The founding myth, as a primordial and sacred history, provides a group with an exemplary model and justifies its activities. The question of a group’s origin, whether it is a small entity like a royal dynasty or a whole civilization like the Roman Empire, has been broadly studied and is generally divided into two large categories, cosmogonic and secondary founding myths.
Types of Founding Myths
A “cosmogonic myth” is a narrative that explains the creation of the world or universe. Set in a primordial time and involving supernatural beings and heroes, it grounds the group’s identity in a common past, one that justifies its presence and, in some cases, its power. The myth is performed through rituals, during which participants are involved in a sacred ceremony, one that connects the group via tradition with the time of the beginnings. Those who take part in the sacred ritual are revitalized: stronger because of their contact with the origin.
The historian Mircea Eliade is perhaps the most widely read expert in the field of founding myths. In one of his key essays he described cosmogonic myths as sacred history that explains the world’s existence, and to an extent justifies activities undertaken by human beings in the present. Eliade further argued that mythology becomes, for a given group of people, the truest form of history because it explains the most essential things—how people came into being, why they are subject to decay and death, how the sexes appeared, and so on. Even the everyday habits of the group are explained through myth: “One engages in a certain type of hunting or agriculture because the myths report how the cultural heroes taught these techniques to the ancestors” (Eliade 1967).
Romanian-born writer and philosopher Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) is a figure closely associated with the study of founding myths. Eliade described cosmogonic myths as “sacred history,” and argued that mythology is the truest form of history for the culture that develops it, as it helps those people to answer the most significant philosophical questions about themselves and their origins. (Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis)
Once people know where they came from and why, they need to function within a certain society, a certain social frame. This explains the appearance of a second type of founding myth, which experts call “secondary founding myths.” These stories do not explain the birth of the world but are concerned more with the beginning of something and explain how things, as we know them, came to be. Families, clans, cities, and nations, for instance, all have a story of “how it began,” and these sacred stories involving extraordinary or legendary characters living in a mythical time serve exactly the same paradigmatic purpose as the cosmogonic myth. More than a history of “us,” secondary founding myths also define who are the “others,” establishing a clear notion of identity and belonging essential to the survival of the group. The founding myths of America belong to this second category.
It would be impossible to look at every founding myth in America, and even more to wonder about how they still operate in Native American culture as well as in modern, diverse social contexts. It is, however, possible to examine the “taken for granted” narrative that still animates and defines what is known as “America.” In that regard, the story of how the United States of America was founded and the rituals actualizing this founding narrative can be examined from a mythical perspective. Through its main elements, a few of which are examined here, America’s founding myth sheds a light on what it means to be an American today.
Christopher Columbus
One could say that America as modern Americans of European ancestry understand it began when Christopher Columbus “discovered” it in 1492. The Italian explorer was looking for a hypothetical naval route to India, Cathay (China), and Cipangai (Japan), financed by Queen Isabella the Catholic of Spain. Of course Columbus didn’t actually discover the American continent but led the way for other Europeans to follow. From then on, America became the New World in the European imagination, a land of promises and riches waiting to be plucked.
America’s first founding myth has to do with the idea that a land can be owned, in fact has to be owned to be worth something. America is rooted in a mythology that is closely associated with the soil and the land, a founding myth that favors those who take, as opposed to those who give. Among the earliest English-language documents promoting America’s colonization was Richard Hakluyt’s 1584 treatise, which insisted on America as a solution to England’s economic problems, as a mean to achieve personal and financial success. Hakluyt’s program linked the economic prospects of American colonization with the possibility of converting Native Americans to Christianity, thereby merging the commercial and religious together in a complex matrix of motivations. This gave the American founding a semisacred quality, which persisted through the colonial and early national periods.
Jamestown
England’s first permanent colony was established in 1607 in Virginia. Its settlers were poorly trained and arrived too late to plant crops, which led to a catastrophic winter of famine and death. They were rescued by Captain John Smith, who engaged in friendly relations with the native Powhatan Indians and sought supplies and food for the colonists. John Smith later wrote that he was captured by the Powhatan and sentenced to death until the chief’s daughter, Pocahontas, pleaded for his life. Although his story is doubted by historians, it entered the tradition of storytelling about the founding of the first permanent English colony, and offered a cast of extraordinary and legendary characters to give substance to the founding myth.
The Jamestown episode and, more importantly, the Pocahontas narrative have played an important role in the evolution of America’s mythology. It offers a physical landscape to serve as a mythical setting, what Eliade would refer to as an axis mundi. It also states that America is inhabited by two different kinds of people, therefore creating categories of “us” and “them.” Jamestown stories justified the settlers’ occupation and ownership of the land, as well as their use of violence in contesting with the local Powhatan Indians. This formed part of a larger narrative in Western European literature that set civilization in opposition to Nature. Jamestown settlers were justified because they brought civilization and order to a wild, disorderly, and immoral wilderness. Furthermore, in reproducing the biblical idea of a promised land that would provide for all, Jamestown mythology places the burden of success on the individual. Starvation came from poor discipline and laziness, and success and wealth from hard work and dedication. Those who came from nothing and achieved success and wealth achieved the American dream. Smith’s writings and early retellings of the Jamestown story contained a moral lesson: a lack of success can be seen as a sign of weakness or moral fault, since God blesses those who deserve it.
Washington Crossing the Delaware
Perhaps no image speaks more to the American sense of self as the scrappy underdog than that of Washington crossing the Delaware. Washington Crossing Historic Park celebrates this daring sneak attack upon the Hessians at Trenton as the turning point of the American Revolution, complete with reenactments. Famously painted in 1851, the iconic image of this legendary event by Emanuel Leutze is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
C. Fee
Pocahontas’s adventures have been a constant in America’s popular culture, even more since Disney’s movie Pocahontas appeared in 1995: when viewing the film, viewers participate in a ritual that reenacts the founding myth.
Plymouth
The pilgrims who founded the Plymouth Colony in 1620 sailed to America to escape religious persecution, and their quest for liberty is now associated with a precise place, another axis mundi, which we know as Plymouth Rock. This location appears in literature some 120 years later, but persists as a focal point for another American founding myth. The Plymouth settlers generated another story that formed part of the national myth of American origins, Thanksgiving. The ritual meal, which embodies the hypothetical collaboration between natives and pilgrims, is deeply engraved in America’s cultural and religious life as a memory of friendship and sharing. The actual historical event is difficult to reconstruct from the available sources, particularly the official history of the colony written by William Bradford, who served as governor of the colony at critical points in its early years.
Bradford’s text described a period of drought that induced the settlers to pray fervently for rain, which followed soon after. In response, the Pilgrims set aside a day of thanksgiving to mark the event, specifically to honor God’s providential blessing, which they interpreted as divine approval of their colonization efforts. This event from 1623 is different from the traditional harvest festival of 1621, as recorded in “Mourt’s Relation,” which brought English and Indians together for feasting and games. The publication of these documents in the nineteenth century encouraged Americans to conflate the two events, and together they created a mythic founding event that suggested Indian compliance with English acquisition of their land, and consequent divine intervention and divine sanction of their efforts.
The Declaration of Independence
Nations rely on a sacred book or document to keep the memory of their beginnings intact. America’s founding document is the Declaration of Independence, kept at the U.S. National Archives. The Declaration was officially adopted July 4, 1776 by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and later signed by fifty-six members of Congress. It was printed and distributed widely throughout the rebellious colonies and by mid-August appeared in newspapers in England
The Declaration created a new political entity and gave birth to the United States of America. It asserts three general principles, written by Thomas Jefferson: (1) all men are created equal; (2) they are given by the Creator inalienable rights; (3) these rights include life, liberty, and the quest for happiness.
The Declaration refers to the American people by using the word “us,” contributing de facto to an emerging national consciousness and working as an important element of America’s founding myth. In spite of the document’s expression of inclusivity, all men were not, in fact, treated as equals in American society, and the “us” did not embrace the idea that women, Native Americans, or black slaves should enjoy the same rights as propertied white men. Still, many mythic elements became part of the story of the Declaration, particularly the collective judgment of the founders that God had approved of what the patriots did in 1776 and drafted the Constitution in 1787. When the Great Seal was developed in the 1780s, the Latin phrase annuit coeptis was added on the obverse, which translates as “he favors our underakings,” and matched with an image of an “eye of providence” looking out from the heavens.
America’s founding includes conquest, proselytism, and power, but also religious liberty and the constitutional framing of essential human rights. The association of the founding with divine intervention added mythic elements to the story, both at the time and in successive retellings of the founding stories. Today, the founding is studied by feminists, historians of slavery, and Native American activists, who find much to criticize in this history, and yet founding myths in the United States have encouraged national cohesion and the persistence of national identity among a diverse, multicultural population.
Geneviève Pigeon
See also Columbus, Christopher; Myths; Pocahontas and John Smith; Thanksgiving
Further Reading
Eliade, Mircea. 1967. “Cosmogonic Myth and ‘Sacred History.’” Religious Studies 2 (2): 171–183.
Klein, Gil. 2012. “The Use of Myth in History.” Colonial Williamsburg Journal website. http://www.history.org/Foundation/journal/summer12/myths.cfm. Accessed July 14, 2015.
Lengel, Edward G. 2011. Inventing George Washington: America’s Founder, in Myth & Memory. New York: HarperCollins.
Loewen, James W. 1995. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: New Press.
Raphael, Ray. 2004. Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past. New York: New Press.