Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells
376â Key topics in the study of religions
Myth as primitive science
By far the most common response to the challenge of science has been to abandon myth for science. Here myth, while still an explanation of the world, is now taken as an explanation of its own kind, not a scientific explanation in mythic guise. The issue is therefore not the scientific credibility of myth but the compatibility of myth with science. Myth is considered to be ‘primitive’ science – or, more precisely, the pre-scientific counterpart to science, which is assumed to be exclusively modern. Myth is here part of religion. Where religion apart from myth provides the belief in gods, myth fills in the details of how gods cause events. Because myth is part of religion, the rise of science as the reigning modern explanation of physical events has consequently spelled the fall of not only religion but also myth. Because moderns by definition accept science, they cannot also have myth, and the phrase ‘modern myth’ is self-contradictory. Myth is a victim of the process of secularization that constitutes modernity.
ThekeyexponentsofthischallengetomythhavebeenthepioneeringEnglishanthropologist E. B. Tylor (1832–1917) and the Scottish classicist and fellow pioneering anthropologist J. G. Frazer (1854–1941). For Tylor, myth provides knowledge of the world: ‘When the attention of a man in the myth-making stage of intellect is drawn to any phenomenon or custom which has to him no obvious reason, he invents and tells a story to account for it …’ (Tylor 1871: I, 392). For Frazer, the knowledge that myth provides is a means to control of the world, especially of crops. For both, the events explained or effected by myth are those in the external world such as rainfall, not social phenomena such as customs, laws, and institutions. Myth is the primitive counterpart to natural, not social, science.
For Tylor and Frazer, science renders myth not merely redundant but incompatible. Why? Because the explanations myth and science give are incompatible. It is not simply that the mythic explanation is personalistic and the scientific one impersonal. It is that both are direct explanations of the same events. Gods operate not behind or through impersonal forces but in place of them. According to myth, the rain god, let us say, collects rain in buckets and then chooses to empty the buckets on some spot below. According to science, meteorological processes cause rain. One cannot stack the mythic account atop the scientific one, for the rain god, rather than utilizing meteorological processes, acts in place of them.
Strictly, causation in myth is never entirely personalistic. The decision of the rain god to dump rain on a chosen spot below presupposes physical laws that account for the accumulation of rain in heaven, the capacity of the buckets to retain the rain, and the direction of the dumped rain. But to maintain their rigid hiatus between myth and science, Tylor and Frazer would doubtless reply that myths themselves ignore physical processes and focus instead on divine decisions.
Because Tylor and Frazer assume that myth and science are incompatible, they take for granted not merely that primitives have only myth but, even more, that moderns have only science. Rather than an eternal phenomenon, as the theorists Mircea Eliade, C. G. Jung, and Joseph Campbell grandly proclaim, myth for Tylor and Frazer is merely a passing, if slowly passing, one. Especially for Tyler, myth has admirably served its function, but its time is over. Moderns who still cling to myth have simply failed either to recognize or to concede the incompatibility of it with science. While Tylor and Frazer do not date the beginning of the scientific stage, it is identical with the beginning of modernity and is therefore only a few centuries old. Dying in the first half of the twentieth century, Tylor and Frazer never quite envisioned a stage post the modern one.
In setting myth against science, Tylor and Frazer epitomize the nineteenth-century view of myth. In the twentieth century the trend has been to reconcile myth with science, so
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that moderns, who by definition espouse science, can still retain myth. Tylor’s and Frazer’s theories have been spurned by twentieth-century theorists on many grounds: for precluding modern myths, for subsuming myth under religion and thereby precluding secular myths, for deeming the function of myth scientific-like, and for deeming myth false. Nevertheless, Tylor’s and Frazer’s theories remain central to the study of myth, and twentieth-century theories can be seen as rejoinders to them. One rejoinder has been to take the function of myth as other than explanatory, in which case myth does not overlap with natural science and can therefore coexist with it. Another rejoinder has been to read myth other than literally, in which case myth does not even refer to the physical world and can therefore likewise coexist with natural science.3 The most radical rejoinder has been to alter both the explanatory function and the literal reading of myth.
