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Myths and the |
Too many of us have a very black-an-white understanding of existence, of language, and even of myth. A myth is not a falsehood, though it may be false. A myth is not a tall-tale though it may be outlandish. A myth is not an old superstition, though it may be composed of mystical nonsense.
So a myth can be not merely a fictitious accounting, but like great literature, something which goes beyond the mundane facts to teach a greater truth. The greatest expert on myth that ever lived, Joseph Campbell, when queried what use myths are, answered:
"It goes beyond that." Exactly. Truth as most great conceptions has many meanings. The writers of dictionaries try to compartmentalize their definitions, try to reduce the words into neat packages. But words are living parts of the culture. They are like the blood cells of the society, carrying messages instead of oxygen. Or perhaps they are more like the chemical alterations that allow the nervous system to provide a means of communication between the parts of the body. Another profound thinker about the mythogenetic (culturally reconstructive) properties of our beliefs, philosopher Alan W. Watts (1915-1973), once (in his Myth and Ritual in Christianity, 1954) defined a myth as "a complex of stories – some no doubt fact, and some fancy – which, for various reasons, human beings regard as demonstrations of the inner meaning of the universe and of human life." Later, in several works, he admitted this was too limited a view, as, for instance, symbols, objects, performances, and images can all be conveyors of myth. But also it falls to properly distinguish myth from religion, philosophy or science; though they themselves are to some degree mythogenetic, myth is always concerned with imagination, and expressed in concrete images. And has as it purpose the justification, integration, and in a special sense the EXPLANATION of life's continuing mysteries. They are means to make intelligible to ourselves the equivocalness of existence; a cultural mechanism to add deepness of meaning to daily life. America itself is a myth, an idealized one that existed before the reality, the myth of a place where freedom was paramount. Where the people ruled themselves. Where not kings nor priests, neither the nobility nor the clerics, where none of these or anyone could force others to believe a certain way. Oh we certainly have not reached that utopia. In reality humankind may never do so. But in this universe things generally are relative. And relative to what has existed before America, and including those places that have followed its lead here, it is getting closer to that acme than anything seen so far is. And as long as that myth of the best that America represents stays alive we can hope, and work, toward ensuring the gains be passed along. Not just handed down but improved, just a little. Cynicism and skepticism are easy. But they are but first steps toward wisdom at their best, and a blind alley at worst. Cop-outs often as not to allow ceasing of effort. (Not that certain myths themselves are not cop-outs, many are indeed justifications for doing nothing.) Dogmatic disbelief is a sterile landscape upon which to grow and develop. Humans are both storytellers and story-BELIEVERS. We want the world to make some kind of sense, and will put some sense in it even if purely fanciful. One doesn't have to swallow whole the pop-mythology of post-modernism to agree that humans need narrative to make the world sensible. But humans have also evolved an external mechanism to deal with that inner craving of order, one which we refer to as culture. Culture protects us from our need for narrative at least as much as it exploits it. Cultures have developed means to test stories for mythogenetic power. If they prove strong and productive, if they add to our understanding of ourselves, if they also prove adaptive to social change, then they can survive a very long time. Some of our myths have as yet endured for many millennium. Other vanish almost upon creation. The myths that last make us more human, not less. That is why for all their popularity among the entertainment packagers, the post-apocalyptic tales, with a couple of notable exceptions, never seem to have much lasting power, never really seem to foster sequels. Two have – the ones with heroes that resisted the cynicism and corruption. Mad Max and Riley. Even in the unfairly judged Alien 3 movie, we saw heroism, perhaps the greatest example of such in SF movies since Patrolman Ben Patterson in the classic Them! crawled alone through a dark storm tunnel to save two kids he'd never met from giant and deadly ants. We don't like to see the hero die however. And the third Alien movie was too advanced, too modern, for folks raised on Star Wars and Battlestar: Galactica flashy recyclings of creaky Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon trifles and other pre-war space-operatic melodramatic themes. But then the lesser critics that mistake cynicism for objectivity and meanness for coolness (as too often witnessed at a certain website where the reviewers generally ain't cool at all despite the name) are also repulsed by heroes that accomplish too much. That actually change their worlds. Why