Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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Lawrence, B. ed. (2005), Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama Bin Laden. London: Verso. This is the best anthology of bin Laden’s statements in English. It is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand bin Laden and the way his anti-imperialism is meshed with reactionary fundamentalist Islam.

Lehmann, D. and B. Siebzehner (2006), Remaking Israeli Judaism: The Challenge of Shas. New York: Oxford University Press.

This is a valuable study of Shas.

Lustick, I. (1988), For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel. New York: The Council on Foreign Relations.

This remains a classic study of the militant national-religious movement in Israel.

Marsden, G. M. (1991), Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids MT: W. B. Eerdmans.

This is an excellent introduction by a respected evangelical historian.

Martin, W. C. (1996), With God on our Side: the Rise of the Religious Right in America. 1st edn. New York: Broadway Books.

This is an excellent and readable narrative history. Broadway Books published a revised edition in 2005 with a brief ‘Afterword’ covering events since 1996.

Norton, A. R. (2007), Hezbollah: A Short History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. This is the best and most readable overview of Hezbollah available in English.

Pape, R. (2005), Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. New York: Random House. This is an influential study stressing that terrorism often assumed to be motivated primarily by Islamic fundamentalism is actually primarily aimed at resisting foreign occupation. Pape goes too far in downplaying the role of Islamic fundamentalism and he focuses too much on resistance to foreign occupation as opposed to resistance to foreign domination in general. This is, nonetheless, a very important book.

Peri, Y., ed. (2000), The Assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

This is an important collection of essays on the significance of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in the context of Israel’s ‘culture war’.

Ravitzky, A. (1996), Messianism, Zionism, and Jewish Religious Radicalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

This is a classic intellectual history, but students often complain that it is too ‘dry’, Dry or not, it is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Israel’s Religious Right.

Schattner, M. (2008), Israël: L’autre conflit. Laïcs contre religieux. Bruxelles: André Versaille.

This is an excellent history of the role of religion in Zionism and the modern state of Israel. For students seriously interested in such matters, it would be worth learning French just to read this book. The author, a secular Franco-Israeli journalist, begins his book by describing how his daughter became ‘ultra-Orthodox’ (haredi) and how now he cannot read the stories of Babar the elephant to his grandchildren. But he nonetheless does an excellent job of conveying a sense of how both the ultra-Orthodox and the national-religious Orthodox see the world.

Sprinzak, E, (1991), The Ascendance of Israel’s Radical Right. New York: Oxford University Press.

This is a classic study of Israel’s religious-nationalist settlers and their supporters, but it is difficult reading for students with little or no knowledge of Israeli politics.

——Â(1999) Brother against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination. New York: The Free Press.

Like Sprinzak’s The Ascendance of Israel’s Radical Right, this is excellent but difficult for students with little or no knowledge of Israeli history.

Chapter 22

Myth and ritual

Robert A . Segal

This chapter is divided into three sections: myth, myth tied to ritual, and ritual. The title of the chapter is meant to refer to myth by itself and to ritual by itself as well as to myth linked to ritual. The subject of each section is not actual myths or actual rites but theories of myths and theories of rituals as well as theories of the two combined.

Theories are accounts of some larger domain, of which myth or ritual or myth tied to ritual is a subset. For example, anthropological theories of myth or ritual are theories of culture applied to the case of myth or ritual. Psychological theories of myth or ritual are theories of the mind. Sociological theories are theories of society. Theories may go back to ancient times, but modern theories, which go back 150 years, come largely, though hardly entirely, from the social sciences, which themselves began to emerge as independent disciplines in the second half of the nineteenth century. Theories from outside the social sciences hail from the hoarier disciplines of philosophy, religious studies, and literature.

Myth

What unite theories 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 fulfill and lasts by continuing to fulfill. What the need is, varies from theory to theory and from discipline to discipline. 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.

Theories differ not only in their answers to these questions but also in the questions they ask. Some theories, and perhaps some disciplines, concentrate on the origin of myth; others, on the function; still others, on the subject matter. Only a few theories tend to all three questions, and some of the theories that tend to origin or to function deal with either ‘why’ or ‘how’ but not both.

It is commonly said that theories of the nineteenth century focused on the question of origin and that theories of the twentieth century have focused on the questions of function and subject matter. But this characterization confuses historical origin with recurrent one. Theories that profess to provide the origin of myth claim to know not where and when myth first arose but why and how myth arises wherever and whenever it does. The issue of recurrent origin has been as popular with twentieth-century theories as with nineteenth-

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century ones, and interest in function and subject matter was as common to nineteenthcentury theories as to twentieth-century ones.

