The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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Myth as primitive science

By far the most common response to the challenge of science has been to abandon myth for science. Here myth, while still an explanation of the world, is now taken as an explanation of its own kind, not a scientific explanation in mythic guise. The issue is therefore not the scientific credibility of myth but the compatibility of myth with science. Myth is considered to be ‘primitive’ science – or, more precisely, the pre-scientific counterpart to science, which is assumed to be exclusively modern. Myth is here part of religion. Where religion apart from myth provides the belief in gods, myth fills in the details of how gods cause events. Because myth is part of religion, the rise of science as the reigning modern explanation of physical events has consequently spelled the fall of not only religion but also myth. Because moderns by definition accept science, they cannot also have myth, and the phrase ‘modern myth’ is self-contradictory. Myth is a victim of the process of secularization that constitutes modernity.

ThekeyexponentsofthischallengetomythhavebeenthepioneeringEnglishanthropologist E. B. Tylor (1832–1917) and the Scottish classicist and fellow pioneering anthropologist J. G. Frazer (1854–1941). For Tylor, myth provides knowledge of the world: ‘When the attention of a man in the myth-making stage of intellect is drawn to any phenomenon or custom which has to him no obvious reason, he invents and tells a story to account for it …’ (Tylor 1871: I, 392). For Frazer, the knowledge that myth provides is a means to control of the world, especially of crops. For both, the events explained or effected by myth are those in the external world such as rainfall, not social phenomena such as customs, laws, and institutions. Myth is the primitive counterpart to natural, not social, science.

For Tylor and Frazer, science renders myth not merely redundant but incompatible. Why? Because the explanations myth and science give are incompatible. It is not simply that the mythic explanation is personalistic and the scientific one impersonal. It is that both are direct explanations of the same events. Gods operate not behind or through impersonal forces but in place of them. According to myth, the rain god, let us say, collects rain in buckets and then chooses to empty the buckets on some spot below. According to science, meteorological processes cause rain. One cannot stack the mythic account atop the scientific one, for the rain god, rather than utilizing meteorological processes, acts in place of them.

Strictly, causation in myth is never entirely personalistic. The decision of the rain god to dump rain on a chosen spot below presupposes physical laws that account for the accumulation of rain in heaven, the capacity of the buckets to retain the rain, and the direction of the dumped rain. But to maintain their rigid hiatus between myth and science, Tylor and Frazer would doubtless reply that myths themselves ignore physical processes and focus instead on divine decisions.

Because Tylor and Frazer assume that myth and science are incompatible, they take for granted not merely that primitives have only myth but, even more, that moderns have only science. Rather than an eternal phenomenon, as the theorists Mircea Eliade, C. G. Jung, and Joseph Campbell grandly proclaim, myth for Tylor and Frazer is merely a passing, if slowly passing, one. Especially for Tyler, myth has admirably served its function, but its time is over. Moderns who still cling to myth have simply failed either to recognize or to concede the incompatibility of it with science. While Tylor and Frazer do not date the beginning of the scientific stage, it is identical with the beginning of modernity and is therefore only a few centuries old. Dying in the first half of the twentieth century, Tylor and Frazer never quite envisioned a stage post the modern one.

In setting myth against science, Tylor and Frazer epitomize the nineteenth-century view of myth. In the twentieth century the trend has been to reconcile myth with science, so

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that moderns, who by definition espouse science, can still retain myth. Tylor’s and Frazer’s theories have been spurned by twentieth-century theorists on many grounds: for precluding modern myths, for subsuming myth under religion and thereby precluding secular myths, for deeming the function of myth scientific-like, and for deeming myth false. Nevertheless, Tylor’s and Frazer’s theories remain central to the study of myth, and twentieth-century theories can be seen as rejoinders to them. One rejoinder has been to take the function of myth as other than explanatory, in which case myth does not overlap with natural science and can therefore coexist with it. Another rejoinder has been to read myth other than literally, in which case myth does not even refer to the physical world and can therefore likewise coexist with natural science.3 The most radical rejoinder has been to alter both the explanatory function and the literal reading of myth.

