MYTH AND MYTHOLOGY. - The myth (Gk. μύθος from the verb μύθειο "I speak, converse, narrate") is the narration of deeds of the divine, heroic, and human world, not excluding the fabled world of animals; mythology is the classification and scientific study of myths.
I. CONCEPT OF MYTH
In its most general sense and in its psychological origin, myth is the animation of the phenomena of nature and of life, brought about by that primordial and intuitive form of human knowledge by virtue of which man projects himself into things, that is, animates and personifies them, giving them figure and attitudes suggested by his imagination; it is, in short, a fantastic representation of reality, spontaneously delineated by the mental mechanism. This conception excludes, in principle, any intellectual elaboration and any interpretative function of myth. Such a personifying apperception of phenomena has its most evident proof in language, where every word expressing an idea appears as originally due to a sensation. Myth therefore springs from the same psychological source as art (Wundt); but the myth-making imagination assumes in it a far more elevated form, inasmuch as it is not proper to a single individual but to an entire people, which in myth finds expressed its spontaneous vision of the world (spontaneous, that is, not due to didactic, allegoristic, or similar motives), the origins of its religious tradition and of its history, the beginnings of its scientific thought.
If, on the other hand, we consider myth in its meaning and its specific value, in accordance with the elements offered by the mythology of the various peoples, it may be defined as a narrative of deeds performed by divine figures, who act outside the limits of space and time: a narrative that is the spontaneous explanation of certain physical phenomena or of certain laws, customs and traditions of social organization.
As such it revolves particularly around the questions that concern the whole social group, that is, those relating to the origins of man and of the world and to his destiny. And it is a true story, in the sense that it justifies the historical tradition and the institutions of the group and that it must therefore be believed; and not a false story, of pure fantasy, narrated like a fairy tale, to delight the listener.
Since myth is a fantastic representation of reality, and this in the physical order presents itself coordinated in a series of phenomena, it is natural that the animation of these and their mutual action should be presented as a tale of grandiose exploits, relating to divine figures because the imagination naturally tends to magnify the outlines of things which, moreover, with regard to natural phenomena, present themselves in proportions far greater than human ones. Thus, for example, the spectacles that accompany the rising of the dawn from the darkness of night are apperceived as the actions of a shepherdess (the dawn) who opens the enclosure of night, letting out the red cows (the clouds struck by the first rays), while she herself advances on a chariot drawn by swift mares (the rising of the sun) and escorted by the two brothers Aavini (the Dioscuri, that is, the double aspect, morning and evening, of the planet Venus).
These divine figures act outside the limits of space and time, that is, outside history (on the special position of the fairy tale and the saga with respect to myth, v. LEGGENDA). This narrative is meant to be the spontaneous explanation (that is, fantastic and not the fruit of erudite research or scientific observation) of phenomena of the physical order and of laws and traditions of social organization, because the group, whether it be as small as a clan or as vast as a nation, needs to give itself an explanation concerning the origin and ordering of the cosmos, that is, concerning the manner in which the Supreme Being or the higher Powers act in its regard; a history of its own origin as a group, an explanation of the traditional laws that govern it; an exemplary norm for the ordinary conduct of its life; a reason for the rites that the community performs and a higher motivation for their proven efficacy.
Besides giving an explanation for the various whys of an intellectual, historical, social nature that present themselves to the mind, myth also has an intellectual function of the first order with regard to religion, not only because, since man is a rational being, a certain cognition of the universe must be implicit in every religion, but also because myth is indispensable: 1) as a unifying symbol of the social group, as an exemplary norm of the action that the group must perform, in a word as a banner under which those who share the same religious emotion gather and in whose name they recognize one another. This emotion is, in itself, something indefinable in the secret of every soul; its quality, its degree may vary in the name of psychophysical elements and stimuli that may be different for each individual; but myth intervenes to unify these various emotions in the name of the model that it presents to the eyes of all, and after unifying them it makes them converge toward that discipline of action which serves the group to express its sentiment in concord and to intensify its social life; 2) as a sustainer of the religious emotion which, unsupported by a mental framework, would fold back exhausted upon itself after a moment of intense explosion; 3) as a renewing element of that same emotion when the circumstances of the group's life require the repetition of the religious action. Thus, for example, the Eleusinian myth of Demeter in search of her daughter Kore, abducted beneath the earth and then found again (a most transparent symbol of the vegetation that disappears into the earth as a seed and reappears as a plant), served to orient the thought of the Greeks toward the sacred mystery of germination (and at a later stage to raise it to a symbol of the blessed fate of the soul); to sustain their piety and, as it were, to distribute it throughout the time and the corresponding circumstances of the festival; to facilitate its annual renewal according to the same pattern, in harmony with the rhythm of the seasonal life.
II. CLASSIFICATION OF MYTHS
The vast congeries of myths can, with regard to their content, be distributed according to three great categories: naturalistic myths, historical myths, etiological myths.
1. Naturalistic myths: these are the broadest and most complicated, because they not only intend to give an account of the various phenomena of nature — astronomical, meteorological, agrarian — but also to explain the origin of the gods (theogony), of men (anthropogony), of the world (cosmogony). Examples of these will be given in the individual chapters. The modern German mythological school founded in Berlin in 1906 (Gesellschaft für vergleichende Mythenforschung) places astral mythology at the center of all mythological development, inasmuch as it maintains that from the initial observation of the sky and especially of the phenomena of the sun and the moon all the various mythical complexes arose. This theory, which has had the merit of grouping together and studying in depth this category of myths and of enabling the historico-cultural school of Graebner and Schmidt to make the appropriate applications of it to cultural cycles, reconstructing solarism among the great hunting peoples (totemic) and lunarism among the agricultural peoples (matriarchal); it has however the fault of disregarding history, in that it wants one to study the theme of a myth without setting it within the cultural environment in which it arose; of not taking into account that in primitive groupings agrarian myths are more important than astral ones; and of limiting to the world of the stars alone the natural process of personifying apperception proper to human thought.
2. Historical myths. The tradition of the various human groups in natural religions: a) traces its own origins as a group and the fundamental institutions that regulate its life back to a mythical figure; for example, Romulus at Rome, Osiris in Egypt, etc.; b) regards the migrations of ethnic groups that are narrated by myth as adventures of divine personages; thus the myth of the Thessalian nymph Cyrene abducted by Apollo and carried off to Libya signifies the colonization of Cyrene by the population of the Minyans of Thessaly, by order of the oracle of Delphic Apollo; c) represents the historical relations or superimpositions of peoples or of cults as alliances of gods; thus the alliance of Apollo and Dionysus at Delphi, etc. To the philologist Ch. O. Müller (d. 1840) is owed the scientific study of myth in relation to history. He observes that the ancient myths have come down to us through various elaborations: of poets who sang them, of scholars who catalogued them, of historians who reshaped them, of philosophers who allegorized them. It is necessary therefore to strip them of all this various overgrowth in order to find at the root of the myth either a fact of history or a cultural datum, whence the necessity of studying cults in order to explain the origin of so many myths.
3. Etiological or explanatory myths (from the Greek aitia = cause). Truly every myth is etiological inasmuch as it gives an account of something, but by this epithet one wishes to mean especially the myths directed at explaining the cause of a rite, the reason for a figuration or a name. The modern school of functional ethnology patronized by B. Malinowski tends to deny the etiological point of view because for primitive man the myth is not only a narration but a reality lived, inasmuch as it is in function of one of his present activities. But this active value of the myth confirms the legitimacy of the etiological point of view, because if it did not have this active and productive value the myth would no longer be at the service of the religious-social life of the group but would sink to the value of a fable.
The same may be said of the direction given by the mythologist K. Kerényi to the study of mythology, based on the examination of "mythologems," that is, of myths considered in their entirety and in their development; thus, for example, Prometheus would be the mythologem of the masculine origins of life. According to this approach myths have their own primordial nucleus, a monad, expressing what is "generally human." This monad, however, does not reveal itself in such a form of primordial immediacy that unites the fundamental data of mythologies — always relative to the origins either of the cosmos or of man — and in which the roots of myth are immersed, but reveals itself only historically, at a later stage, when it becomes the history of the "particularly human" within a given civilization, operating in it according to the time and place proper to that civilization. At the center of myth (and of cult) stands man as actor, who is therefore also the involuntary and spontaneous creator (myth has no explanatory purposes, nor allegorical developments) of the divine world that is the object of mythology. What constitutes the weak side of the system is having placed the foundation of mythology in the "generally human," in the divine figures, daughters of intuition, anterior to every determination, which is reachable only when they descend into the "particularly human," that is, into the actualizations of a given civilization, upon which however it is indispensable to work with the elements of the historical method, and of specific ethnological comparison.
Etiological myths are subdivided into: a) cultural myths properly so called, which are explanatory of rites. These are the most important and are created to justify the celebrations of a rite whose origin is lost in the mists of the past: for example, the myth of the burial of Osiris, considered as the prototype of the Egyptian funerary rite; these myths are also called demiurgic inasmuch as they trace back to a divine operator the first institution of the customs or usages or teachings that the rite reproduces and the myth narrates; b) iconic myths that arose to explain the reason for a figuration: thus the statue of Vulcan, one-eyed, placed in the Vulcanal gave rise to the legend of Horatius Cocles (= one-eyed); c) etymological myths that seek to explain the reason for a name; for example, the name Lateran derived in the Middle Ages from latet rana, that is, from a frog vomited by Nero and secretly reared there. There are then very numerous particular etiological myths suggested by the most varied naturalistic, animal, and vegetable motifs with which the mythology of both primitive and cultural peoples is rich.
