A Short History of Myth

by Karen Armstrong

  It is a painting that is suffused with compassion, the ability to feel with the agony of others. Sacrifice had inspired some of the earliest mythical speculations. In the Palaeolithic period, human beings had felt a disturbing kinship with the animals that they hunted and killed. They expressed their inchoate distress in the rituals of sacrifice, which honoured the beasts which laid down their lives for the sake of humanity. In Guernica, humans and animals, both victims of indiscriminate, heedless slaughter, lie together in a mangled heap, the screaming horse inextricably entwined with the decapitated human figure. Recalling the women at the foot of the cross in countless depictions of Jesus’s crucifixion, two women gaze at the wounded horse in sorrowful empathy with its pain. In prehistoric society, the Great Mother had been an implacable huntress, but in Picasso’s picture, the mother, who holds the limp body of her dead child, has become a victim, uttering a silent scream. Behind her is a bull, which, Picasso said, represented brutality. Picasso had always been fascinated by the spectacular rituals of the bullfight, Spain’s national sport, which had its roots in the sacrificial ceremonial of antiquity. Picasso’s bull does not look savage; he stands with the other victims, swishing his tail and surveying the scene. Perhaps, it has been suggested, he has reached that moment in the bullfight when he stands back from the act ion to consider his next move. But as a sacrificial victim himself, the bull, symbol of brutality, is doomed. So too – Picasso may be suggesting – is modern humanity, which – though Picasso could not have known this – was only just beginning to explore the full potential of its self-destructive and rationally-calculated violence.

  Novelists have also turned to mythology to explore the modern dilemma. We need think only of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in the same year as The Waste Land, in which the experience of Joyce’s contemporary protagonists corresponds to episodes in Homer’s Odyssey. Magical realists – Jorge Luis Borges, Günter Grass, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie – have challenged the hegemony of logos by combining the realistic with the inexplicable, and everyday reason with the mythical logic of dream and fairy tale. Other novelists have looked into the future. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) warns against the dangers of a police state in which might alone is right and the past is constantly modified to fit the present. The precise implications of Orwell’s message have been much debated, but, like the great myths of the past, it has entered popular consciousness. Many of its phrases and images, including the title itself, have passed into ordinary speech: Big Brother, Doublethink, Newspeak and Room 101 are still used to identify trends and characteristics of modern life, even by people who have never read the novel.

  But can a secular novel really replicate traditional myth, with its gods and goddesses? We have seen that, in the pre-modern world, the divine was rarely regarded in the metaphysical terms imposed upon it by Western logos, but was usually used to help people to understand their humanity. As people’s circumstances changed, the gods often receded, taking a marginal place in mythology and religion; sometimes they disappeared altogether. There is nothing new in the godless mythologies of contemporary novels, which grapple with many of the same intractable and elusive problems of the human condition as the ancient myths, and make us realise that – whatever the status of the gods – human beings are more than their material circumstances and that all have sacred, numinous value.

  Because the novelist and the artist are operating at the same level of consciousness as mythmakers, they naturally resort to the same themes. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness can be seen as a heroic quest and initiation that has gone wrong. Published in 1902, just before the West began its great disillusion, the novel describes the sojourn of the ultra-civilised Mr Kurtz deep in the African jungle. In traditional mythology, the hero left the security of the social world behind. Often he had to descend into the depths of the earth, where he would meet an unsuspected aspect of himself. The experience of isolation and deprivation could result in psychological breakdown, which led to vital new insight. If he succeeded, the hero returned to his people with something new and precious. In Conrad’s novel, the labyrinthine, sinister African river recalls the subterranean tunnels of Lascaux, through which the initiates crawled back into the womb of the earth. In the underworld of the primeval jungle, Kurtz does indeed look into the darkness of his heart, but remains stuck in his regression and dies spiritually. He becomes a shaman manqué, with no respect but only contempt for the African community that he abuses. The mythical hero learned that, if he died to himself, he would be reborn to new life; but Kurtz is caught in the toils of a sterile egotism, and when he finally appears in the novel, he has the obscenity of an animate corpse. Obsessed with his own fame, Kurtz seeks not heroism, but only barren celebrity. He cannot make a heroic affirmation of life: his dying words are ‘The horror! The horror!’. T. S. Eliot made Kurtz’s last words the epigraph of The Waste Land. Conrad, a true prophet, had already looked into the triviality, selfishness, greed, nihilism and despair of the twentieth century.

