhemerus’ original intentions have to be conducted, therefore, at two removes from what he actually wrote (Eusebius quoting Diodorus quoting Euhemerus), and conflicting conjectures are understandably inevitable. Was Euhemerus being satirical at the expense of Alexander the Great’s experiences in India, and cynically recommending self-deification as a means to political ends? Or was he rather the Voltaire or Fontenelle of his day, the man held responsible by Plutarch for having ‘disseminated atheism all over the world’ (Moralia, 360A)? Either way, he is assumed to have written ironically, for the possibility that Euhemerus intended to promote emperor-worship by establishing a distinguished precedent for it has not proved popular among readers who would much prefer an iconoclastic to an imperialistic Sacred History. Whatever his intentions, however, Euhemerus has been credited with spectacular achievements, ranging from the subversion of pagan religions to the foundation of modern anthropology.

An emergent Christianity gladly exploited the polemical possibilities of Euhemerus’ revelation that the supreme god of the pagans had been human, all too human, and in doing so they developed what Bolle calls a euhemerismus inversus (1970, p. 23) which differs from the earlier kind in being wholly pejorative. To a second-century Christian like Clement of Alexandria, Euhemerus’ testimony was devastatingly final: ‘the gods you worship were once men’, he said in his Exhortation to the Heathen (iv), as if bad news like that would procure a massive defection to Christianity. Pagans, however, were accustomed to more casual relations between human and divine than Christians ever envisaged. To them, apotheosis was not a blasphemy but a possibility, admittedly remote, but nevertheless a possibility and therefore an incentive to philanthropic endeavour. That gods were benefactors whose gifts made civilization possible was the opinion of Prodicus of Ceos (fifth century B.C.), who noted the association of bread with Demeter and wine with Dionysus; and lists of divine benefactions were still being compiled a couple of thousand years later when Polydore Virgil wrote his De Rerum Inventoribus (Venice, 1499), much to the amusement of John Donne, who chides pagans in The Second Anniversary (1612) for their pitiable lack of discrimination in manufacturing gods out of ‘agues … and war’ as well as such domestic commodities as ‘wine, and corn, and onions’ (lines 425–8). Hercules, Aesculapius, Castor and Pollux, all began life as mortals, as Cicero freely admits (De Natura Deorum, ii. 24); Julius Caesar was declared a god of the Roman state after his murder in 44 B.C.

Clement was more than willing to believe that the whole pagan pantheon had been recruited in this way. Early Christians were appalled of course by the polytheistic and idolatrous nature of pagan religions. The Lord their God was a jealous God with an aversion to syndicates. ‘Thou shalt have none other gods before me’, he decreed, instructing the faithful to kill any of their immediate family who whored after strange gods (Deuteronomy, 13: 6–10); and a passage in the apocryphal Book of Wisdom (14: 15–21) warns how fearfully easy it is to commit spiritual fornication with the best of intentions. So perhaps it was inevitable that Reformation polemicists in search of propaganda against egregious popish impostures should avail themselves of euhemeristic arguments in accusing Roman Catholics of resuscitating paganism by practising idolatry; and as late as the eighteenth century Nicolas Freret acutely drew attention to the persistence among Protestant mythographers of an insidious alliance between euhemerism and anti-Catholicism (Manuel, 1963, p. 96). Later still, and equally controversially, euhemerism was to motivate Herbert Spencer’s theory that ‘ancestor-worship is the root of every religion’ (The Principles of Sociology [London, 1882], i. 440).

Euhemerists whose bias was professedly more historical than theological brought a rather different set of questions to bear on the data of pagan mythology. Euhemerism incorporated what Fontenrose calls Palaiphatism (1971, p. 23), after Palaiphatus, who attempted in De Incredibilibus (fourth century B.C.) to convert mythic into possible events, and circulated the well-known story that Actaeon was not eaten by his hounds but by debts incurred from extravagant hunting. Once the principle is accepted, stories become histories, and it is only a matter of time before an entomologist may be called upon to testify that Little Miss Muffet (who sat on a tuffet) is none other than the squeamish daughter of Thomas Moufet, author of The Theatre of Insects (London, 1658). Taking it for granted that Zeus and all the rest of them had once been mortal, a euhemerist historian felt obliged to determine the dates at which they had lived, in the hope that every major episode recorded in pagan mythology might be placed eventually within the compass of Hebrew history, which was assumed to be the axis of world chronology. As the chronology of antiquity became more refined, increasingly bizarre efforts were made to attach precise dates to episodes embalmed in myths, often by means of some such internal evidence as the mention of a datable astronomical event like the appearance of a comet or an eclipse. The use of astronomical dating as a method for rectifying world chronology on literary evidence was advocated by Joseph Justice Scaliger in his book De Emendatione Temporum (Paris, 1583), and the most celebrated English example of the genre is Isaac Newton’s Chronology of the Ancient Kingdoms Emended (London, 1728), which sets out to preserve the priority of Hebrew civilization by proving that the Greeks have greatly exaggerated the antiquity of their traditions. Euhemerists who believed that Ceres was deified for having taught graniculture to grateful Greeks were now informed that this event had taken place in 1030 B.C. Perseus rescued Andromeda in the year 1005; Theseus killed the Minotaur in 968; Helle drowned in the Hellespont (‘so named from her’) in 962; Prometheus was unbound in 937.

