science, he allows no room in myth for morality, as his objection to the moralallegorizersattests.Forhim,Genesis1shouldmerelyexplain,not assess, creation. Similarly, the story does not just explain the creation of human beings but also elevates them above the rest of creation, according them at once the right and the duty to oversee the physical world. If, further, the ‘image’ of God in which humans are created is more than anatomical, then here, too, Tylor’s theory falls short.
Finally, even if Tylor’s theory worked, what would it illuminate? It is one thing for a theory to fit a myth. It is another for a theory to elucidate whatever it fits. What would Tylor’s theory tell us that we would not know without it? One could not, in fairness, ask of Tylor what a myth means, for Tylor stands committed to a literal rendition of myth: a myth means what it says. Tylor’s contribution
would be to the origin and the function of myth. Genesis 1, he would contend, arose not from wild speculations about the world but from steady observations about recurrent, if still striking, natural processes that call for an explanation. Tylor would find an appreciative audience among creationists – not because he would consider Genesis 1 the correct account of the origin of the world but because he would consider it an account, and a distinctively religious one. Tylor would offer a corrective to those twentiethcentury theologians who, intent on making the Bible palatable to moderns, maintain that Genesis 1 is anything but an account
of creation – a view like that of Rudolf Bultmann on the New Testament, as we shall see in the next chapter.
science and Myth
J. G. Frazer
Tylor’s is but one view of the relationship between myth and science, or between religion and science. Closest to Tylor stands J. G. Frazer (1854–1941), the Scottish-born, Cambridge-affiliated classicist and fellow pioneering anthropologist. For Frazer, as for Tylor, myth is part of primitive religion; primitive religion is part of philosophy, itself universal; and primitive religion is the counterpart to natural science, itself entirely modern. Primitive
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Myth
religion and science are, as for Tylor, mutually exclusive. Primitive religion is false, science true. But where for Tylor primitive religion, including myth, functions as the counterpart to scientific theory, for Frazer it functions even more as the counterpart to applied science, or technology. Where for Tylor primitive religion serves to explain events in the physical world, for Frazer it serves even more to effect events, above all the growth of crops. Where Tylor treats myth as an autonomous text, Frazer ties myth to ritual, which enacts it.
Frazer takes the myth of Adonis as one of the main examples, for him, of the chief myth among all mythologies: the biography of the chief god, the god of vegetation. For Frazer, the myth of Adonis would have been acted out, and that ritualistic enactment would have been believed to work magically to effect whatever had been acted out. To have acted act out the resurfacing of Adonis would have been to effect it and in turn the resurfacing of the crops. The myth would have served not simply to explain why the crops had died – they had died because Adonis, in descending to the land of the dead, had died – but actually to revive the crops. For Frazer, the payoff of myth could scarcely have been more practical: avoiding starvation. Frazer’s interpretation of Adonis will be considered in detail in Chapter 4.
The biggest difficulty for Tylor’s and Frazer’s view of myth as the primitive counterpart to science is that it conspicuously fails to account for the retention of myth in the wake of science. If myth functions to do no more than science, why is it still around? Of course, Tylor and Frazer could promptly reply that whatever remains is not myth, and exactly because it is not serving a scientific-like function. By contrast, the contemporary German philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1920–96) maintains that the survival of myth alongside science proves that myth has never served the same function as science. Yet neither Blumenberg nor Tylor and Frazer ever explain why myth, or religion as a whole, is still invoked alongside science to explain physical events.
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For example, whenever a handful of passengers survives a plane crash, the crash itself gets explained scientifically, but the survival often gets credited to intervention by God and not to, say, the location of the seats. Tylor and Frazer would doubtless reply that the survivors have simply not faced up to the incompatibility of their religious explanation with a scientific one, but this appeal to consistency is apparently outweighed by some more pressing
need that only a religious explanation can fulfil.
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl
Reacting against the views of Tylor, Frazer, and other members of what he imprecisely calls ‘the English school of anthropology’,
the French philosopher and armchair anthropologist Lucien LévyBruhl (1857–1939) insisted on a much wider divide between myth and science. Where for Tylor and Frazer primitives think like moderns, just less rigorously, for Lévy-Bruhl primitives think differently from moderns. Where for Tylor and Frazer primitive thinking is logical, just erroneous, for Lévy-Bruhl primitive thinking is plainly nonlogical—or, in his preferred term, ‘prelogical’.
