Parallel Myths

by J. F. Bierlein

  Structuralists follow Dürkheim in believing that the mind has “molds” that make it possible to think of the totality of things. These molds are the structuralist’s structures. In their most elementary form they are present in all human minds and are ultimately part of the neurophysiology of the human brain. However, each culture fills the “molds” with its own distinctive content—its own ideas.

  Lévi-Strauss is careful to avoid using the term primitive to describe “traditional” cultures, pointing out that the allegedly primitive man has the same brain structure as you or I. The “primitive” person is physically capable of understanding the same things that we do, but our term primitive carries the connotation of being “childish.” In fact, our so-called modern way of thinking is as much the result of “primitive” thinking or mythology as it is the product of science and technology. And our thinking, according to Lévi-Strauss, operates in the same “infrastructure” as does that of the tribesman.

  At times Lévi-Strauss appears to be the hardest to read of all contemporary interpreters of myth. His works are full of abstract, complex, and graphic interrelations between structures, as they are supposedly demonstrated in the myths. However, any overview of structuralism includes the following characteristics:

  A structure is not a collection of social relationships, nor is it a theme or trend in cultural history. Unlike Durkheim’s and earlier anthropologists’ view of myth as a collective cultural function, the structure is a “playing out” of the basic human thinking mechanism. Lévi-Strauss says that a structure “is a system of which the members of a society being studied are unaware.”

  All human beings have the same basic neurologically based “hardware” for thinking. The fact that this basic brain “infrastructure” is common to all human beings explains parallel myths. Lévi-Strauss calls Durkheim’s “molds” “elemental cells.” Myths are similar because all people have the same “elemental cells” that are filled with the “software” of a particular culture.

  Human beings think in dialectical terms, that is to say, we tend to think in pairs of opposites such as god/demon, light/dark, bad/good, and so forth. This dualism means that sometimes one finds a theme in a myth of one culture that does not make sense until it is matched, like a puzzle piece, with the myth of another culture.

  Needless to say, many themes can appear in any one given myth. Thus, in matching them with opposites, structural analysis can be very complex and confusing.

  Some of the most interesting observations of Lévi-Strauss are on his comparison between the structure of myth and the structure of music. Lévi-Strauss believes that both myth and music are specific forms of language in which a meaning can be found only by taking them in their totality. The following is taken from Lévi-Strauss’s Myth and Meaning.

  … My main point was that, exactly as in a musical score, it is impossible to understand a myth as a continuous sequence. This is why we should be aware that if we try to read a myth as we read a novel or from left to right, we don’t understand the myth, because we have to apprehend it as a totality and discover that the basic meaning of the myth is not conveyed by the sequence of events … but … by bundles of events even though these events appear at different moments in the story. Therefore we have to read the myth more or less as we would read an orchestral score…. And it is only by treating the myth as if it were an orchestral score, written stave after stave, that we can understand it as a totality, that we can extract meaning out of the myth.

  Structuralism has been very controversial for a number of reasons. First, its method seems to rob myth of its “truth,” or an application to life. It can be a very sterile and lifeless treatment of a subject that has given meaning to human life for thousands of years.

  With its complex and abstract charts of interrelationships between myths, critics say that structural analysis unnecessarily complicates the study of myth and puts it into the hands of an “initiated” elite. Another criticism of this method is that if one is looking for structures, one will find them.

  Structuralism rejects the psychological approaches of Jung and Freud; the “elemental cells” are part of the structure of the brain and not an element in the human subconscious that is manifested in dreams and myth. It is thus irreconcilably opposed to the theories of Jung and Campbell, as well as to those of the other interpreters of myth we shall look at.

  The most damning criticism of structuralism, however, is that it is dehumanizing. Existentialists and literary critics feel that if structuralism is true—and there are, in fact, basic structures that govern human thinking—then we are really biological “cybernetic” thinking machines. This is in sharp contrast to the human faculties of “feeling” and “belief.” Structuralism is seen as a coldly scientific approach to myth, the most human of functions.

  During the 1970s, structuralism was a potent source in many of the social sciences, especially in Europe and Latin America. However, Lévi-Strauss has yet to formulate laws of human thinking that are as precise and certain as the law of gravity.

  PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES ON MYTH

  Paul Ricoeur (1913-)

  Diametrically opposed to his countryman Claude Lévi-Strauss is French Christian philosopher Paul Ricoeur, who is very interested indeed in the human function of “feeling.”

  Heavily influenced by existentialist philosophy, which stresses the importance of a sense of meaning in human life, Ricoeur sees human beings as “fragile” and “fallible,” “suspended between two poles of existence, finitude and the infinite.” Myth, according to Ricoeur, is the cry of “pathos,” an anguished attempt to reconcile the objective, finite world with the infinite. Ricoeur believes that man has always been open to the idea of a transcendent God to reconcile these two poles, and in the Christian idea of the incarnation of God as Jesus Christ, these poles are reconciled.