Myth as other than explanatory in function
The most important reinterpreters of the function of myth have been Bronislaw Malinowski, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Mircea Eliade. It is not clear whether for Malinowski (1884–1942), the Polish-born anthropologist, moderns as well as primitives have myth. What is clear is that for him primitives have science as well as myth, so that myth cannot be the primitive counterpart to modern science, theoretical or applied. Primitives use science both to explain and to control the physical world. They use myth to do the opposite: to reconcile themselves to aspects of the world that cannot be controlled.
Myth reconciles humans to the travails of life by rooting those travails in the primordial actions of gods or humans. Humans age because long ago a god or human did something that brought old age irremediably into the world: ‘The longed-for power of eternal youth and the faculty of rejuvenation which gives immunity from decay and age, have been lost by a small accident which it would have been in the power of a child and a woman to prevent’ (Malinowski 1926: 104). Myth pronounces the world not the best possible one but, in the wake of irreversible events, the only possible one.
Where for Tylor and Frazer myth deals almost exclusively with physical phenomena, for Malinowski it deals equally with social phenomena. Myth still serves to reconcile humans to the unpleasantries of life, but now to unpleasantries that, far from unalterable, can be cast off by members of society. Myth spurs members to accept the impositions of society by tracing them, too, back to a hoary past, thereby conferring on them the clout of tradition: ‘The myth comes into play when rite, ceremony, or a social or moral rule demands justification, warrant of antiquity, reality, and sanctity’ (Malinowski 1926: 36). Myths say, ‘Do this because this has always been done.’ A myth about the British monarchy would make the institution as ancient as possible, so that to tamper with it would be to tamper with tradition. In England today fox hunting is defended on the grounds that it has long been part of country life. In the case of physical phenomena the beneficiary of myth is the individual. In the case of social phenomena the beneficiary is society itself. The modern counterpart to myths of social phenomena, if moderns do not have myth, is ideology.4
To say that myth traces back the origin of phenomena is equivalent to saying that myth explains those phenomena. When, then, Malinowski denies strenuously that myths are explanations – primitives ‘do not want to “explain,” to make “intelligible” anything which happens in their myths’ (Malinowski 1926: 41) – he is denying that they are, as for Tylor, explanations for their own sake. He cannot be denying that they are explanations at all, for it is exactly by explaining phenomena that myths serve their conciliatory function.
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The French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) does not contest Tylor’s and Frazer’s restriction of myth to primitives. Like Malinowski, he contests less Frazer’s than Tylor’s characterization of primitives and thus of myth. Where for Malinowski primitives are too overwhelmed by the world to have the luxury of reflecting on it, for Lévy-Bruhl primitives are too emotionally involved in the world to be capable of accounting for it. Their feelings shape the way they perceive as well as conceive the world. Rather than, as for Tylor, first experiencing a natural world of animals and plants and then postulating gods to account for their behavior, primitives project their ‘collective representations’ onto the world and thereby experience all things in the world as filled with a sacred, or ‘mystic,’ reality pervading the natural one: ‘Primitive man, therefore, lives and acts in an environment of beings and objects, all of which, in addition to the properties that we recognize them to possess, are endued with mystic properties. He perceives their objective reality mingled with another reality’ (Lévy–Bruhl 1926: 65). All phenomena, including humans, are mystically identical with one another.
Myth functions not to explain this mystical world view but to preserve it. As long as members experience oneness with the group, they experience oneness with the world, and myth is barely needed. But once members begin to experience themselves as individuals, they turn to myth to restore the feeling of oneness with society and the world:
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 … Where the aggregates are of a more advanced type, … there is, on the contrary, an increasingly luxuriant outgrowth of mythology. Can myths then likewise be the products of primitive mentality which appear when this mentality is endeavoring to realize a participation no longer directly felt – when it has recourse to intermediaries, and vehicles designed to secure a communion which has ceased to be a living reality?
