“Myths” should be distinguished from “mythology,” a term that can refer at times to a collection of myths associated with a particular cultural or religious tradition, and other times to the study of myths. The precise definition of the term “myth” is elusive, and no single theory of myth has yet achieved consensus. It may be the case that no singular explanation ever will. As one theorist has it, “All universal theories of myth are automatically wrong” (Kirk 1970, 293). Nevertheless, at least one common denominator seems to have emerged among many accounts of myths since the twentieth century: myths help humans consciously or subconsciously to reconcile their customs, behaviors, and attitudes with their environment.
In popular culture today, the word “myth” is often used synonymously with “false.” When assertions or hypotheses about reality are tested, for example, they are often categorized either as fact or myth. With this sense of the term, it might be better to say that the assumptions are confirmed to be only myth; that is, lacking truth or accuracy.
The popular use of the term notwithstanding, there is much more to myths. Myths may be entertaining, and not entirely trustworthy as factual accounts of past events, but they generally convey true meaning nonetheless. Myths are stories that address basic human questions ranging from the smallest collective units to the universe itself. “Who are we?” “How did our community come to exist?” “How should we treat one another?” “What is at stake in the way we pattern our lives?”
Since these questions are always relevant, and because communities are dynamic and always changing over time, old mythic scenes and types are often transformed or refashioned to suit the changing self-definitions of cultures or their local communities. For this reason, it is no surprise that the early American landscape provides such rich soil for the cultivation of so many new myths, defining and giving expression to a variety of new American realities.
Myth in the Ancient World
Greek Tradition
The word “myth” comes from the Greek mythos, which originally meant “word, speech, or message.” One of the earliest appearances of the term in the Greek tradition can be found in Hesiod’s Theogony (ca. 700 BCE), where it seems to refer to a divinely inspired, poetic utterance. At the beginning of this work, the Muses are said to have taught Hesiod beautiful singing as he shepherded sheep on the sacred Mount Helicon. The poet reports that what follows are the first words (mythos) that the goddesses gave to him, implying a message with divine, sacred meaning.
Already by the sixth century BCE, however, mythos had lost much of its divine signification among some pre-Socratic philosophers, connoting for them a fanciful tale. Thinkers such as Heraclitus disdained the notion of divine inspiration of the poets, noting that Hesiod mistakenly attributed to the gods what is shameful among humans (anthropomorphizing). Similarly, Xenophanes (early fifth century BCE) expressed direct criticism of anthropomorphic polytheism, noting that people tend to imagine deities who reflect themselves.
Later, Plato (429–347 BCE) displayed a kind of ambivalence toward the term mythos. Pointing out that mythical stories about gods and heroes are irrational and false, Plato employed the same language of mythos in reference to rational, philosophical speculation regarding origins.
Finally, Euhemeros of Messene (330–260 BCE) claimed to have journeyed across the Indian Ocean to Panchia, where he read an inscription noting that Kronos and Zeus had once been living kings. From this, Euhemeros concluded that these mortal kings must have been so significant that their legends endured and expanded in subsequent generations until they were remembered as gods. Extrapolating to other myths, Euhemeros—and present day euhemerists who agree—believe that myths contain elements of historical accounts that have been exaggerated and distorted over time.
Western Asian Tradition
Some of the ancient Western Asian mythology is instructive for its use of myths as political ideology, though it is by no means unique in this respect. One of the world’s oldest surviving myths, the Enuma Elish (ca. eighteenth century BCE), recounts the creation of the world as a result of a theomachy, or divine war, between the sea-serpent goddess Tiamat and the conquering protagonist deity. This latter god appears variously as the young Babylonian god Marduk; the god Asshur, representing his namesake city; and likely the Sumerian Ea/Enki or Enlil in the original Sumerian account. Each version portrays the supremacy of a local deity, along with a people group or city as the founding epicenter of the cosmos. The story of the Enuma Elish plays a central role in the Babylonian New Year’s Akitu Festival, the rituals of which include a procession to a temple or “Akitu house,” along with a ritualized dramatic enactment of the myth to ensure the land’s fecundity (or fertility) and to honor the god whose corresponding city-state holds political sway at the moment. The entire festival functions to legitimize or reconfirm the kingship of the local ruler.
