A Short History of Myth

by Karen Armstrong

  In the ancient world, a symbol became inseparable from its unseen referent. Because likeness constitutes some kind of identity, it makes that invisible reality present. The symbolic ritual of the New Year festival was a drama, which, like any good theatrical event, abolished barriers of time and place and snatched audience and participants away from their mundane preoccupations. It was a game of sacred make-believe. Worshippers felt that they had been pitched into the timeless divine realm that formed the backdrop of their daily lives. A scapegoat was killed to cancel the enervated dying year; a mock-battle re-presented Marduk’s struggle against Tiamat; and a saturnalia recreated the forces of chaos, by humiliating the ruler and enthroning a carnival king in his stead. This ritualised dissolution recalls the psychic breakdown that the shaman experienced during his initiation, and the carefully orchestrated regression of the rites of passage. In archaic spirituality, a symbolic return to primordial chaos is indispensable to any new creation.56

  As we know, a creation story never provided people with factual information about the origins of life. In the ancient world, a cosmogony was usually recited in a liturgical setting, and during a period of extremity when people felt they needed an infusion of divine energy: when they were looking into the unknown at the start of a new venture – at New Year, at a wedding or a coronation. Its purpose was not to inform but was primarily therapeutic. People would listen to the recitation of a cosmological myth when they faced impending disaster, when they wanted to bring a conflict to an end, or to heal the sick. The idea was to tap into the timeless energies that supported human existence. The myth and its accompanying rituals were a reminder that often things had to get worse before they could get better, and that survival and creativity required a dedicated struggle.

  Other cosmologies pointed out that true creativity demanded self-sacrifice. In Indian Vedic mythology, creation had been the result of an act of self-immolation. Purusha, a cosmic giant, had offered himself up to the gods, who had sacrificed and dismembered him; the cosmos and the social classes that made up human society had been formed from his body, and were therefore sacred and absolute. In China, there was a popular myth about another giant, called Pan Gu, who laboured for 36,000 years to bring a viable universe into being, and then died, exhausted by the effort. The motif is also present in the Middle Eastern combat myths. Tiamat, Mot and Leviathan are not evil, but are simply fulfilling their cosmic role. They have to die and endure dismemberment before an ordered cosmos can emerge from chaos. Survival and civilised society depends upon the death and destruction of others and neither gods nor men can be truly creative, unless they are prepared to give themselves away.

  Hitherto mythology had centred almost entirely on the primordial feats and struggles of the gods or the archetypal ancestors of primordial time. But the urban myths began to impinge upon the historical world. Because there was now greater reliance upon human ingenuity, people began to see themselves as independent agents. Their own activities came to the foreground, and, increasingly, the gods seemed more distant. Poets began to reinterpret the old stories. We can see this development in the Babylonian poem known as The Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh was probably a historical figure, who lived in about 2600 BCE: he is listed in the records as the fifth king of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia and later became a folk hero. The earliest legends recount his adventures with his servant Enkidu. They include typical heroic and shamanic feats, such as fighting with monsters, visiting the underworld, and conversing with the goddess. Later these stories were given deeper meaning, and became a quest for eternal life. But in the final version of the poem, written in about 1300 BCE, the myth explores the limits and meaning of human culture.

  At the beginning of the poem, we see Gilgamesh as a man who has lost his way. There is a storm in his heart, and he has begun to terrorise his people, who plead with the gods for redress. But, significantly, the gods are no longer willing to intervene directly in human affairs, and act through an intermediary instead. To give Gilgamesh something serious to contend with, they create Enkidu, a wild, primitive man who runs amok in the countryside. His body covered in a shaggy pelt, wild-haired, naked, eating grass, and drinking pond-water, Enkidu is ‘Man-as-he-was-in-the-beginning’,57 who is more at home with animals than human beings. To tame Enkidu, Gilgamesh sends the prostitute Shamhat to teach him civilised ways. After six nights with Shamhat, Enkidu finds that his bond with the natural, animal world has been broken. He has become civilised, but this involves loss as well as gain. Enkidu has been ‘diminished’, but also has become ‘profound’, and ‘like a god’.58 He has acquired the wisdom and refinement that will enable him to enjoy the sophisticated lifestyle of Uruk, which is so far beyond the natural state of humanity that it seems divine.

  Gilgamesh and Enkidu become friends, and set off on their adventures. In the course of their wanderings, they meet Ishtar. In the older mythology, marriage with the Mother Goddess had often represented the supreme enlightenment and the climax of a hero’s quest, but Gilgamesh turns Ishtar down. It is a powerful critique of the traditional mythology, which can no longer speak fully to urban men and women. Gilgamesh does not see civilisation as a divine enterprise. Ishtar is a destroyer of culture: she is like a water skin that soaks its carrier, a shoe that pinches its wearer, and a door that cannot keep out the wind.59 None of her relationships has lasted; she has ruined each one of her lovers.60 Mortals are better off without these destructive encounters with irresponsible gods. Gilgamesh, the civilised man, declares his independence of the divine. It is better for gods and humans to go their separate ways.

  Ishtar takes her revenge, and Enkidu sickens and dies. Gilgamesh is distraught. Oppressed by the realisation that he himself must die, he recalls that the survivor of the Flood – in this poem called Utnapishtim – was granted eternal life, and sets off to visit him in Dilmun. But human beings cannot revert to primitive spirituality and this quest for the world of the gods represents a cultural regression; Gilgamesh roams over the steppes, unshaven, wild-haired, and clad only in a lion’s skin. Like a shaman, he follows the course of the sun through uninhabited lands, has a vision of the underworld, and seeks a ‘secret knowledge of the gods’.61 When he finally reaches Dilmun, however, Utnapishtim explains that the gods will no longer suspend the laws of nature for favoured humans. The old myths can no longer serve as a guide for human aspiration. The visit to Dilmun reverses the old mythical approach.62 In Atrahasis, the story of the Flood was told from the gods’ point of view, but here Utnapishtim reflects on his own experiences, on the practical difficulties of launching his boat, and on his own human reaction to the devastation wrought by the Flood. Where the old myths had concentrated on the sacred world and not been much concerned with temporal events and figures, here the historical Gilgamesh visits the mythical Utnapishtim. History was beginning to impinge upon mythology, as the gods had begun their retreat from the human world.63

  Instead of getting privileged information from the gods, Gilgamesh receives a painful lesson on the limitations of humanity. He heads back to civilisation: bathes, throws away his lion skin, dresses his hair and dons clean clothes. Henceforth, he will concentrate on building the walls of Uruk, and cultivating the civilised arts. He personally will die, but these monuments will be his immortality, especially the invention of writing, which will record his achievements for posterity.64 Where Utnapishtim had become wise by speaking with a god, Gilgamesh has learned to reflect upon his own experience without divine aid. He has lost some illusions, but gained ‘complete wisdom’, returning ‘weary but at last resigned’.65 He has fallen away from the ancient mythical vision, but history has its own consolations.

  There was a similar re-evaluation of the old mythical ideals in Greece. The myth of Adonis, for example, recast the story of Dumuzi and Ishtar, and transformed it into a political myth.66 Adonis is incapable of citizenship. A hopeless hunter, he would have failed the initiation rites that turned Greek adolescents into citizens, which often centred on hunting
ordeals. In thrall to two goddesses, he never separates from the world of women. Greek citizens were united to the polis through the family, but Adonis is the child of incest, an act that perverts the family ideal, and fails to found a family of his own. His irresponsible lifestyle is closer to Tyranny, a form of government which put the king above the law, and which the Athenians had discarded. Adonis’s festival, characterised by the unbridled lamentations of the women, was regarded with distaste by the male establishment. He was, in short, politically retarded, and may have helped Athenians to define themselves by personifying everything that is opposed to the sober, male ethos of the polis.

