A brilliant overview of mythology

Religion 32 (2002), pp 166-8

William G. Doty, Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals, 2nd ed. (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2000)

For fifteen years William Doty’s masterly synthesis of perspectives on mythology has been proving itself indispensable. If one wanted to remind oneself of the various ways theorists have found to relate myth and ritual, narrative and ceremony, form and function, there was no more instructive or delightful way than to take Mythography off the shelf and browse through its contents. The pleasure gained was intrinsic to the information conveyed: one was responding to Doty’s informal but erudite manner, his willingness to make audacious connections, his fondness for the representative anecdote, his relish for the sheer fascination of research.

Now an already impressive volume has been revised and extended. The existing chapters have been reorganised and embellished. Further chapters have been written: there were eight, now there are fourteen. The connecting commentary has been updated to take account of the expansion of higher education, with students needing brief accessible pointers to the current state of mythographic play. A new appendix guides us through the massive contribution to myth studies made by the internet. There are several other pedagogically useful appendices (and by that I mean they will be used by the teacher as well as the student, the scholar and the ‘common reader’). The sheer size of the volume says a good deal: we have jumped from just over 300 pages to nearly 600. Doty could hardly have done much more for us.

The essence of the book’s documentation is done in parts two and three.
Here we are guided effortlessly though differing interpretations of the myth-ritual connection which were influential in the early twentieth century: in particular, Frazer’s comparativism is contrasted with Malinoswki’s functionalism. This might have been an opportunity to patronize the former, but Doty is scrupulously fair, conjecturing that The Golden Bough may have fostered cultural relativism rather than positivist individualism, despite its reputation for being magisterially condescending to the material it documented. Again, while the notion of social function was clearly an advance in understanding, Malinowski and his followers paid too much attention to society and not enough to symbols.

Moving beyond the parameters of ritualism (though still keeping the ritual dimension of behaviour clearly in mind) Doty proceeds to an assessment of psychological theories, with which he displays again his capacity for even-handedness. He gives credit to both Freud and Jung for opening up the mythic dimension of the psyche, but he is obliged to indicate the perils of both psychoanalysis and analytical psychology. If Freud was too fond of etiology (explanation of religion in terms of originary guilt), Jung was too inclined to essentialism (appeal to the Platonic archetype). While conceding the radical insights afforded by such extreme modes of closure, Doty looks to the neo-Jungian James Hillman for a more varied, less restrictive view of mythology: his ‘polytheistic psychology’ is all about finding significance in the myths without distorting them or misrepresenting ourselves, without imposing one dominant model. If this is the ideal, then Joseph Campbell is acknowledged for his attempt to articulate different ‘levels’ of mythic meaning even while his urge to relate them to one fundamental narrative structure, ie, the quest pattern of the ‘monomyth’, is criticised. Similarly, Northrop Frye’s application of Frazer’s seasonal model to the modes of literature is admired, but ultimately Doty withholds his assent from Frye’s mythic totalization of history.

Of the contemporary theorists assessed in the first edition, the two who have survived with least reservation are Clifford Geertz and Victor Turner. Again and again, Doty endorses the former’s reminder that myths not only offer a ‘model of’ reality but also a ‘model for’. And with Turner’s stress on the ritual process as a social drama, involving a ‘liminal’ crisis of disintegration and reintegration, a move from the given ‘structure’ to a new order of ‘communitas’, we get a clear sense of how the ‘model for’ model might be extended beyond the normative to the imaginative dimension.

Of the theorists who feature at length in the second edition for the first time, it is perhaps Pierre Vernant who receives the most unequivocal commendation. A structuralist who has moved beyond the abstract grammar of Levi-Strauss, he demonstrates what can be done when an ability to detect formal contradictions in a narrative is informed by the sense of a particular historical context and a particular semantic crisis. Vernant can tell us a great deal about myth as such because he is so good at articulating the workings of Greek myth at one crucial moment when its meanings were being transformed by way of dramatic performance and intellectual scepticism.