else did they dump on The Postman – which was much overlong, but otherwise pretty good old-fashioned SF heroic adventure – as the reasons given in the reviews simply do not fit the actual movie? Unless it was really because, despite the post-apocalyptic setting, Coster's movie was optimistic and heroic in a real sense, not the exploitative sense found in most action-adventure films. We saw a cynical and selfish man become human again. and help make the world human again as well. It was a positive vision, and that is antipathetic to withered souls. Why else does the intellectual pop-culture mafia trivialize optimistic visions like in Star Trek and overate hackneyed rehashes of sixties New Wave era dystopic space opera like in Babylon Five? A series actually about an anti-utopia, for all the rather embarrassingly silly mystical mumbling about Gray Councils lifted from thirties SF and 19th Century romantic occult fantasies. Of course they had to end off with destroying (or about to) the Earth. When imagination falters, destroy a planet. Blow things up. To make it seem profound, make it Earth. But in the end one was left after struggling through the endless plot-knots, cheesy effects, and too often pretty bad acting (which at least made the better performances look really good in comparison) of B-5, with very little reward other than a wild ride (which is not a bad thing, as long as that is enough for one). Nothing to hope for really. A great sense of tiredness. And a greater one of disappointment – one almost expected to hear Peggy Lee singing "Is That All There Is?" in the closing credits. One both wanted more and didn't want to trudge the swamp yet again. That is why the earlier things of our cultural development that survive to today are the stories we created about ourselves, and how we can be better, greater. About where we came from, always someplace better, even Heaven or another world. And where we want to go. Someplace even better than we came (or come) from.
Star Trek represents just a recent example a myth of where we want to go. While the child in us may be dazzled by the gadgetry. While the savage in us beguiled by the action and the powerful weapons and speeding starcraft. Another part of us is drawn by the greater myth. A myth of a culture where peaceful exploration is the first priority of the military. Where a myriad of different peoples of different origins, planets, belief-systems, fears and desires, somehow live peacefully together. Where tolerance is manifest. Diversity welcomed.
Another time, when Professor Campbell was asked; "What are the purposes of myth?" he replied thus:
Myths are what we use to get past the uncertainties, and the more we learn, the more uncertainties we discover. When we knew little, we also had little to be uncertain about. Things we a lot simpler when gods called all the shots. We had only to try to understand what they wanted of us then surely we would be all right. But there was a fatal flaw in that idea. How did we know that even if the gods existed that they gave a vole's behind for us really? This is the most terrifying conception humankind ever came up with – that the cosmos did not care whether we existed or not. Whether life survived or not. Whether we did not. One reason the Greek and Roman gods did not survive. So we started telling ourselves stories to qualm our distress. We created our gods in our own images, for what else would we use as a template? We then took the next step of insisting they created us, but of course in their image. Circular reasoning has always been the mainstay of religion. Then we began to pattern ourselves after our creations, forgetting the gods' true origins...
Then it really got complicated as with the development of agriculture (which has been called humankind's greatest mistake after creating gods), this led to settling down into civilization, civilization leads to wars and conquest, that that forced together growing populations of people whose myths, fables, and folklore were quite different. Some resisted all other stories. But the nomadic peoples, from the Hebrews to the Polynesians, to the Navahos, all seem to share a common characteristic of stealing every myth and story (and stray animal) they are exposed to. Then remaking them into their own. But Campbell warned us about what happens when one then limits oneself to one set of myths (however varied their origins); when he said the Bible was:
The peoples that wrote the various parts of the Bible collected together rather haphazardly afterwards are all long gone. Their worlds, which can but dimly comprehend, have disappeared into the randomizing fog of passing time. We, despite the false claims of literalists, can but guess at what they might have truly meant by certain words and phrases, and we have lost much of what context these stories were in reference to. Campbell went on to say:
It is one of the greatest tragedies today that along with the teaching of love and tolerance by Christ is incorporated together, and sharing in the authority of His message, are some of the most xenophobic and hateful taboos and ritualistic hatreds every fostered upon a gullible people. The misery and pain and hatred bred by this unhappy accident of scholarship can never be counted or fully recounted...
