READING MYTH

1: PIONEERS

 First published as part of ‘MYTH’, ABES 2000

 The Annotated Bibliography for English Studies, or ABES, was launched in 1997 by Robert Clark at the University of East Anglia, UK.  I contributed between 1997 and 2000. Here I offer an initial selection of my commentaries on books about – or relevant to – the study of mythology.

Please note: When writing these entries, I deliberately made them as substantial as possible: I wanted to avoid perfunctory summaries.

If citing this selection, please use the following details: Laurence Coupe, ‘Myth’, Annotated Bibliography for English Studies, ed. Robert Clark (Lisse & Abingdon: Swets & Zeitlinger, 2000).

 

#Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Ware: Wordsworth Reference, 1922, repr.1993)

This abridged version of Frazer’s magnum opus is the best way for the busy research student to grasp the overall structure of Frazer’s argument, which is essentially a simple one. His original volumes, published between 1895 and 1915, are so full of incidental details and speculative diversions that one can easily lose one’s way.

The key to The Golden Bough is the idea of the relation between myth and ritual. Frazer begins with the ‘King of the Wood’, whom he supposes was a ‘priestly’ king privileged to guard the oak at the centre of a ‘sacred grove’ in ancient Italy. For the oak was the embodiment of the goddess Diana, and the king’s relation to it was that of fertility god to fertility goddess. By means of ‘sympathetic magic’, the violent death and dramatic revival of the king or god ensured the vegetative cycle. Complementing this ritual
sacrificial pattern there arose those narratives we call myths.

Frazer wishes to go further than this, though, and uses this ‘myth and ritual’ basis to explain the very origins of religion and of civilisation, noting parallels with the pattern of the ‘dying and reviving god’ in, for example, Mesopotamia (Tammuz), Egypt (Osiris) and Syria (Adonis).

Subsequent anthropology may have questioned the grounds of this elegant argument, made by a classics scholar who never engaged in field research. But the idea of a primitive fertility ritual – the source of all religion, and still surviving in modern ‘folk’ customs – was too attractive for many modernist writers, most notably T. S. Eliot, to resist.

#Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920, repr. 1980)

Chiefly known as one of one of the two main sources for Eliot’s poem The Waste Land (the other being Frazer’s The Golden Bough), this study of the Grail legend has its own intrinsic merits and should be read by anyone interested in the connection between myth (‘Ritual’) and literature (‘Romance’). It will be clear that the approach taken to the former is that of the Cambridge ‘myth and ritual’ school of interpretation. However, Weston goes beyond Frazer in analysing how the vegetation ceremony associated with the death and revival of the god acquired in time a more specialised interest. That is, she traces the move from the exoteric ‘Life Cult’ to the esoteric ‘Mystery Cult’: where the earlier ritual, with its attendant myth, concerned the maintenance of the crops and the survival of the community, the
later one concerned the initiation of the individual into cosmic wisdom.

Those Arthurian romances which narrate the quest for the lost chalice, reputedly containing the blood of the Messiah, are variations upon the ‘Mystery Cult’ and are rooted in the ‘Life Cult’. Weston insists that they are not primarily Christian in meaning. Not only does this thesis elucidate the main characters and episodes of the Grail legend, but it indicates how one might approach later, more secular quest-narratives. Eliot certainly thought so, and his own work of modernist mythopoeia draws freely not only on Arthurian romance but also on texts which he took to be complementary, such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

#Robert A. Segal (ed), The Myth and Ritual Theory: An Anthology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998)

Robert Segal’s ambitious collection of material takes us from the original formulation of ‘myth-ritualism’, whereby myths derive from rituals, made by William Robertson Smith in 1889, to the structuralist account of myth and ritual as complementary opposites, made by Claude Levi-Strauss in 1963. That is, it demonstrates the extreme variety of the ways of understanding the relation between myth and ritual, between narrative and ceremony. The most famous exponent of ‘myth and ritual theory’, Sir James Frazer, went further than Smith by positing a magical relationship between the death and rebirth of the fertility god and the cycle of vegetation, which ensured the flourishing of the crops. In making this agricultural emphasis, Frazer equivocated between the assumption that the god’s progress was merely imitated and the assumption that he was identified with a royal incarnation  who has actually to be killed.

We are offered not only an extract from Frazer’s The Golden Bough, but also extracts from the various books it influenced, notably Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (a study of the ‘Life Cult’ underlying the legend of the Holy Grail), Jane Harrison’s Themis (an application of Frazerian theory to Greek religion), S. H. Hooke’s Myth and Ritual (which argues that the pattern of the dying and reviving god of vegetation originated in the Ancient East, and then spread elsewhere according to the principle of ‘diffusion’), and Lord Raglan’s The Hero (which treats hero myth as a variation upon fertility myth).

All this is valuable material, which students of myth and literature will benefit from. However, the scope of the anthology extends also to cover literary applications of ‘myth-ritualism’, particularly in the study of drama, but also in the perspective of the development of Western literature as a whole (as provided most impressively by Northrop Frye).

Moreover, the editor interprets ‘myth and ritual theory’ widely enough to include the ideas of several important theorists of myth: apart from Levi-Strauss, we also find Mircea Eliade (who sees ritual as an enactment of myth’s ‘eternal return’ to the moment of origin) and Rene Girard (who agrees with Frazer that myths derive from sacrificial rituals, but who proposes that their function is to disguise the violence which is their source). All in all, this substantial anthology serves to illuminate the complexity of the myth-ritual connection without encouraging complication. The editor’s introduction is a model of clarity.

#Robert  Ackerman, The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (New York and London: Garland Press, 1991)

Ackerman, author of a critical biography of Frazer (J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work, Cambridge University Press, 1987), here puts his ‘comparative method’ of anthropology in its context. Frazer’s immediate debt was to the Biblical scholar, William Robertson Smith, who had associated primitive or tribal myth with ritual, and who had suggested that the ritual involved the killing of the totem or god. Frazer’s innovation was to associate the ritual with vegetation and to identify the god as a god of fertility. However, in claiming to have found the key to all mythologies in a religion based on magic – that is, on the assumption of an intimate bond between human action (killing the king, or representative of the god) and the processes of nature (the renewal of vegetation) – Frazer’s ‘universalism’ owed a great deal to the rationalism of the Enlightenment.

Ackerman traces this background, as he does also the Romantic mythography which reacted against it. In doing so, he implies that Frazer’s work was informed, paradoxically, by the latter perspective simultaneously, in so far as he was seeking to get back to the roots of a humanity that was organically in process, and so could not quite be explained away. This dual tradition illuminates the tension in The Golden Bough: high-handedly ‘intellectualist’, it yet conveys a fascination with the ‘savage’ and remote past it documents.

As for Frazer’s own influence: according to Ackerman, the Cambridge Ritualists, of whom the main representative was Jane Harrison, benefited from his dramatic evocation of ceremonial murder – the agon of dying and reviving god – and they approved of his ‘comparative’ idea of the affinity between ancient Greek culture and primitive custom (which they applied much more systematically than he ever did). But they were dissatisfied with the ‘universalism’ which accompanied his method, his impoverished view of collective psychology, and with his mechanical model (derived from the Enlightenment and from positivism) of a triadic historical development of humanity from magic, through religion, to science. Ackerman elucidates these connections and contrasts thoroughly. The only quibble that a literary student might make is about the scant treatment afforded to Jessie L. Weston: she, of course, was the Ritualist who was given equal credit with Frazer in Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land.

#Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’ (Doncaster: Brinmyll Press, 1979)

This parallel text pamphlet offers Wittgenstein’s original ‘Remarks’ in German together with an English translation by Rush Rhees. Written during the philosopher’s later years, after he had moved from a mimetic to a pragmatic view of language, from the notion that words represent things to the notion that words occur as collective practices or ‘language games’, it remorselessly exposes the fallacies in Frazer’s reconstruction of primitive fertility myth.

For instead of acknowledging that early humans would have recited myths and re-enacted rituals without intellectual reflection, as indeed people still engage in collective practice today, he insists on treating the story of the dying god of vegetation as a ‘theory’ based on an ‘error’. Wittgenstein proposes that this is just as absurd as regarding Christian baptism as ‘an inefficient form of washing’. Wittgenstein castigates Frazer for his ‘narrowness of spiritual Iife’, for his inability to get beyond an arid intellectualism. Though something of a curiosity, this is an important document, in that it juxtaposes one of the most influential philosophers of the century with one of the most influential mythographers.

#Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Religion: Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism and Other Works, ed. Albert Dickson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985)

The student of mythology may safely ignore the ‘other works’ indicated on the title page. Here, in Totem and Taboo (1913) and in Moses and Monotheism (1934-8), we have Freud’s two most important accounts of myth apart from the analysis of the Oedipus story given in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). As in that work, interpretation turns out to be radical rewriting; mythography turns out to be mythopoeia. Having translated Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex from a tragedy of truth into a tragedy of sexual conflict, in Totem and Taboo he proceeds to apply his own, highly fanciful hypothesis of the ‘Oedipus complex’ to history itself. Just as the individual male seeks to repress the memory of his childhood wish to kill his father, so humanity has repressed the memory of the ‘primal crime’, that moment when the tribal patriarch was killed in an act of sexual jealousy (the younger men wanting access to the women of the tribe, hitherto appropriated by the father figure).