By contrast, another comparative newcomer, Rene Girard, is less interested in local culture than in universal human nature. Doty makes sure the various cases against the scapegoat theory are heard, but he himself seems more concerned with the advances in mythography it has made possible. Girard merits a whole chapter, because he more than anyone has demonstrated in the past two decades the necessity of relating myth to ritual. Even though his formulaic equation of the latter with violence and of the former with the disguising of violence is open to question from many fronts, and even though his answer to both is a rather partial reading of Christianity, Doty clearly values his contribution to the ongoing mythographic dialogue.

We can get a sense of how that dialogue progresses by reflecting that in 1986, when the first edition of Mythography appeared, the theory of ritual seemed to be in decline. Thus, there might have seemed something foolhardy about Doty’s subtitle. Would he not have been better concentrating on mythos, on myth as pure narrative? Now, with a major revival in ‘ritology’, we can see that he was looking forward rather than backwards. The association of mythos with cultus did not betoken nostalgia for the apparent certainties of Frazer-inspired ritualism. Doty was insisting on the need to understand myth as not only a tale told and received but also a mode of being in the world. For if mythos was inseparable from cultus, both were inseparable from ethos. Even in this second edition, in the theoretical reflections in the first and fourth parts, we do not get this triad affirmed unequivocally. But a book that ends with a section called ‘Mythographic Moralities’ has, one hopes, made its point.

For Doty, it matters enormously how a society receives and renews its myths, because otherwise it will conduct itself according to their repressed and misrecognized assumptions. This is not the same as naively equating mythology and ideology, but it is certainly quite distinct from any sentiment for a lost golden age of myth. The point for Doty is not the reassertion of origins but the projection of possibilities. Hence ‘ethos’ extends in meaning beyond any apparent consensus, Geertz’s ritual expression of a ‘world view’, to comprehend the imagining of possible ways of being in the world. (Geertz himself, of course, allows for this: disparity between world view and ethos can always trigger change.) According to the literary critic Eric Gould, cited frequently by Doty, what matters is ‘mythicity’. That is, we have to realize that even in traditional myth, the meaning, the ideal, the absolute, was always absent, having to be imagined and desired across an ontological gap. Modern, mythopoeic literature has made us exceptionally conscious of that gap. Learning to live without finality, without closure, may be the most important task we face, given that the presumption of finality has wreaked so much havoc within culture and nature alike. Indeed, Doty refers frequently to the environmental crisis of our time, and hints that mythography makes little sense without an awareness of human limits. Thus, I would infer from my reading of the closing pages that mythos implies cultus implies ethos implies oikos. Learning to live as modestly as possible within our earthly household may be the ultimate lesson of studying myth.

I wish Doty had been more explicit about this dimension of his argument, but perhaps that is asking too much from an exhaustive and exemplary work of scholarship. Again, his point is that mythography comprehends a number of possibilities, and to stress one at the expense of others would contradict the spirit of pluralism which pervades the book. Doty reminds us frequently that his own understanding of myth is ‘polyesmous’, ‘polyfunctional’, ‘multisemiotic’, etc. Complementing this understanding, he proposes a mythography that is ‘interdisciplinary’ and ‘polyphasic’. The polysyllables should not detract us from the essential merit of his ambitious survey: ‘We are what we myth’. If we confine ourselves to one dominant paradigm as scholars then we are perhaps as guilty as those fundamentalists and ideologues who perpetuate what Blake called ‘the mind-forg’d manacles’.

Having defended Doty from my own objection, I am perhaps entitled to make one final quibble, in accordance with reviewing convention. It is this. Why is Barthes given detailed attention while Buber and Burke are ignored entirely? Barthes is, to my mind, something of a charlatan in the area of mythography; the others really matter. Having got that out of the way, it only remains to say that this second edition of Mythography will be welcomed by students of cultural studies, critical theory, literary studies, history of religion, comparative religion and philosophy, as well as by readers who are intrigued by myth. None of these groups of people will go away unenlightened.

Laurence Coupe

Religion 34 (2004), pp 363-4

Beth Eddy, The Rites of Identity: The Religious Naturalism and Cultural Criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003)

To many of us, Kenneth Burke’s most important book is The Rhetoric of Religion (1961); but in a sense all his previous work, from the early Thirties onwards, is implicitly about the relationship between language and the idea of the ‘supernatural’ — between words and the Word. For Beth Eddy, Burke’s emphasis is consistently on the first term in these pairings: that is, his field is religion as a human construct, as a cultural creation. Further, if using words in order to sanctify the ideals which consolidate their communities is what human beings inevitably do, then the phrase ‘religious naturalism’ becomes appropriate.