III. NATURALISTIC INTERPRETATION
The attempt to interpret myths arises when their content no longer conforms to the philosophical-religious mentality and the moral conscience of the group. In general these attempts at interpretation draw their guidelines from the philosophical and scientific ideas in vogue at their time and apply them to the mythical narrative with the complaisant help of etymology. Already Theagenes of Rhegium, who lived in the second half of the 6th century B.C., gave of Homer a physical interpretation conforming to the conclusions of the philosophers of Ionia and saw in the struggle of opposing warriors the contrast of hot with cold, of fire with water: Apollo, Hephaestus, against Poseidon and the Scamander. The Stoics accepted this physical interpretation in full, and for them in Hesiod's Theogony Chaos is the moist element, Gaia is the earthy sediment that settles at the bottom of the water, Night, daughter of Chaos, is the thick vapor that rises from the moisture, Heaven, son of Gaia, is the subtle air that comes from the exhalations of the earth, Cronus who mutilates Uranus is time which limits and arrests the fertility of nature, Zeus who chains Cronus is the first principle that directs and regulates the course of time, and so on. This Stoic interpretation of myth is summarized quite well by Varro (St. Augustine, De Civ. Dei, VII, 14), who demonstrates, with the support of often arbitrary etymologies, that the various divinities are the personification of phenomena of nature or of the elements of the universe. Thus Janus (ab eundo) is the cosmos that turns continually upon itself, Jupiter is the soul of the world and sums up universal life, residing in the ether which is the purest and highest part of the cosmos; Neptune is that part of the soul of the world which penetrates the waters; another section of the cosmos is the earth, also called Ceres or Ops because by working it one improves it, or Proserpina because the crops come forth from it, or Vesta because it clothes itself with grass; Saturn presides over the seed, and if the myth says that he devours his children, it means that the seed returns into the earth from which it came; Juno is the air and therefore dwells in the region immediately below the ether; Diana is the moon, whose rays are symbolized by the arrows the goddess shoots, while her virginity signifies the sterility of the paths over which she presides, which produce no vegetation, and so on. This Stoic exegesis, pantheistic at bottom, had the merit of being a very reasonable and felicitous interpretation of the popular divinities and ended by making them acceptable even to cultivated minds: on this track the interpretation of mythology remained until the end of paganism.
IV. HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION
The historical interpretation of myth also takes the epithet "euhemeristic," from Euhemerus of Messene (late 4th century B.C.). For him the gods are nothing but clever and cunning men, deified after death thanks to their brilliant deeds: Jupiter himself was one of these, who after traveling the earth five times and giving men the laws of agriculture and of civilized life died in Crete, where his tomb can still be seen. This interpretation, which found in some way a confirmation in the cult of heroes (men deified after death) and fits well into the anthropomorphic conception of the gods so pronounced among the Greeks, pleased historians, for example Polybius, and was appreciated by the Fathers of the Church, who saw in it a good arsenal of arguments for combating paganism, both because it reduced the stature of the gods to human proportions, and because, by splitting the various aspects of one and the same divinity into as many historical figures, it excluded at the root every form of that syncretism which, by bringing divine figures back together and unifying them, regarded them as different manifestations of the one divinity (a typical example being Neoplatonism) and thereby elevated and hence reinforced the philosophical-theological speculation of a dying paganism.
The Middle Ages, an age of speculative and not critical thought, and of the philosophical-theological systematization of Christian thought, did not concern itself with mythographic exegesis, also because its religious adversary was no longer paganism, but rather Judaism and Islam, monotheistic religions that had to be combated with entirely different weapons. Humanism and the Renaissance, by rehabilitating ancient literature and culture, and the Protestant Reformation, by spurring a more thorough examination of the Bible, provoked on the one hand the erudite study of mythology and interpreted on the other, renewing the thesis of the Christian apologists, pagan myths and beliefs as a plagiarism of Sacred Scripture. Thus one arrives, through the erudition of the seventeenth century and the rationalism of the eighteenth (English deism, French encyclopedism, German Enlightenment), at the nineteenth century, which inaugurates with F. Max Müller the philological and comparative exegesis of mythology, especially of the great Indo-European family; and with E. B. Tylor the examination of the myths of primitive peoples, studied as the immediate expression of their vision of reality as experienced and then fantastically enriched through the association of ideas, by virtue of analogy.
V. MYTH AND CULT
Myth is a necessary element of religion not only because, since man is a rational being, a certain conception of the universe must be implicit in every religion, but also because the function of myth is indispensable as a unifying symbol of the social group, both in thought and in action. This value of its as a symbol of social life explains why, as the conditions of society change, myth ends up becoming too narrow and insufficient for the group that benefits from it; and then it is replaced by a broader, more comprehensive, more moral mental creation that ends up attaining the value of a metaphysical system. The old myth remains as something superseded and henceforth comprehensible only on condition either of being degraded to the rank of a fairy tale or of being allegorized as a receptacle of a lofty religious and moral teaching.
Myth and cult are therefore the two inseparable elements of the religious fact. Cult presents itself as the expression of that mystical emotion that is specific to religion; myth is the rational commentary on the acts of cult, which explains their development and their directives, which unifies their manifestations, which, in the absence of a written tradition, is the codified sum of all the experiences through which the group has not only given itself a reason for itself and for the universe, but has also provided for its ordinary existence by fixing the norms by virtue of which it can live its life, whether this be the narrow existence of a wandering clan or the politically evolved one of a city or a nation.