In Other Worlds - Margaret Eleanor Atwood [21]
And, more annoyingly: Why do good things happen to bad people?
Yes: why do the wicked prosper? Myth sometimes solves this one by an assurance that the bad people will get their comeuppance later, in the afterlife if necessary, but often things are much more ambiguous. God knows, is one answer; there must be a reason, but we see through a glass, darkly, so we don’t know what the reason is.
What is right behaviour?
Lots of answers here. Under Lifestyles, everything from shoes and where they can be worn, to hairstyles, to forbidden or festive or sacred foods; and under Ethics, many choices too. As a guide to daily life, myths are slippery. We hope that good actions are rewarded and bad ones punished, and that murders and stealing and lying and cheating will be frowned upon by the story, as they are in most human societies; but in myths, it is not always so.
What do the gods want, or God, if it’s a monotheism?
The answers range everywhere from your first-born to burnt kidney fat to endless devotion and obedience to not sleeping with the wrong person to having to avenge your murdered father by killing your mother. That’s the problem with gods. They specialize in cleft sticks—damned if you do, damned if you don’t—and they’re maddeningly oblique. Gods don’t come with clear instructions; or not according to the stories about them.
What are the right relationships between men and women?
Judging from the many and varied myths that tell of strenuous relationships between the sexes—huge female monster deities cut to pieces by heroic upstart-gods, women raped by immortals, mortals who are seduced by goddesses and then come to grief, gods killing guardian dragons and taking over female oracles, female demi-deities revenging themselves on faithless men, men losing paradise because women ate the apple—this seems to be uneasy ground. Stories involving gender conflict and/or separate spheres of influence—Artemis-moon by night, Apollo-sun by day—seem to be central to most mythologies. The Queen of the Night and the solar imagery in Mozart’s Magic Flute did not come from nowhere.
Why were mythologies so apparently universal in what we think of as pre-literate societies? Some commentators see them as inevitable, given human grammar: if you’ve invented the past tense and the future tense, and if you are a question-asking being—which Homo sapiens is—then sooner or later the creative part of the brain is going to come up with a point of origin and an ultimate destination, even if it’s the cyclic destruction and re-creation of the universe.
Early myth systems preceded writing, but once literacy spread, the old, oral mythologies were absorbed into the new medium, which at first simply recorded them—The Iliad existed in oral form before it was written down, we are told—and then imitated them, as Virgil did with The Aeneid. However, when people cease to believe that myths are literally true, believe-it-or-die theologies and perform-it-or-be-damned rituals cease to be based on them, “art” separates itself from liturgy and ritual and iconography, and myths become hidden structural principles or else the subject matter in an art that is essentially allegorical or decorative.
We may repeat the old theologies and the old rituals out of habit or a need for comfort, and we can reinterpret them in various ways; but at the same time we’ve been known to create new myths. Marxism and its cousin, Christian socialism, were such neo-mythical structures. Their pattern was a linear one, like that of Christianity, but for God’s grand plan they substituted History, a godlike entity that would unfold in an inevitable way and justify you if you were on its right side—the side of whoever was urging you on. Then, after a number of obstacles had been overcome, a utopian society would emerge in which all inequalities and sufferings would be eliminated, much like the New Jerusalem. Here is William Morris in his inevitable-future socialist myth-making mode:
Come, then,