Theses about myth. An old interest of mine, partly stimulated by reading Joseph Campbell as a student.

And also by the way Plato uses myth to express truths when the Socratic method of dialectic (i.e. philosophical conversation) reaches a limit, but mainly by the fact that I enjoying reading them. These are just theses I would love to discuss with someone who really understood myth.

 

·         I doubt myth ever really had the function of explaining, in anything remotely resembling scientific explanation, the physical causes at work in the origin or nature or the physical workings of nature itself.

 

·         To the extent that certain complexes of myths and rites were intended to influence or control the forces of nature that had particular groups at its mercy, this has been totally replaced by science and technology, and thus cut off from myth. I would call the attempt to control nature rather 'magic' than myth in the proper sense, though magical practices can integrate myth-like stories. ["The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse.” - C. S. Lewis]

 

·         Religious stories are canonized, officially sanctioned or perhaps in some cases spiritually sanctioned myths. (Joseph Campbell)

 

·         Myths are like public dreams. (Joseph Campbell, C. J. Jung)

 

·         Some myths, the ones people have lived by, concern the deepest mysteries and sources of the human: why something exists at all and not rather nothing, coming to be (birth), passing away (transience, death), sex, etc. They make the terror of existence bearable and give expression to the deepest joys. Myths relate us to the same ultimate realities that metaphysics does, but through narrative and symbols, imagination and emotion.

 

·         Myths can serve different purposes – to entertain, to communicate ethical insights, etc. But when they are candidates for religion, when they deal with the phenomena on which all else depends, they express sublime experiences in a symbolic-picturesque narrative that is a placeholder standing for our relationship to a transcendence beyond our conceptual thought and scientific categories. This need not be religious or mythological in the narrow sense; the story of man’s progress (StarTrek view of the world) or Woody Allen’s nihilism are as mythical in this sense as religious narratives: the Nothing, the Void, is just as much a transcendence as the diverse pictures of God or the Buddhist universe. To that extent, there is nothing deeper, or higher, than mythical consciousness. Neither science nor philosophy can touch it.

 

·         Myth, unfortunately, I am almost tempted to say, gets used to relate the individual to the social order, which has always been an order in which some have power over others; that is to say, it is typically modified to function ideologically in a society or culture. To this extent, the dimension of depth, the symbolic relation to transcendence, is diluted or even perverted. Typically, when a priestly caste assumes authority over the interpretation and development of myth, that means trouble. Campbell says this is a function of myth, and I agree myths that do not connect us to the social order have no life. But myths that reinforce an unjust hierarchy are ideology.

 

·         A myth is a translation of a human relationship to transcendence. [Campbell, like Jung, located transcendence in the human psyche; that seems reductive to me.] To treat it as a factual account of transcendence – to read Genesis, for example, as a report of events that happened in space and time, something like a newspaper article on the origins of the universe – kills the myth. The source of myth is dream, the subconscious mind. The meaning-loaded images it gives rise to do not get their force from states of affairs in the waking world that they are thought to describe, but from the light and value and meaning they shed on the waking world. If the waking world were not imbued with mystery, if the subconscious mind was cut off from it, so to speak, because the mystery of it had been lost to view, if birth, sex, and death had no more significance and wonder than any other trivial fact, then there would be no myth.

 

·         To conclude from the belief that myth has its location in the subconscious mind – the spirit if you will – that myths are nothing but subjective-intersubjective psychological energies translated into conscious images and narratives, that therefore the ‘primitives’ and ‘medieval people’ were less ‘advanced’ than we enlightened moderns, is a modern prejudice and naiveté that many past peoples never made. It is wrong to believe that the Greeks, for example, really imagined Zeus and Hera up on Mount Olympus having a marital quarrel over Zeus’ infidelity, or on the contrary that they believed that Zeus and Hera were nothing but masks for psychological brain workings that could be understood by physical science purely naturalistically. Neither. Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Ares, etc. and the stories connected with them were placeholders for spiritual forces beyond the human ken that entered into human life at various critical times. The reality of Aphrodite consisted precisely in the human inability to comprehend Aphrodite’s reality except indirectly through the experience of the sublime in certain forms connected with erotic love. There was never any assumption that the myths were factual stories or entertaining ways of describing human psychology in purely naturalistic terms. Indeed, what lies beyond what our minds can conceptualize or theorize about scientifically is not a possible scientific question, and it is not something philosophy can grasp except speculatively. What realities our mythical (sublime) consciousness interacts with and translates into human symbols is mystery, the conceptual space in which myth may live.

 

·         The monotheistic religions, in essence, present themselves as myths that were sublimely and uniquely enacted in the waking world. A myth that erupted into history, so to speak, from the other realm.

 

·         Myths can be criticized, but only from within a perspective that draws on another mythical or at least supra-natural (metaphysical) intuition. For example, the dominant image of most if not all oriental mythical narratives – that “there is no such thing as individual life, but only one great cosmic law by which all things are governed in their places,” such that one’s birth determines absolutely what one is to be, and thus what one is to think and do: such a way of imagining the individual’s relation to the cosmos may be deep and even noble in some ways. But as it seems incompatible with the reality of the individual soul, a reality that comes to be in the many forms of love, including the grief over the loss of a beloved individual, it is not a myth I could live by. I don’t think the myths I do live by are true in any absolute sense, and the ones I don’t are false. I think there is a price for the myths that do give rise to the significance of the individual soul. Still, the love of the particular is real to me. So either that is an illusion (Buddhism, for example, would see it like that) or it is real; and if real, then the cycles of myth that reduce individuality to social function, and society to a mirror of some transcendent order, is blind to certain phenomena. Either way, it is not an empirical state of affairs that is at stake but ways of experiencing self and the world.

 

·         Perhaps I am wrong, but I think Campbell’s illuminating thought about myth – in the tradition of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Jung – presupposes a certain metaphysical philosophy that is unquestioned and in the background: that the universe is the mechanical universe of science – indifferent, deterministic, meaningless – and the myth is a subjective, subconscious symbolic response to our place in this universe making it possible for us to live with the horror at the center of our existence. In my thinking, I would replace this closed metaphysic with an open one, one that leaves space for all the don’t know. Myths relate us to transcendence – that which is beyond our conceptual or scientific knowledge. They deal at their deepest with birth, death, and sex; with our connections to the soul, the community, strangers, nature, and the divine – metaphysical realities in the end. There is no need to believe none of these phenomena are disconnected from the rest of being, are illusions produced by a meaning-seeking animal thrust into an inherently meaningless universe. That, too, is a myth.

 

 

C. S. Lewis on the relation of Christianity to myth. C. S. Lewis wrote that Christianity is great myth – true myth. I believe a myth is true when it illuminates spiritual realities in the only way such realities can be illuminated: with images that form some connection between the sublime and the human; that are sublime analogies to experiences we can grasp and which then point to transcendence. Lewis then added: it is a myth that happened in our world. For me, honestly, the truth in the myth would be enough to connect me to Christianity. The becoming real in our world would be icing on the cake.