  Ricoeur is interested in the transition from mythos to logos. Mythos is a Greek word from which we derive our English word myth. It originally carried the connotation of being certain and final, not open to debate, generally accepted.* Logos, in contrast, was the usual Greek word for “word,” and was something that could be debated, or discussed. The passage from mythos to logos, then, is the passage from a worldview based on a universally accepted myth to philosophical speculation about the human place in the universe.

  As mythos became logos, the certainty was gone and with it the sense of meaning. Without the necessary sense of a certain place in the universe, human beings became fragile.

  To compensate for the sense of security that myth once provided, human beings now rely on the faculty of “feeling” to give them the necessary sense of meaning.

  Ricoeur’s theories are interesting because they are a point of intersection between existentialist philosophy and the interpretation of myth. Myth is a “reality” because it is felt.

  Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)

  Karl Jaspers, a native of Oldenburg, Germany, began his working life in neuropathology and the emerging discipline of psychiatry. These led him to his now-famous career as a philosopher, one of the important existentialist thinkers of this century along with such men as Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger.

  A professor at both Heidelberg and Basel, Jaspers was fascinated by the independent and parallel development of the world’s great religions over a comparatively short period in history, roughly five hundred years, during which prophets emerged independently of one another in China, India, Iran, and Palestine.

  Jaspers noted that this was the first great shift from mythos to logos, or from a mythical view of the world to a philosophical speculation, and religion in our present sense of the word. During the “mythological era” of thinking, relationships with the gods were transactional, based on appeasement or rewards with sacrifices and offerings. The “gods” now gave way to God. In Greece, philosophers abandoned the polytheism of their ancestors and began to speak of “God” as a unified force for the first time. Jaspers speculated on why this happene
d at one time in so many places independent of each other.

  Jaspers called this period the “axial period.” He chose the word axial because, for Christians, the “axis” of their history is the life and ministry of Christ. However, Christianity is only one of several world religions, and the “axis” seemed to extend throughout other cultures in Europe and Asia.

  The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this period. Confucius and Lao-Tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-Tse, Lieh-Tsu and a host of others; India introduced the Upanishads [scriptures] and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical speculation down to scepticism, to materialism, sophism and nihilism; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the philosophers—Parmenides, Herclitus, and Plato—of the tragedies—Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China, India and the West, without any one of these regions knowing of the others.

  According to Jaspers, what had taken place was a wholesale advancement in human spiritual thinking, an “evolution” of thought from objective, transactional deities in a polytheistic and ritual-bound world to the concept of a universal God. This necessitated a transformation of the function of myth.

  The mythical age with its tranquility and self-evidence was at an end. The Greek, Indian and Chinese philosophers were unmythical in their decisive instincts, as were the prophets in their ideas of God. Rationality and rationally clarified experience launched a struggle against the myth; a further struggle developed for the transcendence of the one God against nonexistent demons, and finally an ethical rebellion took place against the unreal figures of the gods. Religion was rendered ethical, and the majesty of the Deity thereby increased.

  Do you remember that Pierre Janet wrote that a society abandoned its gods when the gods failed to speak? This is a basic description of what appeared to happen during the axial period.

  The myth, on the other hand, became the material of a language which expressed by it something very different from what it originally signified; it was turned into parable. Myths were remoulded, were understood at a new depth during this transition, which was myth-creating after a new fashion.

  The myth persisted, but it had matured into a vehicle for truth, not an unquestioned truth in itself.

  Jaspers felt that humanity was on the verge of a new axial period, the first period in history where the globe was united by telecommunications. This too could prove a critical juncture in the spiritual development of mankind.

  Jaspers saw science as the modern myth, but an incomplete myth. Certainly science, like so many of the earlier myths, appears to explain the natural world around us. But science can only answer how things happen; it is unable to tell us why.

  THE “HISTORY OF RELIGIONS” SCHOOL OF MYTH

  Mircea Eliade (1907-1986)

  [Myth and] religion are not phases in human consciousness, but a part of human consciousness itself.

  Mircea Eliade was born in Romania, but spent most of his life in France and the United States. He was probably the world’s foremost scholar of myth as “sacred history,” and of the distinction between the “sacred” and the “profane.” For Eliade, myth was the record of the breakthrough of “the transcendent into our world.”

  A professing Christian, Eliade believed that myth and religion are permanent parts of human consciousness and that it is truly human to think in terms of things that are transcendent or infinite. Eliade was careful to distance himself from the psychological schools of myth, stressing, for example, that when he used the word archetypes it did not mean the same thing that Jung meant by the term. Eliade was most concerned by the reduction of “man’s innate religious” function to a mere psychological projection, and he even spoke of the psychological theories of the interpretation of myth as “a second Fall from grace,” a modern version of the Fall that took place in Eden.

