The myth of mythology
Reviewed by Karen Armstrong
Legends aren’t supposed to be history; they are an understanding of what it means to be human. We forget them at our peril
A SHORT HISTORY OF MYTH
(Canongate £12; offer £10.80. 0870 1608080)
www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
IN 1922, T. S. ELIOT DEPICTED THE spiritual disintegration of Western culture in The Waste Land. In the legend of the Holy Grail, inhabitants of the wasteland live inauthentic lives, blindly following social norms without the conviction that comes of deeper understanding.
How could people put down creative roots in the “stony rubbish” of modernity, when they are familiar only with “a heap of broken images” — isolated and unassimilated shards of the mythical wisdom of the past? As he confronted the sterility of his civilisation, Eliot’s narrator concluded: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Only if we piece together these broken insights and recognise their common core can we reclaim the wasteland in which we live.
In our rational society, we have lost touch with the mythical underpinning of our culture. Today “myth” often describes something that is not true. A politician accused of a peccadillo will say that it is a “myth”, that it never happened.
When we hear of gods walking the earth, of dead men striding out of tombs, or of seas parting to allow a favoured people to escape, we dismiss these stories as demonstrably false. In our historical writing, we are concerned above all with what actually happened but when people wrote about the past in the pre-modern period they were chiefly preoccupied with the significance of an event. A myth was an occurrence that, in some sense, had happened once, but which also happened all the time. Mythology pointed beyond history to what was timeless.
Mythology is not an early attempt at historical writing and its stories were never regarded as merely factual. In the pre-modern world, there were two recognised ways of arriving at truth, which the Greeks called mythos and logos. Both were considered essential and neither as inferior to the other. They were complementary modes of acquiring knowledge, each with its own distinct sphere of competence.
People used logos (“science; reason”) to function efficiently in the external world: this type of thinking was essential to the organisation of society or for the development of technology. Logos is pragmatic; it must correspond to objective facts. But it could not answer questions about the value of life nor mitigate the pain and sorrow that is an inescapable part of the human condition. That was the job of mythos. If a beloved friend died or if people witnessed an appalling natural disaster, they found that they did not simply want a rational explanation.
Instead they developed mythical narratives which, like poetry or music, brought comfort that could not be expressed in purely logical terms. They also gave voice to more elusive and mysterious aspects of life that have always been part of human experience. Like art, mythology was the product of the creative imagination; it transfigured our fragmented, tragic world and helped to glimpse new possibilities.
Mythology can be seen as an early form of psychology. The stories of gods or heroes descending into the underworld, threading through labyrinths and fighting with monsters brought to light the mysterious workings of the psyche and showed people how to deal with their turbulent inner world. When Freud and Jung began to formulate the quest for the soul, they instinctively turned to classical mythology to explain their insights.
A myth was not true because it was factual but because it was psychologically effective. If it forced people to change their minds and hearts, gave them hope, and compelled them to live more fully, it was valid, because it told us something important about how humanity worked.
A myth was a programme for action. The myth of the hero, which is remarkably similar in nearly all cultures, showed people what they must do to tap into their own heroic potential. The myth of Demeter and Persephone suggested that a disciplined confrontation with our mortality could lead to spiritual regeneration. A myth is a guide; it tells us what we must do to live more intensely. If we do not apply it to our own situation and make the myth a reality in our own lives, it will remain as incomprehensible as the rules of a board game, which often seem confusing and boring until we start to play. If we do not attempt to implement its directives, we cannot assess its truth.
More at Timesonline