However, Eddy emphasises that by ‘religious naturalism’ she does not mean ‘reductive materialism’. It is significant that the legacy from which she sees Burke benefiting is not that of Marxism but rather that represented by figures such as Emerson and Santayana. For Burke does not set out to explain away spirituality, tradition and received wisdom; indeed, he is especially interested in the benefits of ‘piety’, as are his mentors. What he wants is not that society should abandon religion but that it should allow for its continual critique, adjustment and refinement in a humane spirit of dialogue. Ultimately, his rationale is pragmatic; and Eddy’s subtle defence of Burke as one of the most articulate spokespersons for American pragmatism is a chief pleasure of her book. She demonstrates that his debt is not only to Emerson (though we are left in no doubt of Emerson’s influence on pragmatic thought) but also to William James.

An interesting sideline of her discussion is a careful differentiation of Burke’s Emersonian fascination with the ‘bridging’ power of language, by which he means its capacity to speak of the farther shore of spirit in terms of the mundane ground of experience, from Harold Bloom’s Gnostic interpretation of American pragmatism. In other words, if Bloom’s invocation of the supernatural involves the refusal of the created world, Burke’s involves its realisation. When he defines ‘man’ as ‘the symbol-using animal’, he means to suggest a full range of possibilities. If the human being is a creature with close affinities to other primates, who also have language, what ‘man’ possesses beyond that is the capacity to reflect on his/her own words and, ultimately, to imagine the perfection of the absolute Word.

That said, ‘perfection’ is, for Burke, a deeply ambiguous term. Thus, Eddy has to devote a good deal of space to his reflections on how a society, while finding order and meaning through its ideals, may also define itself through the exclusion, punishment or sacrifice of a ‘scapegoat’. If ideals fail, those dedicated to them may well seek an appropriate ‘other’ to bear the burden of their sins. Eddy argues that for Burke the sacrificial or scapegoating impulse is unlikely to disappear, so he commends its expression in wholly symbolic terms. It is better to achieve catharsis through the intensity of a tragic drama, in which a representative individual appears to suffer and die, than to carry out programmes of social ‘purification’ by which whole groups of people actually suffer and die. But the argument necessarily becomes complicated when Eddy also has to acknowledge the fact that Burke’s own saving mechanism is comedy rather than tragedy. He believes that we may save ourselves from the urge for bloody resolution of the social drama by laughing at our own absurdity. Burke commends the ‘comic’ or ‘charitable’ attitude, by which we forgive ourselves even while we forgive others. This is how ‘piety’ is redeemed from an excess of perfectionism and restored to the pragmatic business of learning to live in community. To put this in other terms, if for Burke rhetoric is primarily a matter of ‘identification’, then the aim of all his work is to encourage  ‘congregation’ that does not involve violent ‘segregation’. Religious custom all too often relies on the language of sacrifice when it should be engaged in a constant debate between ‘piety’ and ‘impiety’ –- the latter being a useful means of ‘comic corrective’.

The influence of Burke on thinkers as diverse as Girard and Geertz may be taken for granted, given such tenets. More surprising is Eddy’s claim that the novelist Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man, was indebted to Burke in his depiction of the troubles of a young black man in New York City, and in his own cultural criticism. Yet about a third of Rites of Identity is taken up with situating Ellison in the context of Burke’s religious naturalism. An interesting aspect of the discussion is Ellison’s ambivalence towards the ‘comic’ mode of redemption. Where Burke distinguishes tragedy and comedy quite sharply, Ellison tends to merge them: his sphere is ‘tragicomedy’, which he sees as being articulated by black Americans most expressively in the musical form known as the blues. Eddy proposes that, in his defence of this genre, Ellison is acknowledging his debt to the ‘piety’ of his own tradition. Moreover, if the blues is a ‘rite of identity’, then it is one that does full justice to suffering even while it offers a ‘comic’ critique of the scapegoating of blacks by whites.