Today it seems the focus of those for whom Christianity is but an excuse to hate and fear others, to grow smug and content in their own rightness, their target is sexuality. Be it of the teenager or the same-sexer, even of adult heterosexuals who do not follow THEIR rules of conduct. Who dare to suppose their own bodies (let alone minds and souls) are their own. What we see today is a increasing lessening of Christ's message of brotherhood by the "literalists" and fundamentalists; they cherry-pick through the Bible and the long obsolete (for Christians) Holiness Code and Old Testament, ignoring the injunctions against counting the days till the Second Coming, and the general failure of Biblical prophecy even inside the Holy Book itself. Some even try to force God's hand (something else the Bible forbids and is ignored) by being more Zionist than the Israelis themselves,and have helped keep the Palestinian problem going as they actively desire the bulldozing of non-Jewish villages, just as they hope and pray for the dynamiting of the Al Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, to allow the rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon, as that is where by pseudo-Christian myth Jesus is to return to Earth and begin the Rapture. Sending all non-Christians or non-believers past infancy to eternal damnation.
So much for the myth America was founded as a "Christian nation;' not only were church-goers a small minority of the Revolutionary population (less than one in five white households belonged to any church), but just about every Founding Father, including the first five Presidents of the United States, specifically denied that factoid – yet one can find faked histories and lying texts in "Christian" bookstores trying to rewrite that history – to support a mythical glorious past one can hearken to. And justify tossing Science and Evolution and Diversity and Free-thought out of the schools. Another example of a dangerous myth is homophobia. Over the last few years I have posted several megabytes of argument and scientific evidence about how natural, normal, and unthreatening homosexuality actually is. Even though I am not gay myself, I have seen first-hand how the discrimination operates. The evidence is available to anyone willing to do some homework here or elsewhere. (See as a start some of my essays on this subject here.) The religiously intolerant, manifesting a paranoid need to confirm their persecution by others projects their own denied characteristics onto others, thereby justifying to themselves their crimes against others. Marriage for but one instance is another example of how both church and state have sought to use sexuality to control people. When one actually stops reacting, stops following buggy programming learned from poor parenting, bad books and worst religions, and pays attention to the Great Teachers, where is intolerance of any form of love found? Or is it not precisely the love of others and tolerance of diversity the most universal truth? Think about it – what is more ridiculous than that anyone, be they a "Man of God," or a governmental official, should tell one whom to love? Who one can mate and bond with. When and where and how this is done. That makes no sense at all! So is not truly a myth. But a falsehood. But we grew up in a culture where this kind of intolerance is done matter-of-factly. Restrictions over a license to MARRY? What the heck? I cannot marry my beloved because he or she is a different color? (Illegal until quite recently in certain states of the USA) Too young or too old? (There the law was too lenient, as twelve-year-old brides were quite legal till very recently, usually in the same states forbidding miscegenation.) Or even sillier, just because they are a he or a she, and so am I also?! TILT! Does not compute to the nth!
Sexuality is something else that has a great hold upon us. The more we repress it the larger it looms. It is quite clear that if Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) had not grown up a Victorian Jew in Hapsburgian Austria-Hungary that so much of his work would have not centered about sexual repression. But that is what he saw and experienced, so much so it kind of washed away nearly everything else. It was the stifling of sexuality that magnified its power, and why he attributed too much to it. The denial of healthy sexuality is part of the self-hatred of our animal natures that diseased religions tend to teach. They feel that somehow being natural means a lowering of themselves. To admit they are animals is an affront to their pride and inflated egos. And part of their projected self-hatred is upon sexuality.