  Thomas Mann also used the motif of initiation in The Magic Mountain (1924), which takes place during another tragic juncture in Western history. He confessed that this had not been his original intention, but when a young Harvard scholar pointed out to him that the novel is a modern example of ‘The Quester Hero’, he immediately realised that this was in fact the case. The mythology of the heroic quest was embedded in his subconscious and he drew upon it without realising what he had done. The Davos sanatorium of Mann’s novel was to become ‘a shrine of the initiatory rites, a place of adventurous investigation into the mystery of life’. Hans Castorp, his hero, is a searcher for the Holy Grail, symbol of the ‘knowledge, wisdom and consecration’ that gives meaning to life. Castorp ‘voluntarily embraces disease and death, because his very first contact with them gives promise of extraordinary advancement, bound up, of course, with correspondingly great risks’. And yet, at the same time, this modern initiation shares the chronic triviality of the twentieth century. Mann saw the patients in the sanatorium forming a ‘charmed circle of isolation and individualism’. Where the traditional seeker wanted to benefit his society, Castorp was engaged in a solipsistic, parasitic and ultimately pointless quest.107 He spends seven years on his magic mountain, dreaming his grand dream of humanity, only to die in the First World War, which can be described as the collective suicide of Europe.

  Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947) is set in Mexico on the brink of the Second World War. It traces the last day in the life of the Consul, an alcoholic, who is not only the alter ego of Lowry himself, but – it is made clear – also Everyman. The book opens in the Cantina del Bosque, which recalls the ‘dark wood’ of Dante’s Inferno, on the Day of the Dead, when the deceased are believed to commune with the living. Throughout the novel, Lowry explores the ancient mythical insight that life and death are inseparable. The novel constantly juxtaposes the teeming life and beauty of the Mexican landscape – a Garden of Eden – with the infernal imagery of death and darkness. Apparently trivial details acquire universal meaning. People shelter from a storm like the war victims who are hiding in air-raid shelters all over the world; the lights of the cinema go out, just as Europe is plunging into darkness. The advertisement for the film Las Manos de Orlac, with its bloodstained hands, reminds us of the collective guilt of humanity; a Ferris wheel symbolises the passing of time; a dying peasant by the roadside reminds us that people all over the globe are dying unheeded. As the Consul becomes chronically intoxicated, his surroundings acquire hallucinatory intensity in which incidents and objects transcend their particularity. In ancient mythology, everything had sacred significance and not a single object or activity was profane. As the Day of the Dead proceeds in Lowry’s novel, nothing is neutral: everything is loaded with fateful significance.

  The novel depicts the drunkenness of the world before 1939. Every drink that the Consul takes brings him one step closer to his inevitable death. Like the Consul, humanity is out of
control and lurching towards disaster. Caught up in a death wish, it is losing its capacity for life and clear vision. The Kabbalah compares a mystic who abuses his powers with a drunkard. This image is central to the novel: like a magician who has lost his way, human beings have unleashed powers that they cannot control, which will ultimately destroy their world. Lowry has told us that he was thinking here of the atomic bomb. And yet the novel is not itself nihilistic, there is deep compassion in its evocation of the pathos, beauty and loveable absurdity of humanity.