Such an insight into the thinking behind Invisible Man, a hugely resonant work of our era, is Eddy’s way of both confirming and revising Burke’s influence. For, if comedy is a mode of transcendence, both Burke and Ellison remind us that this genuinely religious impulse may be celebrated in a manner that is provisional, symbolic and circumspect. For my own part, I believe that Burke is far more fascinated by transcendence in the theological sense than his preoccupation with rhetorical identification might suggest; nor do I consider that such a fascination is incompatible with his relish for what he once called ‘the world’s rich store of error’. But that is an argument for another day, and meanwhile we may be grateful to Beth Eddy for this challenging case for Burke’s ‘religious naturalism’ and its influence.

Laurence Coupe

An important case for Jung

Religion 37 (2007), pp 243-56

Susan Rowland, Jung as a Writer (London and New York: Routledge, 2005)

As someone working in the field of literary studies, I get used to reading critics who espouse a broad acceptance of the Freudian approach to literature, albeit one suitably mediated by later, more semiotically inclined theorists such as Lacan. Thus, if an article or book refers to Shakespeare, it comes as no surprise to see Hamlet being read exclusively in terms of the Oedipus complex. These days, of course, with the idea of an author being long-since declared dead, any suggestion that the text is symptomatic of Shakespeare’s own relationship with his father (Freud’s own claim, in The Interpretation of Dreams) is likely to be underplayed. But the point is that, no sooner has the word ‘textuality’ appeared than, as night follows day. we can expect the complementary rhyme ‘sexuality’. Perhaps this is a caricature, but my point is that Freud still rules, as far as literary theory is concerned. Seldom does one hear mention of Jung, except in the most dismissive terms.

Obviously, this is less likely to be the case in religious studies, but I think it is important to reflect on the probability that, if one were to convene a seminar on Jung which consisted of a broad spectrum of academics working in the humanities, certain fallacies about his work would find expression sooner rather than later. These would include the following: (1) Jung has little interest in history, since he is concerned chiefly with the idea of a collective unconscious which is atemporal. (2) Jung has little interest in culture, since he believes archetypes to be wholly ‘natural’. (3) Jung has, despite (2), little interest in nature in the sense of the material environment, since for him the term ‘natural’ refers exclusively to human nature. (4) Jung has little interest in the external world generally, since his focus is consistently on the internal world of the psyche. (5) Jung has little interest in the way mythology is extended through literature, since for him a myth only has meaning in so far as it can convey a message which will aid the process of psychic individuation. (6) Jung has little interest in gender, despite his recognition of the importance of the anima: like Freud, only more so, his interest in the female is tokenistic. (7) Jung has little interest in his own style: unlike Freud, he shows scant regard for the problem of expression, concentrating on getting his ideas onto the page, no matter how prosaically and clumsily.

Again, I might be guilty of caricature; but I sense that the above catalogue of complaints sums up the consensus amongst those academics who know of his work but have not felt obliged to read very much of it. Thus, it is to the lasting credit of Susan Rowland, a scholar who has already begun the process of re-reading Jung — in C. G. Jung and Literary Theory (Palgrave, 1999) and in Jung: A Feminist Revision (Polity Press, 2002) — that she dispels all of the above fallacies and more besides. Above all, her very title, Jung as a Writer, alerts us to the possibility that not only have we read Jung all too seldom, but that when we have done so we have largely missed the point – that the way he writes is inseparable from what he has to say, that the content of his writing cannot be understood without paying attention to the form. If Jung’s ‘project’ (to use Rowland’s term) is the revitalisation of Western consciousness by opening it up to the challenge of the ‘other’, then we should be prepared to find possibilities expressed in the very act of writing. It would not be enough for Jung simply to state the need to acknowledge and incorporate the power of marginal, frequently feminine, voices within Western discourse: the point, Rowland affirms, is that his own demonstration of creativity enacts the process of opening up.

At the same time, it would be naive to see Jung simply as a practitioner of that play of the signifier which will be associated with post-structuralism: what we find, rather, is a tension – contradiction, even — between his characteristically modern assumption that the masculine, rational worldview is important enough to merit revitalisation and his incipiently postmodern fascination with the infinite potential of the liminal feminine which borders and defines it. Rowland elegantly demonstrates how Jung’s writing works within the tension. Moreover, if it is to be conceived as a contradiction, she shows again and again how Jung’s texts work by moving between the claims of a magisterial dialectic — which would posit the question of gender in terms of a polarity — and an urge to a more ambiguous, androgynous, elusive process.