  Eliade felt that no society could be understood without an understanding of its sacred history; all of the institutions, morality, and culture of any given society were vitally dependent upon a shared sacred history of the “breakthroughs of the transcendent.”

  In explaining parallel myths, Eliade was a diffusionist; he was particularly indebted to Frobenius’s theory of the myth-producing cultural centers.

  As to answers to the question of meaning, Eliade felt that the Christian religion offered a complete set of mythic images that satisfied an innate human need. Rather than abandon Christianity as a societal myth, Eliade argued that the Christian faith must be reexamined in light of our modern society.

  * Garcilaso de la Vega, a Spanish priest, was fascinated by the Peruvian legend of Thunpa, a wise and revered teacher who erected something resembling a cross. De la Vega identified Thunpa as Saint Thomas, who was reputed to have traveled to India during the missionary expansion of the early Christian church. De la Vega believed that Saint Thomas had traveled from India across the Pacific to Peru, where he preached the gospel.

  * Deshi is Sanskrit for “of the country.” NOTE: Bangladesh means “country [desh] of the Bengali people [Bangla]”

  * Dürkheim, and later Jung, use the term psychic to mean “of the mind,” recalling the Greek word psyche for “soul.” It is not used in the popular sense of the word to mean “paranormal” or “supernatural.”

  * You will recall that Freud viewed myths as projections of the personal unconscious only, and that mythic thinking would inevitably be superceded by “scientific” thinking.

  * Marcel Mauss was Durkheim’s nephew.

  * See Carl Jung and Christian Spirituality, edited by Robert L. Moore (New York and Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1988).

  * See the Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on “Myth.”

  14. Myth—Yours, Mine, and Ours

  But time and again it is seen: for us the Deity, if it exists, is only as it appears to us in the world, as it speaks to us in the language of man and the world. It exists for us only in the way in which it assumes concrete shape, which by human measure and thought always serves to hide it at the same time. Only in ways that man can grasp does the Deity appear.

  Thus it is seen that it is wrong to play off against each other the question about man and the question about the Deity. Although in the world only man is reality for us does not preclude that precisely the quest for man leads to transcendence. That the Deity alone is reality does not preclude that this reality is accessible to us only in the world; as it were, as an image in the mirror of man, because something of the Deity must be in him for him to be able to respond to the Deity. Thus the theme of philosophy is oriented in polar alternation, in two directions: deum et animam scire cupio. [Latin: “I desire knowledge of God and the soul.”]

  —Karl Jaspers

  MODERN QUESTIONS OF FAITH

  Christian Myth

  The word “myth” is used in the title of this volume in a specific and definite sense. A myth is a symbolic story which demonstrates, in Alan Watts’s words, “the inner meaning of the universe and of human life.” To say that Jesus is a myth is not to say that he is a legend but that his life and message are an attempt to demonstrate the “inner meaning of the universe and of human life.” As Charles Long puts it, a myth points to the definite manner in which the world is available for man: “the word and content of myth are revelations of power.” Or as A. K. Coo-maraswamy observes, “Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.”

  Many Christians have objected to my use of this word even when I define it specifically. They are terrified by a word which may even have a slight suggestion of fantasy. However, my usage is the one that is common among historians of religion, literary critics, and social scientists. It is a valuable and helpful usage; there is no other word which conveys what these scholarly traditions mean when they re
fer to myth. The Christian would be well advised to get over his fear of the word and appreciate how important a tool it can be for understanding the content of his faith.

  —Father Andrew Greeley, Myths of Religion

  Myth, whether Christian or other, is an exposition of truth in the form of a story. The meaning given to “myth” in the 19th century—i.e., that myth is fiction—continues to exert a pervasive influence in popular and journalistic literature. It is this 19th-century view of myth as fiction that has caused many Christians to reject the notion that Christianity contains within its Scriptures, theology, and practices various mythological elements. Mythological themes taken over from the Greeks and the Jews … have been transformed by Christian concepts of history and the development of Christian doctrine.

  … The function of Christian myth is to express in imaginative and often dramatic terms answers to the most significant questions asked by man: Who am I? Where am I going? Though these questions are universal, in Western Civilization they have been answered, for the most part, by those cognitive and imaginative elements influenced by Christian myth. Concerned with the nature, origin and destiny of man, his society and the world, Christian myth seeks to elucidate and describe the truth of the human condition (for those affected by Western Civilization) in a manner that goes beyond the mere apprehension and comprehension of facts that can be empirically verified—i.e., substantiated by the senses.

  Employing the imagination to communicate concepts, Christian myth is concerned with the realm of the spirit—i.e., the sphere of meaning and value. That area—involving man’s understanding of himself and his relationship to his society and his world and to the sacred or holy …