Repression of sexuality, as social commentator and author Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990) amusingly put it once; puts sex on the brain, and that is a most peculiar place to have it. He also noted that: "The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment." Which of course frightens those that do not yet grok that Christ is to found not in an external image, or in any book, even The Book, but in one's heart? The Cross is but a symbol. But it because an idol when considered more than that. Just as a false image of Jesus profanes His message. Or focusing too much upon the Crucifixion rather than His message. Passion Plays were always bad ideas, as they played to morbidity, sadism, melodrama, and too often fueled the old lie about Jews as Christ-killers. HOW He died is almost trivial in comparison as to WHY. I have shown several times here how Jesus not only showed no sexual intolerance, showed not the slightest homophobia, but indeed treated queers as good and decent folks, unafraid to break the custom, even the law, to go into their dwellings and heal a sick one. But somehow even though those ancient and vile taboos of a millennium nearly earlier time of madness had been specifically rejected, that in this as they have in other instances before, come back to haunt us. These most unchristian of intolerances treated as Holy Commandments to justify with an unspeakable profanity against Christ the hatred, fears and ignorance all pseudo-Christian gay-bashers manifest. It is in the Bible they cry! So what? A lot of stuff and nonsense and evil has been gathered into that collective volume over the centuries as well as some fragments of greater truth, and greater myth.
But when the myth is an evil one, as we have seen in Nazi Germany, in the Balkans, and in central Africa, petty dictatorships in Asia, and so forth today as well as back throughout the last two millennium, this power over minds extends to the souls. Too often it is thought necessary to create Great Lies, teach them as myths, in order to create a following to some political or ideological agenda. Often ones done in Christ's name, Hitler to the end considering himself a good Christian as did most German churches, but really for selfish interest and out of human aggressiveness, the actual meaningfulness is in the destruction of anything leaders, and we, choose to dislike. Empires depend upon the creation of a unifying myth. Of a national and usually racial superiority. And of ignoring that history shows us empires always end up costing more than they brought in.
Back in 1996, I wrote this:
Myths can if good one, meaningful ones, and ones appropriate for the time and culture, help that maturation process. But when they are leftovers from a Neolithic culture where xenophobia was a useful defense mechanism, this actually stunts the growth of the mind (and the soul). I was lucky in that my upbringing gave me a myth of Jesus of love and tolerance, not fear and paranoia. But I saw this in others not as lucky as I in what church they were born into. Just as I wondered how God could be so unfair and to be frank sloppy in getting His Word out. So many millions never had a chance. This was the God who would cut off and sacrifice part of Himself as a token of His forgiveness? It did not grok. Neither did the answers my Church gave. So I left it, but not Christ. I found that so much of what was taught as history, as religious truth, as even science, was myth. And that this was a misuse of the power of myth. Myth can give us a deeper understand than bare facts alone. A story is more powerful than a report, a good tale can teach more than any textbook. After all the most powerful works are themselves largely stories, collections of myths and folklore, including the one were call The Bible. Or in fact all Scriptures of all religions.
I was also lucky in growing up in a house where ALL books were welcome. One of my parents had been a teacher. My uncle next door became head of the economics department at a Midwestern college. And nearly half of my cousins have taught at one time or another, as I have myself. On the other hand many of my uncles were preachers, as had been my grandfather, and I thought long and hard about the ministry for myself, but never had the Call. My parents thought that exposure to even what others considered trash was better than developing a dislike for reading. As too often resulted when this natural curiosity was broken by my peers' parents' attempts to "bring them up right," and was twisted and turned into an aversion to reading and questioning. Or even worst a blindness to anything or anyone not saying the "right things." And I had a sadistic and alcoholic brother whose torments and mind games ironically prepared me to resist the forces of mental dissuasion in the schools.
For all the blather about educational research the fact is that schools (public and private) have nearly everything backasswards by the time the parents and politicians and preachers and pundits get through turning them into worker production factories or kiddie warehouses. Most of the rather large amount we actually do know about childhood development tends to be ignored for ideological reasons, and when they do teach something useful it generally is at the wrong times if individual education was actually the real agenda. The examples are legion; from teaching second or third languages a decade past the prime time for children to acquire such skills, to the classroom structure itself being still modeled (by the "reformer" Horace Mann) after those of early 19th Century Prussian military cadet academies, where order and obedience were paramount – not personal education. Any wonder we see increasing references to the "education industry" or similar characterizations?
But modern development psychology has long since determined this is an awful way to allow someone to actually learn something. That people are not taught, they learn! No matter what certain instructors were allowed to "learn" about the process.
