Myth Analyzed

Robert A. Segal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000163261
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Folklore y mitología

Comparing and evaluating modern theories of myth, this book offers an overview of explanations of myth from the social sciences and the humanities.

This ambitious collection of essays uses the viewpoints of a variety of disciplines - psychology, anthropology, sociology, politics, philosophy, religious studies, and literature. Each discipline advocates a generalization about the origin, the function, and the subject matter of myth. The subject is always not what makes any myth distinct but what makes all myths "myth". The book is divided into five sections, covering topics such as myth and psychoanalysis, hero myths, myth and science, myth and politics, and myth and the physical world. Chapters engage with an array of theorists--among them, Freud, Jung, Campbell, Rank, Winnicott, Tylor, Frazer, Malinowski, Levy-Bruhl, Levi-Strauss, Harrison, and Burkert. The book considers whether myth still plays a role in our lives is one of the issues considered, showing that myths arise anything but spontaneously. They are the result of a specific need, which varies from theory to theory.

This is a fascinating survey by a leading voice in the study of myth. As such, it will be of much interest to scholars of myth and how it interacts with Sociology, Anthropology, Politics and Economics.

1 The leading modern theories of myth

It is commonly said that theories of the nineteenth century focused on the question of origin and that theories of the twentieth century have focused on the questions of function and subject matter. But this characterization confuses historical origin with recurrent origin. Theories that profess to provide the origin of myth claim to know not where and when myth first arose but why and how myth arises wherever and whenever it does. The issue of recurrent origin has been as popular with twentieth-century theories as with nineteenth-century ones, and interest in both function and subject matter was as common to nineteenth-century theories as to twentieth-century ones.

The real difference is that, generalized, nineteenth-century theories deem myth the “primitive” counterpart to science, which is taken to be largely, even exclusively, modern. Twentieth-century theories deem myth other than the primitive counterpart to science, in subject or function or both.

Disciplines differ in their definitions of myth. Not all even assume that myth is a story. For political scientists, for example, myth can be a belief or credo—that is, an ideology, which may be illustrated by stories but is not rooted in them. Take, for example, the rags-to-riches myth, or the conviction that the United States is a land of opportunity for those who work hard. The novels of Horatio Alger exemplified this belief but did not create it.

Even when myth is assumed to be a story, disciplines differ over the contents. For folklorists, myth is about the creation of the world. For example, in the Bible only the two creation stories (Genesis 1 and 2), the Garden of Eden story (Genesis 3), and the Noah story (Genesis 6–9) would qualify as myths. All other stories would instead constitute either legends or folktales. For theories from religious studies, the main characters in myth must be gods or near-gods, such as heroes. Theories from anthropology, psychology, and sociology tend to allow for secular as well as religious myths.

Myth and science

In the West the ancient challenge to myth was on ethical grounds: Plato bemoaned Homeric myths for presenting the gods as practitioners of immoral behavior. The chief modern challenge to myth has come from science.

One form of the modern challenge to myth has been to the scientific credibility of myth. Did creation really occur in a mere six days, as the first of two creation stories in Genesis (1:1–2:4a) claims? Was there really a worldwide flood? The most unrepentant defense against this challenge has been to claim that the biblical account is correct. For after all, the Pentateuch was revealed to Moses by God. This position, known as creationism, assumes varying forms, ranging from taking the days of creation to mean exactly six days to taking them to mean “ages.” At the same time creationists of all stripes tout their views as scientific as well as religious, and they enlist scientific evidence to refute “pseudo-scientific” rivals like evolution.

A much tamer defense against the challenge of modern science has been to reconcile myth with modern science. Here elements at odds with modern science are either removed or, more cleverly, reinterpreted as in fact scientific. There might not have been a Noah able singlehandedly to gather up all living species and keep them alive in a wooden boat sturdy enough to withstand the strongest seas that ever arose, but a worldwide flood did occur. What thus remains in myth is true because it is scientific—modern scientific.

By far the most common response to the challenge of science has been to abandon myth for science. Here myth is taken as an explanation of its own kind, not a scientific explanation in mythic guise. The issue is therefore not the scientific credibility of myth but the compatibility of myth with science. Myth is considered to be the “primitive” counterpart to science, which is assumed to be modern. Myth is here part of religion. The rise of science as the reigning modern explanation of physical events has consequently spelled the fall of myth. Because moderns by definition accept science, they cannot also have myth, and the phrase “modern myth” is self-contradictory. Myth is a victim of the process of secularization that constitutes modernity.

The pioneering English anthropologist E. B. Tylor (1832–1917) (1871) remains the classic exponent of the view that myth and science are at odds. Tylor subsumes myth under religion and in turn subsumes both religion and science under philosophy. Primitive philosophy is identical with primitive religion. There is no primitive science. Modern philosophy, by contrast, is divided into religion and science. Primitive religion is the primitive counterpart to science because both are explanations of the physical world. The religious explanation is personalistic, the scientific one impersonal. The explanations are incompatible because both are direct explanations of the same events. In causing lightning, Zeus thrusts thunder bolts onto his target rather than setting up meteorological processes that operate on their own. Gods operate not behind or through impersonal forces but in place of them. One cannot, then, stack the religious account atop the scientific account.

Modern religion, by contrast, has surrendered the explanation of the world to science and has instead become a combination of metaphysics and ethics, neither of which is present in primitive religion. One now reads the Bible not for the story of creation but for the Ten Commandments, just as for Plato a bowdlerized Homer would enable one to do. This irenic position is like that of the US evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. Yet for Tylor myths are too closely tied to gods as agents in the world to permit any transformation like that of religion. Where, then, there is “modern religion,” albeit religion shorn of its prime role as explanation, there are no modern myths.

In pitting myth against science, as in pitting religion qua explanation against science, Tylor epitomizes the nineteenth-century view of myth. In the twentieth century the trend has been to reconcile myth as well as religion with science, so that moderns can retain myth as well as religion.

Closest to Tylor stands J. G. Frazer (1854–1941) (1911–15), the Scottish classicist and fellow pioneering anthropologist. For Frazer, as for Tylor, myth is part of primitive religion; primitive religion is part of philosophy, itself universal; and primitive religion is the counterpart to natural science, itself entirely modern. Primitive religion and science are, as for Tylor, mutually exclusive. But where for Tylor primitive religion, including myth, functions as the counterpart to scientific theory, for Frazer it functions even more as the counterpart to applied science, or technology. Where for Tylor primitive religion, including myth, serves to explain events in the physical world, for Frazer it serves even more to effect events, above all the growth of crops. Where Tylor treats myth as an autonomous text, Frazer ties myth to ritual, which enacts it.

The biggest difficulty for Tylor’s and Frazer’s view of myth as the primitive counterpart to science is that it conspicuously fails to account for the retention of myth in the wake of science. If myth functions to do no more than science, why is it still around?

Reacting against the views of Tylor and Frazer and other members of what he imprecisely calls “the English school of anthropology,” the French philosopher and armchair anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) (1926) insisted on a much wider divide between myth and science. Where for Tylor and Frazer “primitives” think like moderns, just less rigorously, for Lévy-Bruhl “primitives” think differently from moderns. Where for Tylor and Frazer primitive thinking is logical, just erroneous, for Lévy-Bruhl primitive thinking is not logical.

According to Lévy-Bruhl, “primitive” peoples believe that all phenomena are part of a sacred, or “mystic,” realm pervading the natural one. Phenomena become one another yet remain what they are. The Bororo of Brazil deem themselves red araras, or parakeets, yet still human beings. Lévy-Bruhl calls this belief “prelogical” because it violates the law of noncontradiction: the notion that something can simultaneously be both itself and something else.

For Lévy-Bruhl, as for Tylor and Frazer, myth is part of religion, religion is primitive, and moderns have science rather than religion. But where Tylor and Frazer subsume both religion and science under philosophy, Lévy-Bruhl associates philosophy with thinking freed from mystical identification with the world. Primitive thinking is nonphilosophical because it is not detached from the world. “Primitive” peoples have a whole mentality of their own, one evinced in their myths.

One reaction to Lévy-Bruhl was to accept his separation of myth from philosophy but not his characterization of myth as pre-philosophical or pre-scientific. The key figure here was the Polish-born anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) (1926), who early on moved to England. Following Frazer, Malinowski argues that “primitives” are too busy scurrying to survive in the world to have the luxury of reflecting on it. Where for Frazer “primitives” use myth in place of science, for Malinowski “primitives” use myth as a fallback to science. “Primitives” possess not just the counterpart to science but science itself, even if only in rudimentary form. Where science stops, they turn to magic. Where magic stops, they turn to myth—not to secure further control over the world, as Frazer would assume, but to reconcile themselves to aspects of the world that they cannot control, such as natural catastrophes, illness, aging, and death. Myth explains how, say, illness arose—a god or a human brought it about—but primitive science and magic try to do something about it. By contrast, myth says that nothing can be done about it.

Reacting both against Malinowski’s view of “primitive” peoples as practical rather than intellectual and against Lévy-Bruhl’s view of “primitives” as mystical rather than intellectual, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) (1955) boldly sought to revive an intellectualist view of “primitives” and of myth. At first glance, Lévi-Strauss seems a sheer throwback to Tylor. Yet in fact Lévi-Strauss is severely critical of Tylor, for whom “primitives” concoct myth rather than science because they think less critically than moderns. For Lévi-Strauss, “primitives” create myth because they think differently from moderns but, contrary to Lévy-Bruhl, still think and still think rigorously. For both Lévi-Strauss and Lévy-Bruhl, myth is the epitome of primitive thinking.

Where for Tylor primitive thinking is personalistic and modern thinking impersonal, for Lévi-Strauss primitive thinking is concrete and modern thinking abstract. Primitive thinking focuses on the observable, sensible aspects of phenomena rather than, like modern thinking, on the unobservable, insensible ones. Yet antithetically to Tylor, Lévi-Strauss considers myth no less scientific than modern science. Where for Tylor myth is the primitive counterpart to science per se, for Lévi-Strauss myth is the primitive counterpart to modern science. Myth is primitive science, but not thereby inferior science.

If myth is an instance of primitive thinking because it deals with concrete, tangible phenomena, it is an instance of thinking itself because it classifies phenomena. Lévi-Strauss maintains that all humans think in the form of classifications, specifically pairs of oppositions, and project them onto the world. Many cultural phenomena express these oppositions. Myth is distinctive in resolving or, more accurately, tempering the oppositions it expresses. Those contradictions are to be found not in the plot but in what Lévi-Strauss famously calls the “structure.”

Karl Popper (1902–1994) (1974), the Viennese-born philosopher of science who eventually settled in England, breaks radically with Tylor. Where for Tylor science simply replaces myth, for Popper science emerges out of myth—not, however, out of the acceptance of myth but out of the criticism of it. By “criticism” Popper means not rejection but assessment, which becomes scientific when it takes the form of attempts to falsify the truth claims made.

Myth and philosophy

The relationship between myth and science overlaps with that between myth and philosophy. Yet there is an even greater array of positions held on the relationship between myth and philosophy: myth is part of philosophy, myth is philosophy, philosophy is myth. myth grows out of philosophy, philosophy grows out of myth, myth and philosophy are independent of each other but serve the same function, and myth and philosophy are independent of each other and serve different functions.

The most abrupt reaction to Lévy-Bruhl’s opposing of myth to both science and philosophy came from the Polish-born anthropologist Paul Radin (1883–1959) (1957), who was brought to the United States as an infant. Radin grants that most “primitives” are far from philosophical but observes that so are most persons in any culture. Both the average “man of action” and the exceptional “thinker types of temperament” are to be found in all cultures and in the same proportion. If Lévy-Bruhl is therefore wrong to deny that any “primitives” are reflective, Tylor is equally wrong to assume that all are. But those “primitives” who are get credited by Radin with a philosophical prowess keener than that granted even myth makers by Tylor. Contrary to Tylor, “primitives,” furthermore, are capable of rigorous criticism. Likely for Radin, as definitely for Popper, the capacity for criticism is the hallmark of thinking.

A far less dismissive reaction to Lévy-Bruhl came from the German-born philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–1945) (1955), who eventually came to the United States in 1941. For Cassirer, wholly following Lévy-Bruhl, mythic, or “mythopoeic,” thinking is primitive, is part of religion, and is the projection of mystical oneness onto the world. But Cassirer claims to be breaking sharply with Lévy-Bruhl in asserting that mythic thinking has its own brand of logic. In actuality, Lévy-Bruhl says the same and invents the term “prelogical” exactly to avoid labeling mythic thinking “illogical” or “nonlogical.” Cassirer also claims to be breaking with Lévy-Bruhl in stressing the autonomy of myth as a form of knowledge—language, art, and science being the other main forms. Yet Cassirer simultaneously maintains, no differently from Lévy-Bruhl, that myth is incompatible with science and that science succeeds it. For both Cassirer and Lévy-Bruhl, myth is exclusively primitive and science exclusively modern. Still, Cassirer’s characterization of myth as a form of knowledge puts myth in the same genus as science—not quite where Lévy-Bruhl puts it.

As philosophical as Cassirer’s approach to myth is, he never contends that myth is philosophy. The theorists who do so are the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) (1953) and the German-born philosopher Hans Jonas (1903–1993) (1963), who eventually settled i...