This ‘scientific’ speculation, tenuously supported by references to Charles Darwin and James Frazer, provides Freud with his explanation of ‘the beginnings of so many things – of social organisation, of moral restrictions and of religion’ (p. 203). The totem represents the murdered, primal father; the taboo is that against patricide (and, by association, incest). Twenty years later, Freud begins to apply the same narrative pattern to the Bible, and in Moses and Monotheism he constructs an original explanation of the beginnings of both Judaic and Christian religion: both are about atoning to the father (Yahweh); but the latter goes much further and, in commemorating the sacrificial death of the son (Christ), proves to be more thoroughly Oedipal than the faith from which it sprang.

No one can fault the originality and ingenuity of Freud’s interpretation in either Totem and Taboo or in Moses and Monotheism, nor its immense influence on literary criticism, but the reader should, of course, bear in mind the question he posed in his famous dialogue with Einstein: ‘Does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology?’

#Carl Jung (with M.L. von Franz, Joseph L. Henderson, Jolande Jacobi & Aniela Jaffe), Man and his Symbols (London and New York: Arkana, 1964, repr. 1990)

This is not just a volume of selected essays: the title page indicates clearly that it is Jung who is here offering his definitive account of the subject, with four other Jungians adding supplementary arguments. Everything hinges on the main author’s opening essay, nearly one hundred pages long. In it Jung repudiates Freud’s notion that the unconscious is primarily driven by sexual desire and repressed memory, and insists that dreams and symptoms are indices of spiritual need and an orientation towards future healing. He further rejects Freud’s characterisation of dream motifs as ‘archaic remnants’, which implies an historically motivated psyche. For Jung, symbolism is natural, neutral and normative: ‘archetypal images’ come from a ‘collective unconscious’ which is universal and eternal. Individual dreams provide access to it, but the best way of talking about it is through mythology. Indeed, all myths turn out to be stories of an archetypal encounter: that of the ‘ego’ with its ‘shadow’ and its ‘anima’ / ‘animus’, on the way to the psychic harmony which is the ‘Self’.

This circuitous journey is, we understand, the stuff of most narrative that is primitive, or which maintains a healthy proximity to the primitive mind, as further revealed in the other contributors’ essays. These apply Jung’s ideas to (a) the Bible, (b) the myths of Theseus, Perseus, Orpheus and Dionysus, (c) the legends of Saint George and the Dragon plus Beauty and the Beast, and (d) literary works such as Dante’s Divine Comedy and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. The whole book is richly illustrated, and makes an attractive introduction to Jungian psychology in general and to psychological mythography in particular.

#Carl Jung, Jung on Mythology, ed. Robert A. Segal (London: Routledge, 1998)

lt is surprising that it has taken so long for a selection of Jung’s writings on mythology to appear, but this volume is worth the wait. Complementing Segal’s earlier selection, The Gnostic Jung (see below), it benefits from an editorial introduction which is just as lucid as the one to that volume. Most of its divisions correspond to sections of the anthology, and the whole thing is organised logically and coherently.

Segal first explains that, for Jung, the subject-matter of myth is the projection of the inner onto the outer world, of psyche onto nature. He then proceeds to distinguish Jung’s perspective from Freud’s: in particular, he repudiates the latter’s impoverished interpretation of mythic material as expressive of sexual problems rather than spiritual promises. Proceeding further still, we come to Jung’s approach to the origin of mythology: rejecting experience or acquisition as adequate explanations, he argues for independent invention, arising from the collective unconscious, with myths giving narrative shape to inherited archetypes.

Next come those writings of Jung’s on the function of myth, which he sees as the revelation, experience, and understanding of the unconscious. Other important sections cover the following: myth and dream; myth as a way of thinking; kinds of myths; primitive myths; myths and moderns; myth and religion. These sections comprise the first (and longer) of two parts. Overall, we get a strong sense of the audacity of Jung in taking on the challenge posed by science to the viability of myth: far from seeing mythic material as residing in the past, offering only a nostalgic appeal, Jung is one of the most important advocates of the living power of myth, of its absolute necessity, once we have agreed to interpret it symbolically rather than literally, psychologically rather than referentially.

To complete the volume, the second (and shorter) part of the anthology demonstrates Jung’s influence, as represented by Erich Neumann, Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman. Perhaps the last of these is the most interesting, in that he develops ‘archetypal psychology’ away from Jung’s own ideal of the unified, individuated self (a legacy from his Christian background) and towards a pluralistic psychology and a polytheistic mythology. The volume as a whole may remind us how much richer is the potential of Jung’s work than Freud’s, once we have decided that myth really matters.

#Carl Jung, The Gnostic Jung, ed. Robert E. Segal (London: Routledge, 1992)

The special attraction of this collection will be the inclusion of Jung’s Seven Sermons to the Dead, previously unavailable. This complements a generous selection of more familiar material in which Jung addresses the relevance of Gnosticism, alchemy, and hermeticism to his own ‘analytical psychology’. Useful as these contents are, they assume a proper shape and significance thanks to Segal’s lucid introduction. He not only explains the connection between ancient Gnosticism and modern existentialism, but he also weighs up the evidence carefully before deciding whether Jung adheres to the details of Gnosticism or adapts it to his own ends in a parallel manner to the existentialists.

What he argues finally is that, though the Gnostic and Jungian myths have a great deal in common, both being creation narratives which permit the identification of cosmos and psyche, of outer and inner worlds, they differ in that the former is finally regressive, involving a return to the primordial godhead and a refusal of the material world, while the latter is finally progressive, involving a sense of the expanding potential proceeding from the ‘collective unconscious’ – the archetype of the ‘Self’ representing inclusiveness and balance rather than negation).

There is an alternative reading of the Gnostic myth, that it is all about the sanctification of matter, of the discovery of the invisible within the visible: a reading which relates it to  hermeticism (as implicit in the hermetic motto, ‘as above, so below’). But Segal does not regard this as the dominant one, and leaves it aside.

#Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (London: Paladin, 1949, repr. 1988)

Joseph Campbell’s title indicates that he is far more concerned with the similarities between myths than the differences: there is only one ‘hero’ or story, even though there may be many ‘faces’ or versions. This story he calls ‘the monomyth’, borrowing a neologism from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Its ‘nuclear unit’ is the pattern of the rite of passage: ‘separation -initiation -return’ (p. 30): that is, ‘a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return’ (p. 35).

But Campbell’s aim is to translate this anthropological model into psychological terms, mainly after the manner of Carl Jung (though with passing concessions to Freud). Thus, in the section which forms the centre of the book, entitled ‘The Keys’ (pp. 245-51 ), the narrative pattern now approximates to the circular journey of the individual psyche from ‘ego’ to ‘self’ by way of descent into the realm of the ‘shadow’. Campbell elaborates on this by charting the various mythic motifs that he gleans from around the world: for example, ‘call to adventure’, ‘crossing the threshold’, ‘dragon battle’, ‘crucifixion’, ‘sacred
marriage’, ‘apotheosis’, ‘flight’, ‘resurrection’, ‘elixir’. The aim of this journey, this universal hero quest, seems to be the reconciliaton of the conscious with the unconscious mind. This being achieved, other oppositions fall into place: male and female, human and divine, natural and supernatural, individual and cosmic. In other words, the ‘monomyth’ reveals that all is one: it is an essentially mystical narrative.

Campbell’s application of a quasi-Jungian psychology to myth and literature has proved immensely popular, and has even been used by film directors in the creation of mythic entertainments (eg., Star Wars). However, the discerning reader may note that he makes larger claims for mythology than Jung ever did, and that his search for unification results in a Procrustean approach to particular myths.

#Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, A Skeleton Key to ‘Finnegans Wake’ (London: Faber and Faber, 1944, repr. 1959)

The authors, the first being a celebrated mythographer in his own right, claim that the ‘key’ to Joyce’s ‘dream saga’ is mythology, and that ‘the fundamental narrative’ it recounts is the ‘mighty allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind’. Campbell was soon to produce his own ‘key’ to world mythology, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and one can see him rehearsing the principle of the ‘monomyth’ in this detailed study of a text which he and Robinson take to be not only literary, but also profoundly mythopoeic.

Campbell and Robinson start from the book’s origin in the old Irish song of the same title, in which the labourer Tim Finnegan, who has fallen from his ladder while drunk, is brought back to life at his own wake when someone splashes the corpse with whisky. From there, they  trace the transformation of this unlikely hero into a figure of mythic proportions. Indeed, Joyce’s Finnegan embodies all heroes, including Thor, Prometheus, Osiris, Christ, and Finn MacCool: it is by his ‘coming again’ (‘Finn-again’) that ‘strength and hope are provided for mankind’. Indeed: ‘By his death and resurrection, hod-carrier Finnegan comically refigures the solemn mystery of the hero-god whose flesh and blood furnish the race with spirit-fructifying meat and drink.’

This ‘monomyth’ becomes more complex still when we realise that the labourer’s fall from his ladder symbolises Lucifer’s fall, Adam and Eve’s fall, the setting sun that will rise again, the fall of Rome, a Wall Street crash, and Humpty Dumpty’s ‘great fall’. Moreover, the descent sets in motion an historical process, which Joyce depicts along the lines of the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Vico’s four-part cycle. That is, humanity passes through four phases: theocratic, aristocratic, democratic, and chaotic.