We have what is best described as an Instructionist Theory of Education in place through most of the Western and the more developed Eastern countries, so firmly that even its greatest distracter John Dewey (1859-1952) is misquoted in educational texts to hide his criticisms. The idea is that the schools via its agents the teachers, "instruct" their students to the correct modes of thought and proper set of "facts." With as little input or control as possible by the students. This developed partly thanks to the religious indoctrination that was Western education for over a millennium, but it was not discarded when Science replaced God as the source of Knowledge. It was just a bit more subtle in its methodology. Since direct knowledge simply was not practical for a lot of knowledge, it was also simple economics as well as the idea of children as parental and communal property, that meant that demonstrations, experiments, and personal experience was nearly totally replaced by rote-learning and parroting of the instructors by the time public education developed as a political acceptable idea. Fact is people have always and are still short-changing education. Never mind it has the greatest long-term pay back of any investments. People cannot seem to see past a few months in the future. Historians now recognize that the greatest investment every made by government beat in returns anything any capitalistic venture ever gained – the GI Bill. And one reason it worked so well was the students were all mature. Seasoned veterans with their own minds, Used to dealing with (and ignoring) authoritarian hierarchies and the mind-games of command based systems. After all Instructionist Education is inherently authoritarian. As New York University educational historian Henry J. Perkinson observed:
If education is regarded as the instrument for the one-way transmission of "knowledge" from the teacher (or textbook) to the student, then the knowledge possessed by the teacher (or textbook) must be accurate. Teachers and textbook authors must appear to be unquestionable authorities on the subjects being taught and written about. And of course this is far from true. No textbook is totally accurate and many are in part, or even largely, out-of-date. And the teachers even more so. Instruction-oriented education puts the blame on the student for failure to learn, since if the information to be transmitted is presented clearly and accurately, such failure must be due to problems on the receiving end. Lack of attention, laziness, and lack of motivation are therefore often met with punishment and ridicule in an effort to make students pay attention and do their work. Never mind that one of the earliest findings of the science of psychology was that the higher the expectations of both student and teacher, the higher the achievements. And that all children are motivated to learn given achievable goals.
Since education is seen as merely the transmission of "knowledge" from educator and textbook to student, then the test of its success is whether students can reproduce the transmitted information in spoken or written form. Thus the (ab)use of standardized, objective tests as indicators of academic success. Though in fact science has long since discredited this as correlated to actual intelligence or learning. Yet IQ test derived SATs are considered the "objective" measure of the student, and the schools, "achievements." And more and more, the income of the teachers... Perkinson in a later work, Teachers Without Goals/Students Without Purposes (1993), commented:
But do we hear much about this in public discussions on education? Hardly... Instead the long outmoded notions of schooling are given new whitewashes, tricked out with phony statistics and even phonier research, and the student as a learner is as always, given little attention. This is all critical to the idea of myths and fantasy as these provide the best mechanism to counter the mental dysfunctionalism of the educational process. It is therefore not surprising that in most schools science-fiction is barely tolerated, if at all. Certainly not comic books or graphic novels. And in general "popular culture" is acceptable only in an artificially and sterilized form. Similarly the myths and fantasy that does make it into the system is carefully distilled. Selected for banality or irrelevance to modern culture. And "taught" in as boring a fashion as possible. Since several of my parents' friends (and happily they became mine as well) were historians, I was puzzled by the contrast between history as I read it in primary sources or heard it from these historians, and what passed for history in schools. After all history really sound be about the most interesting subject in school if one looked at it objectively – it contains EVERYTHING ELSE really. All other subject areas after all developed within a historical process and are best learned that way. History has all the adventure, all the drama, all the sex & violence, combat and achievement, triumphs, and glory, crisis and struggle, that anyone could want. And it really happened. So why was history in school so awesomely, so exceedingly, so stupefying DULL?! So we would not learn it... Or from it. For the same reason fantasy and myth was available in classrooms only in packaged and flavorless morsels, doled out enough to create an illusion of studying the process of mythmaking, the meaning of fantasy, their crucial roles in ALL societies – even postmodern technological (when one figures in the size of the entertainment business, including professional sports and the arts and more and more the news media, it is clear how much myth-production is big business indeed). After all if we realized their place in past cultures we might see clearly the modern myths about us. And as a result ask the wrong questions. Like: Why These Rotten Myths?
