The World's Mythology in Colour [antikvár]

Introduction iTlyth and iTIankind by Jacquetta Hawker It is rare for a word to retain two precisely opposite meanings, each being selected according to the beliefs and prejudices of the user. Myth is such a word. Thinkers of many different disciplines have found that at all times myth represents an absolute truth, affords insight 'into the indescribable realities of the soul', or, as Malinowski says 'is -not in the nature of an invention but a living reality'. Such vital interpretations look like winning the day, yet their victory is far from complete. Thus in the august pages of the Oxford English Dictionary myth is defined as 'A purely fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural persons, actions or events and embodying some popular idea concerning natural history or historical phenomena.' This supercilious O.E.D. attitude is conspicuously maintained in everyday talk and journalism. The use of the term myth as synonymous with fiction comes to us from nineteenth-century positivism and rationalism. Comte's famous Law of the Three States laid it down that the nature of man's thought had at first been theological, then philosophical and was now entering its rational scientific or Positivist state of enlightenment. The most extreme of the rationalist interpreters was to be Max Muller who suggested that myth was 'a disease of language', an abnormality of the human mind caused by an inability to express abstract ideas except by metaphor. He saw it as a disease that was at its worst in the early stages of human thought, but which had never been completely cured. The early theorists might seek the origin of the mythical figures of religion through a linguistic study of the historic mythologies of the Indian Veda, the Iranian Avesta, of Homer and the Norse Edda. Soon, however, there was a new generation of pioneers in anthropology and archaeology to add the beliefs and rites of non-literate peoples past and present as subjects of study and speculation. After Darwin, evolutionary ideas based on biological rather than historical models were, of course, greatly strengthened, and so, too, was hostility between those who accepted divine revelation and those who subjected it to rationalist vivisection. Among the founding fathers of anthropology, R.B. Tylor, influenced by Comte and later involved in Darwinian disputes, was above all an anti-theological evolutionist who sought to apply scientific laws to man's emergence, step by regular step, from prehistoric darkness into modern European light. In particular he taught that the 'primitive' peoples of the contemporary world were indeed survivals from the savage or barbaric phases of the past and so could illuminate the beliefs and practices of early man. This view, later consigned to a dishonoured grave, is now being offered a cautious hand for resurrection. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the evolutionary approach tended to be displaced by the sociological. It was Emile Dürkheim who probably did most to break out from a narrow rationalism by recognizing religion, with its expression in myths and symbols, as a reality in itself, a force that existed and would always exist, enabling human beings to relate themselves to the external world and to the order of society. He went so far as to say that religious forms were the primeval matrix out of which both culture and society had grown, and which, in spite of ever sharper division from the secular, they could never do without. With the fully developed functionalist school of social anthropology all concern for historical change was set aside in the hope of obtaining a static, but all-inclusive picture of individual societies and cultures-as though they could bc revealed by the camera of a spy satellite. In practice, however, the great virtue of their method was that it took the functionalists into the field to live at close quarters with native communities. It was his experience among the Trobriand Islanders that obliged Malinowski to sec that their myths were neither primarily symbolic in meaning nor stories invented to satisfy curiosity as to 'how things began'. He wrote: 'The myth in a primitive society, that is in its original Hi'inil form, is not a mere tale told but a reality lived. For the iiatiiv these stories are the assertion of an original, greater, more important reality through which the present I ife, fate and u'ori^ of man kitid are governed and the kinvi'ledge of n'hich provides men on the one hand fvith motives for ritual and moral acts, ofi the other with directions for their performance.' This was a recognition of the social reality of myths: at much the same time a totally new approach began to reveal their psychological reality. Hitherto theorists had studied myths in time and spacc, historically, culturally, socially-