Parallel Myths (42 page)

The reason is of ancient date why myths have come, in vulgar estimation, to be synonymous with lies; though true myths—and there are many such—are the most comprehensive and splendid statements of truth known to man. A myth, even when it contains a universal principle, expresses it in a particular form, using with its peculiar personages the language and accessories of a particular people, with the connected accidents of time and place, are familiar and dear, receive the highest enjoyment from the myth, and the truth goes with it as the soul with the body.

I believe that a large portion of the mythological conception of the world which reaches far into the most modern religions, is nothing but psychology projected to the outer world.

Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be expressed in words.

I am therefore inclined to believe that the mysteries of the divine as well as of the human and world life, with all their complexity of historical destiny, admit of solution only through concrete mythology. The knowledge of the divine life is not attainable by means of abstract philosophical thought based on the principles of formalist or rationalist logic, but only by means of a concrete myth which conceives the divine life as a passionate destiny of concrete and active persons…

Myth is the natural and indispensable intermediate stage between unconscious and conscious cognition.

… it struck me what it means to live with a myth, and what it means to live without one. “Myth,” writes a Church Father, “is what is believed always, everywhere by everybody; hence the man who thinks he can live without myth or outside it, is an exception. He is like one uprooted, having no true link with either the past, or the ancestral life within him, or yet with contemporary society.

The primitive habit of thought survives in mythology, which is an observation of things encumbered with all they suggest to a
dramatic fancy. It is neither conscious poetry nor valid science, but the common root and raw material of both.

Every positive statement about ultimate things must be made in the suggestive form of myth, of poetry. For in this realm the direct and indicative form of speech can only say “Neti, neti” (Sanskrit for “No, no”), since what can be described and categorized must always belong to the conventional realm.

Myth is a symbolic story which demonstrates the inner meaning of the universe and of human life.

It makes clear that the typical is actually the mythical, and that one may as well say “lived myth” as “lived life”…. The mythical interest is as native to psychoanalysis as the psychological interest is to all creative writing. Its penetration into the childhood of the individual soul is at the same time a penetration into the childhood of mankind, into the primitive and mythical…. For myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious…. What is gained is an insight into the higher truth contained in the actual; a smiling knowledge of the eternal, the ever-being and authentic; a knowledge of the schema in which and according to which the supposed individual lives, unaware, in his naive belief in himself as unique in space and time, of the extent to which his life is but formula and repetition and his path marked out for him by those who trod it before him.

Mythology is such a poem of nature. In its fabric the supreme values are actually shaped by art; all is connection and transformation, related and translated, and this relation and translation constitutes its peculiar procedure, its inner life, its method.

Mythology is inevitable, it is natural, it is an inherent necessity of language, if we recognize in language the outer form and manifestation of thought; it is in fact the dark shadow that language throws upon thought, and which can never disappear until language becomes entirely commensurate with thought, which it never will. Mythology, no doubt, breaks out more fiercely during the early periods of the history of human thought, but it never disappears altogether. Depend upon it, there is mythology now as there was in the time of Homer, only we do not perceive it, and because we ourselves live in the very shadow of it, and because we all shrink from the full meridian light of truth … Mythology, in the highest sense, is the power exercised by language on thought in every possible sphere of mental activity.

Plato—who may have understood better what forms the mind of men than do some of our contemporaries who want their children exposed only to “real” people and everyday events—knew what intellectual experiences make for true humanity. He suggested that the future citizens of his ideal republic begin their literary education with the telling of myths, rather than with mere facts
or so-called rational teachings. Even Aristotle, master of pure reason, said: “The friend of wisdom is also a friend of myth.”

Modern thinkers who have studied myths and fairy tales from a philosophical or psychological viewpoint arrive at the same conclusion, regardless of their original persuasion. Mircea Eliade, for one, describes the stories as models for human behavior [that] by that very fact give meaning and value to life.

Myths are dramatic stories that form a sacred charter either authorizing the continuance of ancient institutions, customs, rites and beliefs in the area where they are current, or approving alterations.

I maintain that there exists a special class of stories, regarded as sacred, embodied in rituals, morals, and social organization, and which form an integral and active part of primitive culture. These stories live not by idle interest, not as fictitious or even as true narrative, but are to the natives a statement of a primeval, greater and more relevant reality, by which the present life, fates, and activities of mankind are determined, the knowledge of which supplies man with the motive for ritual and moral actions, as well as indications of how to perform them.

Studied alive, myth … is not symbolic, but a direct expression of the subject matter; it is not an explanation in satisfaction of a scientific interest, but a narrative resurrection of primeval reality, told in satisfaction of deep religious wants, moral cravings, social submissions, assertions, even practical requirements. Myth fulfills in primitive culture an indispensable function: it expresses, enhances and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality; it vouches for the efficiency of ritual
and contains practical rules for the guidance of man. Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard worked active force; it is not an intellectual explanation or artistic imagery, but a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom.

We are able, through scientific thinking, to achieve mastery over nature … myth is unsuccessful in giving man more material power over the environment. However, it gives man, very importantly, the illusion that he can understand the universe and that he does understand the universe.

Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, the myths of man have flourished, and have been the living inspiration of whatever else appeared out of the human body and mind. It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social form of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries of science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

… myth, legend, images and symbols may not be criticized because they are myths, legends, images and symbols…. Thus, even when the mythical element is simply eliminated [from Christianity]—as becomes evident in the theology of the Enlightenment and liberalism—it is at the expense of the Christian message, which is thrown out together with the myth.

Myth is a past with a future, exercising itself in the present.

Creer un mythe, c’est a dire entrevoit derriére la réalité sensible une realité supérieure, est le signe le plus manifeste de la grandeur de Väme humaine et la preuve de sa faculté de croissance et de developpement infinis
.

To create a myth, that is to say, to venture behind the reality of the sense to find a superior reality, is the most manifest sign of the greatness of the human soul and the proof of its capacity for infinite growth and development.

The real point of myth is not to give an objective world picture; what is expressed in it, rather, is how we human beings understand ourselves in our world. Thus, myth does not want to be interpreted in cosmological terms but in anthropological terms—or, better, in existentialist
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terms. Myth talks about the power or the powers that we think we experience as the ground and limit of our world and of our own action and passion. It talks about these powers in such a way, to be sure, as to bring them within the circle of the familiar world, its things and forces, and within the circle of human life, its affections, motives and possibilities. This is the case, say, when it talks about a world egg or a world tree in order to portray the ground and source of the
world in a graphic way or when it talks about the wars of the gods from which the arrangements and circumstances of the familiar world have all arisen. Myth talks about the unworldly as worldly, the gods as human.

What is expressed in myth is the faith that the familiar and disposable world in which we live does not have its ground and aim in itself but that its ground and limit lie beyond all that is familiar and disposable and that this is all constantly threatened and controlled by the uncanny powers that are its ground and limit. In unity with this myth also gives expression to the knowledge that we are not lords of ourselves, that we are not only dependent within the familiar world but that we are especially dependent on the powers that hold sway beyond all that is familiar, and that it is precisely in dependence on them that we can become free from familiar powers.

… Myth talks about gods as human beings, and about their actions as human actions, with the difference that the gods are represented as endowed with superhuman power and their action as unpredictable and able to break through the natural run of things. Myth thus makes the gods (or God) into human beings with superior power, and it does this even when it speaks of God’s omnipotence and omniscience, because it does not distinguish these qualitatively from human power and knowledge but only quantitatively.

In short, myth objectifies the transcendent into the immanent, and thus also into the disposable, as becomes evident when cult
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more and more becomes action calculated to influence the deity by averting its wrath and winning its favor.