The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss suggests that myth is an idealized and affective (that is, arouses emotionally) ensemble of stories that articulates a schemata, a selection, of expected behaviors while specifying and defusing its culture's antinomies or internal contradictions. Its aim is the coercive institution of order, regularity, and harmony - even if those are met. At times through controlled ritual passages into frenzy, carnival and hysteria. Bread and circuses, mass pop-culture and entertainment.
While Lévi-Strauss's structuralism is currently considered passé in the often rather flighty halls of academia, replaced by the post-modernism already crumbling under its own absurdities and even more absurd theorists, and by "critical theory," which like logical positivism, is stunted by the limits of its postulates. The good news is that the idea of cultural structures is creeping back in via the neurosciences and the new synthesis of biology and systems theory. After all DNA is really as close as we can find in nature to a computer program, it has structures that after "processing" raw material into organic molecules can function as logic elements, there are subroutines, links, error-correction mechanisms, hierarchical organization and even fuzzy logic. And it seems old Charlie Darwin was more correct than many of his followers about the possibility of individual organisms passing along learned characteristics. While Lamarck was mostly wrong, "epigenetic inheritance" is a fact of biology that few evolutionists are yet ready to deal with. But genetic information DOES get directly altered, there are various mechanisms that allow this to be passed down or even transferred quite naturally between species, even in widely separated orders. The development of the individual has been too slighted, after all the embryonic stage is so complex that even well before birth we find millions of physical variations even between identical twins. We have all found that inheritance does indeed play an important role is how we act, in what we like, and what we become (though not sternly deterministic in more complex behaviors). The old idea of the "blank slate" at birth has been utterly discredited. Unfortunately, the myth of genetic determinism has immediately been brought forward yet again to replace that Blank Slate. The reality is that Genes are NOT Destiny. Each organism, most particularly humans with the greatest genetic toolbox to start with, evolve independently and uniquely. DNA is the foundation, but the rest is "determined" by environment and individual choices. Identical twins (or artificial twins like clones) are physically and mentally more different than usually admitted, especially by research funded by organizations with stakes in racial determinism to focus almost entirely upon supposed similarities. Though certain smart fools have cherry-picked through anthropological research to try to "prove" the case for genetic determinism, this ignores how much human culture (and history) is a common inheritance, and every month it seems we find more evidence that very rarely were civilizations long out-of-touch with one another, though geography did its best to divide them. It is also clear that our minds are at least as much a cultural creation as a biological one. Thus our collective history and shared mythology are as much (or no more) determinants of how we turn out as the chromosome set we get from our parents. But then, culture itself seems a genetically hardwired aspect of social creatures like humans. Put two people together and you have a society. And argument. And creation.
Though I will not go into detail here, there does indeed seem biological (as well as societal) mechanisms for cultural structures, for Jung's Collective Consciousness; just as surely as there seems an inborn structure that allows the rapid development of language skills in humans. Humans do indeed seem prone to myths. Perhaps an inheritance of our millions of years in a "bicameral" stage of consciousness. See Star Trek versus Automatic Thought The Federation represents the mythology of one man in particular but also the creative input of hundred, including the fans millions, of minds idea of a more progressed civilization. Far from perfect but certainly utopian in many senses. Star Trek is a shared myth. Like earlier myths it need not be "true" in a prosaic sense, if anything it is better if it is not. That would be too restrictive. No, a good myth is like art (as Picasso pointed out), a lie that tells the truth. A deeper truth. D. H. Lawrence said once
Roland Barthes the French semiologist in his masterful 1957 Mythologies, in a chapter called "Myth Today: Reading and Deciphering Myth" said:
Too often however it can become a restrictive conception, as Ann Oakley in Woman's Work: The Housewife, Past and Present (1974) warned, acting primarily:
A myth teaches only as long as one knows it as a myth, recognizes it is not true, nor false, but deeper and other. A good myth hits the depths of our minds, goes below the surface consciousness, touches parts of ourselves dry logic can never reach. A good myth is like a poem, a great play, and masterpiece of visual or performing art. It is beyond the prosaic. Asking a myth to be true in the same sense as one would test a sample of ore, a fossil, evidence in a court of law, is missing the entire point. It literally destroys the meaning. A certain degree of suspension of disbelief is required to grok a myth. But the meanings then realized can be examined, dissected, analyzed and tested. THEN believed in. Myths are stories which utilize traditions and customs and Jung's Collective Unconsciousness to offer an explanation of some puzzling fact or phenomenon – or that provides a common thread to unite people. Myths may reflect ultimate personal truth to persons and cultures. A myth is a mental model with which people try to interpret reality and respond to it. Myths have value in enabling us to organize the way we perceive facts and see ourselves and the world. Myths speak through rich symbols, helping to bring order into what may otherwise be a chaos of personal experience. When we need a sense of order that mere factual explanations are unable to provide; when organization and order must be taken out of the murky confusion of experience; that is where, as A. K. Coomaraswamy (Hinduism and Buddhism, pg. 33, 1943) put it:
As Watts above pointed out, however, myth is far more than words or a story or even narrative, it is images, symbolization and creative expressions of all varieties. Myths, as with kindred poetry, are neither wholly true nor wholly untrue. Just because some modem usage of the word have connotations that suggest that some myths are irrelevant or wrong does not make this true for all myths. As the truths inside the myths may be ones that direct narrative or objective analysis may not be able to communicate. Whether true or not, myths help us make sense of what is going on around us. Myths can provide a valuable doorway into the value structure of a society or culture and may give insights that are difficult to achieve by more conventional means.
The Genesis myths recorded in the Bible are grand ones. But they are not scientifically not historically "true." That much we KNOW for certain, or at least those who can examine the evidence with an educated and open mind. They are however "true" in so many other ways. They represent a development of conception that altered how humans saw the world and themselves. But they were not the first creation myths nor the last. They are not the grandest myths nor the least. They are those a collective tribe of, by our standards quite primitive, roaming Semites whose mythology was assembled from all about them in the near Orient. They then creatively expanded these into a new myth with themselves at the center. But surely as much a myth as Star Trek. Which has not keep it from the older one from wielding enormous power, even in its errors, and especially when misapplied. Witness the madness as two Semitic people claim the very same land (and water) rights direct from God, and though both have been prohibited by that same God from needless taking of their brother's life, nevertheless brother tribes attack each other viciously and ruthlessly. With suicide bombers and Gatling-cannon equipped gunships, assassinations and the blood of the innocent young. In America that particular myth, collected with others as well as folk-history, proverbs, and such, thanks to wild interpretations and profane misuse, has divided believers into thousands of denominations and sects. On one hand have fools playing with rattlesnakes and drinking poison based upon a poetical offhand remark in Scripture, while others kill doctors for allowing women to control their own bodies. Some let their own children die rather than get medical help. A corrupted mythology has led to condemnations and exile by family members of one another for the sexual orientation God choose them to be born with. Some misguided believers have even claimed for one of the several creation myths within the Bible an unearned equal status as a Scientific Theory, in oppostition to that of the most proven fact of Science – Evolution; yet can offer up no one iota of collaboration, no good argument, has no support from any credible authority – except from their own misappropriation of an old and fourth-hand tale. Fairness though does not mean nonsense has as much value (or place in the classroom) as proven fact. Other powerful myths have led to the madness of the "Cultural Revolution" in China, the purges of tens of millions of Soviets, the destruction of the educated in Cambodia, the annihilation of hundreds of native tribes and hundreds of species not just in America, the genocidal attacks of neighbors upon each other in Bosnia, Rwanda, and East Timor (to name but three of hundreds of places). Just as less recent history is full of mad crusades, polgroms, massacres, and wars for the most absurb of justifications (even a beard). Other myths gave us Nazi Germany. The Roman Empire. Napoleon's Empire. The British Empire. All brutal and exploitative regimes, economic disasters, enslavement, for all those not in control (if some were less evil than others, they usually made up by being more extensive and lingering on far too long). On the other hand... Some myths have given us glorious art and literature. Unified nations – even created the UN (for all its present faults, only the idiotic think it is not how humankind must proceed). Myths have led to noble experiments (of far more lasting impact and success than usually conceded by historians with a fixation on wars and big leader-types) as the utopian communities of Robert Owen and Fourier, the Cathari, the Waldenses, Buddhists, Fabians, and communes past and present. And other myths of far-away places, different times, strange places, new concepts, inspired young boys and girls to have dreams of a better world. Some get to help work toward such directly. Others, perhaps with more telling results, go on to inspire other youngsters, some of whom never give up the dream. So do not discount Myth. Cherish the good ones. Battle the false ones. And help create even better ones for the next generations.