  We have seen that a myth could never be approached in a purely profane setting. It was only comprehensible in a liturgical context that set it apart from everyday life; it must be experienced as part of a process of personal transformation. None of this, surely, applies to the novel, which can be read anywhere at all without ritual trappings, and must, if it is any good, eschew the overtly didactic. Yet the experience of reading a novel has certain qualities that remind us of the traditional apprehension of mythology. It can be seen as a form of meditation. Readers have to live with a novel for days or even weeks. It projects them into another world, parallel to but apart from their ordinary lives. They know perfectly well that this fictional realm is not ‘real’ and yet while they are reading it becomes compelling. A powerful novel becomes part of the backdrop of our lives, long after we have laid the book aside. It is an exercise of make-believe that, like yoga or a religious festival, breaks down barriers of space and time and extends our sympathies, so that we are able to empathise with other lives and sorrows. It teaches compassion, the ability to ‘feel with’ others. And, like mythology, an important novel is transformative. If we allow it to do so, it can change us forever.

  Mythology, we have seen, is an art form. Any powerful work of art invades our being and changes it forever. The British critic George Steiner claims that art, like certain kinds of religious and metaphysical experience, is the most ‘“ingressive”, transformative summons available to human experiencing’. It is an intrusive, invasive indiscretion that ‘queries the last privacies of our existence’; an Annunciation that ‘breaks into the small house of our cautionary being’, so that ‘it is no longer habitable in quite the same way as it was before’. It is a transcendent encounter that tells us, in effect: ‘change your life’.108

  If it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest. If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world.

  References

  1 Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or Cosmos and History (trans. Willard R. Trask, Princeton, 1994), passim.

  2 J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens (trans. R.F.C. Hall, London), 1949, 5–25.

  3 Huston Smith, The Illustrated World Religions, A Guide to our Wisdom Traditions (San Francisco, 1991), 235.

  4 Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, The Encounter between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic Realities (trans. Philip Mairet, London, 1960), 59–60.

  5 Ibid., 74.

  6 Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion (trans. Rosemary Sheed, London, 1958), 216–19; 267–72.

  7 Ibid., 156–85.

  8 Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 38–58.

  9 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, An Inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational (trans. John Harvey, Oxford, 1923), 5–41.

  10 Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, 172–8; Wilhelm Schmidt, The Origin of the Idea of God (New York, 1912), passim.

  11 Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, 99–108.

  12 Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, 54–86.

  13 Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (New York, 1988), 87.

  14 Ibid.

  15 Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, 63.

  16 Walter Burkert, Homo Necans, The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (trans. Peter Bing, Los Angeles, Berkeley and London, 1983), 88–93.

  17 Ibid., 15–22.

  18 Campbell, The Power of Myth, 72–74; Burkert, Homo Necans, 16–22.

  19 Joannes Sloek, Devotional Language (trans. Henrik Mossin, Berlin and New York, 1996), 50–52, 68–76, 135.

  20 Walter Burkert, Structure and History in Greek Mythology and Ritual (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1980), 90–94; Joseph Campbell, Historical Atlas of World Mythology; Volume 2: The Way of the Animal Powers; Part 1: Mythologies of the Primitive Hunters and Gatherers (New York, 1988), 58–80; The Power of Myth, 79–81.

  21 Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, 194–226; Campbell, The Power of Myth, 81–85.

  22 Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, 225.

  23 Campbell, The Power of Myth, 124–25.

  24 Burkert, Homo Necans, 94–5.

  25 Homer, The Iliad 21:470.

  26 Burkert, Greek Religion, 149–152.

  27 Burkert, Homo Necans, 78–82.

  28 Eliade, Patterns of Comparative Religion, 331–343.

  29 Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, 138–40; Patterns in Comparative Religion, 256–261.

  30 Hosea 4:11-19; Ezekiel 8:2-18; 2 Kings 23:4-7.

  31 Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries 161–171; Patterns in Comparative Religion, 242–253.

  32 Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, 162–65.

  33 Ibid., 168–171.

  34 Ibid., 188–89.

  35 Genesis 3:16–19.

  36 Anat–Baal Texts 49:11:5; quoted in E. O. James, The Ancient Gods (London, 1960), 88.

  37 ‘Inanna’s Journey to Hell’ in Poems of Heaven and Hell from Ancient Mesopotamia (trans. and ed. N. K. Sandars, London, 1971), 165.