According to Lévy-Bruhl, primitives believe not, as for Tylor, that all natural phenomena possess individual, human-like souls, or gods, but that all phenomena, including humans and their artefacts, are part of an impersonal sacred, or ‘mystic’, realm pervading the natural one. Primitives believe, further, that the ‘participation’ of all things in this mystic reality enables phenomena not only to affect one another magically but also to become one another, yet remain what they are: ‘objects, beings, phenomena can be, though in a way incomprehensible to us [moderns], both themselves and something other than themselves’. The Bororo of Brazil declare themselves red araras, or parakeets, yet still human beings. Lévy-Bruhl calls this belief prelogical because it violates the law of noncontradiction: the notion that something can simultaneously be both itself and something else.
science and Myth
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Where for Tylor and Frazer myth involves the same processes of observation, inference, and generalization as science, or at least of science as they think of it, for Lévy-Bruhl mythic thinking is the opposite of scientific thinking. Where for Tylor and Frazer primitives perceive the same world as moderns but simply conceive of it differently, for Lévy-Bruhl primitives see and in turn conceptualize the world differently from moderns – namely, as identical with themselves.
For Lévy-Bruhl, as for Tylor and Frazer, myth is part of religion, religion is primitive, and moderns have science rather than religion. But where Tylor and Frazer subsume both religion and science under philosophy, Lévy-Bruhl associates philosophy with thinking freed from mystical identification with the world. Primitive thinking is nonphilosophical because it is not detached from the world. Primitives have a whole mentality of their own, one evinced in their myths.
Myth
Even the use to which myth is put is for Lévy-Bruhl one of emotional involvement rather than, as for Tylor and Frazer, one of intellectual detachment. Primitives use religion, especially myth, not to explain or to control the world but instead to commune with it – more precisely, to restore the ‘mystic’ communion that has gradually begun to fade:
Where the participation of the individual in the social group is still directly felt, where the participation of the group with surrounding groups is actually lived – that is, as long as the period of mystic symbiosis lasts – myths are meagre in number and of poor quality.
. . . Can myths then likewise be the products of primitive mentality which appear when this mentality is endeavouring to realize a participation no longer felt – when it has recourse to intermediaries, and vehicles designed to secure a communion which has ceased to be a living reality?
(Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, p. 330)
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Presented with the myth of Adonis, Lévy-Bruhl would surely focus on Adonis’ mystic relationship to the world. Ovid’s Adonis is oblivious to all warnings about the dangers of the world because he imagines himself at home in the world, and at home because one with the world. He is unable to resist the goddesses because he sees them as his mother, with whom he seeks not intercourse but womb-like absorption. Between him and the goddesses there exists the primordial state of oneness that Lévy-Bruhl calls participation mystique.
Bronislaw Malinowski
One reaction to Lévy-Bruhl was to reassert the philosophical nature of myth – a reaction to be considered in the next chapter. The key theorists here were Paul Radin and Ernst Cassirer. Another reaction was to accept Lévy-Bruhl’s separation of myth from philosophy but not his characterization of myth as pre-philosophical or pre-scientific. The key figure here was the Polish-born anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942), who early on moved to England. Where Lévy-Bruhl asserts that primitives seek to commune with nature rather than to explain it, Malinowski asserts that primitives seek to control nature rather than to explain it. Both associate a philosophical approach with an explanatory, or intellectualist, one, and both associate that view with the British – for Malinowski, with Tylor but not also with Frazer. Both attribute this contrived notion of myth and, in general, of religion to a contrived notion of primitives.
Invoking Frazer, for whom myth and religion are the primitive counterpart to applied science, Malinowski argues that primitives are too busy scurrying to survive in the world to have the luxury of reflecting on it. Where for Frazer primitives use myth in place of science, which, again, is exclusively modern, for Malinowski primitives use myth as a fallback to science. Primitives possess not just the counterpart to science but science itself:
science and Myth
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