Myth as other than explanatory in function

The most important reinterpreters of the function of myth have been Bronislaw Malinowski, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Mircea Eliade. It is not clear whether for Malinowski (1884–1942), the Polish-born anthropologist, moderns as well as primitives have myth. What is clear is that for him primitives have science as well as myth, so that myth cannot be the primitive counterpart to modern science, theoretical or applied. Primitives use science both to explain and to control the physical world. They use myth to do the opposite: to reconcile themselves to aspects of the world that cannot be controlled.

Myth reconciles humans to the travails of life by rooting those travails in the primordial actions of gods or humans. Humans age because long ago a god or human did something that brought old age irremediably into the world: ‘The longed-for power of eternal youth and the faculty of rejuvenation which gives immunity from decay and age, have been lost by a small accident which it would have been in the power of a child and a woman to prevent’ (Malinowski 1926: 104). Myth pronounces the world not the best possible one but, in the wake of irreversible events, the only possible one.

Where for Tylor and Frazer myth deals almost exclusively with physical phenomena, for Malinowski it deals equally with social phenomena. Myth still serves to reconcile humans to the unpleasantries of life, but now to unpleasantries that, far from unalterable, can be cast off by members of society. Myth spurs members to accept the impositions of society by tracing them, too, back to a hoary past, thereby conferring on them the clout of tradition: ‘The myth comes into play when rite, ceremony, or a social or moral rule demands justification, warrant of antiquity, reality, and sanctity’ (Malinowski 1926: 36). Myths say, ‘Do this because this has always been done.’ A myth about the British monarchy would make the institution as ancient as possible, so that to tamper with it would be to tamper with tradition. In England today fox hunting is defended on the grounds that it has long been part of country life. In the case of physical phenomena the beneficiary of myth is the individual. In the case of social phenomena the beneficiary is society itself. The modern counterpart to myths of social phenomena, if moderns do not have myth, is ideology.4

To say that myth traces back the origin of phenomena is equivalent to saying that myth explains those phenomena. When, then, Malinowski denies strenuously that myths are explanations – primitives ‘do not want to “explain,” to make “intelligible” anything which happens in their myths’ (Malinowski 1926: 41) – he is denying that they are, as for Tylor, explanations for their own sake. He cannot be denying that they are explanations at all, for it is exactly by explaining phenomena that myths serve their conciliatory function.

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The French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857–1939) does not contest Tylor’s and Frazer’s restriction of myth to primitives. Like Malinowski, he contests less Frazer’s than Tylor’s characterization of primitives and thus of myth. Where for Malinowski primitives are too overwhelmed by the world to have the luxury of reflecting on it, for Lévy-Bruhl primitives are too emotionally involved in the world to be capable of accounting for it. Their feelings shape the way they perceive as well as conceive the world. Rather than, as for Tylor, first experiencing a natural world of animals and plants and then postulating gods to account for their behavior, primitives project their ‘collective representations’ onto the world and thereby experience all things in the world as filled with a sacred, or ‘mystic,’ reality pervading the natural one: ‘Primitive man, therefore, lives and acts in an environment of beings and objects, all of which, in addition to the properties that we recognize them to possess, are endued with mystic properties. He perceives their objective reality mingled with another reality’ (Lévy–Bruhl 1926: 65). All phenomena, including humans, are mystically identical with one another.

Myth functions not to explain this mystical world view but to preserve it. As long as members experience oneness with the group, they experience oneness with the world, and myth is barely needed. But once members begin to experience themselves as individuals, they turn to myth to restore the feeling of oneness with society and the world:

Where the participation of the individual in the social group is still directly felt, where the participation of the group with surrounding groups is actually lived – that is, as long as the period of mystic symbiosis lasts – myths are meagre in number and of poor quality … Where the aggregates are of a more advanced type, … there is, on the contrary, an increasingly luxuriant outgrowth of mythology. Can myths then likewise be the products of primitive mentality which appear when this mentality is endeavoring to realize a participation no longer directly felt – when it has recourse to intermediaries, and vehicles designed to secure a communion which has ceased to be a living reality?

(Lévy-Bruhl 1926: 368–9)

For Lévy-Bruhl, myth is part of a mythic mentality, and from him comes the notion of a distinctively mythic, or ‘mythopoetic,’ way of thinking. Where for Tylor myth is as logical as science, for Lévy-Bruhl it is conspicuously illogical, or ‘pre-logical.’ For primitives, despite their yearning to re-experience the oneness of all things, simultaneously and inconsistently deem all things distinct. Theorists of myth influenced by Lévy-Bruhl include the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1955).

At first glance the French structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908) seems a throwback to Tylor. For Lévi-Strauss, myth is not only an exclusively primitive enterprise but, more, a rigorously intellectual one. Lévi-Strauss denounces nonintellectualists like Malinowski and Lévy-Bruhl as vigorously as they denounce intellectualists like Tylor. Indeed, in declaring that primitives, ‘moved by a need or a desire to understand the world around them, … proceed by intellectual means, exactly as a philosopher, or even to some extent a scientist, can and would do’ (Lévi-Strauss 1978: 16), Lévi-Strauss seems indistinguishable from Tylor. Yet he is in fact severely critical of Tylor. For Lévi-Strauss, primitives think differently from moderns rather than fail to think as well as moderns.

Primitive, or mythic, thinking is concrete. Modern thinking is abstract. Primitive thinking focuses on the observable, sensory, qualitative aspects of phenomena rather than, like modern thinking, on the unobservable, nonsensory, quantitative ones. Yet myth for Lévi-Strauss is

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no less scientific than modern science. It is simply part of the ‘science of the concrete’ rather than the science of the abstract. For Lévi-Strauss, myth is primitive science and not just the primitive counterpart to exclusively modern science. But because primitive and modern science concentrate on different aspects of the physical world, they are compatible rather than, like myth and science for Tylor, incompatible. And primitive science is not inferior to modern science, the way myth is to science for Tylor.

If myth is an instance of mythic thinking because it deals with concrete, tangible phenomena, it is an instance of thinking per se, modern and primitive alike, because it classifies phenomena. According to Lévi-Strauss, all humans think in the form of classifications, specifically pairs of oppositions, and project them onto the world. Many cultural phenomena express these oppositions, which Lévi-Strauss calls ‘binary oppositions.’ Myth is distinctive in resolving the oppositions it expresses: ‘the purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction’ (Lévi-Strauss 1958: 105). Myth resolves a contradiction by providing either a mediating middle term or an analogous, but more easily resolved, contradiction. Either tactic narrows and thereby alleviates the contradiction, but, strictly, neither fully resolves it.

Like the contradictions expressed in other phenomena, those expressed in myth are for Lévi-Strauss apparently reducible to the fundamental contradiction between ‘nature’ and ‘culture.’ That contradiction stems from the conflict that humans experience between themselves as at once animal-like, hence a part of nature, and civilized, hence a part of culture. This conflict arises from the projection onto the world of the oppositional character of the mind. Humans not only think ‘oppositionally’ but, through projection, experience the world ‘oppositionally’ as well. By showing a way of diminishing that opposition, myth makes life more bearable and, even more, solves a logical conundrum.

In calling his approach to myth ‘structuralist,’ Lévi-Strauss distinguishes it from a ‘narrative’ approach, which adheres to the plot of myth. All other theories take for granted that the meaning of myth lies in its plot. Lévi-Strauss dismisses the plot and locates the meaning of myth in the structure. The plot is that element – say, event – A leads to event B, which leads to event C. The structure, which is identical with the expression and diminution of contradictions, is either that events A and B constitute an opposition mediated by event C or that events A and B are as opposed to each other as events C and D, an analogous opposition, are opposed.

Lévi-Strauss confines himself to, primarily, Native American myths, but other structuralists analyze modern myths. In Mythologies (1972) the French semiotician Roland Barthes (1915– 80) takes as myths various cultural artifacts and shows how they serve to justify the bourgeois outlook of postwar France. The function of myth here is not intellectual but ideological. Myth has nothing to do with natural science. Where Lévi-Strauss largely analyzes myths independent of their social context – the grand exception is his analysis of the myth of Asdiwal – others inspired by him have, like Barthes, tied myths to their contexts. For the classicists Jean-Pierre Vernant (1983), Marcel Detienne (1977), Pierre Vidal-Naquet, and Nicole Loraux, the relationship between myth and society is much more malleable, subtle, and ironic than it is for Malinowski or even Barthes. Myth can as readily challenge as bolster existing ideology.

Unlike Malinowski and Lévy-Bruhl, the Romanian-born historian of religions Mircea Eliade (1907–86) has no hesitation in making one function of myth explanatory. For him, myth explains less how the gods presently control the world, as for Tylor and Frazer, than how they created it. Like Malinowski, Eliade includes myths of social phenomena as well as

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of physical ones. Explanation for Eliade is both an end in itself and, even more, a means to another end. To hear, to read, and above all to reenact a myth is magically to return toÂthe time of the myth, the time of the origin of whatever phenomenon it explains. It is when the world is fresh that gods, the creators in myth, are belived to be closest at hand, as in the biblical case of ‘the Lord God[’s] walking in the garden of the cool of the day’ (Genesis 3:8). The return to this ‘primordial time’ reverses the subsequent separation from gods, a separation that is equivalent to the fall, and is regenerative spiritually: ‘What is involved is, in short, a return to the original time, the therapeutic purpose of which is to begin life once again, a symbolic rebirth’ (Eliade 1968: 8). The ultimate benefit of myth is proximity to the gods, one or more.

Eliade ventures beyond the other respondents to Tylor and Frazer in proclaiming myth panhuman rather than merely primitive. Instead of showing how myth is logically compatible with science, he circumvents the issue by citing modern plays, novels, and movies with the mythic theme of yearning to escape from the everyday world into another, often earlier one:

A whole volume could well be written on the myths of modern man, on the mythologies camouflaged in the plays that he enjoys, in the books that he reads … Even reading includes a mythological function … particularly because, through reading, the modern man succeeds in obtaining an ‘escape from time’ comparable to the ‘emergence from time’ effected by myths. Whether modern man ‘kills’ time with a detective story or enters such a foreign temporal universe as is represented by any novel, reading projects him out of his personal duration and incorporates him into other rhythms, makes him live in another ‘history.’

(Eliade 1968: 205)

If moderns, who by definition have science, also have myth, then for Eliade myth simply must be compatible with science – not quite the conclusion that Tylor and Frazer would draw. If even professedly atheistic moderns have myths, then myth must be universal. How modern myths, which do not involve gods, can still provide access to gods, Eliade never reveals. Likely for him, the agents in modern myths are merely human heroes, but heroes so elevated above ordinary mortals as to be virtual gods.

Myth as other than literal in meaning

The most prominent reinterpreters of not the function but the meaning of myth have been the German New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) and the German-born philosopher Hans Jonas (1903–93). Both were students of the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) in his earlier period and consequently offer existentialist readings of myth. While they limit themselves to their specialties, Christianity and Gnosticism, they apply a theory of myth per se.

Bultmann acknowledges that, read literally, myth is about the physical world and is incompatible with science. But unlike Malinowski and Eliade as well as Tylor, he reads myth symbolically. In Bultmann’s exasperatingly confusing phrase, one must ‘demythologize’ myth, by which he means not eliminating, or ‘demythicizing,’ myth, the way Kramer does, but on the contrary extricating its true, symbolic subject matter. Once demythologized, myth is no longer about the external world but is instead about the place of human beings in that world. Myth no longer explains but instead describes, and it describes not the external world but

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humans’ experience of that world: ‘The real purpose of myth is not to present an objective picture of the world as it is, but to express man’s understanding of himself in the world in which he lives. Myth should be interpreted not cosmologically, but anthropologically, or better still, existentially’ (Bultmann 1953: 10). Myth depicts the human condition.

Read literally, the New Testament for Bultmann describes a cosmic battle between good and evil anthropomorphic gods for control of the physical world. These gods intervene miraculously not only in the operation of nature, as for Tylor and Frazer, but also in the lives of human beings. The beneficent beings direct humans to do good; the malevolent ones compel them to do evil. Taken literally, the New Testament presents a prescientific outlook:

The world is viewed as a three-storied structure, with the earth in the centre, the heaven above, and the underworld beneath. Heaven is the abode of God and of celestial beings – the angels. The underworld is hell, the place of torment. Even the earth is more than the scene of natural, everyday events, of the trivial round and common task. It is the scene of the supernatural activity of God and his angels on the one hand, and of Satan and his daemons on the other. These supernatural forces intervene in the course of nature and in all that men think and will and do. Miracles are by no means rare. Man is not in control of his own life. Evil spirits may take possession of him. Satan may inspire him with evil thoughts. Alternatively, God may inspire his thought and guide his purposes.

(Bultmann 1953: 1)

Demythologized, the New Testament still refers in part to the physical world, but now to a world ruled by a single, nonanthropomorphic, transcendent God. Satan does not even still exist. He becomes a symbol of one’s own evil inclinations:

Mythology expresses a certain understanding of human existence. It [rightly] believes that the world and human life have their ground and their limits in a power which is beyond all that we can calculate or control. Mythology speaks about this power inadequately and insufficiently because it speaks about it as if it were a worldly [i.e., physical] power. It [rightly] speaks of gods who represent the power beyond the visible, comprehensible world. [But] it speaks of gods as if they were men and of their actions as human actions … Again, the conception of Satan as ruler over the world expresses a deep insight, namely, the insight that evil is not only to be found here and there in the world, but that all particular evils make up one single power which in the last analysis grows from the very actions of men, which form an atmosphere, a spiritual tradition, which overwhelms every man. The consequences and effects of our sins become a power dominating us, and we cannot free ourselves from them.

(Bultmann 1958: 19, 21)

Damnation refers not to a future place but to one’s present state of mind, which exists as long as one rejects God. There is no physical hell. Hell symbolizes despair over the absence of God. As John Milton’s Satan declares, ‘Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.’ Similarly, salvation refers to one’s state of mind once one accepts God. Heaven refers not to a place in the sky but to joy in the presence of God. The eschatology refers not to the coming end of the physical world but to the personal acceptance or rejection of God in one’s everyday life. The Kingdom comes not outwardly, with cosmic upheavals, but inwardly, whenever one embraces God.

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Demythologized, myth ceases to be purely primitive, as for Tylor and Frazer, and becomes universal, as for Eliade. Myth ceases to be false, as for Tylor and Frazer, and becomes true. Where Eliade invokes the existence of modern myths as ipso facto evidence of the compatibility of myth with science, Bultmann actually labors to reconcile myth with science. Where Eliade claims that moderns have myths of their own, Bultmann claims that moderns can retain biblical myths.

Bultmann’s boldest response to Tylor and Frazer is to circumvent the function of myth. In translating the meaning of myth into terms acceptable to moderns, he sidesteps the issue of why moderns, even if they can have myth, need it. Unlike other symbolic interpreters of myth such as the religious philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1967) and the philosopher Philip Wheelwright (1968), Bultmann never asserts that the meaning of myth is untranslatable into nonmythic terms and is therefore indispensable for expressing or even revealing its contents. Since he takes the meaning of myth from Heidegger’s philosophy, he can hardly be doing so. He is thereby left with a theory that makes myth palatable to moderns but unnecessary for them. And even the palatibility of myth for moderns is tenuous, for myth still refers to God, albeit of a nonphysical kind. One must still believe in God to accept myth.

Like Bultmann, Jonas seeks to show that ancient myths have a meaning that continues to speak to moderns. For both Bultmann and Jonas, myth describes the alienation of humans from the world as well as from their true selves prior to their acceptance of God. Because Gnosticism, unlike mainstream Christianity, is radically dualistic, humans remain alienated from the physical world and from their bodies even after they have found the true God. And they find the true God only by rejecting the false god of the physical world.

Unlike Bultmann, who strives to bridge the divide between Christianity and modernity, Jonas acknowledges the divide between Gnosticism and modernity. In Gnosticism the state of alienation is temporary; in modern, secular existentialism alienation is permanent. Alienation is the human condition, not a fall from it. Jonas does not, then, seek to ‘demythologize’ either the source of alienation or the solution to it – as if alienation were temporary – but the fact of alienation. He translates Gnostic myths into existentialist terms not to make Gnosticism acceptable to moderns but only to show the similarity between the Gnostic and the existentialist outlooks: ‘the essence of existentialism is a certain dualism, an estrangement between man and the world … There is only one situation … where that condition has been realized and lived out with all the vehemence of a cataclysmic event. That is the gnostic movement’ (Jonas 1963: 325).

Like Bultmann, Jonas bypasses the function of myth and confines himself to the meaning. But he, like Bultmann, is thereby still left with finding a use for myth. Since he, too, takes his glossary from Heidegger, modern philosophy unlocks myth and not vice versa. What function, then, does myth serve?

Myth as both other than explanatory and other than literal

The most radical departures from Tylor and Frazer have transformed both the explanatory function and the literal meaning of myth. The most influential theorists here have been the Austrian physician Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung (1875– 1961). For both, the subject matter of myth is the unconscious, and the function of myth is to manifest the unconscious. The two differ sharply over the nature of the unconscious and in turn over the reason myth is needed to manifest it.

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Because the Freudian unconscious is composed of repressed sexual and aggressive drives, myth functions to release those drives, but in a disguised way, so that the creator and the user of a myth need never confront its meaning and thereby their own nature. Myth, like other aspects of culture, serves simultaneously to reveal and to hide its unconscious contents. Compared with Jung, Freud wrote little on myth. His key discussion is his analysis of the myth of Oedipus in The Interpretation of Dreams (1953). The classical psychoanalytic study of myth is that of his one-time disciple, fellow Austrian Otto Rank (1884–1939). Focusing on myths of male heroes, Rank sees the myths as providing an unconscious, vicarious fulfillment of, above all, Oedipal drives. By identifying oneself with the named hero, whose own saga must be psychologized, one gains a partial fulfillment of lingering childhood desires. Myth serves neurotic adult males fixated at their Oedipal stage: ‘Myths are, therefore, created by adults, by means of retrograde childhood fantasies, the hero being credited with the myth-maker’s personal infantile history’ (Rank 1914: 82).

By no means do Freudians still take myth so negatively. Spurred by ego psychology, contemporary Freudians such as the American Jacob Arlow (b. 1912–2004) take myth positively. For them, myth helps to solve the problems of growing up rather than to perpetuate them, is progressive rather than regressive, and facilitates adjustment to society and the physical world rather than childish flight from both. Myth may still serve to vent repressed drives, but it serves even more to sublimate them and to integrate them. Moreover, myth serves everyone, not just neurotics:

Psychoanalysis has a greater contribution to make to the study of mythology than [merely] demonstrating, in myths, wishes often encountered in the unconscious thinking of patients. The myth is a particular kind of communal experience. It is a special form of shared fantasy, and it serves to bring the individual into relationship with members of his cultural group on the basis of certain common needs. Accordingly, the myth can be studied from the point of view of its function in psychic integration

– how it plays a role in warding off feelings of guilt and anxiety, how it constitutes a form of adaptation to reality and to the group in which the individual lives, and how it influences the crystallization of the individual identity and the formation of the superego.

(Arlow 1961: 375)

Jungians have taken myth positively from the outset. For them, the unconscious expressed in myth is not the Freudian repository of repressed, anti-social drives but a storehouse of innately unconscious ‘archetypes,’ or sides of the personality, that have simply never had an opportunity at realization: ‘Contents of an archetypal character … do not refer to anything that is or has been conscious, but to something essentially unconscious’ (Jung 1968: 156). Myth is one means of encountering this Jungian, or ‘collective,’ unconscious. The function of myth is less release, as for classical Freudians, than growth, as for contemporary ones. But where even contemporary Freudians see myth as a means of adjusting to the demands of the outer world, Jungians see myth as a means of cultivating the ‘inner world.’ The payoff is less adjustment than self-realization. Some Jungians and Jungian-oriented theorists such as the American Joseph Campbell (1904–87) (1949) so tout the benefit of myth that it becomes a panacea for humanity’s problems. But Jung himself never goes this far. For Jung, myth works best as part of therapy. For Campbell, myth makes therapy unnecessary, and only the absence of myth makes therapy necessary.

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For even contemporary Freudians, myth harks back to childhood. For Jungians, myth points forward. Myth especially serves adults already settled in the outer world but largely severed from the unconscious. Myth is to be read symbolically, as for Freudians, but not because its meaning has intentionally been disguised. Rather, the unconscious speaks a language of its own and simply awaits grasping. Understanding myth is less like breaking the Enigma code, as for Freudians, and more like deciphering the Rosetta Stone.

‘Post,’ or ‘archetypal,’ Jungians such as James Hillman (b. 1926) (1975) and David Miller (b. 1936) (1981) maintain that classical Jungian psychology, by emphasizing the therapeutic message of mythology, reduces myth to psychology and reduces god to a concept. They advocate the reverse: that psychology be viewed as irreducibly mythological. Myth is still to be interpreted psychologically, but psychology itself is to be interpreted mythologically. One grasps the psychological meaning of the myth of Saturn by imagining oneself to be the figure Saturn, not by translating Saturn’s plight into clinical terms like depression. Moreover, the depressed Saturn represents a legitimate aspect of one’s personality. Each god deserves its due. The psychological ideal should be pluralistic rather than monolithic – in mythological terms, polytheistic rather than monotheistic. Post-Jungians maintain that Jung’s psychological ideal of a single, unified self (or ‘Self’) reflects a Western, specifically monotheistic, more specifically Christian, still more specifically Protestant, outlook. Instead of the Bible, Hillman and Miller take their mythic cues from the Greeks, however simplistic the equation of Greece with polytheism and of the Bible with monotheism may be. The title of Miller’s key book says it all: The New Polytheism (1981).

Furthermore, the Western emphasis on progress is purportedly reflected in the primacy that Jung accords both hero myths and the ego, even in the ego’s encounter with the unconscious. For the encounter is intended to abet development. According to Hillman and Miller, the ego is just one more archetype with its attendant kind of god, and it is the ‘soul’ rather than the ego that experiences the archetypes through myths. Myth serves to open one up to the soul’s own depths. The payoff of mythology is aesthetic rather than moral: one gains a sense of wonder and contemplation rather than, as for classical Jungians, a guide to living. Consequently, the most apposite myths are those of the playful puer archetype and of the receptive anima archetype rather than, as for classical Jungians, those of the striving hero archetype and of the fully united, or integrated, wise old man archetype.

Myth and ritual

Myth is commonly taken to be words, often in the form of a story. A myth is read or heard. It says something. Yet there is an approach to myth that finds this view artificial. According to the myth and ritual, or myth-ritualist, theory, myth does not stand by itself but is tied to ritual. Myth is not just a statement but also an action. The most uncompromising form of the theory maintains that all myths have accompanying rituals and all rituals accompanying myths. In tamer versions some myths may flourish without rituals or some rituals without myths. Alternatively, myths and rituals may originally operate together but subsequently go their separate ways. Or myths and rituals may arise separately but subsequently coalesce. Whatever the tie between myth and ritual, the myth-ritualist theory differs from other theories of myth and from other theories of ritual in focusing on the tie.