This last phase is the setting for Joyce’s central tale, which takes place in and around Dublin, and which features Henry Chadwick Earwicker, a mythic successor to Finnegan’s role. Himself seeking redemption from his own ‘original sin’ (a drunken act of exposure in the ‘Eden’ of Phoenix Park), his and all humanity’s redemption may not be understood apart from the regenerative cycle of fertility which is symbolised by his wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle. Again, if HCE and ALP ‘represent a primordial male-female polarity, which is basic to all life’, then their sons Shem the Penman (introvert writer) and Shaun the Postman (extrovert politician and bearer of messages) ‘represent a subordinate, exclusively masculine polarity which is basic to all history’.

Campbell and Robinson are explicit that they have not attempted to offer a critical interpretation of the literary text, but they show considerable flair in tracing a mythic structure within a work which, at the time of writing, was regarded as impossibly obscure.

#Alan Watts, ‘Return to the Forest’, Zen and the Beat Way (Boston, MA, and Enfield: Eden Grove, 1997)

This is the text of a talk which the philosopher Alan Watts gave in 1960: a celebration of his friend Joseph Campbell’s ideas on the development of religion. According to Campbell, and as confirmed by Watts, two main phases in humankind’s religious history may be traced; these may be associated with two kinds of culture which predate our own technological kind.

Firstly, there was the nomadic, hunting culture: this was characterised by shamanism, the shaman being a solitary medicine man or ‘man of power’ who was thought to have undergone a rite of initiation into the world of spirits; this rite would have taken place in the dark forest or some other mysterious realm.

Secondly, there was the settled, agrarian culture: this was characterised by a more hierarchical religious system based on the division of labour; instead of the solitary, adventurous shaman, there was the traditional order of priests, which dictated the terms of the social order itself.

But neither Campbell’s nor Watts’s concern is with celebrating this second stage of religious history: there must come a point when human beings begin to grow dissatisfied with hierarchy and office – in short, with being told what to believe – and they yearn for a third stage, a ‘return to the forest’. This mythic quest pattern is celebrated in Campbell’s most famous book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

Finally Watts offers his own version, in keeping with his particular erudition in the field of Asian religion: if the second stage may be paralleled by Confucianism, with its appeal to tradition and authority, then the third stage, the urge to recover what has been lost, namely direct encounter with the spirit, may be discerned in Taoism and Zen Buddhism

#Robert Graves, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth
(London and Boston, MA: Faber and Faber, 1948, repr. 1990)

Long before Graves wrote this treatise, or poetic manifesto, scholars had discerned similarities between the various fertility goddesses of early civilisations and had inferred that they might have a common origin in a female agricultural deity of the neolithic period, this in turn being a development from the palaeolithic earth mother or moon goddess. Graves’s initiative is to insist that all these figures are essentially one, and that this unity indicates that the roots of civilisation are matriarchal.

The story he goes on to tell is of the violent replacement of matriarchy by patriarchy: in the second millennium BC, the cult of the goddess of fertility and seasonal cycle was overthrown by the cult of the sky god, dedicated to war, order, and reason. For Graves, this cataclysmic event brought about a rupture in the collective psyche: this was, in effect, the beginning of alienation. Only the poets kept the earlier vision alive: they remained faithful to the Muse, the triple ‘White Goddess’. In doing so, they themselves adopted the role of her male mate, the dying and reviving god of vegetation documented elsewhere by Sir James Frazer. There is, then, only one poetic theme: ‘the antique story … of the birth, death and resurrection of the God of the Waxing Year’ [sic]. This god fights a losing battle with that of the ‘Waning Year’ for love of ‘the capricious, all-powerful Threefold Goddess, their mother, bride and layer-out’. The poet identifies ‘himself with the God of the Waxing Year [sic] and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird’. Indeed: ‘All true poetry … celebrates some incident or scene in this very ancient story.’

Thus as well as being a historical record, Graves’s book is a didactic defence of poetry as an expression of fundamental concerns and as an invocation of a residual imaginative structure,. As such, it works extremely well (even if such details as the hidden ‘tree language’ of the Druids are hard to follow at times). Advisory reading for students of myth and literature, its eccentricity is inseparable from its insights.

#Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: or, Cosmos and History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954, repr. 1971)

Mircea Eliade was the founder of the modern discipline of the history of religions, and was particularly interested in understanding archaic religion phenomenologically. This book is his clearest statement of this interest. In it he argues that the archaic mind divides everything it experiences into the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’. Its overriding aim is to transcend ‘history’, or ‘profane time’, by abolishing it: this it does through myth and ritual, which offer an ‘eternal return’ to ‘cosmos’, ie, ‘sacred time’.

For Eliade, the modern mind, dominated by the Judaeo-Christian model of progress, as secularised by the Enlightenment, seems to have lost this possibility. True, he does indicate, if only in passing, a new interest in ‘eternal return’ among modern writers; but it will need Thomas Altizer to spell out how this recovery of the sacred in the profane is achieved.

#Thomas J. J Altizer, Mircea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1963)

Mircea Eliade was the founder of the discipline of the history of religion, and was a leading interpreter of myth. Altizer starts from Eliade’s account of the ‘archaic mind’, which made sense of the world by distinguishing between ‘sacred time’ and ‘profane time’. It felt itself to have ‘fallen’ from the one to the other, and used myth and ritual to regain its sense of ‘cosmos’ – which was felt to be the opposite of ‘history’. Altizer’s innovation is to argue for a ‘dialectic’ of the sacred and profane dimensions. He proposes that our ‘fallen’ world is still open to a ‘coincidence of opposites’ whereby ‘cosmos’ and ‘history’ can be known as aspects of each other. He draws on Christian theology to do so, and illustrates his argument by reference to many important modern authors. This dialectic is evident in, for example,
Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘illumination’, in James Joyce’s ‘epiphany’ and in Marcel Proust’s ‘memory’.

#Claude Levi-Strauss, ‘The Structural Study of Myth’, Structural Anthropology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963, repr. 1972) pp. 202-31

This is an essay which nobody seriously engaged in the study of modern mythography has thought it possible to ignore. Unfortunately, though it begins as a broad invitation to the interpretation of myth along the model of Saussure’s linguistics, it becomes highly condensed and difficult when it offers an example of a specific analysis of a myth. Regarding the broad invitation: the anthropologist Levi-Strauss objects to the ‘chaotic’ state of mythography and points out that the trend is to treat myth as either ‘idle play’ or ‘a crude kind of philosophical speculation’. He wishes to replace this muddle with the following principles: that the meaning of a myth resides not in isolated elements, but in their combination; that myth is a special kind of language; and that, as such, it is more about the inner mind than the outer world  — the relation between the sign (i.e., the signifier and signified combined) and the referent (the thing itself) being arbitrary and conventional.

As for the analysis itself: Levi-Strauss takes the myth of Oedipus, not in any particular version, but on the basis of all the elements that have accrued to the story, then proceeds to demonstrate that its purpose is to mediate between binary oppositions, the most fundamental of which are the categories of culture and nature. The logic of myth takes two opposed terms which seem incapable of resolution, and resolves them by substituting a pair of equivalent opposites. In the Oedipus myth, the original contradiction is between the traditional understanding of humanity as deriving from the earth, and the experiential evidence that human beings are born as a result of sexual reproduction. The contradiction substituted for this is that between the ‘overvaluing of blood relations’ and the ‘undervaluing of blood relations’. The figure who mediates between these is Oedipus himself, who commits both incest and patricide. Ingenious as this interpretation is, it has struck many other anthropologists as far too arid and intellectualist. But it has been so influential and is so frequently cited that its challenge has to be confronted.

#Claude Levi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning (London: Routledge, 1978)

Literary students seeking access to the mysteries of structuralism are often advised to start with Levi-Strauss’s famous essay, ‘The Structural Study of Myth’ (see above). But the complex interpretation of the Oedipus legend given there is perhaps better left until after one has read this short and accessible account of myth.

Arguing that since the seventeenth century there has been a sharp divide between scientific and mythic thinking, with the former regarding the latter as superstitious and retrogressive, Levi-Strauss puts the case for rediscovering ‘primitive thinking’ as opposed to the ‘civilised mind’, the ‘logic of the concrete’ as opposed to the abstractions of the Enlightenment. In doing so, he gives some useful definitions and characterisations. For example: ‘Myths get thought in man unbeknownst to him’ (p. 3); ‘the structuralist approach … is the quest for the invariant, or for the invariant among superficial differences’ (p. 8); ‘To speak of rules and to speak of meaning is to speak of the same thing’ (p.12). Furthermore, he offers a fascinating interpretation, based on the above dicta, of a Native American story, before going on to reflect on the continuties between mythology and history, and on the parallels between mythology and music.

#Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Paladin/Granada, 1957, repr. 1973)

This selection of magazine articles has proved hugely influential in the field of cultural studies, and it still stands as a searching enquiry into the world we take for granted. However, students of mythology should be forewarned that the volume has created some confusion by virtue of Barthes’s use of the word ‘myth’ as virtually synonymous with ‘ideology’ – though he purports not to be doing so.

Thus, when he addresses the ‘mythology’ of, for example, ‘The World of Wrestling’, ‘The Face of Garbo’, ‘Wine and Milk’ or ‘Romans in Films’, he is chiefly interested in exposing the ‘depoliticised speech’ of the status quo. For Barthes such speech presents particular, historical images and ideas as if they were eternal: it translates ‘culture’ into ‘nature’.

Students might like to take into account that Barthes’s structuralist approach, loosely informed by Marxism, overlooks those aspects of myth which many other interpreters have found interesting: firstly, that it is a narrative; secondly, that if it is ‘ideological’ it is also ‘utopian’. That said, the book is certainly stimulating.

