How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [96]
Mythology has been interpreted by the modern intellect as a primitive, fumbling effort to explain the world of nature (Frazer); as a production of poetical fantasy from prehistoric times, misunderstood by succeeding ages (Müller); as a repository of allegorical instruction, to shape the individual to his group (Durkheim); as a group dream, symptomatic of archetypal urges within the depths of the human psyche (Jung); as the traditional vehicle of man’s profoundest metaphysical insights (Coomaraswamy); and as God’s revelation to his children (The Church). Mythology is all of these. The various judgments are determined by the viewpoints of the judges. For when scrutinized in terms not of what it is but how it functions, of how it has served mankind in the past, or how it may serve today, mythology shows itself to be as amenable as life itself to the obsessions and requirements of the individual, the race, the age.
Campbell’s theory, as described in his 1972 Myths to Live By, is that myths serve four functions: (1) mystical, which “serves to awaken and maintain the individual sense of awe and gratitude in relation to the mystery dimension of the universe, not so that one lives in fear of it, but so that he recognizes that he participates in it”: (2) explanatory, or “an image of the universe which will be in accord with the knowledge of the time, the sciences and the fields of action of the folk to whom the mythology is addressed”; (3) normative, or to “validate, support, and imprint the norms of a given, specific moral order, that, namely of the society in which the individual is to live”; and (4) guidance, or “to guide him [the individual], stage by stage, in health, strength and harmony of spirit, through the whole foreseeable course of a useful life.” This is a useful outline to help us get our minds around the varied culture of myths, but it is only answering how questions about myths at a proximate level. To know why humans need to experience the mystical, explain the world, create norms, or seek guidance, we need to consider myths from an evolutionary perspective.
A myth is a form of symbolic communication that invests stories not only with ordinary people and events but also with gods, supernatural beings, and extraordinary happenings, often unfolding in a place or time different from that of ordinary human experience. There are many themes and subjects embodied in myths: origins (cosmogony and creation), eschatology (end times and destruction), heroes (humans with special powers and experiences), time and eternity (ages of man, periods of history), providence and destiny (destiny, mastery over fate), memory and forgetting (prenatal existence, previous lives, collective unconscious), higher beings (celestial gods), founders of religions, nations, and peoples (Abraham, Moses, Buddah, Romulus and Remus, Siegfried), kings and ascetics (Arthur and Merlin), transformation (coming of age), rebirth and renewal (seasons and ages), and messianic and millenarian (second comings and new world orders).
If myths are to be explained on a deeper evolutionary level, then they must be universal for all peoples, including ourselves. Myths are not just someone else’s story, or stories that come from far-off times or places. We have plenty of myths of our own. Marxism was a political myth, as was pure laissez-faire capitalism, both providing explanatory, descriptive, and, most importantly, normative mythic functions. Freudian psychoanalysis was a psychosocial myth, as was Skinnerian behaviorism, both serving to justify and control