  38 Ibid., 163.

  39 Campbell, The Power of Myth, 107–11.

  40 Ezekiel 8:14; Jeremiah 32:29, 44:15; Isaiah 17:10.

  41 Burkert, Structure and History, 109–110.

  42 Burkert, Structure and History, 123–28; Homo Necans, 255–297; Greek Religion, 159–161.

  43 Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, 227–8; Patterns in Comparative Religion, 331.

  44 Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (trans. Michael Bullock, London, 1953), 47.

  45 Gwendolyn Leick, Mesopotamia, The Invention of the City (London, 2001), 268.

  46 Genesis 4:17.

  47 Genesis 4:21–22.

  48 Genesis 11:9.

  49 Leick, Mesopotamia, 22–23.

  50 In other epics, Atrahasis is called Ziusudra and Utnapishtim (‘he who found life’).

  51 Thokhild Jacobsen, ‘The Cosmos as State’ in H. and H. A. Frankfort (eds), The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man, An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East (Chicago, 1946), 186-197.

  52 Ibid., 169.

  53 Enuma Elish, I:8–11, in Sandars, Poems of Heaven and Hell, 73.

  54 Enuma Elish, VI:19, in Sanders, Poems of Heaven and Hell, 99.

  55 Isaiah 27:1; Job 3:12, 26:13; Psalms 74:14.

  56 Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, 80–81; The Myth of the Eternal Return, 17.

  57 The Epic of Gilgamesh, I: iv:6, 13, 19, Myths from Mesopotamia, Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others (trans. Stephanie Dalley, Oxford, 1989), 55.

  58 Ibid., I: iv:30–36, p.56.

  59 Ibid., VI: ii:1–6, p.78.

  60 Ibid., VI: ii:11–12, p.78-9.

  61 Ibid., XI: vi:4, p.118.

  62 David Damrosch, The Narrative Covenant. Transformations of Genre in the Growth of Biblical Literature (San Francisco, 1987), 88–118.

  63 Epic of Gilgamesh, XI: ii:6–7 in Dalley, 113.

  64 Ibid., I:9–12, 25–29, p.50.

  65 Ibid., 1:
4–7, p.50.

  66 Robert A. Segal, ‘Adonis: A Greek Eternal Child’ in Dora C. Pozzi and John M. Wickersham (eds), Myth and the Polis (Ithaca, New York and London, 1991), 64–86.

  67 Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (trans. Michael Bullock, London 1953), 1–78.

  68 The author of the Dao De Jing, which did not become known until the mid-third century, was using the name of the fictitious sage Laozi, who was often thought to have lived in the late seventh or sixth century, as a pseudonym.

  69 Genesis 18.

  70 Isaiah 6:5; Jeremiah 1:6–10; Ezekiel 2:15.

  71 Confucius, Analects 5:6; 16:2.

  72 Sadly, inclusive language is not appropriate here. Like most of the Axial sages, Confucius had little time for women.

  73 Confucius, Analects 12:22; 17:6.

  74 Ibid., 12:2.

  75 Ibid., 4;15.

  76 Ibid., 8:8.

  77 Ibid., 3:26; 17:12.

  78 Anguttara Nikaya 6:63.

  79 Dao De Jing 80.

  80 Ibid., 25.

  81 Ibid., 6, 16, 40, 67.

  82 Jataka 1:54–63; Vinaya: Mahavagga 1:4.

  83 Psalm 82.

  84 2 Chronicles 34:5–7.

  85 Hosea 13:2; Jeremiah 10; Psalms 31:6; 115:4–8; 135:15.

  86 Exodus 14.

  87 Isaiah 43:11–12.

  88 Plato, The Republic, 10:603D-607A.

  89 Ibid., 522a8; Plato Timaeus 26E5.

  90 Metaphysics III, 1000a11–20.

  91 Plato, The Republic 6:509ff.

  92 Plato, Timaeus 41e.

  93 Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1074 Bf.

  94 2 Corinthians 5:16.

  95 Philippians 2:9.

  96 Philippians 2:9–11.

  97 Philippians 2:7–9.

  98 Luke 24:13–22.

  99 Kabbalists stressed that En Sof was neither male nor female. It was an ‘It’ that became a ‘Thou’ to the mystic at the end of the process of emanation.