 

READING MYTH 2: DEVELOPMENTS

 First published as part of ‘MYTH’, ABES 2000

Jack Lindsay, John Bunyan: Maker of Myths (London: Methuen, 1937)

Lindsay’s pioneering study of Bunyan is remarkable for attempting to fuse Marxist and Freudian approaches, while offering a critical biography that might make his subject accessible to non-academic readers. He sees Bunyan as a transitional writer, struggling to reconcile historical contradictions within himself, but forced to endure the experience of being a divided soul within a divided society.

If the Restoration seemed to offer a balance of classes after what was then seen as the chaos and anarchy of the bourgeois English Revolution, Bunyan wanted a third way of solidarity and true equality, but could not see the means for its achievement. Hence he pursued a radically religious vision; but the spirit of the Reformation had been increasingly compromised, and the Calvinist doctrine of predestination to which he subscribed could be interpreted all too easily as a vindication of bourgeois individualism. Devoting himself to the attainment of grace, he could not relate it to what Lindsay calls ‘the social core’, except intermittently through the ‘fellowship’ experienced with his fellow-Congregationalists; he was increasingly tormented in isolation by a ‘battle’ between God and the Devil, which was in effect ‘a profound inner conflict, the refraction of social issues’. If the projected unity was to be achieved at all, it could only be on the level of the transcendent abstraction of theology: feeling himself thoroughly sinful, Bunyan could yet find assurance of grace in the very fact of his suffering and his dispossession.

On the basis of this summary, it may seem that ‘myth’ is being used here, reductively, to mean ‘ideology’; but the chapters relating to The Pilgrim’s Progress demonstrate Lindsay’s appreciation of the shaping power of the narrative imagination. His psychoanalytic understanding of traditional myth is that it concerns the trauma of being born and the need to overcome parental authority figures (often figured as giants or ogres) in pursuit of one’s ‘real self’ or ‘external soul’, believed to have been lost at birth. The fundamental impulse is the desire to live; but Bunyan, as ‘maker’ of modern myths, can only express this negatively, as the desire to die. On the other hand, if the dream format of his allegory foregrounds the isolated individual dealing with obstacles and horrors as the projection of his own inner division, what it constantly gestures towards is the need for ‘fellowship’ and social justice.

Lindsay has a good eye for such paradoxes, and his book is an audacious experiment in a period when both Marx and Freud were being applied rather too literally and heavy-handedly.

#Alan Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1953, repr. 1968)

ln his ‘Prologue’ Alan Watts repudiates those interpretations of mythology which he regards as reductive: for example, Frazer’s, which patronises the ancient from the point of view of the modern. He prefers the insights of Jung, who sees myths as collective dreams which represent the healing process of the psyche. He finds such insights to be complemented by the work of Ananda Coomaraswamy, who assumes that modern Western society is abnormal in that, in its blind march of progress, it has forgotten the wisdom of the ‘perennial philosophy’. This wisdom may be understood either through mystical experience or through mythology.

Watts knows that Christian myth may be explained historically: that is, as dependent on an historical event, namely the incarnation, and as a narrative which presents redemption as the fulfilment of an historical process. But he still insists that the mythic power of Christianity is best grasped under the aspect of liturgy rather than that of history: he is interested in the apprehension of the Christ of faith through recurrent ritual and recitation.

The body of his book consists of a fascinating account of how Christian myth takes effect in the context of seasonal Christian ceremony: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Whitsun, Trinity, and Michaelmas.

This is an erudite work from the philosopher whom we remember as a specialist in Zen, but who knew his Christianity as thoroughly as he knew his Buddhism.

#Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967)

This original and comprehensive work cannot be ignored by anyone interested in the relation between mythology, on the one hand, and philosophy, theology, or hermeneutics on the other. Culminating in the asssertion that ‘The symbol gives rise to thought’, this is less a study of evil than a study of the way evil is mediated through image and narrative.

Part I deals with the ‘primal’ symbols of ‘defilement, sin and guilt’, as found in the Bible and other founding texts of Western culture. Each of them highlights the paradoxical human situation, both free and unfree, which Ricoeur calls ‘the servile will’.

Part II develops these insights by outlining the speculative possibilities of myth. Repudiating the tradition of interpretation which sees myth as ‘false explanation’, Ricoeur insists on its exploratory significance and its contribution to understanding. He distinguishes four kinds of myth which have addressed the problem of evil: ‘The Drama of Creation’, ‘The Wicked God and the “Tragic” Vision of Existence’, ‘The Adamic Myth and the “Eschatological” Vision of History’, and ‘The Myth of the Exiled Soul and Salvation through Knowledge’. As a theologian as well as a philosopher, Ricoeur argues that all four of these are contained, or at least implied, by the third, the distinctly Biblical. Invoking the tradition of Judaeo-Christian hermeneutics, he argues that symbol and myth can only become alive again in our day

if we start negatively from our sense of having fallen and positively from the fullness of language and the challenge of interpretation.

#Richard Chase, Quest for Myth (New York: Greenwood Press, 1949, repr. 1969)

 ‘The central premise of this book is that myth is literature and therefore a matter of aesthetic experience and the imagination, a truth that literary critics should have affirmed long ago.’ Richard Chase’s words, written in 1949, anticipate the more recent work done on myth within the sphere of literary criticism. At a time when the relation of the literary to the mythic was thought to be simply one of derivation, it was certainly adventurous to refer to the two spheres as synonymous. Moreover, Chase’s book aims ‘to rescue myth from those who see it only as the means and end of philosophy, religious dogma, psychoanalysis, or semantics’. Myth, as a matter of delight more than of instruction, is not to be explained away, but should be celebrated without apology on aesthetic terms.

The thesis becomes no more specific than that, and the reader may be forgiven for forming the impression that all literature is equally mythic. Perhaps the most interesting chapters of the book are those giving an historical survey of the development of modern mythography, focusing on the Enlightenment and the Romantic rebellion against its premises.

#M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971)

 According to Abrams, the Romantic poets not only thought of themselves as prophets and visionaries in a generalised way, but specifically and consciously adopted a secularised version of the Biblical ‘circuitous quest’. That narrative concerns an initial harmony known as Eden, a fall from that harmony and a long journey through the wilderness towards a higher, more`complex harmony known as Jerusalem. Romantic poetry, according to Abrams, follows this pattern exactly, but dispenses with the notion of an external and conventional God who is responsible for the redemption of humankind.

For William Wordsworth and William Blake alike, salvation is a psychological or imaginative process, by which divisions are healed and alienation overcome. The apocalypse is symbolised by the marriage of the male mind and its female ‘contrary’ and not by that of the Messiah and his church. Abrams carefully relates this revolution in thought to philosophy, particularly that of Hegel. Natural Supernaturalism is a vast, stimulating work which crosses many boundaries. As such it may be categorised under not only ‘Myth’ but also ‘Romanticism’ and ‘Ecocriticism’.

 #Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972, repr. 1977)

Girard’s argument is best indicated by contrast. Firstly, he rejects the model of the Oedipus complex propounded by Freud in favour of a theory of ‘mimetic desire’: violence originates not in sex but in status. One person wants to imitate another person: to have what they have, to be what they are. If this urge is not channelled, society is polluted by ‘impure’ violence: hence the need for the ‘pure’ and decisive violence of the sacrifice of a ‘surrogate victim’ or ‘scapegoat’. Thus, violence explains the emergence of religion.

Secondly, unlike Frazer (The Golden Bough) Girard sees the choice of the sacrificial victim as arbitrary: it is after the sacrifice, not before, that he is granted the status of divinity.

Thirdly, though this book assumes a collective logic, which moves instinctively towards the imposition of order on disorder, culture on nature, he repudiates the structuralism of Levi-Strauss, which treats myth as a permanent kind of ‘language’ encoded in the brain.

The implicit point of Girard’s thesis – made explicit in Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (1987) – is that humanity has to learn to ‘desacralise’ violence and to transcend what we have known as myth. Indeed, as a Christian, he believes in a sacrificial victim whose own death signifies the end of sacrifice and atonement by blood, and so a rejection of stories which glorify them. Of all Girard’s fascinating books, Violence and the Sacred is probably the most accessible to literary students, since it contains a detailed reinterpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex.

#David Miller, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses (Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, 1974, repr. 1981)

Nietzsche may have announced the death of God, and so of monotheism, but he thereby also announced the rebirth of the gods, and so of polytheism. David Miller sees the problem with Western culture over the past 2,000 years as being the fixation on one Truth, one Law, and one God; its liberation can only come about through the rediscovery of the pleasures and challenges of mythological diversity.

On the one hand, he demonstrates the disastrous consequences of privileging being over becoming, abstract ideas over storytelling, space over time, and science (or at least, a certain restricted view of science) over mysticism. On the other hand, he ingeniously argues that Christian theology, try as it might to privilege uniformity over diversity, orthodoxy over pluralism, nevertheless has its roots in polytheism. It is, for instance, no coincidence that Jesus Christ’s story is reminiscent of the dying and reviving gods of the Ancient Near East; nor should we overlook the polytheistic implications of a free-floating Holy Spirit.

For signs that we have begun to find our way back to the wisdom of the gods after so long in thrall to monotheistic dogma, he points to the more exciting (if eccentric) thinkers of this century: Martin Heidegger, Carl Jung, Norman O. Brown, and James Hillman, for example. Though not a literary-critical work, The New Polytheism is a pioneering approach to cultural history which reminds us how intimately religion is related to mythology, and how both are essentially narrative in origin. Also, it is a highly enjoyable read.

