Parallel Myths (44 page)

Bachofen, as we shall see, was an influence on Sigmund Freud’s development of the Oedipal theory. Bachofen also may have influenced another psychoanalytic pioneer, the Austrian-American Alfred Adler. Adler believed that the oppression of women by men as adults was an overcompensation for the dependence felt by male children toward their mothers. Graves and Bachofen would have said that this was a conscious persistence of an unconscious ancestral memory of a time when adult men were ruled by adult women.

It is interesting to note that in our own time, during the fight for the ratification of the U.S. Equal Rights Amendment, opponents of the bill warned of a type of hetairism (although they never used the word) that would result from the equality of the sexes.

Robert Graves

Robert Graves was, by any standard, a most prolific and varied writer: a classical scholar, critic, novelist, and poet. Son of an Irish writer and his German-born wife, Graves was a gifted linguist, a co-translator of the
Rubaiyat
of Omar Khayyam, and was eulogized in the
London Times
as “the greatest love poet in English since [John] Donne.” He is best known today in the United States and Canada for his historical novels about ancient Rome,
I, Claudius
and
Claudius the God
, on which a successful BBC-TV drama series was based.

In his studies of Greek, Germanic, Celtic, and Semitic myths, he concluded that European mythology may only be properly understood in light of a primeval matriarchal period when “the white goddess” (also the title of one of his books) was the universal Earth Mother deity throughout Europe.

Graves felt that the myths that told about the male chief of the Greek gods, Zeus, overthrowing an earlier pantheon of gods, as well as other myths, were the surviving records of the triumph of patriarchy over the matriarchy. Graves was certain of this as a historical fact in ancient Europe, but felt that it might or might not have been the case in other cultures. In the introduction to his celebrated book
The Greek Myths
, he wrote:

Graves, like Bachofen, saw the moon as an important religious symbol during the time of matriarchy. The goddess Artemis (Diana in Latin), goddess of the hunt, was also identified with the moon, even as her brother Apollo was identified with the sun in addition to being a patron of arts and culture. The hunt was considered by the Greeks to be a decidedly unfeminine pursuit and her role may well be interpreted as a remnant of earlier matriarchic thinking. Graves considered this indicative of the roles of women in matriarchal Europe as hunters and warriors, before men became mercenaries under the control of the matriarch.

Consistent with the example of the moon goddess Artemis and with Bachofen’s theories, Graves contended that time during the matriarchal era was measured by the moon, reflective of the menstrual cycle of women. The change from the lunar-based religion to worship of a sun-god, as well as the switch for measuring time from increments of lunar years to those of solar years, are all illustrations of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy.

Nor was the end of matriarchy entirely sudden and final; the struggles between the matriarchy and patriarchy still have influences on our culture today. The modem women’s movement was seen by Graves as a reaction to the tyranny of the patriarchy that has dominated society since preclassical times.

Graves was mainly a believer in the diffusion theory of explaining parallel myths. This is only natural, as Graves was chiefly concerned with Europe, and saw certain myth-producing centers in the ancient Near East and among the Indo-European invaders of Europe. The Greek myths are the result of “syncretism,” a blending of traditions from these two sources of myth.

Adolf Bastian (1826-1905)

Bastian, a Berliner, was trained as a physician, but he soon lost interest in the practice of medicine and devoted himself to his real love: ethnology, the study of cultures. He was largely self-educated in this discipline and traveled throughout Asia, Africa, and South America, impressed by the parallels between myths of widely distant cultures. Bastian was one of the first to express this phenomenon as something common to all human beings in all cultures and all periods of history.

Bastian’s observations are reflected today in both the modern structural and the psychological schools of myth. Bastian advanced the theory of two components of myth: the Elementary Thought (a series of basic mythic patterns common to all human beings and possibly centered in the brain) and the People’s Thought (the specific “coloration” of the Elementary Thought by a given ethnic group at a given time).

As has been pointed out by both the Hindu scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy and the American Joseph Campbell, Bastian’s approach is similar to a traditional Hindu view of the parallel myths. There is the
marga
—the universal path, the elements of myth common to all human beings; this is Bastian’s Elementary Thought. There is also the
deshi-marga
*
the specific form taken by
marga
in a given place and time.

Leo Frobenius (1873-1938)

Frobenius was an amateur scholar of myth, working by day in an export firm in Bremen, Germany, and studying Greek, anthropology,
and mythology by night. During his lifetime, Frobenius was hailed as the world’s foremost authority on prehistoric art.

In 1898, Frobenius announced the then-radical theory called “Kulturkreislehre” (the study of “cultural circles”). He believed that there was a central myth-producing region that stretched from West Africa to India, thence through Indonesia and Oceania to the Americas. In other words, Frobenius was the first radical diffusionist.