(Lévy-Bruhl 1926: 368–9)
For Lévy-Bruhl, myth is part of a mythic mentality, and from him comes the notion of a distinctively mythic, or ‘mythopoetic,’ way of thinking. Where for Tylor myth is as logical as science, for Lévy-Bruhl it is conspicuously illogical, or ‘pre-logical.’ For primitives, despite their yearning to re-experience the oneness of all things, simultaneously and inconsistently deem all things distinct. Theorists of myth influenced by Lévy-Bruhl include the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1955).
At first glance the French structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908) seems a throwback to Tylor. For Lévi-Strauss, myth is not only an exclusively primitive enterprise but, more, a rigorously intellectual one. Lévi-Strauss denounces nonintellectualists like Malinowski and Lévy-Bruhl as vigorously as they denounce intellectualists like Tylor. Indeed, in declaring that primitives, ‘moved by a need or a desire to understand the world around them, … proceed by intellectual means, exactly as a philosopher, or even to some extent a scientist, can and would do’ (Lévi-Strauss 1978: 16), Lévi-Strauss seems indistinguishable from Tylor. Yet he is in fact severely critical of Tylor. For Lévi-Strauss, primitives think differently from moderns rather than fail to think as well as moderns.
Primitive, or mythic, thinking is concrete. Modern thinking is abstract. Primitive thinking focuses on the observable, sensory, qualitative aspects of phenomena rather than, like modern thinking, on the unobservable, nonsensory, quantitative ones. Yet myth for Lévi-Strauss is
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no less scientific than modern science. It is simply part of the ‘science of the concrete’ rather than the science of the abstract. For Lévi-Strauss, myth is primitive science and not just the primitive counterpart to exclusively modern science. But because primitive and modern science concentrate on different aspects of the physical world, they are compatible rather than, like myth and science for Tylor, incompatible. And primitive science is not inferior to modern science, the way myth is to science for Tylor.
If myth is an instance of mythic thinking because it deals with concrete, tangible phenomena, it is an instance of thinking per se, modern and primitive alike, because it classifies phenomena. According to Lévi-Strauss, all humans think in the form of classifications, specifically pairs of oppositions, and project them onto the world. Many cultural phenomena express these oppositions, which Lévi-Strauss calls ‘binary oppositions.’ Myth is distinctive in resolving the oppositions it expresses: ‘the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction’ (Lévi-Strauss 1958: 105). Myth resolves a contradiction by providing either a mediating middle term or an analogous, but more easily resolved, contradiction. Either tactic narrows and thereby alleviates the contradiction, but, strictly, neither fully resolves it.
Like the contradictions expressed in other phenomena, those expressed in myth are for Lévi-Strauss apparently reducible to the fundamental contradiction between ‘nature’ and ‘culture.’ That contradiction stems from the conflict that humans experience between themselves as at once animal-like, hence a part of nature, and civilized, hence a part of culture. This conflict arises from the projection onto the world of the oppositional character of the mind. Humans not only think ‘oppositionally’ but, through projection, experience the world ‘oppositionally’ as well. By showing a way of diminishing that opposition, myth makes life more bearable and, even more, solves a logical conundrum.
In calling his approach to myth ‘structuralist,’ Lévi-Strauss distinguishes it from a ‘narrative’ approach, which adheres to the plot of myth. All other theories take for granted that the meaning of myth lies in its plot. Lévi-Strauss dismisses the plot and locates the meaning of myth in the structure. The plot is that element – say, event – A leads to event B, which leads to event C. The structure, which is identical with the expression and diminution of contradictions, is either that events A and B constitute an opposition mediated by event C or that events A and B are as opposed to each other as events C and D, an analogous opposition, are opposed.