  Urban life had changed mythology. The gods were beginning to seem remote. Increasingly the old rituals and stories failed to project men and women into the divine realm, which had once seemed so close. People were becoming disillusioned with the old mythical vision that had nourished their ancestors. As cities became more organised, policing more efficient, and robbers and bandits brought to justice, the gods seemed increasingly careless and indifferent to the plight of humanity. There was a spiritual vacuum. In some parts of the civilised world, the old spirituality declined and nothing new appeared to take its place. Eventually this malaise led to yet another great transformation.

  v

  The Axial Age (c. 800 to 200 BCE)

  By the eighth century BCE, the malaise was becoming more widespread, and in four distinct regions an impressive array of prophets and sages began to seek a new solution. The German philosopher Karl Jaspers called this period the ‘Axial Age’ because it proved to be pivotal in the spiritual development of humanity; the insights gained during this time have continued to nourish men and women to the present day. 67 It marks the beginning of religion as we know it. People became conscious of their nature, their situation and their limitations with unprecedented clarity. New religious and philosophical systems emerged: Confucianism and Taoism in China; Buddhism and Hinduism in India; monotheism in the Middle East and Greek rationalism in Europe. These Axial traditions were associated with such men as the great Hebrew prophets of the eighth, seventh and sixth centuries; with the sages of the Upanishads, and the Buddha (c. 563–483) in India; with Confucius (551–479) and the author of the Dao De Jing in China;68 and with the fifth-century tragedians, Socrates (469–399), Plato (c. 427–347) and Aristotle (c. 384–322 BCE) in Greece.

  There is much about the Axial Age that remains mysterious. We do not know why it involved only the Chinese, Indians, Greeks and Jews, and why nothing comparable developed in Mesopotamia or Egypt. It is certainly true that the Axial regions were all caught up in political, social and economic upheaval. There were wars, deportations, massacres and destruction of cities. A new market economy was also developing: power was passing from priests and kings to merchants, and this disturbed the old hierarchies. All these new faiths developed not in remote deserts or mountain hermitages, but in an environment of capitalism and high finance. But this upheaval cannot fully explain the Axial revolution, which made an indelible impression on the way that human beings related to themselves, to each other, and to the world around them.

  All the Axial movements had essential ingredients in common. They were acutely conscious of the suffering that seemed an inescapable part of the human condition, and all stressed the need for a more spiritualised religion that was not so heavily dependent upon external rituals and practice. They had a new concern about the individual conscience and morality. Henceforth it would not be sufficient to perform the conventional rites meticulously; worshippers must also treat their fellow-creatures with respect. All the sages recoiled from the violence of their time, and preached an ethic of compassion and justice. They taught their disciples to look within themselves for truth and not to rely on the teachings of priests and other religious experts. Nothing should be taken on trust, everything should be questioned, and old values, hitherto taken for granted, must be subjected to critical scrutiny. One of the areas that required re-evaluation was, of course, mythology.

  When they contemplated the ancient myths, each of the Axial movements adopted a slightly different position. Some were hostile to certain mythical trends; others adopted a laissez-faire attitude. All gave their myths a more interior and ethical interpretation. The advent of urban life had meant that mythology was no longer taken for granted. People continued to examine it critically, but when they confronted the mystery of the psyche, they found that they still instinctively turned to the old myths. The stories might have to be recast, but they were still felt to be necessary. If a myth was banished by the more exacting reformers, it sometimes crept back later into the system in a slightly different guise. Even in these more sophisticated religious systems, people found that they could not do without mythology.