Frobenius noted many common myths and cultural relationships in this area and believed that parallel myths were the result of cultural exchanges between ancient peoples on a scale beyond that which most scholars had considered possible. For example, it was the nature of the ancient Polynesians to travel vast distances by sea as they populated islands as distant from one another as New Zealand, Tahiti, Easter Island (off the coast of Chile), and Hawaii. It wouldn’t be reasonable, thought Frobenius, to assume that the early Polynesians would have turned back after reaching as far as Easter Island; it was only natural that they had gone on, to make contact with Peru, also located on the coast of South America. Likewise, there were currents that could have carried the Hawaiians to the northwestern coast of the United States.

Following the theories of Frobenius, the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, in his epic 1947 journey, recounted in
Kon Tiki
, traveled by a South American balsa-wood boat from Peru to Polynesia in an attempt to prove contact between the two cultures was possible.
Kon Tiki
is a term common to the mythologies of Peru, where Con Tiqui is the name of a Creator god, and
tiki
is Polynesian for the image of a god.

Luden Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939)

The celebrated French anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl concentrated his studies on the thought processes of “primitive” or “traditional” peoples. He concluded that the “traditional” cultures make no distinction between the natural (or objective) world and myth, nor between myth and history. For the people in such cultures, myth is the only history.

Lévy-Bruhl advanced an influential theory of parallel myths, believing that there were “motifs” or “representations collectives”—shared plots and characters—of myths that were common to all human beings.

Émile Dürkheim (1858-1917)

In the course of this book, we have already encountered several quotes by Émile Dürkheim, the great French sociologist who focused on the power of myth to bind societies together. A key function of the myth, according to Dürkheim, was to conform the behavior of the individual to the group.

Originally planning to be a rabbi, Dürkheim was keenly interested in the impact of myth and religion on culture. He was particularly impressed with the concept of the “civic myth,” on which states are founded, as well as with the power of myth as an agent of morality.

Dürkheim explained the striking similarities between the myths of diverse historically and geographically distant cultures by a theory he called the “collective conscious.” He believed that the basic ingredients of myth, the plots and characters, were the products of a neurologically based function of the human brain, and thus they were common to all human beings. These universal mythic patterns were the “molds” from which myth came, and the specific cultures “poured” their own elements into these molds. In
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Dürkheim wrote:

With the idea that myth is a product of the collective conscious, a shared “pool” of ancestral memories and images common to all human beings, Dürkheim is a direct contributor to the psychological interpretations of myth given by Carl Jung (and expanded by Joseph Campbell), as well as to the “structuralist” school of the interpretation of myth founded by Claude Lévi-Strauss.

Durkheim’s own life was marked by great tragedy. A frail, nervous, and sensitive man, he was devastated by World War I. He had been attacked as a “professor of German origin” who taught the “foreign” study of sociology, which was considered an import from the hated Germans. And perhaps there was an anti-Semitic element to these attacks as well. His son, a soldier in the French army, was killed in battle in 1916, and Dürkheim died the following year—at only fifty-nine years of age.

As we shall see, Durkheim’s contributions to the interpretation of myth were enormous.

Bronislaw Malinowski

Bronislaw Malinowski was a Polish-born British anthropologist who studied the power of myth in primitive cultures, especially his own field work in the Trobriand Islands of the Pacific. Malinowski saw that “primitive” peoples view myth as the only history that matters, believing all objective life lived today is merely a replay of the events described in the myths.

Malinowski stressed that myth is central to every culture, not merely to traditional cultures. Myth, in his view, is the source of ritual, moral conduct, and social relationships, and is the key element in the worldview of a people.

Malinowski followed the view of Dürkheim, but his explanations of parallel myth were strongly influenced by Frobenius; thus Malinowski felt that mythic themes were diffused from a few mythic centers.

Pierre Janet (1859-1947)

We are not to suppose that religion ever could have persisted if the gods had not spoken.

By the year 1900, four different functions of the unconscious mind had been identified and generally accepted by the psychological and medical community:

1. The conservative function: the recording of personal memories.
   

2. The dissolutive function: things that were once conscious became unconscious (for example, habits) or repressed.
   

3. The creative function.
   

4. The “mythopoetic function.” This was a term coined by the English literary critic and amateur psychologist Frederick Myers, who was possibly the first to say that mythic and epic stories were a permanent part of the human mental structure, and that
   they were constantly composed and played out in the unconscious of the individual.
   

It is at this time that Sigmund Freud, Pierre Janet, and Carl Jung began or were in the early stages of their careers. In 1900, Sigmund Freud, then forty-four, published his landmark book
The Interpretation of Dreams
. This was also the year in which speculations were first advanced that myths were an expression of images in the unconscious mind. Pierre Janet was forty-one in 1900; Jung was a twenty-five-year-old medical student.