#William Righter, Myth and Literature (London and Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975)

This short but comprehensive book tries to identify what is characteristic about the modern approach to myth, and in particular the creative and critical uses to which it has been put. The first chapter, ‘The Consciousness of Myth’, distinguishes between three different questions that might be asked concerning myth. That asked by the ancients is ‘is it literally true?’; that asked by the Renaissance is ‘what kind of hidden, or allegorical, truth does it contain?’; and that asked by the moderns is ‘what place does the phenomenon of myth occupy among the languages of mankind?’. This last approach – broad and non-dogmatic, alert to the possibility of infinite contextualisation – is broken down into four ‘theories of myth’: the functionalist, the psychological, the religious, and the symbolic. In all four cases, what is striking is the rise of the self-conscious reception of material that was received as given in earlier times.

The second chapter, ‘Myth and lnterpretation’, deals with what is normally called ‘myth criticism’, demonstrating that this methodology can range from the simple identification of archetypes to the complex construction of ‘a mythical structure devised for the explication of other mythical structures’, as in Northrop Frye’s complex Anatomy of Criticism.

 

This suggestion of the affinity between interpreting myth and making myth is expanded upon in the third chapter, ‘The Myth of Myth’. Though mythology may have had its day as a body of narratives in which we might believe, the notion of ‘significant story’ shows no sign of abating. Indeed, the more critics recognise the ‘rage for order’, the more the question of myth overlaps with that of fiction itself. Righter draws on the work of Frank Kermode here, with its account of human life as inevitably involved in narrative constructions, seeking as it does coherence and concordance amidst the chaos of temporal experience. Righter seems to agree: his final emphasis is on the sense-making function of myth, understood to find fulfilment in the discovery of ‘an’ order rather than ‘the’ order. All students of myth and of literature will find this book useful and, to use its own recurrent term, ‘significant’.

#Marina Warner, Alone Of All Her Sex: The Myth And The Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Picador, 1976, repr. 1990)

Marina Warner here considers the four dogmas of ‘Mariology’: the virgin birth of Mary’s son Jesus; the immaculate conception of Mary herself; her divine motherhood; her assumption, body and soul, into heaven. Warner’s main interest is in the historical nature of the myth of Mary, and in particular, how men have constructed the ideal of the feminine. She has a keen eye for contradiction, the central one being that of Christianity itself. For in its doctrine of Christ’s incarnation it validates the flesh; but in its reverence for Mary as possessing a perfection beyond humanity, which is a riposte to the sexual nature of all other women, it castigates the flesh.

In her emphasis on history she consciously invokes the work of Roland Barthes and rejects the notion of the eternally feminine advocated by Carl Jung. But her own findings are perhaps richer than Barthes’; and her fascination with Catholic iconography and narrative suggests an openness to spirituality that would not offend many Jungians.

She is especially interesting when she compares and contrasts ‘Mariology’ with ‘pagan’ mythology. For example, Mary is a virgin like Diana, but now virginity connotes asceticism rather than joyous freedom from male constraints. She is ‘queen of heaven’ like lnanna, but cannot officially be envisaged as descending into hell to wrestle with death (except in non-doctrinal folklore). She is associated with the moon, like Diana, Ishtar, and lsis, but may only be depicted in proximity to the serpent (in other cases, identified with fertility and wisdom) if she is shown to be crushing it underfoot.

As for Biblical mythology itself, Warner is illuminating on the relation between the compelling narrative power of Mary’s role as ‘second Eve’ and the otherwise arid-sounding doctrines of original sin and fortunate fall. Again, she traces carefully the transition from the ‘beloved’ of the Song of Songs (itself rooted in fertility myth), via the apocalyptic wedding feast of Revelation, to the idea of Mary as being not only the mother of Christ but also his bride. Such paradoxes are handled in a shrewd and scholarly manner, as is the function of Mary in secular writing.

Warner is especially interesting on the way the religion of adulterous love promulgated by the Troubadour poets of the twelfth century was radically revised the following century in the service of ‘Mariolatory’ and the ideal of married love. Nor should one overlook her useful account of Dante’s Comedy, which she regards as exceptional for its time in the balance it maintains between divine love (Mary) and human love (Beatrice), and in its non-dualistic approval of humanity. All in all, this is a book which is required reading for students of myth, of the Bible, and of literary and cultural history.

#Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, The American Monomyth (New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977)

The definition of ‘American monomyth’ provided by Jewett and Shelton is ‘an archetypal plot pattern emerging in American popular culture in which a community threatened by evil is redeemed through superheroism’. The historical context is the ‘axial decade’: that is, it was in the period of the Great Depression,between 1929 and 1941, that ‘traditional dramatic motifs coalesced to create the American monomyth’.

The theoretical context is Joseph Campbell’s formulation of the ‘classical monomyth’: ‘an archetypal plot pattern in folktales and classical myths, deriving from pagan rites of initiation in which a hero leaves home, undergoes trials, and returns as an adult’. But whereas Campbell un-problematically celebrates American individualism, Jewett and Lawrence address the function of myth in popular culture: they write, for instance, about ‘mythic massage’ and ‘pop religion’. However, the fact that they perceive the desire to affirm an idealised American community as ‘monomythic Eden’ as resulting from economic factors between the wars does not mean that they belong to the ‘demythologising’ school. Indeed, one of the most useful contributions of the book is the theory of the ‘myth of mythlessness’: ‘the unexamined belief that scientific culture has transcended mythical forms of thought’. Those who patronise popular culture are accused of committing the ‘bubble-gum fallacy’: ‘the ascription of trivial, diversionary qualities to popular entertainments while denying their mythical aspects and formative influences’.

The authors are so keen to avoid committing this fallacy that they might appear to be excessively attentive to the minutiae of television and cinema: they even include ‘Trekkie’ in their glossary (‘a devoted follower of the Star Trek series’). At the same time, they provide the means to criticise the reactionary aspect of modern myth making, as evident from the United States: stories in which the ‘American Dream’ is saved by the intervention of a solitary superhero are demonstrated to be distortions of the traditional role of mythology. The overall achievement of their researches is both fascinating and provocative.

#Frank McConnell, Storytelling and Mythmaking: Images from Film and Literature (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979)

This book is an extended corrective to Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. While agreeing with Frye that we can relate all literary and cinematic plots to a certain limited number of literary modes or ‘mythoi’, he disagrees that the seasonal model (romance complementing summer, tragedy autumn, satire winter, and comedy spring) is the best to use. It suggests temporal succession, whereas McConnell wants to stress the simultaneity of narrative structures: ‘the way in which – however temporal they may seem – they are always all present in the mind as potential forms of human life, potential levels of social organization’.

The four kinds of story he posits relate to the four types of law distinguished by Rousseau
in The Social Contract: epic, which concerns the founding of civilisation, and whose hero is a king, complements political law; romance, which concerns the maintenance of civilisations, and whose hero is a knight or equivalent, complements civil law; melodrama, which concerns the conflict between public and private duty, and whose hero is a pursuer of wrongdoers, complements criminal law; satire, which concerns the loss of value and the experience of guilt, and whose hero is the satirist himself, complements the law of public opinion. Just as Frye adds a fifth mode, that of ‘the return of irony to myth’, so McConnell adds the story of ‘recognition and rebirth’, which addresses the question of self-consciousness (Rousseau’s underlying concern), and whose hero is the madman who may turn out to be the messiah.

Thus, McConnell’s ingenious categorisation owes a great deal to the Anatomy; but,given this, its independence of thought and its range of original illustrations should be acknowledged. In keeping with his notion of the simultaneity of the above paradigms, he shows how we can trace the key figures of each story throughout whole narrative cycles. For example, Arthurian legend gives us the following characters: Arthur (epic), Gawain (romance), Lancelot (melodrama), Mordred (satire) and Perceval (recognition).

Again, George Lucas’s film Star Wars gives us Kenobi (epic), Luke Skywalker (romance), Hans Solo (melodrama), the droids (satire), and ‘the Force’ itself (recognition). Lastly, the western film genre gives us: the frontiersman or cattle baron, such as John Wayne in Red River (epic); the federal marshal, such as Henry Fonda in My Darling Clementine (romance); the town marshal, such as Gary Cooper in High Noon (melodrama); the principled outlaw whose existence implies judgement of the community, such as Alan Ladd in Shane or Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter (satire); and the new founder, who suggests the possibility of a different way of life, such as John Wayne in The Shootist (recognition). All in all, this is a book full of brilliant ideas, which should benefit those engaged in literary and cultural studies.

#Eric Gould, Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981)

Instead of thinking of a set body of ‘mythology’, Gould proposes that we ponder the very  process of ‘mythicity’. This is not the same thing as ‘mythopoeia’, which suggests a deliberate, almost programmatic, endeavour. Gould refers rather to the idea that myth exists mainly as an intention implicit in a literary text. It is a linguistic movement, a ‘play’ of words which presupposes the experience of metaphysical ‘lack’. It is an ongoing human expression, an open-ended discourse which involves continual interpretation and reinterpretation. Indeed, myth itself is inseparable from hermeneutics. Hence we are advised to think of mythic images not as archetypes but as signs.

As narrative and as interpretive act, myth seeks to close the gap between signifier and signified: this is impossible, but then myth centres on that very impossibility. Thus it is not about origins, about the sacred as pure, pre-linguistic phenomenon, but about an endlessly deferred goal of competed understanding. In Gould’s words: ‘there can be no
myth without an ontological gap between event and meaning.’