Having read this book, I am persuaded that Jung really did find a way of letting the ‘other’ have its being. It is hard to convey the way Rowland effects such persuasion: that would involve me in a detailed commentary on her own circumspect, speculative kind of writing. Suffice it to say that I think she is justified in speaking of her approach to Jung as that of ‘a certain friendly fidelity’ to the spirit of his words; certainly, she avoids that plodding literalism which would reduce his rich, varied discourse to an arid scheme.

Having testified to the effect that this book has had on me, I feel obliged to declare an interest. Rowland’s way of reading Jung is partially indebted to ideas that I developed in Myth (Routledge, 1997) and The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism (Routledge, 2000). However, I do not feel that such a declaration necessarily disqualifies me from assessing Jung as a Writer. Rather, I might consider myself uniquely placed to see what Rowland has done with those ideas. I had better state immediately that I not only approve of her argument, but that I am impressed by the sure and subtle way she has developed an approach to Jung that, while broadly confirming some modest insights of my own, extends them considerably by applying them in ways I had not envisaged to a body of work to which their relevance is not immediately apparent.

When I coined the term ‘radical typology’, I wished to offer a corrective to what I called, by way of shorthand, ‘allegory’ — the reading of mythology in terms of extrenal, independent concepts. Instead of translating narrative into idea – mythos into logos — one would do better to see myths as forming a series characterised by foreshadowing and fulfilment, as in biblical exegesis. The difference would be that the process would not involve any closure, so that the potential of the narrative would never finally be realised: the end would always be ‘not yet’. I must admit that when I formulated this idea, I did not have Carl Jung’s theory of myth in mind; but reading Rowland’s book, I realise now that I should have done, and that I should have made a lot more of the sheer exuberance and creativity of his formulations. Jung as a Writer has taught me to see ‘radical typology’ at work in the way his own creativity of expression furthers the cause of reading myth as a means of exploring borderlines and glimpsing horizons.

In particular, by comparing his work with Mikhail Bakhtin’s, she shows that Jung, while always mindful of the need for a received, unifying vision, knows full well that it is in diversity and marginality that the future lies. His thinking is not so much dialectical as ‘dialogical’. Hence his fascination with crossing boundaries: culture/ nature, male/female, eternity/time, sacred/profane. Moreover, his distinction between the ‘psychological’ and the ‘visionary’ dimensions of narrative allows for a much richer reading of both mythic and literary material than Freud’s. Confining himself largely to causal explanation, biographical information and the individual case study, it is Freud who now appears to lack a cultural, collective, historical sense – without which we lose the dimension of the ‘not yet’. It is Carl Jung who, on the evidence of Rowland’s skilful exposition, shows himself capable of that: his approach is more ‘visionary’ than ‘psychological’.

Looking for the key moment in Rowland’s book where she conveys the gist of her argument most succinctly, I settled on this:

Jung understood that this culture was built on structures of exclusion, and that this was a sickness. He tried to put back together the rational science derived from religious premises with ethical relating to the (unconscious) other. Mythically, these are represented by the transcendent Father-God of monotheism and in the relational web of the Earth mother-goddess. While Jung’s texts are limited by his own prejudices, his writing is yet to be fully appreciated as an experiential process of cultural healing. In the urgent task of addressing the world still haunted by apocalyptic narrative, now in the form of environmental crisis and global terror, Jung’s aesthetic-science is a resource in the writing. (p. 195)

That summation comes at the end of the penultimate chapter. I can honestly say that getting there, and being able to see Jung in a wholly new light, has been a rewarding experience for this particular reader. To those who are instinctively sceptical about Rowland’s assertion, I can only advise them strongly to make the effort to progress attentively through the substantial thesis set out in these pages, and to suspend their disbelief so that they might have a revelation as rich as mine.