In the Hebrew Bible, much of the primeval history of Genesis 1–11 appears to correspond in varying degrees to Mesopotamian and Canaanite myth, likely in part for the purpose of group definition by contrast. The “Tower of Babel” story of Genesis 11:1–9, for example, portrays Babylon as the negative point of origin for human differentiation in culture and language.
Some parts of the Bible, notably Isaiah 51:9–11, render as myth what is presented elsewhere as historical prose—namely, the account of Israel’s exodus—as a means of infusing the original exodus story with additional rhetorical force for a community in need of a second exodus experience.
Modern Approaches to Myth
Comparative Mythology
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) first posited that the physical environment affects a people’s collective disposition and values. From this assumption, scholars known as the comparative mythologists sought to trace myth types back to presumed original versions, often finding an environmental cause—the behavior of the sun or powerful winds and thunderstorms.
One such comparativist was F. Max Müller (1823–1900), who contended that myths originated to explain the behavior of nature in the days before modern science. He used the “solar myth” theory to analyze many myths, including a majority of the hero stories. As Müller would have it, a significant proportion of myths serve to explain the sun’s activity and its effects, including the cycles of day and night and the seasons. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the comparative method was widely used by scholars in pursuit of various myths’ origins and content, often tracing mythic traditions across diverse cultural versions.
The Brothers Grimm
A love of languages caused Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) to ponder the differences among the so-called Indo-European family of languages, as well as the changes that came to these languages as they split into separate dialects and eventually into new languages. Along with these linguistic transformations, Grimm’s attention turned to the role of traditional stories in the development of language. Together with his brother Wilhelm (1786–1859), Jacob compiled and edited many traditional stories and folktales, including such popular stories as Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, and Rumpelstiltskin. Even though Jacob Grimm did not introduce a theory or definition of myth, it is fair to say that he was one of the first and most important scholars to identify myth as a function of language.
Myth and Ritual
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the scholarly emphasis on myths’ origins was replaced by a questioning of myths’ functions. Instrumental to this change was the work of William Robertson Smith (1846–1894), a biblical scholar who studied myth in the context of the evolution of religion. Smith argued that early myths perform the same function that dogma does in modern religions. He, along with others of this period, maintained that myths begin to develop very early in the trajectory of religion, following animism—the worship of nature’s life forces—and in association with complex polytheism. At the center of this emerging shift was Sir James Frazer (1854–1941), whose study of myth in The Golden Bough assumed an anthropological, evolutionary perspective. Frazer’s studies traced a progression from primitive magic, to ritual in primitive religion, to more sophisticated abstract symbolism in civilized religion.
Out of this thought came the functionalist approach of the so-called “Myth and Ritual” school. As the name suggests, myth and ritual thinkers (also known as the “Cambridge Ritualists” because of their concentration at Cambridge University) associated the generation of myths with the otherwise illogical acts of rituals, whose original functions may have been long forgotten. Even though a ritual’s original meaning or function may be lost, the development of a mythic narrative can attach new significance to the ritual. In turn, myths can outlast the rituals for which they were composed.
Functional Anthropology
Modern anthropologists disdain the “armchair” approach of the comparative mythologists and, to some degree, the ritualists, criticizing a negligent ignorance for what “primitives” actually understand about their environment, and even the extent of their sober realization of the truth-value of their myths. Instead, these anthropologists stress the importance of field research and observation of the actual conditions in which myths function. One of the common hazards of this approach, of course, is that the researcher herself can unwittingly inhibit or otherwise interfere with those conditions. Examining the social conditions and realities of living societies, these modern anthropologists apply their findings to explain details of older myths that are otherwise unclear.
One such researcher was Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), who worked among the peoples of the Trobriand Islands, probing the role of myth and sympathetic magic in the daily lives of those who believe them. Malinowski considered myths to be the dogmatic backbone of primitive civilizations; however, this is not to say that they are simply primitive methods of making sense of natural occurrences. Indeed, myths are not explanations or intellectual efforts at all. Rather, myths for Malinowski express and enhance belief, enforce morality, affirm ritual, and provide rules for guidance. Myths are, in short, functional.