The myth and ritual, or myth-ritualist, theory was pioneered by the Scottish biblicist and Arabist William Robertson Smith (1846–94), who argued that ritual came first and that

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myth arose to explain ‘the circumstances under which the rite first came to be established, by the command or by the direct example of the god’ (Smith 1894: 17). In Smith’s version of myth-ritualism, myth is clearly subordinate to ritual.

The fullest development of the theory came in, especially, the second and third editions (1900, 1911–15) of J. G. Frazer’s Golden Bough, itself dedicated to Smith. Frazer ties myth to magic, specifically to the first of his two laws of magic. The first law, that of homeopathy, is epitomized by voodoo, according to which the imitation of an action causes the action to occur. Ritual puts magic into practice. The aim is to get the crops to grow.

Frazer ties myth not only to ritual but also to kingship. In one version of his myth-ritualist scenario the king, merely human, plays the part of the god of vegetation, the key god of the pantheon, and acts out the myth of the god’s death and rebirth. The ritualistic imitation of the death and rebirth of the god is believed to cause the same to happen to the god. And as the god goes, so go the crops. The ritual is performed at the end – the desired end – of winter, presumably when provisions are running low. The myth can be said to explain the ritual, as for Smith, but from the outset and in the form of the script of a play. Without the myth, there would be no ritual. At the same time the subject of myth is, as for Tylor, the world and not, as for Smith, the ritual: myth is about the death and rebirth of vegetation, not about the ritual used to effect that rebirth.

In the other version of Frazer’s myth-ritualist scenario the king does not merely play the part of the god of vegetation but is the god, whose soul resides in the body of the incumbent. Here the king does not act out the death and rebirth of the god but is himself killed, with the god’s soul then being transferred to the body of his successor. This ritualistic regicide occurs as often as annually or as infrequently and as unpredictably as at the earliest sign of the king’s weakening. Now as the king goes, so goes the god and so in turn goes vegetation.

Strictly speaking, no magic is involved here. The replacement of the king does not imitate the revival of the god but effects it. In fact, no myth is involved either. The killing of the king is not the enactment of the myth of the death of the god of vegetation but the sheer killing of the king. The ritual – the killing – really stands alone, undirected by any mythic script. It is Frazer’s English disciple Lord Raglan (1936) who provides a mythic script for the ritual: for him, hero myths describe ideal kings whose willingness to die for their community should be emulated by present-day kings. In both of Frazer’s scenarios the ritual, whether with or without myth, is the primitive counterpart to applied science rather than, as for Tylor, the counterpart to scientific theory.

The classicists Gilbert Murray, F. M. Cornford, and A. B. Cook, all British or Britishresident, applied the first version of Frazer’s myth-ritualist scenario to such ancient Greek phenomena as tragedy, comedy, the Olympic games, science, and philosophy. These seemingly secular, even anti-religious phenomena are interpreted as latent expressions of the myth of the death and rebirth of the god of vegetation.

Among biblicists, the English S. H. Hooke, the Swede Ivan Engnell, the Welshman Aubrey Johnson, and the Norwegian Sigmund Mowinckel differed over the extent to which ancient Israel in particular adhered to a myth-ritualist pattern based on Frazer’s first version. Engnell saw an even stronger adherence than the cautious Hooke. Johnson and especially Mowinckel saw a weaker one.

Invoking Frazer, Bronislaw Malinowski applied his own, qualified version of the theory to the myths of native peoples worldwide. Malinowski argues that myth, which for him, as for Smith, explains the origin of ritual, gives rituals a hoary origin and thereby sanctions them. Society depends on myth to spur adherence to rituals. But if all rituals depend on myth, so do