In their feasts, fastings and sacrifices, they are exceedingly like those ancient people. Many of them have a feast closely resembling the Jewish Passover; and amongst others an occasion much like the Israelitish feast of the Tabernacles, which lasted eight days (when history tells us they carried willow boughs, and fasted several days and nights) making sacrifices of the first fruits and best of everything, closely resembling the sin-offerings and peace-offerings of the Hebrews.
Catlin was careful to point out that he did not necessarily accept the then-popular theory, which is embodied in the Mormon religion today, that the Indians were descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel, who vanished after the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel; nor did he propose any theory of contact with the ancient Jewish people. But, writing long before the advent of psychiatry or modern anthropology, he did express his astonishment at the similarities between the two.
The German existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, as part of his theory of the “axial period” of history (which will be discussed in depth later in this chapter), made note of the amazement of the first Jesuit missionaries in Japan at finding a Japanese Buddhist sect that seemed remarkably like European Lutheranism. This sect, which we now know as “Pure Land” Buddhism, explicitly states its belief in “salvation by grace through faith,” in this case, in Amida Buddha. The sinner, in the doctrine of the “Pure Land” sect, is absolutely helpless and has no chance of salvation through his or her own merits, but must trust in the grace of Amida Buddha to be “reborn in the Pure Land,” analogous to the Protestant “salvation by grace through faith in Christ.”
The European colonists and missionaries developed some curious, even bizarre, theories to explain this phenomenon of parallel beliefs. One common view, especially among the Spanish missionaries in Mexico, was that non-European religions were “satanic” imitations of the “true faith.” Another theory, which is not all that far from the psychological theories we are about to consider, is that these beliefs are mainifestations of a once universally received and understood Divine revelation that had become corrupted over time. My personal favorite explanation offered for the similarities between Roman Catholicism and the Peruvian religion was the view that Saint Thomas traveled to Peru via India during the first century A.D.* The nearly identical practices between the Old World and the New became a public obsession during the 19th century, the heyday of the “Lost Tribes of Israel” theory, which was taken very seriously right up until the American Civil War.
By the year 1900, however, serious scholarship had been applied to comparative religion and mythology. This led to two basic approaches to the parallels between the myths of vastly separated cultures. The first approach is that of diffusion, which held that the myths were produced in a few myth-creating areas, such as India, and thence passed through contact between cultures during the earliest times. The second is a psychological view, whereby the core elements of myth are products of the human psyche and thus universal to all human beings. Today both points of view, as well as a mixture of the two, vie for acceptance.
MYTH AS A HISTORY OF PREHISTORY: THE MATRIARCHAL THEORY
It is generally agreed that myth is largely the product of oral history, passed down from generation to generation. As myth begins with the creation of the world, it is truly “a history of prehistory.” Two scholars on the subject, nineteenth-century Swiss classicist Johann Jakob Bachofen and twentieth-century British writer Robert Graves, found within many Greek myths a record—at times thickly veiled, at other times obvious—of a prehistorical battle between a matriarchy (society ruled by women) and the emerging patriarchy (society ruled by men) that supplanted it. For Bachofen and Graves, this is the record of one of the pivotal moments in ancient European history.
As one reads the myths today, one is often struck by both lofty philosophical content and a brutally cruel attitude toward women within the text.
Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887)
Bachofen, a native of Basel, Switzerland, studied law but pursued a career in archaeology and was a scholar of the Greek classics. He was fascinated by mythology, and tried to sift through it for clues to the earliest history of Europe. Bachofen came to the conclusion that there were three clear stages in early European culture. The first was a barbaric stage; this was followed by a matriarchy that, in turn, was supplanted by patriarchy.
In his view, the history of this struggle, subsequent relapses into the earlier phases of development, and the eventual victory of patriarchy, are all fairly clearly chronicled in many of the myths.
Bachofen called the barbaric stage “hetairism,” from the Greek hetero, meaning “both.” In this earliest stage, neither males nor females were dominant in society. This was a period of widespread sexual promiscuity when children did not know their fathers, women were defenseless, rape took the place of marriage, and family life was virtually nonexistent. The characteristic goddess in Greek mythology during this period, according to Bachofen, was Aphrodite, the goddess of love, with no aspect of order or morality.
Next, women banded together for their own defense, leading to the development of a matriarchal society that replaced the chaos of hetairism. This phase saw the first blossom of civilization, laws, agriculture, and the arts. Love of the mother and worship of a mother goddess were characteristic of this age, which was symbolized for Bachofen by Demeter, the goddess of the crops. In an important Greek myth, Demeter’s daughter Kore (or Persephone) is seized by force from her mother by Hades, the lord of the Underworld. According to Bachofen, the Greek myths of fierce female warriors, the Amazons, are an ancestral memory of women banding together for protection.
He interpreted the myth of Oedipus as the depiction of the three phases of this struggle. Oedipus kills the Sphinx, symbol of the old hetairistic age (the Sphinx was hermaphroditic, having both male and female genitalia). Oedipus then marries his own mother, who is the ruler of Thebes. The tragic events describing her downfall were interpreted thus as a thinly veiled account of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy.
Bachofen, as we shall see, was an influence on Sigmund Freud’s development of the Oedipal theory. Bachofen also may have influenced another psychoanalytic pioneer, the Austrian-American Alfred Adler. Adler believed that the oppression of women by men as adults was an overcompensation for the dependence felt by male children toward their mothers. Graves and Bachofen would have said that this was a conscious persistence of an unconscious ancestral memory of a time when adult men were ruled by adult women.
It is interesting to note that in our own time, during the fight for the ratification of the U.S. Equal Rights Amendment, opponents of the bill warned of a type of hetairism (although they never used the word) that would result from the equality of the sexes.
Robert Graves
Robert Graves was, by any standard, a most prolific and varied writer: a classical scholar, critic, novelist, and poet. Son of an Irish writer and his German-born wife, Graves was a gifted linguist, a co-translator of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and was eulogized in the London Times as “the greatest love poet in English since [John] Donne.” He is best known today in the United States and Canada for his historical novels about ancient Rome, I, Claudius and Claudius the God, on which a successful BBC-TV drama series was based.
In his studies of Greek, Germanic, Celtic, and Semitic myths, he concluded that European mythology may only be properly understood in light of a primeval matriarchal period when “the white goddess” (also the title of one of his books) was the universal Earth Mother deity throughout Europe.
Graves felt that the myths that told about the male chief of the Greek gods, Zeus, overthrowing an earlier pantheon of gods, as well as other myths, were the surviving records of the triumph of patriarchy over the matriarchy. Graves was certain of this as a historical fact in ancient Europe, but felt that it might or might not have been the case in other cultures. In the introduction to his celebrated book The Greek Myths, he wrote:
An
cient Europe had no gods. The Great Goddess was regarded as immortal, changeless and omnipotent; and the concept of fatherhood had not been introduced into religious thought. She took lovers, but for pleasure, not to provide her children with a father. Men feared, adored and obeyed the matriarch: the hearth which she tended in a cave or hut being their earliest social centre, and motherhood their prime mystery…. There is however, no evidence that, even when women were sovereign in religious matters, men were denied fields in which they might act without female supervision, though it may well be thought that they adopted many of the “weaker-sex” characteristics hitherto thought to be entrusted to man. They could be trusted to hunt, fish, gather certain foods, mind flocks and herds, and help defend the tribal territory against intruders, so long as they did not transgress matriarchal law.
Graves, like Bachofen, saw the moon as an important religious symbol during the time of matriarchy. The goddess Artemis (Diana in Latin), goddess of the hunt, was also identified with the moon, even as her brother Apollo was identified with the sun in addition to being a patron of arts and culture. The hunt was considered by the Greeks to be a decidedly unfeminine pursuit and her role may well be interpreted as a remnant of earlier matriarchic thinking. Graves considered this indicative of the roles of women in matriarchal Europe as hunters and warriors, before men became mercenaries under the control of the matriarch.
Consistent with the example of the moon goddess Artemis and with Bachofen’s theories, Graves contended that time during the matriarchal era was measured by the moon, reflective of the menstrual cycle of women. The change from the lunar-based religion to worship of a sun-god, as well as the switch for measuring time from increments of lunar years to those of solar years, are all illustrations of the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy.
Nor was the end of matriarchy entirely sudden and final; the struggles between the matriarchy and patriarchy still have influences on our culture today. The modem women’s movement was seen by Graves as a reaction to the tyranny of the patriarchy that has dominated society since preclassical times.
Graves was mainly a believer in the diffusion theory of explaining parallel myths. This is only natural, as Graves was chiefly concerned with Europe, and saw certain myth-producing centers in the ancient Near East and among the Indo-European invaders of Europe. The Greek myths are the result of “syncretism,” a blending of traditions from these two sources of myth.
TRANSITIONAL THINKING IN THE INTERPRETATION OF MYTH
Adolf Bastian (1826-1905)
Bastian, a Berliner, was trained as a physician, but he soon lost interest in the practice of medicine and devoted himself to his real love: ethnology, the study of cultures. He was largely self-educated in this discipline and traveled throughout Asia, Africa, and South America, impressed by the parallels between myths of widely distant cultures. Bastian was one of the first to express this phenomenon as something common to all human beings in all cultures and all periods of history.
Bastian’s observations are reflected today in both the modern structural and the psychological schools of myth. Bastian advanced the theory of two components of myth: the Elementary Thought (a series of basic mythic patterns common to all human beings and possibly centered in the brain) and the People’s Thought (the specific “coloration” of the Elementary Thought by a given ethnic group at a given time).
As has been pointed out by both the Hindu scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy and the American Joseph Campbell, Bastian’s approach is similar to a traditional Hindu view of the parallel myths. There is the marga—the universal path, the elements of myth common to all human beings; this is Bastian’s Elementary Thought. There is also the deshi-marga* the specific form taken by marga in a given place and time.
Leo Frobenius (1873-1938)
Frobenius was an amateur scholar of myth, working by day in an export firm in Bremen, Germany, and studying Greek, anthropology, and mythology by night. During his lifetime, Frobenius was hailed as the world’s foremost authority on prehistoric art.
In 1898, Frobenius announced the then-radical theory called “Kulturkreislehre” (the study of “cultural circles”). He believed that there was a central myth-producing region that stretched from West Africa to India, thence through Indonesia and Oceania to the Americas. In other words, Frobenius was the first radical diffusionist.
Frobenius noted many common myths and cultural relationships in this area and believed that parallel myths were the result of cultural exchanges between ancient peoples on a scale beyond that which most scholars had considered possible. For example, it was the nature of the ancient Polynesians to travel vast distances by sea as they populated islands as distant from one another as New Zealand, Tahiti, Easter Island (off the coast of Chile), and Hawaii. It wouldn’t be reasonable, thought Frobenius, to assume that the early Polynesians would have turned back after reaching as far as Easter Island; it was only natural that they had gone on, to make contact with Peru, also located on the coast of South America. Likewise, there were currents that could have carried the Hawaiians to the northwestern coast of the United States.
Following the theories of Frobenius, the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl, in his epic 1947 journey, recounted in Kon Tiki, traveled by a South American balsa-wood boat from Peru to Polynesia in an attempt to prove contact between the two cultures was possible. Kon Tiki is a term common to the mythologies of Peru, where Con Tiqui is the name of a Creator god, and tiki is Polynesian for the image of a god.
Luden Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939)
The celebrated French anthropologist Lévy-Bruhl concentrated his studies on the thought processes of “primitive” or “traditional” peoples. He concluded that the “traditional” cultures make no distinction between the natural (or objective) world and myth, nor between myth and history. For the people in such cultures, myth is the only history.
Lévy-Bruhl advanced an influential theory of parallel myths, believing that there were “motifs” or “representations collectives”—shared plots and characters—of myths that were common to all human beings.
Émile Dürkheim (1858-1917)
… There is something eternal in religion, namely the faith and the cult.
To adore the gods of antiquity was to provide for their material life with the aid of offerings and sacrifices, because the life of this world depended on their life.
Even the most rational and secularized religions cannot and never will dispense with a very particular form of speculation that cannot be scientific.
In the course of this book, we have already encountered several quotes by Émile Dürkheim, the great French sociologist who focused on the power of myth to bind societies together. A key function of the myth, according to Dürkheim, was to conform the behavior of the individual to the group.
Originally planning to be a rabbi, Dürkheim was keenly interested in the impact of myth and religion on culture. He was particularly impressed with the concept of the “civic myth,” on which states are founded, as well as with the power of myth as an agent of morality.
Dürkheim explained the striking similarities between the myths of diverse historically and geographically distant cultures by a theory he called the “collective conscious.” He believed that the basic ingredients of myth, the plots and characters, were the products of a neurologically based function of the human brain, and thus they were common to all human beings. These universal mythic patterns were the “molds” from which myth came, and the specific cultures “poured” their own elements into these molds. In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life Dürkheim wrote:
The collective conscious is the highest form of the psychic* life, since it is the consciousness of the consciousness. Being placed outside and above all individual and local contingencies, it sees things in their permanent and essential aspect, which it crystallizes into communicable ideas … it alone can furnish the mind with the molds which are applicable to the totality of things and which make it possible to think of them.
> With the idea that myth is a product of the collective conscious, a shared “pool” of ancestral memories and images common to all human beings, Dürkheim is a direct contributor to the psychological interpretations of myth given by Carl Jung (and expanded by Joseph Campbell), as well as to the “structuralist” school of the interpretation of myth founded by Claude Lévi-Strauss.
Durkheim’s own life was marked by great tragedy. A frail, nervous, and sensitive man, he was devastated by World War I. He had been attacked as a “professor of German origin” who taught the “foreign” study of sociology, which was considered an import from the hated Germans. And perhaps there was an anti-Semitic element to these attacks as well. His son, a soldier in the French army, was killed in battle in 1916, and Dürkheim died the following year—at only fifty-nine years of age.
As we shall see, Durkheim’s contributions to the interpretation of myth were enormous.
Bronislaw Malinowski
Myth as it exists in a savage community, that is, in its primitive form, is not merely a story told but a reality lived. It is not of the nature of fiction, believed to have once happened in primeval times, and continuing ever since to influence the world and human destinies. This myth is to the savage what, to a fully believing Christian, is the Biblical story of Creation, of the Fall, of the Redemption by Christ’s Sacrifice on the cross. As our sacred story lives in our ritual, as it governs our faith and controls our conduct, even so does his myth for the savage.
Parallel Myths Page 28