Another more recent functionalist was Joseph Campbell (1904–1987), who insisted that myths operate by reconciling the human order with the greater cosmic order of nature. Similarly put, myths and rituals function as “mesocosms,” a sort of middle level bridging the space between the microcosm (the individual) and the macrocosm (the all). One of the major human problems to be reconciled, said Campbell, is psychological: humans have a lengthy maturation phase at the beginning of life, and also at the end of life with an early recognition of death’s approach. Myths, Campbell claimed, help to bring up the young from nature, and help to bear the aging back to nature.
Psychological Analyses
For the two great fathers of psychology, Sigmund Freud (1865–1939) and his friend Carl Jung (1875–1961), myth was intricately connected to the unconscious. Both Freud and Jung took as a basic starting point the emergence of myths from the deep psyche, but their development from this basis diverged. Freud, in keeping with an evolutionary model, asserted that early tribal human behavior once operated to ensure survival, and now those patterns of behavior persist in our subconscious even though their usefulness in contemporary society is long past. Dreams and myths, then, give expression or outlet to these subconscious behavioral patterns. Jung, on the other hand, spoke of the “collective unconscious,” which gives expression to recurring archetypes, or patterns, of myth. These archetypes are not invented by the primitive mentality; rather, the mind experiences such independent patterns as are shared by the collective group.
Structuralism
The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) was in some respects not unlike Freud and Jung, who studied myths as expressions of the deep psyche of the unconscious. Lévi-Strauss, too, sought myths’ “deep structures,” which, while operating below the surface of individual awareness, are consistent with and reflect the meanings and values supporting and establishing all artifacts of human culture. Structuralism, then, with its attention for objective structures undergirding literary meaning, is also a reaction against the comparative approach of the nineteenth century, with its subjective interpretations arising from researchers’ impressions and imaginations.
Lévi-Strauss found less significance in the story lines of myths, since stories are regulated by rules of sequence and other concerns related to plot development. Far more important to Lévi-Strauss was the bifurcation of motifs. By collating and comparing pairs of opposites within stories—examples including male and female, raw and cooked, family and nonfamily, the group and the other—Lévi-Strauss built graphs to analyze a people’s social organization and attitudes. He contended that myths manage the tension created by these oppositions, even if individuals within a group are unaware of the existing tension.
Eternal Return
One prominent contemporary of Lévi-Strauss and his structuralism was Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), who subjected space, time, and objects to the binary categories of sacred or profane. Profane places, times, and objects are always available, without ritual, to anyone. Sacred places (such as temples) or times (such as religious festivals), on the other hand, along with their accompanying sacred objects, must be regulated according to the dictates of ritual. This would be true for Native Americans as much as ancient Greeks or medieval Christians.
One of the central features of myth, according to Eliade, is the disjunction between the cosmic time of myth and the regular time of human history. Eliade explained that myth provides people with a means of returning to the cosmic time of origins—to make a new start—through ritual, by participating once again in the life-giving power of creation. In this way, by means of ritual, people are able to purge the profane consciousness and restore the possibilities intrinsic to the cosmic time of origins. Myth, in other words, offers a way to comprehend the otherwise incomprehensible, and explain the otherwise inexplicable.
John T. Noble
See also Birth of Good and Evil, an Iroquois Myth; Campbell, Joseph; Chinese American Mythological and Legendary Deities; Creation Stories of the Native Americans; Mormon Mythology
Further Reading
Baeten, Elizabeth M. 1996. The Magic Mirror: Myth’s Abiding Power. Albany: State University of New York.
Campbell, Joseph, ed. 1970. Myths, Dreams, and Religion. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Eliade, Mircea. 1959. The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt.
Eliade, Mircea. 2005. The Myth of the Eternal Return. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Kirk, Geoffrey S. 1970. Myth: Its Meaning & Functions in Ancient & Other Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Leonard, Scott, and Michael McClure. 2004. Myth & Knowing: An Introduction to World Mythology. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1983. Introduction to a Science of Mythology. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1954. Magic, Science, Religion and Other Essays. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor.