Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [23]
Sacred stories. The Bible, Koran, Bhagavad-Gita, Popol Vuh. Every religion has its collection of sacred or divine stories, which, in essence, are myths. After all, myths were first told to describe how the sacred powers directly influenced the world.
As Ninian Smart writes in The World’s Religions, “Experience is channeled and expressed not only by ritual but also by sacred narrative or myth…. It is the story side of religion. It is typical of all faiths to hand down vital stories: some historical; some about that mysterious primordial time when the world was in its timeless dawn; some about great founders, such as Moses, the Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad; some about assaults by the Evil One…. These stories are called myths. The term may be a bit misleading, for in the modern study of religion, there is no implication that a myth is false.”
This is the essence of one problem between believers of different faiths and traditions. Jews and Christians who hold on to the Bible as the divinely inspired word of God don’t necessarily allow that the Mayan Popol Vuh, a collection of sacred stories, is anything more than an invention, superstition that is far beneath their own “holy writ.” Arguments over these sacred stories even split people with shared religious traditions. For instance, Catholics and Protestants don’t even agree on what should be in the Bible. The portions of the Bible known as the Apocrypha are considered sacred by Catholics, but are less than divine according to Protestant belief. Many Jews and Christians believe that the Creation accounts in Genesis provide the literal and historical explanation for the beginning of the universe and life on earth. Other believers accept the scientific explanations for the creation of the universe and view the biblical account as a metaphor, accepting the message contained in the stories without treating the specific details as literal truth.
In other words, the difference between myth and religion may exist only in the eye of the believer—or the nonbeliever. And Ninian Smart’s conclusion brings this chapter nearly full circle. Myths are the sacred stories that may convey essential truths, even if they come in the guise of tales about ancient gods behaving badly.
MYTHIC VOICES
I believe that a large portion of the mythological conception of the world which reaches far into the most modern religions, is nothing but psychology projected to the outer world.
—SIGMUND FREUD (1856–1939)
Myths go back to the primitive storyteller and his dreams, to men moved by the stirring of their fantasies. These people were not very different from those whom later generations called poets or philosophers.
—CARL GUSTAV JUNG (1875–1961)
Are myths all in our minds?
Beyond exploring the sacred, spiritual, or religious component at the heart of myths, the twentieth century brought one more significant explanation for the source of mythology. With the beginnings of modern psychology, pioneers of psychological thought, such as Sigmund Freud, maintained that myths originate in the unconscious mind. Freud called myths “the dreams of early mankind,” and he frequently made reference to mythic characters, most famously in the term “Oedipus complex,” which drew on the story of the Greek king Oedipus who killed his father and then married his mother, and which was set forth in Freud’s landmark The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).
To Freud, myths were a product of personal psychology and dreams were the source of these myths. Specifically, he believed that most myths were sexual in nature. Heroes slaying dragons and gods killing other gods were all really forms of every male’s desire to kill his father and have sex with