Lévi-Strauss confines himself to, primarily, Native American myths, but other structuralists analyze modern myths. In Mythologies (1972) the French semiotician Roland Barthes (1915– 80) takes as myths various cultural artifacts and shows how they serve to justify the bourgeois outlook of postwar France. The function of myth here is not intellectual but ideological. Myth has nothing to do with natural science. Where Lévi-Strauss largely analyzes myths independent of their social context – the grand exception is his analysis of the myth of Asdiwal – others inspired by him have, like Barthes, tied myths to their contexts. For the classicists Jean-Pierre Vernant (1983), Marcel Detienne (1977), Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Nicole Loraux, the relationship between myth and society is much more malleable, subtle, and ironic than it is for Malinowski or even Barthes. Myth can as readily challenge as bolster existing ideology.
Unlike Malinowski and Lévy-Bruhl, the Romanian-born historian of religions Mircea Eliade (1907–86) has no hesitation in making one function of myth explanatory. For him, myth explains less how the gods presently control the world, as for Tylor and Frazer, than how they created it. Like Malinowski, Eliade includes myths of social phenomena as well as
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of physical ones. Explanation for Eliade is both an end in itself and, even more, a means to another end. To hear, to read, and above all to reenact a myth is magically to return toÂthe time of the myth, the time of the origin of whatever phenomenon it explains. It is when the world is fresh that gods, the creators in myth, are belived to be closest at hand, as in the biblical case of ‘the Lord God[’s] walking in the garden of the cool of the day’ (Genesis 3:8). The return to this ‘primordial time’ reverses the subsequent separation from gods, a separation that is equivalent to the fall, and is regenerative spiritually: ‘What is involved is, in short, a return to the original time, the therapeutic purpose of which is to begin life once again, a symbolic rebirth’ (Eliade 1968: 8). The ultimate benefit of myth is proximity to the gods, one or more.
Eliade ventures beyond the other respondents to Tylor and Frazer in proclaiming myth panhuman rather than merely primitive. Instead of showing how myth is logically compatible with science, he circumvents the issue by citing modern plays, novels, and movies with the mythic theme of yearning to escape from the everyday world into another, often earlier one:
A whole volume could well be written on the myths of modern man, on the mythologies camouflaged in the plays that he enjoys, in the books that he reads … Even reading includes a mythological function … particularly because, through reading, the modern man succeeds in obtaining an ‘escape from time’ comparable to the ‘emergence from time’ effected by myths. Whether modern man ‘kills’ time with a detective story or enters such a foreign temporal universe as is represented by any novel, reading projects him out of his personal duration and incorporates him into other rhythms, makes him live in another ‘history.’
(Eliade 1968: 205)
If moderns, who by definition have science, also have myth, then for Eliade myth simply must be compatible with science – not quite the conclusion that Tylor and Frazer would draw. If even professedly atheistic moderns have myths, then myth must be universal. How modern myths, which do not involve gods, can still provide access to gods, Eliade never reveals. Likely for him, the agents in modern myths are merely human heroes, but heroes so elevated above ordinary mortals as to be virtual gods.
Myth as other than literal in meaning
The most prominent reinterpreters of not the function but the meaning of myth have been the German New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) and the German-born philosopher Hans Jonas (1903–93). Both were students of the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) in his earlier period and consequently offer existentialist readings of myth. While they limit themselves to their specialties, Christianity and Gnosticism, they apply a theory of myth per se.
Bultmann acknowledges that, read literally, myth is about the physical world and is incompatible with science. But unlike Malinowski and Eliade as well as Tylor, he reads myth symbolically. In Bultmann’s exasperatingly confusing phrase, one must ‘demythologize’ myth, by which he means not eliminating, or ‘demythicizing,’ myth, the way Kramer does, but on the contrary extricating its true, symbolic subject matter. Once demythologized, myth is no longer about the external world but is instead about the place of human beings in that world. Myth no longer explains but instead describes, and it describes not the external world but