MYTH AND MYTHOLOGY. – Myth (Gr. μύθος, from the verb μύθειο, “I speak, converse, narrate”) is the narration of events belonging to the divine, heroic, and human worlds, including the realm of animal fables; mythology is the classification and scientific study of myths.
SUMMARY:
I. The concept of myth
II. Classification of myths
III. Naturalistic interpretation
IV. Historical interpretation
V. Myth and worship.I. CONCEPT OF THE MYTH
In its most general meaning and in its psychological origin, myth is the animation of the phenomena of nature and life, due to 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 forms and attitudes suggested by his imagination; in short, it is a fantastic representation of reality, spontaneously delineated by the mental mechanism. This conception excludes, in principle, every intellectual elaboration and every interpretive function of myth. This personifying apperception of phenomena finds its clearest proof in language, where every word expressing an idea appears to derive originally from a sensation. Myth, therefore, springs from the same psychological source as art (Wundt);but the myth-making imagination assumes in it a much higher form, since it is not proper to a single individual but to an entire people, which finds in myth an expression of its spontaneous vision of the world (spontaneous, that is, not due to didactic, allegorical, etc. motives), the origins of its religious tradition and its history, and the beginnings of its scientific thought.
If, instead, myth is considered in its specific meaning and 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 entire social group, namely those relating to the origins of man and the world and to its destiny. And it is a true history, in the sense that it justifies the historical tradition and institutions of the group and is therefore to be believed; not a false history, of pure fantasy, narrated like a fairy tale to entertain the listener.
Since myth is a fantastic representation of reality, and since reality in the physical order presents itself as coordinated in a series of phenomena, it is natural that the animation of these phenomena and their mutual action should be presented as a tale of grandiose exploits, relating to divine figures, because the imagination naturally tends to enlarge the outlines of things, which, moreover, with regard to natural phenomena, appear in proportions far greater than human ones. Thus, for example, the spectacles accompanying the rising of dawn from the darkness of night are perceived 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 Aavini brothers (the Dioscuri, that is, the planet Venus in its two aspects, morning and evening).
These divine figures act outside the limits of space and time, that is, outside history (concerning the special position of the fairy tale and saga in relation to myth, V. LEGGENDA). This narrative is intended to be the spontaneous explanation (that is, a fantastic one, not the product of learned research or scientific observation) of phenomena belonging to the physical order and of laws and traditions of social organization, because the group, whether as restricted as a clan or as extensive as a nation, needs to provide itself with 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 with regard to it; 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 performed by the community; and a higher justification of their proven efficacy.
Besides providing an explanation for the various intellectual, historical, and social questions that arise in the mind, myth also has a first-rate intellectual function with regard to religion, not only because, since man is a rational being, some knowledge 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 for the action that the group must perform, in a word, as a banner under which and in whose name those who share the same religious emotion gather and recognize one another. This emotion is, in itself, something indefinable in the secrecy of every soul; its quality and degree may vary on account of psychophysical elements and stimuli that may differ for each individual; but myth intervenes to unify these various emotions in the name of the model it presents to everyone’s eyes, and, after unifying them, makes them converge toward that discipline of action which serves the group to express its feeling concordantly and to intensify its social life; 2) as a support for the reli-
gious emotion which, unsupported by a mental framework, would fold back exhausted upon itself after a moment of intense outburst; 3) as a renewing element of the emotion itself when the circumstances of the group’s life require the repetition of religious action. Thus, for example, the Eleusinian myth of Demeter in search of her daughter Core, abducted underground and later found again (a perfectly transparent symbol of vegetation that disappears into the earth as a seed and reappears as a plant), helped to orient the thought of the Greeks toward the sacred mystery of germination (and, at a later stage, to elevate it into a symbol of the blessed destiny of the soul); to sustain their piety and, as it were, distribute it throughout the entire period and circumstances of the festival; and to facilitate its annual renewal according to the same pattern, in harmony with the rhythm of seasonal life.