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| Campbell Joseph Campbell wrote many great books but the ones below are his masterpieces: The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949, revised edition 1980. The Masks of God: Volume 1: Primitive Mythology, 1959, Volume 2: Oriental Mythology, 1962, Volume 3: Occidental Mythology, 1964, Volume 4: Creative Mythology, 1968. The Mythic Image. 1975; 1981. Myths to Live By, 1972. Historical Atlas of World Mythology: Volume 1: The Way of the Animal Powers, 1983, [revised edition published in two parts, Part 1: Mythologies of the Primitive Hunters and Gatherers, 1988, Part 2: Mythology of the Great Hunt, 1988]; Historical Atlas of World Mythology, Volume 2: The Way of the Seeded Earth, Part 1: The Sacrifice, 1988, (Part 2 released posthumously). Anthony, S. Who's Who in Egyptian Mythology. 1978. Avery, Catherine B., ed. The New Century Handbook of Greek Mythology and Legend. 1972. Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. 1976. Boas, Franz. The Mind of Primitive Man. 1911. Brunvand, Jan H. Folklore: A Handbook for Study and Research. 1976. Christie, Anthony. Chinese Mythology. rev., 1985. Clarkson, Atelia and Gilbert B. Cross. World Folktales. 1980; 1984. Dorson, Richard M. America in Legend: Folklore from the Colonial Period to the Present. 1973. Eastman, Mary Huse, ed. Index to Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends. 2d ed., 1926. supplements published 1937, 1952, 1973, 1979 (ed. by Norma Ireland) Eliade, Mircea. Myth and Reality. 1968. Evans, Ivor H., ed. Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. rev., 1981. The Facts on File Encyclopedia of World Mythology and Legend. 1988. Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough. 13v. 1890, 1907. (try the adbridged one volume version first) Fromm, Erich The Forgotten Language: An Introduction into the Understanding of Dreams, Fairy Tales and Myths. 1951 Grant, Michael. Myths of the Greeks and Romans. 1989. Grimal, Pierre. The Dictionary of Classical Mythology. Tr. and Preface by A. R. Maxwell-Hyslop. 1986. Henig, Martin. Religion in Roman Britain. 1984. Frankfort, Henri. Kingship and the Gods. 1948; 1978. King, Leonard W. Babylonian Religion and Mythology. 1978 Leach, Maria and Jerome Fried, eds. Funk & Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend. 1972; 1984. Leick, Gwendolyn. A Dictionary of Ancient Near Eastern Mythology. 1991. Leeming, David A. The World of Myth. 1991. Luthi, Max. The European Folktale. 1982, 1986. MacKenzie, Donald A. Myths of Babylonia and Assyria. 1915, 1978. Manguel, Alberto and Guadalupi, Gianni. The Dictionary of Imaginary Places. 1980, 1987. Mercatante, Anthony S. Good and Evil: Mythology and Folklore. 1978. Norton, Daniel S. and Peters Rushton. Classical Myths in English Literature. n.d. Puhvel, Jaan. Comparative Mythology. 1987. Schwaller de Lubicz, R. A. The Temple in Man. 1981. Spence, Lewis. Myths and Legends of Babylonia and Assyria. 1916. Tripp, Edward. Meridian Handbook of Classical Mythology.1974. |
| see God and Myths. Excellent webpage with selected sites Myths and Legends by Christopher B. Siren. MythText, has selections of myths around the world. And The Encyclopedia Mythica, a great source for all kinds of legends and myths and folktales. |
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