Mythology

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Begin with the word, because the word changed under its speakers. The Greek mythos meant a thing said — an utterance, a tale, a report carried from mouth to mouth — and at the start it carried no charge of falsehood. A mythos was what the bard sang and the elder told; it was authoritative speech, the kind a listener received rather than tested. Then it hardened. By the time a philosopher was setting mythos against logos — the reasoned account, the thing one could check and argue — the older word had been demoted to the tale a careful mind distrusts. Plato kept telling myths even as he questioned them, banishing the poets from the ideal city in one breath and reaching for a story of the soul’s journey in the next. The slippage built into the term never resolved. Mythology means, at once, a body of sacred narrative and the suspicion that narrative invites — the stories, and the long quarrel over what kind of thing a story is.

So the word has two senses braided together. In the first, mythology is what a culture holds: its traditional narratives of gods, origins, and the deep past, told as authoritative rather than invented, the account of how the world came to be arranged as it is found. In the second, mythology is the study of those narratives — the discipline, the theories, the centuries of interpreters deciding what such tales really are. The two senses pull against each other, because the second tends to be applied to other people’s first. The narrative a community lives inside is its scripture; the narrative seen from the outside, by someone who does not stand within its rites, is “mythology.” The same story shifts category with the standing of the one who names it. The term marks, more often than not, the sacred stories of others.

Scripture to the insider

Within their own settings these narratives were not idle. They were load-bearing. A myth fixed the order of the cosmos, gave a people its ancestry and its claim to a land, and supplied the words that a rite required — for the story and the rite were frequently a single thing, the one explaining the other, neither standing alone. The Babylonian Enūma Eliš, the seven-tablet creation epic that opens “When on high,” was no antiquarian relic in Mesopotamia: it was recited at the akītu, the Babylonian New Year festival, where the recounting of how Marduk split the body of Tiamat to make the heavens and earth was bound to the renewal of kingship and the annual reaffirmation of cosmic order. To tell the story was to re-stabilize the world. Hesiod’s Theogony did related work for the Greeks, marshalling the gods into a genealogy and a sequence — who begot whom, who overthrew whom, which generation of powers gave way to the next, the Titans before the Olympians, Iapetos fathering the line that reached down toward humankind. A genealogy is an argument about authority: it says which gods are older, which are sovereign, and why the present arrangement of power is the right one. The stories traveled with the cults they sustained, and where the heavens themselves were read as a script — the rising of the Pleiades marking a season’s turn, a planet’s station read as a sign — myth and divination and prophecy drew on the same conviction that the world was legible and spoke in narrative.

The reductions, in order

The argument over what to make of such stories runs from antiquity to the present, and for most of that span it has been a sequence of reductions — each school proposing that beneath the myth lies some other, truer thing the myth has disguised. The history of the second sense of mythology is largely a history of people refusing to take the first sense at its word.

The earliest of the great reductions bears its author’s name. Euhemerus of Messene, writing around 300 BCE in the orbit of the Macedonian king Cassander, composed a fictional travelogue, the Sacred History, in which a voyage to an island in the Indian Ocean turns up a golden pillar inscribed with the truth about the gods: that Uranus, Kronos, and Zeus had been kings and benefactors of old, men whose deeds and memory swelled, after death, into divinity. Myth, on this reading, is garbled history — biography inflated by gratitude and distance until a ruler becomes a god. The approach acquired his name: euhemerism, the deflation of the divine into the human and the historical. It has never gone away, because it always has at least the look of sobriety.

The Stoics took a different knife to the same material. Where Euhemerus found buried kings, Stoic allegory found buried physics: the gods were not men but forces, the names of the divine standing in for fire, air, aether, the procreative heat of the cosmos. Read rightly — and reading rightly meant cracking the etymology of a divine name — a scandalous tale of castration or incest among the Olympians turned into a decorous statement about the elements separating out of primal matter. Myth was a code, and the philosopher held the key. Christian apologists inherited both tools and bent them to a polemic. They kept the pagan myths in circulation precisely to explain them away, deploying euhemerism to demote the old gods to dead kings and allegory to salvage whatever could be made to point, dimly, toward a truth the pagans had missed. To preserve a story in order to dissolve it is its own kind of homage.

Then, in the nineteenth century, the comparativists arrived with a larger ambition than any of these: not to decode one pantheon but to find the single mechanism that produced them all. Friedrich Max Müller, the Oxford philologist, located it in language itself. Myth, for Müller, was a “disease of language” — a pathology that set in when the literal sense of an old word was lost and its surviving metaphor was misread, when a phrase like “the sun follows the dawn” congealed, over generations of forgetful retelling, into a story of a god pursuing a maiden. The names of natural things, drained of their first meaning, hardened into the names of gods; nomina became numina. From this Müller spun an entire solar mythology in which a vast share of the world’s stories reduced, on analysis, to the daily drama of the sun. The system did not survive its own confidence. The etymologies were forced, the method unfalsifiable, and the critics merciless: the folklorist Andrew Lang dismantled the solar readings with anthropological counter-evidence, and R. F. Littledale delivered the coup de grâce by applying Müller’s own method to Müller, proving with perfect rigor that the professor himself was a solar myth — a being from the East who rose in the morning of his career, climbed to a zenith of fame, and would decline into the west. A method that can prove its own author fictional has demonstrated something about the method.