In my case, an added bonus is offered by seeing how the ecological approach to culture – what I call ‘green studies’ in general, and which is known as ‘ecocriticism’ in particular — may acquire new significance once we allow Jung to speak to our age: one of environmental crisis, as Rowland reminds us above. If we are prepared to recognise his engagement with history and culture, we should also be prepared to learn how he enriches our concept of nature. Despite appearing to share in the masculine bias of monotheism and modernity, Jung effectively deconstructs the male ego and patriarchal law, releasing alternative possibilities which he finds to reside in the idea of the natural world as sacred. The ‘web’ of the goddess will always exceed the scope of the male-centred hero myth, just as she stands as a perpetual challenge to the male-centred creation myth. Yet Jung may teach us also to avoid the error of post-structuralism, namely its bias towards language at the expense of environment, towards the word at the expense of the world. Jung shows how the two realms may be brought back together, just as the inner life finds symbolic expression in the outer by way of such phenomena as ‘synchronicity’.

Significantly, he does so by reviving discourses that have been repressed by the Western mind, from animism to alchemy, all of which have something to say about the way humanity relates to nature, and how the male relates to the female. It is not that each of them simply anticipates ecocriticism, but that ecocriticism realises their potential in new and unexpected ways. If we forget how to read such discourses, then our alienation may culminate in a literal apocalypse, as we destroy everything that is ‘other’ in the name of ‘man’. Thanks to Rowland’s exposition of Jung’s thought, we can not only see where we may have got him wrong, but we can also see where our civilisation is going disastrously wrong insofar as it does not know how to attend to such creative, exploratory, audacious writing as his.

I began this review by musing on the dominance of Freudian thought in literary studies, so it seems appropriate to end where this book ends, with Hamlet. For, as if this major revaluation of Jung were not sufficient unto itself, we get by way of bonus an ‘epilogue’ on Shakespeare’s most enigmatic tragedy. Judiciously conceding the force of Freud’s Oedipal reading, Rowland proceeds in no more than twelve pages to sketch the blueprint for an alternative, Jungian reading of the play that relates it to the following topics, amongst others: the myth of the goddess; the transition between Catholic feudalism and Protestant capitalism (a brief allusion to Ted Hughes’s remarkable study of Shakespeare proving useful here); the move within patriarchy from sacred to political ritual; the birth of modernity and of the alienated consciousness; the death-awareness that grew in the early modern era, defining the individual in new ways, given the demise of an organic sense of belonging; the emergence of republicanism in the wake of the demise of sacred kingship. Not only are such complex issues addressed clearly and cogently, but the whole account of the play forms a coherent coda to Rowland’s case for Jung’s ‘visionary’ way of reading – and of writing.

Laurence Coupe

Reading for the Myth

Laurence Coupe

The English Review, 4, 4 (April 1994), pp. 6-9

What do we understand by ‘myth’? Laurence Coupe answers by showing how mythic patterns lie behind works as different as T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land, and Coppola’s film, Apocalypse Now.

Note: This is a slightly revised version.

***

Being told you may have to find out about ancient mythology while working on Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, say, or Milton’s Lycidas, may be initially annoying, but it would be misguided to deny the relevance of the exercise. Indeed, reading for the myth — looking at particular works for their underlying, primitive pattern — need not be considered a painful duty at all. If you think about it, it is something we do automatically, even when we are not consciously studying for literary examinations. We ‘read’ film and popular music whenever we stop to think about their hidden design.

Myth and ritual

Let us first recognise that it will not be much use if we start out, as many people do, by using the word ‘myth’ to mean ‘false account of things’, as in ‘It’s a myth that we are live in a free society.’ But rather than run through the many, various definitions which are rather more helpful than that, we will base our discussion on one massively influential theory concerning the very origin of myth, that of Sir James Frazer.

Frazer was the author of the twelve volumes of interpretation known collectively as The Golden Bough (completed 1915). Here, he argued that we could not understand myth separately from ritual. His focus was on that early form of myth which concerned fertility, and would have been the story accompanying some form of vegetation ceremony, or nature cult. The tale it told would have been that of ‘the dying and reviving god’. Why did the god have to die? Precisely because his business was fertility. The community depended on him (or so it believed) for its own survival. If the god did not die he could not be reborn, and so there would be no new crops.