His argument is close in spirit to deconstruction, and stands opposed to all essentialism. Negative as it may sound in paraphrase, it yet provides the occasion for a celebration of modern writing: not only Joyce, whom one would expect, but also Eliot and Lawrence, all three being seen as negotiating, with varying degrees of conviction, the mythic dialectic between intention and impossibility.

#Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982)

This detailed and demanding book is worth persevering with, for its thesis is clear enough: ‘myth redeems history.’ Frye assumes that the Bible is a ‘unified structure of imagery and narrative’ which follows the pattern known by theologians as ‘salvation history’. In keeping with the account of literature, as an ‘order of words’ which forms the extension of a mythic paradigm, given in his earlier Anatomy of Criticism, Frye identifies the Biblical narrative as a ‘myth of deliverance’ involving seven phases: creation, revolution, law, wisdom, prophecy, gospel and apocalypse.

Lest we conceive of this as a simple, linear pattern, Frye explains that the overall scheme moves between the poles of the divine world (symbolised by the Garden of Eden, the Promised Land and Jersualem) and the demonic world (symbolised by Egypt, Babylon and Rome). This dialectical pattern of imagery is the ‘U-shaped standard shape of comedy’. Thus the Bible is not only a ‘myth of deliverance’ but a ‘divine comedy’: one in which ‘man loses the tree and water of life at the beginning of Genesis and gets them back at the end of Revelation.’

The Great Code, though a work of sophisticated scholarship, is radically and powerfully simple.

#Paul A. Cantor, Creature and Creator: Myth-making and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)

An interesting complement to M. H. Abrams’s Natural Supernaturalism, which concerns the Romantic rewriting of the last book of the Bible, this book concerns the Romantic rewriting of the first book. In the poetry of William BIake and Percy Bysshe Shelley, for example, creation myth becomes a Gnostic narrative, in which the traditional ‘creator’ is exposed as a ‘demiurge’ or inferior deity, against whom his ‘creature’ is right to rebel. In doing so, he realises his own divine potential and so becomes both ‘creature and creator’. Cantor celebrates the radical shift in sensibility involved in this ‘myth-making’, but also traces the growing disillusionment with human powers of creation which becomes evident in, for example, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein.

# Robert Clark, History, Ideology and Myth in American Fiction,1823-52 (London: Macmillan, 1984)

 The terms of Clark’s title convey the direction of his argument. In order to explain the complex nature of the novels of Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville, he analyses how the American pioneer experience of settling a new-found land produced a contradictory belief in both the necessary extension of civilisation and the ideal innocence of the natural life. It is in the fiction that the contradictions are resolved in mythical terms, the recurrent plot following one basic formula: ‘Civilisation threatens Adamic Innocent living in harmony with Edenic Nature’. That is, ideological contradictions are dealt with by representing them ‘the other way around’ in order to provide ‘a wish-fulfilling dream’ which inverts cause and effect, leaving us with ‘a timeless image of concord where there was once work, economy, history, politics, and struggle’.

Taking his cue from Roland Barthes’s analysis of mythic thought, Clark demonstrates how pre-Civil War fiction fulfils a process of psychological ‘censorship’, moving from history (the ‘real conditions’ of the farmer expropriating the land of the Indians by violence) to ideology (the attribution of ‘goodness’ to the signified ‘farmer’ by association with the signifier ‘yeoman’) and so to myth (the idealised ‘American hero’ being taken to signify pure, uncomplicated ‘innocence’). The book’s fascination lies in seeing how this abstract pattern facilitates such intriguing and distinctive readings of classic texts. Though Clark’s concern is with the exposure of narrative devices, he always manages to negotiate the subtle distinction between ‘mythology’ and ‘ideology’.

#Estella Lauter and Carol Schreier Rupprecht (eds), Feminist Archetypal Theory: Interdisciplinary Revisions of Jungian Thought  (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1985)

These essays comprise an extended ‘Yes, but … ‘ to Carl Jung. Yes, feminists will be grateful to him for taking ‘the feminine’ seriously, particularly the images of the ‘anima` and the ‘great mother’, and for positing the notion of a ‘collective unconscious’ that precedes the patriarchal stress on the personal (usually male) unconscious. But they ought to reject completely his dualism, which polarises male spirit (‘Logos’) and female body (‘Eros’), and his assumption that the ‘archetypes of the collective unconscious’ are eternal and essential.

These ideas are challenged generally in the editors’ introduction. Most interesting for the literary student is Annis V. Pratt’s essay, ‘Spinning Among Fields: Jung, Frye, Levi-Strauss and Feminist Archetypal Theory’. Pratt shows how the theorists listed in her title can prove
useful influences within feminism, provided they are radically reread. Jung’s description of the archetypal rebirth journey must be amended to take account of parallel quests undertaken by the protagonists of female narratives.

Frye is helpful in so far as he demonstrates archetypes to be recurrent images in the ‘total order of words’ that is literature rather than unchanging and unchangeable symbols, but his identification of men with culture and women with nature is obviously not helpful. Levi-Strauss may be acknowledged for his notion that all the varying practices of a community may be understood as forming a ‘bundle of relations’ which is its hidden meaning, but his abstract system of interpretation, which explains all phenomena according to a logical structure of signs, is ‘dualistic and imperial’.

The answer, Pratt suggests, is not simply to reject the hegemony of male reason, but to keep working across different discipline boundaries, countering absolutism: hence her metaphor of ‘spinning among fields’. In the words of the editors’ summing up of Pratt’s argument: ‘the task is to disentangle feminine archetypes from the masculine warp of culture.’ The fact that even here polarities have to be provisionally assumed may indicate what a complex and important project the editors and the contributors have set themselves.

#William G. Doty, Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals (Alabama, TN: University of Alabama Press, 1986)

This is a thorough guide to modern interpretations of myth rather than to the myths themselves, though of course the latter are illuminated in the process. Assuming that ritual, in the broadest sense, will always be implicit in any myth (mythos and cultus being complementary), Doty goes on to explore various dimensions of the term ‘myth’, demonstrating the diversity of emphases.

Thus, when considering the social function of myth, he distinguishes between the static model of society proposed by functionalism proper and the ideal of change explored by anthropologists such as Geertz: i.e„ myth as goal (‘model for`) as well as basis (‘model of’). Similarly, he distinguishes, within modern ‘demythologisation’, between Bultmann’s potentially useful corrective to the literal interpretation of Biblical myths and his followers’ reduction of all myths to empty fantasies.

Within ‘myth and ritual theory’ itself, he distinguishes between Frazer’s retrospective account of the primitive need for ceremonies and for their accompanying stories, on the one hand, and Victor Turner’s prospective account of ‘social drama’, which emphasises the possibilities of renewal offered to a social order by the ‘liminal’ stage of ritual in the form of trickster myths, etc., on the other.

Under the category of ‘psyche’, Doty gives a succinct account of Freud: seeing rituals as neuroses and myths as cultural dreams, the father of psychoanalysis works according to a ‘hermeneutics of deceit’ which puts both Judaism and Christianity in their place as Oedipal narratives, but which increasingly relies on his own myth of the war between Eros and Thanatos. He may be contrasted with Jung, whose ‘collective unconscious’ is far deeper and wider in scope than his mentor’s ‘archaic heritage’; but Doty, in agreement with the critic Eric Gould, rejects Jung’s essentialism.

Gould figures also in his account of ‘myth criticism’ as such: the way forward beyond the ‘totalising’ seasonal model of a Northrop Frye and the ‘monomythicism’ of a Joseph Campbell is the idea of myth as an open-ended discourse, an ongoing human expression. One wonders whether this time the odds have not been stacked unfairly here: against Frye, whose Biblical, apocalyptic project is in itself more exploratory than explanatory, if not against Campbell. However, in discussing structuralism, Doty redresses the balance: while rightly indicating the dangers of interpreting myths in terms of an abstract logic or grammar, he does point out that where deconstruction has demonstrated myth to involve endless reworking and transformation, it has in many respects been anticipated by Levi-Strauss.

This is an important, central work about modern mythography: demanding and controversial by turns, it merits close attention.

#Elinor W. Gadon, The Once and Future Goddess: A Symbol for Our Time (San Francisco, CA: Harper Collins, 1989)

The title indicates that this book is not just concerned with documenting the decline of the female deity, but seeks to promote a new spirituality centred on the goddess, which might begin to repair the damage of millennia of patriarchy. Reverence for the Earth Mother of the Ice Age (35,000-10,000 BC) was associated with the rise of art and ritual. Her replacement by the Great Goddess with the invention of agriculture in the New Stone Age was not, according to Gadon, part of the story of decline (though others, it should be said, have seen the agricultural revolution as fostering a newly aggressive and demanding attitude to the earth). Rather, she becomes the rich, complex figure of the Triple Goddess, whose phases of virgin, mother and crone embody the cycle of vegetation and moon alike.

It was against this deity that the nomadic, patriarchal tribes from the north reacted, foisting upon peaceful, egalitarian, matrifocal communities the worship of the sky god. Gadon traces in some detail the process by which the Minoan culture was destroyed, and how its rituals were subordinated in the telling of new myths of the male hero: Theseus, in particular, who triumphs over the body of the goddess, in the form of the labyrinth. Such hollow victories were not always so dramatic: she also draws on considerable scholarship to demonstrate that it was a long time after the Hebrews settled in Canaan that they decided to reject Asherah, the native goddess, as a suitable mate for their god Yahweh. Not that this prevents her from indicating the devastating effect of monotheism, with its dualism of man and woman, humanity and nature, life and death, good and evil.