There is one genuine difference between nineteenthand twentieth-century theories. Nineteenth-century theories tended to see the subject matter of myth as the natural world and to see the function of myth as either a literal explanation or a symbolic description of that world. Myth was typically taken to be the ‘primitive’ counterpart to science, which was assumed to be wholly modern. Myth and science were not merely redundant but outright incompatible, and moderns, who by definition are scientific, therefore had to reject myth. By contrast, twentieth-century theories have tended to see myth as almost anything but an outdated counterpart to modern science, either in subject matter or in function. Consequently, moderns have not been obliged to abandon myth for science.

Besides the questions of origin, function, and subject matter, questions often asked about myth include: is myth universal? is myth true? The answers to these questions stem from the answers to the first three questions. A theory which contends that myth arises and functions to explain natural processes will likely restrict myth to societies supposedly bereft of science. By contrast, a theory which contends that myth arises and functions to unify society may well deem myth acceptable and perhaps even indispensable to all societies.

A theory which maintains that myth functions to explain natural processes is committed to the falsity of myth if the explanation given proves incompatible with a scientific one. A theory which maintains that myth functions to unify society may well circumvent the issue of truth by asserting that society is unified when its members believe that the laws they are obliged to obey were established long ago by revered ancestors, whether or not those laws really were established back then. This kind of theory sidesteps the question of truth because its answers to the questions of origin and function do.

Definition of myth

That myth, whatever else it is, is a story may seem self-evident. After all, when asked to name myths, most of us think first of stories about Greco-Roman gods and heroes. Yet myth can also be taken more broadly as a belief or credo – for example, the American ‘rags to riches myth’ and the American ‘myth of the frontier.’ Horatio Alger wrote scores of popular novels illustrating the rags to riches myth, but the credo itself rests on no story. The same is true of the myth of the frontier.

All of the theories considered here deem myth a story. But what is myth a story about? For folklorists above all, myth is about the creation of the world. In the Bible only the two creation stories (Genesis 1 and 2), the Garden of Eden story (Genesis 3), and the Noah story (Genesis 6–9) would qualify as myths. All other stories would instead constitute either legends or folktales. Other disciplines are less rigid and instead define myth as simply a story about something significant. Some theories insist that the story take place in the past. Others allow the story to take place in the present or in the future too.

For theories from, above all, religious studies, the main characters in myth must be gods or near-gods. Other disciplines tend to be more flexible. But all disciplines insist that the main figures be personalities – divine, human, or even animal. Excluded would be impersonal forces like Plato’s Good.

Save for Rudolf Bultmann and Hans Jonas, all of the theorists considered here tend to the function of myth, and Bronislaw Malinowski tends to it almost exclusively. Theorists differ over what the function of myth is, but for all of them the function is weighty – in contrast

374â Key topics in the study of religions

to the lighter functions of legend and folktale. Myth accomplishes something significant for adherents.

In today’s parlance, myth is false. Myth is ‘mere’ myth. But the ‘mere’ is misleading. Used negatively, ‘myth’ still captures the strength of the false conviction, and does so more fully than would tamer phrases like ‘erroneous belief’ and ‘popular misconception.’ A myth is a conviction false yet tenacious.

By contrast, the phrase ‘rags to riches myth,’ which sums up the traditional American conviction that anyone with determination can succeed, uses the term myth positively. Ironically, some Americans who continue to espouse the rags to riches credo may no longer refer to it as a ‘myth’ because the term has come to connote falsity. Let, then, myth here be deemed a story that expresses a tenaciously held conviction, be the conviction true or false.

The obvious way to classify theories of myth is by the disciplines from which they come. But this categorization turns out to be less than clear-cut, for a theory that formally falls within one discipline can seemingly also fall within another. For example, the anthropologist Malinowski entitles his classic essay on myth Myth in Primitive Psychology. The theory of the literary critic René Girard rests on a psychology that is pitted against Freud’s. The categorization used in this chapter ignores disciplinary boundaries. Theories are classified by their positions on the relationship of myth to science.