  But people no longer experienced the sacred as easily as their ancestors. The gods had already begun to retreat from the consciousness of some of the early city-dwellers. People in the Axial countries still yearned for transcendence, but the sacred now seemed remote, and even alien. A gulf now separated mortals from their gods. They no longer shared the same nature; it was no longer possible to believe that gods and men derived from the same divine substance. The early Hebrew myths had imagined a god who could eat and converse with Abraham as a friend69 but, when the prophets of the Axial Age encountered this same god, he was experienced as a fearful shock, which either endangered their lives, or left them feeling stunned and violated.70 The supreme reality now seemed impossibly difficult of access. In India, Buddhists felt that they could enter the sacred peace of Nirvana only by mounting a formidable attack on their normal consciousness by means of yoga exercises that were beyond the reach of ordinary folk, while the Jains practised such severe asceticism that some even starved themselves to death. In China, Confucius believed that the Dao, the supreme reality, was now so alien from the world of men that it was better not to speak about it.71 This radically different religious experience meant that mythology could no longer easily speak about the divine in the old anthropomorphic way.

  China has not figured much in our discussion, because in their high culture the Chinese did not tell stories about the gods. There were no tales of divine combat, dying gods or sacred marriages; there were no official pantheons, no cosmogony, and no anthropomorphic gods. The cities had no patron deities, and no urban cult. This does not mean that Chinese society had no mythical underpinning, however. Ancestor worship was of crucial importance, and pointed to a world that had predated the world of human beings. Rituals to departed kinsfolk provided the Chinese with a model for an idealised social order, which was conceived as a family, and governed by the principles of decorum. Rivers, stars, winds and crops all had indwelling spirits which lived harmoniously together in obedience to the Sky God, Di (later also known as Tian: ‘heaven’). Unlike other Sky Gods, the Chinese High God did not fade away. He became more prominent at the time of the Shang dynasty (c. 1600–mid-eleventh century BCE). The king’s legitimacy derived from the fact that he alone had access to Di/Tian, and, according to the principles of the perennial philosophy, he was the earthly counterpart of God – a myth that survived in Chinese culture until the revolution of 1911. Earthly government was identical to the arrangements of heaven; the king’s ministers aided him just as Tian was assisted in the governance of the cosmos by the gods of the elements.

  The Chinese seemed to have been groping towards the Axial ethos earlier than the other cultures. In 1126 BCE, a people from the Wei River valley, in the present-day Shensi province, overthrew the Shang state and established the Zhou dynasty. The Zhou claimed that the last Shang king had been corrupt and that, in his concern for the people’s suffering, Tian had passed his mandate to the Zhou – a myth that endowed Tian with an ethical character. The Zhou celebrated the order of heaven in elaborate ritual ceremonies, accompanied by powerfully beautiful music. This liturgy was experienced as an epiphany of a social harmony that was itself divine. All participants, living and dead, had to conform to these ceremonies. All
beings – spirits, ancestors and humans – had their special place; everybody had to subordinate their likes, dislikes and personal inclinations to the rites, which made the ideal order of the universe a reality in the flawed world of men and women. It was the rites and not the actors who were important; individuals felt caught up and subsumed into the Sacred World, which was the foundation of both the cosmos and their own polity.

  By the time of Confucius, however, the Zhou dynasty had fallen into decline and the old order was in ruins. Confucius attributed this anarchy to the neglect of the rituals and the accepted codes of behaviour (li) that had taught people how they should comport themselves to one another. Now decorum had been cast aside and people pursued only their own selfish interests. Some of the old myths had pointed out that creativity was based upon self-sacrifice, but the Axial Sages made the ethical consequences of this insight more explicit. This self-immolation had to be practised in daily life by everyone who wished to perfect his humanity.72 Confucius infused the old Chinese ethos with the Axial virtue of compassion. He promoted the ideal of ren (‘humaneness’), which required people to ‘love others’.73 He was the first to promulgate the Golden Rule: ‘Do not do unto others as you would not have done unto you.’74 The Axial spirit demanded inner reflection and self-scrutiny, a deliberate analysis of the deeper recesses of the self. You could not behave rightly to others unless you had first examined your own needs, motivation and inclinations; proper respect for others required a process of shu (‘likening to oneself’).75