Near a sacred lake in ancient Italy, in the days of imperial Rome, there stood a sacred grove, at the centre of which was a sacred oak. The place was called Nemi, and it was there, according to Frazer, that there persisted a custom which had its roots in the primitive magic of the Neolithic period, or New Stone Age. The ‘King of the Wood’ was annually replaced by ritual slaughter. The contender for the title had to pluck ‘the golden bough’, or mistletoe, from the oak in order to prove he had taken over the power of the god. Only through this violent succession could the fertility of the land be ensured. There was a magical connection between the drama of the dying and reviving god on the one hand, and the seasonal cycle on the other. The king is dead: long live the king.

If Frazer’s account of the ritual origin of myth was confined to the original ceremony, his approach inspired others to trace its influence. As the title of Jessie L. Weston’s book, From Ritual to Romance (1920), suggests, it was possible to discover the outline of the primitive drama of the slain god in later literary forms. In particular she was interested in the medieval story of the search for the Holy Grail, the cup containing the blood of the crucified Christ. She was sure the legend had its basis in the nature cults documented in The Golden Bough.

Essentially she argued that, just as there was no question that the existing god of the year had to be replaced by a stronger successor (in order that autumn and winter should lead to spring and summer), so the questing knight had to prove himself via a definite series of tasks. He had to undergo terrible ordeals, such as that of the Perilous Chapel. He had to find the Grail Castle. He had to ask the ritual question of the chalice: ‘Whom does it serve?’ He had to understand the answer: that the wounded Fisher King and the Waste Land were one. Only then would the healing powers of the Grail be effective: the waters freed, the monarch healed and fertility restored. Finally, with the Waste Land redeemed, its ruler would be able to die, and the quester would replace him as the new Fisher King. We have here glimpsed a mysterious initiation, founded in vegetation ceremony and embellished both by ‘folk’ imagination and Christian doctrine: a complex development of ‘ritual’ into ‘romance’.

The modern wilderness: The Waste Land

Frazer and Weston were important figures in what became known as ‘the myth-and-ritual’ school of interpretation. Myth derived from ritual, and literature from myth. This theory had a tremendous influence on the early 20th-century movement known as ‘modernism’, and modernist writers were particularly keen to draw on ancient myth to give added depth to their own work. The novelists D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf were typical in their obsession with primitive patterns, as were the poets W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound. But perhaps the most thorough exponent of what he himself called ‘the mythical method’ was T. S. Eliot, author of the long, multi-layered poem, The Waste Land (1922).

This work is a deliberate updating of two stories: that of the dying and reviving god, and that of the questing knight and the Fisher King. In our era, the poet seems to say, the god has died but the community is not ready for his revival. Spring brings only anxiety not rejoicing: ‘April is the cruellest month, breeding / Lilacs out of the dead land.’ The inhabitants of this land may well be asked: ‘What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?’ But the question cannot yet be answered, because these ‘crowds of people, walking round in a ring’ are oblivious to the need for true ceremony. Theirs is an empty ritual. A corpse is buried in a garden, suggesting a link with the ancient Egyptian cult of the god Osiris, but there is no mention of any rebirth. A sailor drowns, suggesting a link with the ancient Syrian/Greek god Adonis, but the waters of death are not transformed into the waters of life. Even when the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ are alluded to, the inhabitants of the modern metropolis, ‘Unreal city’, can only reflect: ‘He who is living is now dead / We who were living are now dying / With a little patience…’

Thus the nameless narrator of the poem, who serves as witness to its various episodes – we can hardly call him hero – is on a quest whose purpose seems to have been forgotten. This is a Waste Land which scarcely deserves to be redeemed, since the role of the Fisher King has been denied and degraded. Where once the fish symbolised fertility — abundant life brought out of the waters — it is now associated chiefly with desolation: ‘A rat crept softly through the vegetation / Dragging its slimy belly on the bank / While I was fishing in the dull canal / On a winter evening round behind the gashouse / Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck / And on the king my father’s death before him.’ (References here to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a play categorised as a ‘romance’, concerning the triumph of love and life over hatred and death, are as ironic as those to the Grail legend itself.) The questing knight may have to undergo ordeals — there are allusions to the episode of the Perilous Chapel, where ‘bats with baby faces in the violet light / …crawled head downward down a blackened wall’ — but there is no sense of an initiation leading to the healing knowledge of the Grail.