II. CLASSIFICATION OF MYTHS
The extensive collection of myths may, with regard to their content, be distributed into three major categories: naturalistic myths, historical myths, and etiological myths.1. Naturalistic myths: these are the broadest and most complicated, because they seek not only to account for the various phenomena of nature—astronomical, meteorological, and agricultural—but also to explain the origin of the gods (theogony), of human beings (anthropogony), and of the world (cosmogony). Examples will be given in the individual chapters. The modern German mythological school that arose in Berlin in 1906 (Gesellschaft für vergleichende Mythenforschung) places astral mythology at the center of the entire development of mythology, maintaining that all the various mythic complexes arose from the initial observation of the heavens, and especially of the phenomena of the sun and the moon. This theory has had the merit of grouping and thoroughly studying this category of myths, and of enabling the historical-cultural school of Graebner and Schmidt to make the appropriate applications by reconstructing solarism among the great hunter peoples (totemic peoples) and lunarism among agricultural peoples (matriarchal peoples); yet it is at fault for disregarding history, insofar as it wishes the theme of a myth to be studied without placing it within the cultural or cultural environment in which it arose; for failing to take account of the fact that among primitive groupings agricultural myths are more important than astral ones; and for restricting 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) renews their origins as a group and the fundamental institutions regulating their life by assigning them to a mythical figure; for example, Romulus at Rome, Osiris in Egypt, etc.; b) regards the migrations of ethnic groups narrated by myth as the adventures of divine personages; thus the myth of the Thessalian nymph Cyrene, abducted by Apollo and transported to Libya, signifies the colonization of Cyrene by the population of Minì in Thessaly, following the command of the Delphic oracle of Apollo; c) represents the historical relations or superimpositions of peoples or cults as alliances among gods; thus the alliance of Apollo and Dionysus at Delphi, etc. The philologist Ch. O. Muller (d. in 1840) is responsible for the scientific study of myth in relation to history. He observes that the ancient myths have reached us through various elaborations: by poets who sang them, by scholars who catalogued them, by historians who expanded them, and by philosophers who allegorized them. It is therefore necessary to strip them of all this varied superimposition in order to find at the root of the myth either a fact of history or a cultural datum, hence the necessity of studying cults in order to explain the origin of so many myths.
3. Etiological or explanatory myths (from the Greek airia = cause). Strictly speaking, every myth is etiological insofar as it accounts for something, but by this epithet are meant especially myths intended to explain the cause of a rite, the reason for a representation, or the origin of a name. The modern school of functional ethnology sponsored by B. Malinowski tends to deny the etiological point of view because, for primitive people, myth is not merely a narration but a lived reality, insofar as it serves one of their present activities. But this active value of m.
confirms the legitimacy of the etiological point of view, because if it did not possess this active and productive value, myth would no longer be at the service of the religious-social life of the group but would decline into the status 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 the « mythologemes », that is, of myths considered in their entirety and in their development; thus, for example, Promoteo would be the mythologeme of the male 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, which unites the fundamental data of mythologies—always relating to the origins of either the cosmos or humanity—and in which the roots of myth are immersed; rather, it reveals itself only historically, at a second stage, when the history of the « particularly human » is made within a given civilization, operating in accordance with the time and place proper to that civilization. At the center of myth (and of cult) stands human beings as the actor, and thus also the involuntary and spontaneous creator (myth has no explanatory purposes or allegorical developments) of the divine world that is the object of mythology. What constitutes the weak side of the system is that it has placed the foundation of mythology in the « generally human », in divine figures, children of intuition, prior to every determination—figures that can be reached only when they descend into the « particularly human », that is, into the actualizations of a given civilization, which nevertheless must be studied using the elements of the historical method and of specific ethnological comparison.
Etiological myths are divided into: a) properly cultural myths, which explain rites. They are the most important and are created to justify the celebration of a rite whose origin is lost in the mists of the past: for example, the myth of the burial of Osiris, considered the prototype of the Egyptian funerary rite; these myths are also called demiurgic insofar as they attribute to a divine agent the first institution of the usages, customs, or teachings that the rite reproduces and the myth narrates; b) iconic myths, arising to explain the reason for a representation: thus the statue of Vulcan, one-eyed, placed in the Vulcanal, gave rise to the legend of Horatius Cocles (= one-eyed); c) etymological myths, which 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 raised there. There are also very numerous particular etiological myths suggested by the most varied naturalistic, animal, and vegetal motifs with which the mythology of both primitive and civilized peoples abounds.
