Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [11]
Like most words, “myth” means different things to different people, but in its most basic sense, a myth is defined as “A traditional, typically ancient story dealing with supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes that serves as a fundamental type in the world view of a people, as by explaining aspects of the natural world or delineating the psychology, customs, or ideals of society.” (American Heritage, emphasis added.)
“Explaining aspects of the world”—that’s another way to say “science” or “religion,” the two principal ways people have used to explain the world.
“The psychology, customs, or ideals of a society.” That’s a large mouthful that covers just about everything else not covered by science and religion—but gets to the heart of what we think and believe, even if we can’t “know” it.
In the ancient world, myth had a meaning that is almost completely opposite to our modern concept of myth as an “untruth.” In the earliest days of humanity, myths existed to convey essential truths. They were, in a very real sense, what many people today might call gospel. Or as David Leeming put it in A Dictionary of Creation Myths, “A myth is a…projection of a…group’s sense of its sacred past and its significant relationship with the deeper powers of the surrounding world and universe. A myth is a projection of…a culture’s soul.” Ananda Coomaraswamy, a twentieth-century Indian philosopher, put it this way: “Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be expressed in words.”
Viewed in this very ancient and much broader sense, myths are about what makes us tick. They are as old as humanity and as current as the news.
The word myth is derived from the Greek word mythos, for “story,” and when the Greek philosopher Plato coined the word “mythology” more than two thousand years ago, he was referring to stories that contained invented figures. In other words, the great Greek thinker conceived of myths as elaborate fiction, even if they expressed some larger “Truth.” Plato—using the voice of Socrates as his Narrator—criticized the myths as a corrupting influence, and in his ideal state, set out in The Republic, banned poets and their tales.
“The first thing will be to establish a censorship of writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only.” He goes on to say about the stories of the gods: “These tales must not be admitted into our State, whether they are supposed to have an allegorical meaning or not. For a young person cannot judge what is allegorical and what is literal;…and therefore it is most important that the tales which the young first hear should be models of virtuous thoughts.”
On the other hand, Plato himself was not above using allegories (a Greek word that essentially means “saying something in a different way”) as a teaching device; Plato’s own tale of Atlantis, a mythical idealized world, and his famed allegory of the Cave, in which most men are trapped in a world of illusion and ignorance, seeing only flickering shadows of reality, are inventions—stories that are meant to convey a greater eternal and universal Truth.
For thousands of years we have invented stories to tell one another and our children. But why? Myths clearly fulfill some basic function in human life. But what is that function? And was the philosopher Plato mistaken? Is mythology more than a set of elaborate fictions?
There is no question or doubt that the creation of myths and their role in everyday life is one of the most common of all human endeavors. As Homer said, “All men have need of the gods.” So, we need myths. It is clear that myths developed in the dawn of human consciousness, from the very first evidence of human culture—cave paintings, carved pieces of bone, fertility figurines, household idols, and ancient