Significantly, as the poem draws to its close, the narrator assumes the guise of the Fisher King, still waiting to be healed: ‘I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me….’ This moment is immediately followed by the final (unanswered) question: ‘Shall I at least set my lands in order?’ — words adapted from the Biblical prophet Isaiah’s warning to a sick ruler whose kingdom lies desolate.

Entering the ‘heart of darkness’

Eliot’s The Waste Land, with its comprehensive and ironic use of the insights of Frazer and Weston, is one of the highest achievements of modernist literature. Anyone who failed to read it for the myth would be missing most of its significance. But the power of the primitive pattern is not confined to ‘the great tradition’ of set books. Popular cinema and music often gain their effects in similar ways. Consider Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now (1979), with its intermittent use of a song by the 1960s band, The Doors.

Coppola was inspired initially by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902). The film follows the novella in having the narrator (then Marlow, now Willard) take a terrifying river-journey (then through the Congo in the days of Empire, now through Vietnam to Cambodia during the American war against the Vietcong). He is trying to locate a mysterious figure (in both cases called Kurtz) whose mind has apparently been deranged by his years in the wilderness. Kurtz has become the object of native worship, and has encouraged the most barbaric practices.

The film goes beyond Conrad’s story in that Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) of the US Army has received instructions to ‘terminate with extreme prejudice’ — i.e. kill — Colonel Kurtz (Marion Brando) because his ‘methods are unsound’. In other words, his mission is the murder of a man who has set himself up as a god.

In case we fail to note the mythic theme, the film gives us all sorts of clues. When Willard finally encounters his victim, he finds him reading aloud from the poetry of T. S. Eliot. On his table lie copies of Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. On his way there, Willard has experienced all manner of ordeals, culminating in a nightmare imprisonment in a cage. Shortly after the meeting he will carry out the murder simultaneously with the natives’ ritual sacrifice of a buffalo. No sooner is the deed performed, and the body of the ‘god’ left bleeding, than Kurtz’s followers bow down and worship his killer, whom they assume to be his replacement.

The fact that Willard refuses to take over from Kurtz — that the dying god is not replaced by the reviving god, that the questing knight does not succeed the Fisher King — is consistent with the ironic use of myth in Eliot’s modernist poetry. Apocalypse Now is what you might call a ‘literary’ film. But the point is that its massive appeal — it is after all a ‘cult’ work among countless young adults — suggests a fundamental need for mythic meaning. Even those who do not spot the references — Frazer, Weston, Eliot — are aware that they are witnessing something at once very complex and very simple, sophisticated and primitive, modern and archaic.

This is borne out by the even greater appeal of the Doors’ music, shrewdly used by Coppola at key points in the film. The lengthy song, ‘The End’ (1966), which accompanies the opening and closing sequences, is as mythic in its own way as is Eliot’s poem. We enter ‘a Roman wilderness of pain’: that is, ‘a desperate land’ where ‘All the children are insane.’ Nor is that all. ‘Waiting for the summer rain’, the people are ‘desperately in need of some stranger’s hand’, some ritual guidance. The singer seems to know the answer, but he expresses it cryptically, so that only those aware of myth and myth theory can understand. His solution, then, is twofold: ‘Ride the king’s highway’ (follow the way of the god) and ‘Ride the snake’ to ‘the ancient lake’ of Nemi (trust to fertility, mystery). As if to confirm the implicit pattern (though Morrison is clearly thinking also of Freud and the Oedipus legend), the song includes an account of ritual murder: that of the father (dying god) by the son (reviving god). Once again, however, the meaning is ambiguous. Hope may be implied by the lines inviting us to ‘picture what will be, / So limitless and free…’. But both the first and the final declaration is stark and clear: ‘This is the end.’ Whether the end leads to a new beginning is left uncertain.

There is a lot more to say about how such archaic material actually functions in particular texts, and about how various critics disagree over its interpretation. But at least we can acknowledge here that recognising the fundamental narrative pattern — that is, reading for the myth — is  necessary for the full appreciation of the work being considered. It may be a film or a song which we happen to find intriguing; it may be a difficult, modernist poem which has been set for examination. In each case, the pleasure and satisfaction can only be increased.

Further reading:

Laurence Coupe, Myth, 2nd edition (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009)