List of illustrations
1Venus and Adonis by
Rubens |
9 |
© 2003 The Metropolitan |
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Museum of Art, New York. |
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Gift of Harry Payne |
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Bingham, 1937. All rights |
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reserved. |
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2 E. B. Tylor |
15 |
© Archivo Iconografico, |
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S. A./Corbis |
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7 |
The Green Corn |
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fertility dance of |
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the Minatarees |
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of North America |
69 |
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Mary Evans Picture Library |
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8 |
Hunting the |
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Calydon Boar |
77 |
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© The Art Archive/The |
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Louvre/Dagli Orti |
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3 |
Sisyphus in Tartarus |
45 |
9 |
The Duke and |
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Duchess of Windsor |
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© Historical Picture |
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Archive/Corbis |
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on their wedding |
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4 |
Mircea Eliade |
54 |
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day |
90 |
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© Bettmann/Corbis |
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© Photos12.com/Carlos Freire |
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J. F. Kennedy, Jr |
58 |
10 |
Sigmund Freud |
92 |
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© Corbis |
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© Reuters 2000 |
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6 |
George Washington |
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11 |
C. G. Jung |
103 |
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Mary Evans Picture |
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before Yorktown |
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Library |
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by Rembrandt Peale |
59 |
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© The Corcoran Gallery |
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of Art/Corbis |
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12 Claude Lévi-Strauss 115 |
13 Bronislaw |
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© Veldman Annemiek/ |
Malinowski |
127 |
Corbis Kipa |
© Hulton-Deutsch |
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Collection/Corbis |
The publisher and the author apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list. If contacted, they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.
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Let me be clear from the outset: this book is an introduction not to myths but to approaches to myth, or theories of myth, and it is limited to modern theories. Theories of myth may be as old as myths themselves. Certainly they go back at least to the Presocratics. But only in the modern era – specifically, only since the second half of the nineteenth century – have those theories
purported to be scientific. For only since then have there existed the professional disciplines that have sought to supply truly scientific theories of myth: the social sciences, of which anthropology, psychology, and to a lesser extent sociology have contributed the most. Some social scientific theories of myth may have earlier counterparts, but scientific theorizing is still different from earlier theorizing. Where earlier theorizing was largely speculative and abstract, scientific theorizing is based far more on accumulated information. The differences summed up by the anthropologist John Beattie apply to the other social sciences as well:
Thus it was the reports of eighteenthand nineteenth-century missionaries and travellers in Africa, North America, the Pacific and elsewhere that provided the raw material upon which the first anthropological works, written in the second half of the last century, were based. Before then, of course, there had been plenty of conjecturing about human institutions and their origins . . . But although their speculations were often brilliant, these thinkers were
1
Myth
not empirical scientists; their conclusions were not based on any kind of evidence which could be tested; rather, they were deductively argued from principles which were for the most part implicit in their own cultures. They were really philosophers and historians of Europe, not anthropologists.
(Beattie, Other Cultures, pp. 5–6)
Some modern theories of myth hail from the hoary disciplines of philosophy and literature, but they, too, reflect the influence of the social sciences. Even Mircea Eliade, who pits his theory from
religious studies against those from the social sciences, enlists data from the social sciences to support his theory!
Each discipline harbours multiple theories of myth. Strictly, theories of myth are theories of some much larger domain, with myth a mere subset. For example, anthropological theories
of myth are theories of culture applied to the case of myth. Psychological theories of myth are theories of the mind. Sociological theories of myth are theories of society. There are no theories of myth itself, for there is no discipline of myth in itself. Myth is not like literature, which, so it has or had traditionally been claimed, must be studied as literature rather than as history, sociology, or something else nonliterary. There is no study of myth as myth.
What unite the study of myth across the disciplines are the questions asked. The three main questions are those of origin, function, and subject matter. By ‘origin’ is meant why and how myth arises. By ‘function’ is meant why and how myth persists. The answer to the why of origin and function is usually a need, which myth arises to fulfil and lasts by continuing to fulfil. What the need is, varies from theory to theory. By ‘subject matter’ is meant the referent of myth. Some theories read myth literally, so that the referent is the straightforward, apparent one, such as gods. Other theories read myth symbolically, and the symbolized referent can be anything.
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