James Frazer’s The Golden Bough gathered the comparative harvest into its grandest form. Beginning from a single puzzle — the priest at the grove of Nemi who held his office until a challenger killed him for it — Frazer ranged across continents and millennia to assemble a portrait of the dying-and-rising god: a vegetation deity who perishes and returns with the seasons, his death and revival enacted in ritual to secure the renewal of the crops, with Adonis, Attis, Osiris, and others marshalled as instances of one recurring figure. The reach was immense and the prose seductive, and for two generations the dying-and-rising god seemed an established fact of comparative religion. Later scholarship took it apart. When the alleged members of the category were examined one at a time against their own sources, most failed to fit: some gods descended but did not die, some died but did not return, some merely vanished. The figure looked less like a discovery than an artifact of the comparison itself — a pattern produced by lifting details out of context and laying them side by side until they rhymed.

The twentieth-century split

By the middle of the twentieth century the field had divided, and the division holds. One line, structuralist, followed Claude Lévi-Strauss, who treated myth as a species of language and read it for logic rather than content. A myth, on this account, is built from recurring units — bundles of relations — and its work is to handle a contradiction a society cannot resolve in life: the gap between the claim that humans are born of the earth and the fact that they are born of two parents, the opposition of life and death, of nature and culture. The myth does not answer the contradiction; it processes it, generating mediating terms and turning an unbearable two-term opposition into a workable series. Meaning lives in the structure, not the surface, and every variant of a tale — including the anthropologist’s own retelling — counts as part of the myth. The story is a machine for thinking with.

The other line ran toward depth and the sacred. Drawing on Carl Jung’s archetypes and collective unconscious, and elaborated above all by Mircea Eliade, this reading took myth as the expression of something shared — a stratum of the psyche common to humankind, or a fundamental human encounter with sacred time. For Eliade the myth narrates what happened in illo tempore, “in that time,” the strong creative time before ordinary time, and the rite that repeats the myth abolishes profane duration to return the celebrant to that founding moment. The account is capacious and often luminous, and it has shaped how a century of readers feels the weight of an old story. It has also drawn the steady objection that it cannot be tested: that an archetype confirmed by every case and refuted by none, a sacred time available to all archaic peoples and inaccessible to verification, explains everything and therefore predicts nothing.

Critical editions and the scholarship of myth

The discipline that studies all this has its own canon. Eric Csapo’s Theories of Mythology (Blackwell, 2005) is the standard survey of the field’s competing schools — comparative, psychoanalytic, ritualist, structuralist, ideological — taken in turn and judged on their own terms, and it is the readiest single map of the terrain sketched above. Wendy Doniger’s The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (Columbia University Press, 1998) makes the case for cross-cultural comparison after its nineteenth-century overreach — not the search for one universal key, but a disciplined reading across traditions that holds difference and resemblance in the same hand. On the ancient pivot of the whole vocabulary, Catalin Partenie’s Plato’s Myths in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy traces how Plato could both attack myth and deploy it, the clearest short account of the mythos/logos fault line from which the modern double sense of the word descends. The dismantling of the dying-and-rising god is itself a landmark of the literature: Jonathan Z. Smith argued in his entry under that heading in the Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan, 1987) that the category was largely a modern construction, and the Ugaritic scholar Mark S. Smith reinforced the point from the side of the sources, showing that the gods most often cited tended to disappear rather than to die and rise; a partial rehabilitation for a few specific cases came later with Tryggve Mettinger’s The Riddle of Resurrection (2001). The primary myths themselves remain the ground of all of it — Hesiod’s Theogony, the Enūma Eliš, the corpus of tales attached to figures from Pan to Iris — and the readings have value only against the texts they read.

Across all of it runs an older strain that the academic discipline keeps at arm’s length: the esoteric conviction that myths are not error and not literature but a deliberately veiled wisdom, a single primordial doctrine fractured into the world’s mythologies and recoverable by the initiated. Helena Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine (1888) gave this its most ambitious modern statement, reading the symbolism of the world’s traditions as the scattered remnant of one archaic teaching. It is a nineteenth-century construction in its own right, contemporary with Müller and Frazer and sharing their hunger for the master pattern — the same instinct Lévi-Strauss and Eliade later carried into the academy in tamer dress.

That instinct — to find one thing beneath the many stories — is the durable temptation of the whole subject, and its durable hazard. The reductions disagree about what the one thing is. For Euhemerus it was a king, for the Stoics a force of nature, for Müller a misheard word, for Frazer a vegetation god, for Lévi-Strauss a logical operation, for the Jungian a figure rising from the psyche’s floor. Each found a key, and each key turned in some locks and jammed in others. The two senses of mythology meet here, in the gap that none of them closes: a culture’s sacred narratives are real objects, told and recited and enacted, and the thing said beneath the thing said — the single grammar, the buried truth that would explain them all at once — has proven endlessly worth seeking and impossible to hold. The stories are a mythos, an utterance received; the search for what they are is a logos that never quite arrives, and the distance between the two is exactly as wide as it was when a Greek first set the two words against each other.

→ In the library: Blavatsky — The Secret Doctrine (1888): The Evolution of Symbolism

→ Related: Logos · Divination · Mesopotamia · Pleiades · Stoicism · Carl Jung · Ritual · Religion · Prophecy · Pan · Iapetos · Iris