That people make history by first making myths seemed axiomatic to Niccolo Machiavelli after analyzing ancient Roman power-struggles, and the basic principles of such enterprises were reaffirmed in the Nazi ideology Alfred Rosenberg created in Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (Miinchen, 1930). Although the concept is totalitarian it is not particularly modern, in so far as Plato’s myths are aimed at subordinating individuals to the desires of the state, and Aristotle thought it likely that this is really what myths are for (Metaphysics, xi. 8). Is it so surprising, then, that Francis Bacon should have learned a lesson in counter-revolutionary tactics from studying the story of how Jupiter regained control over Typhon with Mercury’s assistance (The Wisdom of the Ancients [1619], ch. 2)? The politicization of myth is seen most strikingly in the creation of ethnogenic fables which enable the politically ambitious to declare themselves heirs of antiquity. The significance of the legendary Aeneas to the emperor Augustus is a case in point; so too is the Merovingian myth that the Trojan Francus is the eponymous hero of the Franks. Tudor historiography, as reconstructed by Greenlaw, provides a rich literary yield as well as a classic demonstration of the method, for it was Henry VII who first exploited the British origins of the Welsh Tudor family in ways suggested by a reading of the twelfth-century Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fabulous Historia Regum Britanniae. Two bits of unfinished business in the matter of Britain – Merlin’s prophecy that King Arthur would return eventually to rid Britain of her enemies, and the legend that the land would survive invasions to be ruled once again in the fullness of time by a British monarch –pointed the way to an imaginative man with imperial ambitions: so Henry christened his first son Arthur and hired a mendacious genealogist (Andre of Toulouse) to trace his line of descent back through the last British king (Cadwallader) to that Trojan Brutus who was allegedly the great-grandson of Aeneas and who eponymously established the brutish British in Albion (Isidore warns us that Britons may have been so called because they are stupid [bruti]: Etymologiae, ix. 1). The Faerie Queene (1590–6) sublimely celebrates on behalf of Queen Elizabeth this Tudor dynastic fantasy which receives much more pedestrian treatment in William Warner’s Albion’s England (1586) and Michael Drayton’s England’s Heroical Epistles (1597); and studies by E. C. Wilson reveal the diligence of imperial mythographers in creating cult-images of Elizabeth (as Astraea, Diana, Pandora, etc.) which could provide a focus and a stimulus for empress-worship. Subsequently, when Elizabeth was dead and the next Arturius Redivivus, James I, laid claim to a Divine Right of Kings which placed him above the common law of the land, it became expedient (as Brinkley shows) to replace what Milton called the ‘Trojan pretence’ of Galfredian British history with a new Parliamentarian myth of constitutional liberty as manifest in the Saxon legacy of Magna Charta.

Just as myth may be historicized, therefore, so too history can be mythicized by those with a Faulknerian gift for sublimating the actual into the apocryphal. To adopt Peter Munz’s terms (1956), the distention of myth into history is complemented by the telescoping of history into myth, in that both processes try to evade the ineffability of isolated events: for seeing that what actually happened (res gestae) is knowable only through an account of what happened (historia rerum gestarum), the historian becomes a sort of myth-maker willy-nilly. Attempts to dissociate a historical Jesus Christ from the messianic mythology in which he is presented to us are therefore likely to be as absorbingly inconsequential as investigations into the historicity of Robin Hood. But if some myths contain some history, which nobody but a ritualist like Raglan (1936) would deny, then precisely what kind of history is it? Probably what Michael Grant has called ‘para-history’, which records ‘not what happened but what people, at different times, said or believed had happened’ (1971, p. xviii). Roman mythology, as Grant reads it, embodies a para-history of Rome; and ‘to get an idea of a civilization’, he adds, ‘one needs a history and a para-history as well.’

Myths as natural science

An alternative to euhemerism is to believe that myths are allegories of goings-on in the universe around us: myths are not history, but natural history. ‘All metamorphoses are the physics of the early ages’, wrote Fontenelle, echoing Cicero’s comment that ‘these impious fables enshrined a decidedly clever scientific theory’ (De Natura Deorum, ii. 24). How was this possible? Mainly because by Cicero’s time the names of the gods had long been associated astronomically and astrologically with the names of planets and zodiacal constellations, as well as geophysically with the names of metals and the four elements out of which the world was supposed to be made. How tempting it must have been to look retrospectively at Greek myths in the light of subsequent developments and imagine them to have been invented originally by primitive astrologers or alchemists or other authorities on the arcane. Christians could dabble in pagan mythology with a clear conscience provided they remembered (as Sir Walter Ralegh did) that the names of the pagan gods are really the names of ‘natural and divine powers’ which God has distributed in the world for our common benefit (The History...