FAILING TO PICK THE LOW HANGING FRUIT:

Our popular narrative, then, is that we shed mythology in its traditional sense, probably during the process that began in the Enlightenment, in the course of which the world became "disenchanted" by the advance of science, and that has led since to a secular society on which the old deities have lost their grip. We grew out of gods and myths because we acquired reason and science.

This picture is tenacious, and I suspect it accounts for much of the resistance to the notion (and there is a lot of resistance, believe me) that anything created in modern times might deserve to be called a "myth." To accept that we have never relinquished myths and myth-making might seem to be an admission that we are not quite modern and rational. But all I am asking, with the concept of myth I use in this book, is that we accept that we have not resolved all the dilemmas of human existence, all the questions about our origins or our nature--and that, indeed, modernity has created a few more of them.

Our popular narrative, then, is that we shed mythology in its traditional sense, probably during the process that began in the Enlightenment, in the course of which the world became "disenchanted" by the advance of science.

One objection to the idea of a modern myth is that, to qualify as myth, a story must contain elements and characters that someone somewhere believes literally existed or happened. Surely myths can't emerge from works of fiction! The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski asserted as much, saying of myth that "it is not of the nature of fiction, such as we read today in a novel, but it is a living reality, believed to have once happened in primeval times, and continuing ever since to influence the world and human destinies."

But this is simply the grand narrative with which Malinowski and his generation framed their study of the myths of "primitive" cultures. It allows us to insist (as they wished to) that we advanced societies have no myth left except religion (and even that is no longer believed in quite the same way as it was a couple of centuries ago). As Baldick puts it, in this view "myth is the quickest way out of the twentieth [and now the 21st] century."

Even in its own terms, however, Malinowski's definition is tendentious. Did the author(s) we know as Homer believe he was merely writing history, right down to, say, Athena's interventions in the Trojan war? To assert this would be to neglect the long and continuing scholarly debate about what Homer was really up to--was he, for instance, a skeptic, or a religious reformer? Worse, it would neglect the even longer and profound debate about what storytelling is up to. It might be unwise to attach any contemporary label to Homer, but one that fits him more comfortably than most is to say he was a poet, and that he used poetic imagination to articulate his myths. Stories like his relate something deemed culturally important and in an important sense "true"--but not as a documentary account of events. Plato admitted as much in the 5th century BCE; are we then to suppose that Greek myth was already "dead" to him?

To ask if ancient people "believed" their mythical stories is to ask a valid but extremely complex question. It is much the same as asking if Christian theologians, past and present, "believe" the Bible. Yes, they generally do--but that belief is complicated, multifaceted, and contentious, and to imagine it amounts to a literal conviction that all the events and peoples described in the holy book occurred as written is to misunderstand the function of religion itself. What's more, while we can adduce a range of interpretations about these beliefs today, it is not clear we can ever truly decide how these correspond (or whether they even need to correspond) to the convictions of the people who created the original text.

Tweet   @brothersjudd