III. NATURALISTIC INTERPRETATION
The attempt to interpret myths arises when their content is no longer in conformity with the philosophical-religious mentality and moral consciousness of the group. In general, these attempts at interpretation derive their guiding principles from the philosophical and scientific ideas current in their time and apply them to the mythical narrative with the willing aid of etymology. As early as the second half of the sixth century B.C., Teagene de Regio, who lived at that time, gave Homer a physical interpretation in conformity with the conclusions of the philosophers of Ionia and saw in the struggle of the opposing warriors the contrast between heat and cold, fire and water: Apollo and Efesto against Posidone and the Scamander. The Stoics fully accepted this physical interpretation, and for them, in Hesiod’s Theogony, Chaos is the moist element, Gaia is the earthy sediment deposited at the bottom of the water, Night, daughter of Chaos, is the dense vapor rising from moisture, Heaven, son of Gaia, is the subtle air arising from the exhalations of the earth, Crono, who mutilates Uranus, is time, which limits and arrests the fecundity of nature, Zeus, who chains Crono, is the first principle that directs and regulates the course of time, and so forth. This Stoic interpretation of myth is summarized very well by Varrone (St. Agostino, De Civ. Dei, VII, 14), who demonstrates, with the support of often arbitrary etymologies, that the various divinities are personifications of phenomena of nature or of the elements of the universe. Thus Janus (ab eundo) is the cosmos, which continually turns upon itself; Jupiter is the soul of the world and sums up universal life, dwelling 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 Opi because working it improves it, or Proserpina because crops emerge from it, or Vesta because it is clothed with grasses; Saturn presides over the seed, and if the myth says that he devours his children, this signifies that the seed returns to the earth from which it came; Guinone is the air and therefore dwells in the region immediately beneath the ether; Diana is the moon, whose rays are symbolized by the arrows that the goddess shoots, while her virginity signifies the sterility of the paths over which she presides, which produce no vegetation, and so forth. This Stoic exegesis, pantheistic in its foundation, had the merit of being a very reasonable and successful interpretation of the popular divinities and ultimately made them acceptable even to cultivated minds: along these lines the interpretation of mythology remained until the end of paganism.IV. HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION
The historical interpretation of myth is also known as Euhemeristic, after Evemero of Messene (late fourth century B.C.). For him, the gods are nothing but capable and cunning men, deified after death on account of their brilliant deeds: Jupiter himself was one of these men who, after traversing the earth five times and giving mankind the laws of agriculture and civil life, died in Crete, where his tomb can still be seen. This interpretation, which found some confirmation in the cult of heroes (men deified after death) and fits well with the anthropomorphic conception of the gods so marked among the Greeks, appealed to historians, for example, Polybius, and was appreciated by the Fathers of the Church, who saw in it a valuable arsenal of arguments for combating paganism, both because it reduced the stature of the gods to human dimensions and because, by dividing the various aspects of a single divinity into as many historical figures, it fundamentally excluded every form of that syncretism which, by bringing together and unifying the divine figures, regarded them as different manifestations of the one divinity (neoplatonism being the typical example) and thereby elevated and consequently strengthened the philosophical-theological speculation of dying paganism.The Middle Ages, an age of speculative rather than critical thought and of the philosophical-theological systematization of Christian thought, did not concern itself with mythographical exegesis, also because its religious adversaries were no longer paganism, but 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 encouraging a more thorough examination of the Bible, on the one hand gave rise to the erudite study of mythology and, on the other, renewed the thesis of the Christian apologists by interpreting pagan myths and beliefs as a plagiarism of Holy Scripture. Thus, through the erudition of the seventeenth century and the rationalism of the eighteenth (English deism, French encyclopedism, German Enlightenment), we arrive at the nineteenth century, which inaugurated, 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 an immediate expression of their vision of reality as experienced and then imaginatively enriched through the association of ideas, by virtue of analogy.
V. MITO E CULTO
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 myth as a symbol of social life explains why, when the conditions of society change, myth eventually becomes too narrow and insufficient for the group that benefits from it; and it is then replaced by a broader, more comprehensive, more moral mental creation that ultimately attains the value of a metaphysical system. The old myth remains as something superseded and comprehensible thereafter only either on condition that it be degraded to the rank of a fairy tale or that it be allegorized as a repository of lofty religious and moral teaching.Myth and cult are therefore the two inseparable elements of the religious phenomenon. Cult presents itself as the expression of that mystical emotion which is specific to religion; myth is the rational commentary on the acts of cult, explaining their development and directives, unifying their manifestations, and, in the absence of a written tradition, constituting the codified sum of all the experiences through which the group has not only provided itself with a reason for its own existence and that of the universe, but has also provided for its ordinary existence by establishing 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 existence of a city or a nation.
BIBLI: W. Wundt, Mythus und Religion (Völkerpsychologie, 4, 5, 6), Lipsia 1905; B. Malinowski, Myth in primitive psychology, Londra 1926; K. Th. Preuss, Der religiöse Gehalt der Mythen, Tübinga 1933; A. H. Krappe, La genèse des mythes, Parigi 1938; R. Pettazzoni, Miti e leggenda, I, Africa Australia, Torino 1948; C. G. Jung-K. Kerényi, Prolegomeni allo studio scientifico della mitologia, Italian translation, Torino 1948; M. Eliade, Traité d'histoire des religions, Parigi 1949; C. Kerényi, Miti e misteri, Italian translation, Torino 1950.