So much for the goddess who was ‘once’; as for the ‘future goddess’, Gadon is inspired by James Lovelock’s vision of Gaia (which she compares to the shaman’s intuition of the wholeness of the planet) to advocate new aesthetic developments, by female artists
especially, which might restore us to a sense of the sacredness of the earth and purge us of our false identification of the spritual with the supernatural. If she also invokes Carl Jung and his follower Joseph Campbell, it is with the strict understanding that we can no longer countenance the narrative of the male journey for self-realisation away from the mother. At their best, Jung and Campbell seemed to realise this, whatever contrary pronouncements they might have made.

This is a deeply fascinating work which should interest students of art, literature, myth, religion, and anyone interested in how to regain an ‘ecological wisdom’.

#Robert A. Segal (ed), In Quest of the Hero (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990)

This volume reproduces a large part of three important works of mythography: Otto Rank’s The Birth of the Hero, Lord Raglan’s The Hero, and Alan Dundes’ The Hero Pattern and the Life of Jesus. Rank’s approach is Freudian and symbolic: the hero stands for the childhood desires of the mythmaker and reader alike – to kill the tyrannous father and mate with the mother. However, the desire is so abhorrent that it must be repressed: hence, myths of the hero convey this Oedipal content in disguised form; hence, too, there is a need to interpret them carefully and to keep an eye out for condensed or displaced material.

Raglan’s approach is Frazerian and literalist: the hero of the myth, who should be a king, is
identical with the dying god of fertility. Whereas Rank’s hero serves himself and promotes his own life by overcoming and replacing the father/ king, Raglan’s hero saves the community, as king, by letting himself be killed. Where Rank’s focus of interest is the family, Raglan’s is the physical world. Rank thinks myth will be necessary as long as there is sexual neurosis; Raglan, with Frazer, thinks myth must finally be dismissed on scientific grounds as an illusory means of ensuring the survival of the community.

The third mythographer, Dundes, draws on both Raglan’s ritualistic approach and Rank’s psychoanalytic approach in seeking to resolve the paradox that Jesus is important not only as an historical figure, but also as a mythic hero. Raglan proposes 22 motifs of hero myth: for example, 1.’The hero’s mother is a royal virigin’; 9. ‘We are told nothing of his childhood’; 18. ‘He meets with a mysterious death’; 19. ‘Often at the top of a hill’. Dundes shows how Jesus’s life may roughly approximate to Raglan’s pattern without disqualifying his historical existence and importance. Rank sees all father-son narratives as Oedipal; Dundes agrees, and explains the way Jesus’s life has been structured via folklore to offer a wish-fulfilment for Mediterranean males. Jesus manages the impossible: he acts out his role as a dutifiul son who obeys his father, even to the point of being crucified (i.e.,castrated); yet he simultaneously triumphs over the father, by means of his resurrection and ascension into heaven and by his lasting association (implicitly sexual) with Mary Magdalene (who serves as substitute for that other Mary, his own mother).

The volume offers a good deal of such food for thought; it is lucidly introduced by Robert Segal, who usefully compares and contrasts Rank, Raglan, and Dundes with Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell.

#Ted Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (London: Faber and Faber, 1992)

Hughes’s audacious thesis is that Shakespeare’s mature drama is based on one fundamental storyline, combining the plot of his two early poems, ‘Venus and Adonis’ and ‘The Rape of Lucrece’. The female hero of this ur-myth is the goddess of Hughes’s title, known in Latin as Venus. She can take three forms: great mother, sacred bride, and queen of the underworld. She is always implicitly the first, since that is the form which contains the whole cycle of being. She pursues Adonis as the second, only to be rejected. This provokes her, as the third, to adopt the guise of a wild boar and kill him. But the narrative is only complete when the slain young man is reborn as the woman-hating tyrant who seeks the destruction of the goddess in all her forms; as Tarquin, he then rapes Lucrece.

Hughes relates this myth to the religious and political turmoil of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Shakespeare is seen as sympathetic to a Catholic faith which is centred in the body and the female: hence he identifies the destructive Adonis-Tarquin figure with Puritanism. While no one play will give us access to the complete paradigm, Hughes argues that all the problem comedies, tragedies and romances dramatise one aspect or another. Thus, typical goddess-haters include Angelo, Othello and Hamlet; again, though there are images of reconciliation at the end of The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, these are unconvincing because Shakespeare is really only interested in the mythic ‘power circuit’ of the whole story, which is about a major cultural disaster. Hughes’s vast elaboration on an hypothesis – parallel to that sketched by T. S. Eliot in his ‘Metaphysical Poets’ essay (‘dissociation of sensibility’) and that sketched by D. H. Lawrence in his discussion of Hamlet in Twilight in ltaly (a ‘change in the European psyche’ involving revulsion against the flesh) – might well scandalise the Shakespearean specialist even as it delights those seeking an accessible and stimulating overview of the plays.

 #Marc Manganaro, Myth, Rhetoric and the Voice of Authority: A Critique of Frazer, Eliot, Frye and Campbell (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1992)

Marc Manganaro is not only concerned with the way the rhetorical appeal to myth has functioned in literary modernism and in the criticism deriving from it: he wishes to interrogate the very nature of modern anthropology, from which writers such as Eliot drew their authority. Manganaro distinguishes between two broad approaches to the study of the ‘primitive’: the comparative method associated with Frazer and the ethnography of Malinowski. The former is concerned with ‘being everywhere’ (making ambitious
connections against an evolutionary context), while the latter concentrates on ‘being there’ (making specific observations on a given tribe as a result of field research). At first sight, the former seems ‘dialogical’, the latter monological; the former seems ‘writerly’, the latter ‘readerly’; but Manganaro wishes to demonstrate that the encyclopedic range and diversity of vision advocated by Frazer reveals its totalitarian, reductive, and Eurocentric basis once its influence on Eliot, Frye, and Campbell is studied.

To take the example of Eliot, and to use (as does Manganaro) his own terminology: the declared ‘impersonality’ of his ‘mythical method’ gives him an ‘objective correlative’ of ‘fact’, and so the authority to adopt the stance of the poet-priest who will repair the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ of modernity, restoring Western culture to unity by the power of ritual while managing to articulate the dimension of the sacred on a higher level than that of the ‘primitive’. That is, Frazer’s comparative documentation of vegetation ceremonies fosters a rhetorical claim to reunite ‘blood’ and ‘brain’, conscious and unconscious, tradition and orthodoxy in the apparently neutral ‘definition of culture’.

The complexity of Manganaro’s extensive study will be evident even (or especially) in paraphrase; but this is a book which cannot be ignored by the serious student of myth, modernism, and modernity.

#Marina Warner, Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time (London: Vintage, 1994)

The six chapters of this study of contemporary mythology originated in the Reith Lectures which Marina Warner gave on BBC radio in 1994, The main title is explained by etymology: Warner traces the word ‘monster’ back to two Latin words, one of which means ‘show’ and the other of which means ‘warn’. Thus: ‘a myth shows something, it’s a story spoken to a purpose, it issues a warning’ (p.19). Her account of the ‘six myths of our time’ outlined here demonstrates that we are in danger of ‘managing monsters’ only in the crude terms of the violent film or video game: that is, by slaying them. She advocates a more subtle, traditional approach to the monstrous other: negotiation, sympathy,understanding.

Thus, in the first lecture we are invited to stop demonising the female, whether in the form of the rampaging dinosaurs of Jurassic Park or of the ‘irresponsible’ single mothers of the tabloid press. From ‘monstrous mothers’ we proceed to the myths of masculinity, of childhood innocence, of the wilderness (whether as symbolised by beast or by ‘wild man’), of primitive ‘savagery’, and of nationalism. Examples are drawn from literature, film and journalism. What is advocated is a constant vigilance in the face of a corrupted imagination, and a deeper knowledge of the sources from which contemporary myths are constructed. Far from being pessimistic about the impoverishment of the collective psyche, Warner insists that myth-making is an historical necessity which can never be contained, either by the scholar or by the capitalist entertainment industry. The brevity and colloquial style of this book belie its importance.

#Christopher G. Flood, Political Myth: A Theoretical Introduction (New York and London: Garland Press, 1996)

In literary studies, myth is often taken to be an archaic heritage, a given body of narratives on which writers can draw. Flood argues to the contrary that myth and mythmaking characterise modern society as much as they do archaic or ancient societies. He works within a tripartite division, indicating the complexity of the relations involved. On one side, we have ‘sacred myth’, by which he means myth as traditionally understood, in close proximity to religion. On the other side, we have ‘political ideology’, which at first seems to be quite distinct. In between, and mediating between the two apparent extremes, is ‘political myth’. It is narrative by virtue of being myth; it is ideological by virtue of being political. Like sacred myth, it consolidates a group and validates a particular version of reality by telling a story of origin, or of exemplary conduct, or of destination; like ideology, it is taken for granted, and is virtually invisible.

Flood emphasises that both myth and ideology are indispensable modes of thinking, and he rejects any definitions which suggest a deliberate, sinister process of indoctrination is involved. He tries to remain what he calls ‘neutral’, that is to say inclusive, in his own discussion. Particularly useful is his querying of attempts to separate out myth and ideology: he demonstrates that both Hitler’s and Marx’s works inevitably fuse both discourses. But also salutary is his challenge to Barthes, who notoriously declares myth to be nothing more than an instrument of ideology, a non-narrative image whose illusion must be revealed so that its power may be dispelled: for Flood, his thinking is vague and his approach is a ‘class-reductionist version of the Marxist theory of ideology’ which shows little sensitivity to the workings of myth. Such scepticism in the face of the idols of critical theory indicates the innovative and enquiring quality of this work.

#Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)

Myth is not a matter of origins so much as ends, according to Michael Bell; twentieth-century mythopoeia tells us where we are going rather than where we have come from. In this regard, he argues within the context of Heidegger’s ‘age of the world view’ and recognises the problem of ‘believing’ in a myth while acknowledging that it is contingent and provisional. He agrees also with Adorno and Horkheimer that the representative myth of the twentieth century is that of Odysseus, but he emphasises the theme of wandering, of quest for a homeland, rather than any implicit ideology. Indeed, one might view this book
as a timely and erudite riposte to all those who have got away with treating ‘mythology’ and ‘ideology’ as synonyms.

Bell’s sensitive reading of some key texts of modernism and of postmodernism
demonstrates that it is never enough to explain away writers as simply constrained by a world view: one has to attend to the relation between their recovery of the power of ancient myth and their attempt to challenge the given order. Indeed, he usefully distinguishes between those writers tending to the literal interpretation and application of myth (Pound largely, Eliot partially) and those trying to remain alert to its newly heuristic function (Joyce always, Lawrence intermittently). Again, while establishing the ethical importance of Primo Levi’s engagement with both history and myth, he pertinently queries the whimsical play between the two which he discovers in Angela Carter’s fiction. Of particular interest and importance is the last chapter, where Bell repudiates the stance of ‘ideological foreclosure’ adopted by certain contemporary critics, who thereby deny the exploratory power of myth. This book deserves serious attention.

#Ford Russell, Northrop Frye on Myth: An Introduction (New York: Garland Press, 1998)

The author is not interested in Frye as a literary critic so much as a theorist of myth. This means that he devotes much of his book to a comparative account of Frye and his
immediate predecessors in the field of mythography: Frazer, Cassirer, Freud, Jung, and others. This is useful work, and offers occasional insights: for instance, Cassirer and Northrop Frye share a Kantian interest in the way the human mind constructs the world as much as receives it (through symbolism, in the former case, and through the mythological imagination in the latter). On the other hand, some comparisons can be misleading: Jung and Frye are not really any more close than are Jung and Eliade, even though all three use the word ‘archetype’. That said, the central thesis of the book, emerging as it does from Russell’s painstakingly comparative work, is probably valid: that Frye is chiefly concerned to forge his own myth, and it is one that centres on the ‘ideal reader’, situated in an ‘intertextual universe’, as hero.

The task of this figure is to reach the still centre of the ‘order of words’ that is literature; having done so, he or she will have attained the point of epiphany. It will be obvious, then, that Russell’s book does suit literary students after all, even if they have to be prepared to engage with a good deal of philosophy in order to reap its benefits. Moreover, Frye’s myth of the reader as hero is also based upon theology, and so some interest in Biblical interpretation would be an advantage.

#Eleazar Meletinsky (trans. G. Lanque and A. Sadetsky), The Poetics of Myth (New York and London: Garland Press, 1998)

First written in 1976, but only recently translated, Melitinsky’s volume represents a high point in Russian critical theory. It is a comprehensive work which seeks to encompass most modern approaches to both myth and literature, most traditional forms of myth, and most of the important developments in ‘mythification’ (or mythopoeia) in twentieth-century literature. It is perhaps a significant contribution to treat myth as a mode of narrative susceptible to the same treatment as literature, on the understanding that it belongs to its ‘pre-history phase’ (hence the ‘poetics’ in his title), but his more important thesis is that literature develops from a ‘mytho-poetic base’.

This base is analysed in materialist terms, the main emphasis being on myth as a means of ordering and sanctioning social behaviour. In this respect, Melitinksy is a follower of Malinowski; but the argument becomes really interesting when he tries to marry this functionalist approach with the structuralism of Levi-Strauss. If archaic societies maintained a semantic dimension to myth (the signified being social reality, as commonly understood), modern societies have demonstrated the semiotic potential of myth (the signifier becoming less constrained and so more imaginatively interesting).

The crucial moment for Meltinisky is the demise of nineteenth-century realism and the rise of twentieth-century modernism: he explores the work of Joyce and Kafka in particular. The former revises traditional myths as if they were a ready-made fictional language. The latter creates a more spontaneous kind of myth by defamilarising familiar objects, creatures, and kinds of people in the process of attributing mythic status to them. Yet both, in a sense, seem to Melitinsky to fulfil the promise of Schlegel’s Romantic case for literary mythopoeia. Such connections are typical of this wide-ranging volume, which merits attention from students of fiction, critical theory, and the sociology of literature, as well as of mythology proper.

#Jason Whittaker, William BIake and the Myths of Britain (London: Macmillan Press, 1999)

Scholars such as E. P. Thompson and David Erdman have argued for BIake as a political radical, concerned to rewrite both Bible and native mythology in repudiation of the dominant ideology of his day. Jason Whitaker does not so much disagree with such an interpretation as insist on the need to widen and deepen it. He concentrates mainly on the figure of Albion, whom antiquarians before Blake had been identifying with the established English order. Blake by contrast identified him with the new Adam, whose awakening signified a complete transformation of human consciousness. To a large extent, this awakening would involve the end of social oppression and cultural hegemony; but for Whitaker, we fail to do BIake justice if we confine his symbolism to the political sphere. For his rereading of the myth of Albion complemented his rereading of the Bible: the point was to challenge not only monarchy and patronage, but also deism, druidism, and empiricism.

For BIake, the traditional God the Father was ‘Urizen’, and ‘your reason’ demanded control, sacrifice, and merely rational knowledge. Hence the subject of the major prophecies, Milton and Jerusalem, is the awakening of the self to its diverse powers, hitherto confined by the orthodoxy of ‘single vision and Newlon’s sleep’. For Whitaker this revelation is essentially a religious one, even if it has political implications.

He makes a good case for his kind of interpretation, drawing on psychoanalysis and poststructuralist theory rather than Marxism and historicism. While he may underestimate the importance of Thompson and Erdman, his own work effectively complements theirs.

 #Robert A. Segal, Theorizing about Myth (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999)

This volume consists of the author’s various introductions to, or essays on aspects of, key theorists of myth. Ostensibly a diverse selection, it turns out to be a consistent and coherent statement on the nature and status of ‘mythography’, or interpretation of myth. Segal assumes that any theorist will address one or more of the following questions about myth: What is its origin? What is its function? What is its subject-matter? He demonstrates that, in practice, most theorists fail to answer all three: for example, Bultmann only really talks about subject matter (the place of human beings in the world), while Malinowski only really talks about function (the sanctioning of social and religious practices).

If theorists do not on the whole offer complete accounts of myth, how are they to be assessed? Segal’s approach is to define their positions by contrast with those of others, since he sees the history of mythography as a process of reaction against predecessors. Thus: Tylor reacted against symbolic readings; Jung and Eliade reacted against Tylor; and so on. If Segal is a comparative historian of religion, then his comparisons usually end up as contrasts. This has the advantage of clarity; it also encourages students to make connections and to make intelligent generalisations. Lastly, one should point out that, as well as summing up so much, this volume also provokes discussion about established reputations: for example, Freud does not seem to have half as much to say about myth as Jung, while Campbell’s work is in many respects a distortion of Jung’s. This is a lucid and valuable volume.

#Maria Kuteeva (ed), The Ways of Creative Mythologies: Imagined Worlds and Their Makers, Tolkien Society Seminars, Volumes 1 and 2, (Telford: Tolkien Society, 2000)

This collection of papers on myth, with particular reference to Tolkien, originated in a conference held at Manchester University in 1997. The premise is that, given Tolkien is dismissed or patronised by the academy, it might be a good idea for academics to talk about the modern urge to ‘remythologisation’ in a wider context than The Lord of the Rings, though without feeling obliged to hide their enthusiasm for that magisterial work.

In the first part of Volume 1, Myth, Nationalism and ldeology, Tom Shippey sets the tone by, first, contesting the usual reasons for which critics treat Tolkien with condescension, and then going on to celebrate that twentieth-century English author’s impressive ability to incorporate the concerns of nineteenth-century German scholars of myth into his own imaginative project.

The papers in the second volume, Myth, Modernity and Postmodernity, discuss not only The Lord of the Rings as a corrective to the facile faith in technological progress for example, but also the dangers of Eliot’s narrowly modernist view of mythopoeia, as corrected by his contemporary, Kenneth Burke. The first section of this second volume – ‘Mythic lmagination’ – includes discussions of The Lord of the Rings in relation to ‘dialogism’ (a Bakhtinian concept acceptable to critics, but not normally associated with Tolkien), on the one hand, and in relation to the hierarchical cosmos of Platonism, on the other. The second part, ‘Myth in Contemporary Culture’, ranges from myth and politics in George Oppen’s poetry to the revitalisation of classical mythology in contemporary drama. Most papers are preceded by useful abstracts, and the whole thing is introduced in a lively manner by the editor.

 

 

 

See also:

For also:  Laurence Coupe, Myth 

For details, see: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/books/

 

For more on reading myth, see also:

https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/reading-for-the-myth/

https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/myth-a-very-short-introduction/

 

For more on Campbell, see: https://laurencecoupe.co.uk/the-heros-journey/