Whether or not myths are as old as humanity, challenges to myth are as old, or almost as old, as myths themselves. In the West the challenge to myth goes back at least to Plato (c. 428–348 or 347 bce), who rejected Homeric myth on, especially, moral grounds. It was above all the Stoics who defended myth against this charge by reinterpreting it allegorically. The chief modern challenge to myth has come not from ethics but from science. Here myth is assumed to explain how gods control the physical world rather than, as for Plato, to describe how gods behave among themselves. Where Plato bemoans myths for presenting the gods as models of immoral behavior, modern critics dismiss myths for explaining the world unscientifically.

Myth as true science

One form of the modern challenge to myth has been to the scientific credibility of myth. Did creation really occur in a mere six days, as the first of two creation stories in Genesis (1:1–2:4a) claims? Was there really a worldwide flood? Is the earth truly but six or seven thousand years old? Could the ten plagues on the Egyptians actually have happened? The most unrepentant defense against this challenge has been to claim that the biblical account is correct, for after all, the Pentateuch was revealed to Moses by God. This position, known as ‘creationism,’ assumes varying forms, ranging, for example, from taking the days of creation to mean exactly six days to taking them to mean ‘ages.’

At the same time creationists vaunt their views as scientific. ‘Creationism’ is shorthand for ‘creation science,’ which appropriates scientific evidence of any kind both to bolster its own claims and to refute those of secular rivals such as evolution. Doubtless ‘creation scientists’ would object to the term ‘myth’ to characterize the view they defend, but only because the term has come to connote false belief. If the term is used neutrally for a firmly held conviction, creationism is a myth that claims to be scientific. For creation scientists, it is evolution that is untenable scientifically. In any clash between the Bible and modern science, modern science must give way to biblical science, not vice versa. Creationism, which may have its counterparts in other religions, thus goes beyond other versions of fundamentalism in claiming to be both religious and scientific, not religious rather than scientific.

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Myth as modern science

A much tamer defense against the challenge of modern science has been to reconcile myth with modern science. Here elements at odds with modern science are either removed or, more cleverly, reinterpreted as in fact scientific. Myth is credible scientifically because it is science. There might not have been a Noah able single-handedly to gather up all living species and to keep them alive in a wooden boat sturdy enough to withstand the strongest seas that ever arose, but a worldwide flood did occur. What thus remains in myth is true because scientific. This approach is the opposite of that called ‘demythologizing,’ which separates myth from science.

In their comment on the first plague, the turning of the waters of the Nile into blood (Exodus 7:14–24), the editors of the Oxford Annotated Bible epitomize this rationalizing approach: ‘The plague of blood apparently reflects a natural phenomenon of Egypt: namely, the reddish color of the Nile at its height in the summer owing to red particles of earth or perhaps minute organisms’ (May and Metzger 1977: 75). Of the second plague, that of frogs (Exodus 8:1–15), the editors declare similarly: ‘The mud of the Nile, after the seasonal overflowing, was a natural place for frogs to generate. Egypt has been spared more frequent occurrence of this pestilence by the frog-eating bird, the ibis’ (May and Metzger 1977: 75). How fortuitous that the ibis must have been away on holiday when Aaron stretched out his hand to produce the plague and must have just returned when Moses wanted the plague to cease!1 Instead of setting myth against science, this tactic turns myth into science – and not, as is fashionable today, science into myth.

Likewise for the American Near Eastern scholar Samuel Noah Kramer (1897–1990), Sumerian creation myths evince observations about the physical world and scientific-like hypotheses drawn to account for them:

It cannot be sufficiently stressed that the Sumerian cosmogonic concepts, early as they are, are by no means primitive. They reflect the mature thought and reason of the thinking Sumerian as he contemplated the forces of nature and the character of his own existence. When these concepts are analyzed; when the theological cloak and polytheistic trappings are removed, … the Sumerian creation concepts indicate a keenly observing mentality as well as an ability to draw and formulate pertinent conclusions from the data observed.

(Kramer 1961: 73)

Gods are mere personifications of natural phenomena, and their actions are mere metaphors for natural processes. Thus the mythic pronouncement that ‘The union of [the male heaven-god] An and [the earth-goddess] Ki produced the air-god Enlil, who proceeded to separate the heaven-father An from the earth-mother Ki’ is to be translated as follows: ‘Heaven and earth were conceived as solid elements. Between them, however, and from them, came the gaseous element air, whose main characteristic is that of expansion. Heaven and earth were thus separated by the expanding element air’ (Kramer 1961: 74, 73). Again, myth is science – modern science.2