A Short History of Myth

by Karen Armstrong

  But Confucius realised that this could not be done by an act of will or by rational reflection alone. Absolute transcendence of selfishness could only be achieved through the alchemy of ritual and music, which, like all great art, transfigures human beings at a level that is deeper than the cerebral.76 Yet it was not enough simply to attend the rituals: it was essential to understand the spirit behind them, which inculcated an attitude of ‘yielding’ (rang) to others in order to overcome pride, resentment and envy.77 As the worshippers bowed to the other participants, submitted to the demands of the rite, and allowed others to take the lead when required – all to the accompaniment of sublime music – they learned how to behave to their fellows in ordinary transactions and relationships. Confucius looked back to exemplary models of the past. The Chinese had no stories about the gods, but they did revere culture heroes, who were in fact mythical figures but were thought to be historical. Confucius’s special heroes were two of the five Sage Kings of remote antiquity. The first was Yao, who had not only taught the Chinese the proper use of ritual and music, but had demonstrated the virtue of rang. Because he deemed none of his sons worthy to rule, he chose the virtuous peasant Shun as his successor. Shun had also displayed exceptional selflessness when he had continued to love his father and brothers and treat them with reverence and respect, even though they had tried to kill him.

  But for Confucius, ritual, if properly understood, was more important than these mythical stories. There had been a similar development in Vedic India, where the rituals of sacrifice had eclipsed the gods to whom they were offered. The gods gradually retreated from the religious consciousness, and the ritual reformers of the eighth century BCE devised a new liturgy that put the solitary individual at centre-stage. Henceforth men could not rely on the gods for help; they had to create an ordered world for themselves in the ritual arena. The power engendered by these ceremonies, which was known as Brahman, was experienced as so overwhelming that it was thought to be the ultimate reality that lay beyond the gods and kept the world in being. Even today, a religious festival can produce the rapture that Indians call anya manas, the ‘other mind’ that is quite different from normal, profane consciousness. The Indian and Chinese emphasis on liturgy reminds us yet again that myth cannot be viewed in isolation from this context. Myth and cultic practice are equal partners, both help to convey a sense of the sacred, and usually do so together, but sometimes ritual takes first place.

  The Axial Sages all insisted on a third component, however. To understand the true meaning of the myth, you must not only perform the rites which give it emotional resonance, but you must also behave in the correct ethical manner. Unless your daily life was informed by what Confucius called ren, rang and shu, a myth like that of Yao or Shun would remain abstract and opaque. In Vedic India, ritual actions had been called karma (‘deeds’). The Buddha, however, had no interest in sacrificial ritual. He redefined karma as the intentions that inspired our ordinary actions.78 Our motives were internal karma, mental actions that were far more important than ritual observance, and just as important as external actions. This was a revolution typical of the Axial period, which deepened and interiorised the understanding of both morality and mythology. Myth had always demanded action. The Axial sages showed that myth would not reveal its full significance, unless it led to the exercise of practical compassion and justice in daily life.

  The third-century BCE author of the Dao De Jing, traditionally known as Laozi, also had a negative view of traditional ritual. Instead of li, he relied on exercises of concentration similar to the Indian practice of yoga. Civilisation, he was convinced, had been a mistake, which had diverted human beings from the true Way (Dao). Laozi looked back to a Golden Age of agrarian simplicity, when people lived in small villages with no technology, no art or culture, and no war.79 This Golden Age, the Chinese believed, had come to an end with the death of the culture hero Shen Nong, who, at immense cost to himself, had taught human beings the science of agriculture. Shen Nong had personally tasted all plants to find out which were edible, and had once been poisoned seventy times in one day. By the third century BCE, when the more powerful kingdoms were swallowing up small states and communities in one destructive war after another, the myth of Shen Nong had changed. He was now regarded as the ideal ruler. It was said that he had governed a decentralised empire, had ploughed his own fields alongside his subjects, and had ruled without ministers, laws or punishments. Idealistic hermits had dropped out of public life to recreate the Shen Nong ideal, and the Dao De Jing, which is addressed to the ruler of a small state, gives similar advice. It is best to retreat, lie low and do nothing until the great powers have overreached themselves.

  But like all Axial teachers, Laozi was not simply concerned with the practicalities of survival, but with finding a source of transcendent peace in the midst of earthly turbulence. He aspires to the ultimate reality, the Dao, which goes beyond the gods, and is the ineffable basis of all existence. It transcends everything we can conceptualise, and yet if we cultivate an inner emptiness, without selfish desire and without greed, and live in a compassionate manner, we will be in harmony with the Dao and thus transformed. When we give up the goal-directed ethos of civilisation, we will be in tune with the Way things ought to be.80 Yet just as Laozi appeals to the mythical Golden Age of Shen Nong when describing the ideal polity, he also appeals to traditional myths (which may have been current in popular culture) in order to evoke the Dao. The Dao is the Source of Life, the Perfect Ancestor, and also the Mother. Prehistoric human beings had seen the Great Mother as fierce and violent, but in the new Axial spirit, Laozi gives her the attributes of compassion. She is associated with the selflessness that is inseparable from true creativity.81 Prehistoric men and women had sometimes enacted a return to the womb by burrowing through subterranean tunnels. Laozi imagines the Sage, the perfected human being, making this return by conforming to the Way of the universe.

  Both Laozi and the Buddha were willing to use old myths to help people to understand the new ideas. Believing that animal sacrifice was not only useless but also cruel, the Buddha attacked Vedic ritualism, but was tolerant of traditional mythology. He no longer believed that the gods were efficacious, but he was able to set them quietly to one side, and felt no need to mount an ideological offensive against them. He also gave the gods a new, symbolic significance. In some of the stories about his life, gods such as Brahma, the supreme deity, or Mara, lord of death, seem to be reflections of his own inner states, or personifications of conflicting mental forces.82

  But the prophets of Israel could not take this relaxed attitude. They felt compelled to fight hard against old myths that they found incompatible with their Axial reform. For centuries, Israelites had enjoyed the ritual and mythical life of the Near East, worshipping Asherah, Baal and Ishtar alongside their own god, Yahweh. But now that Yahweh seemed so distant, prophets such as Hosea, Jeremiah and Ezekiel undertook a radical revision of the old anthropomorphic myths. Because the old stories now seemed empty, they declared them to be false. Their god Yahweh, whose towering transcendence showed the triviality of these old tales, was the only god. They mounted a polemic against the old religion. Yahweh himself is depicted as having to make a belligerent bid for the leadership of the Divine Council, pointing out that his fellow-gods are neglecting the Axial virtues of justice and compassion, and will, therefore, be phased out, dying like mortal men.83 Culture heroes, such as Joshua, David and King Josiah are shown violently suppressing the local pagan cults,84 and the effigies of Baal or Marduk are ridiculed as man-made, consisting entirely of gold and silver, and knocked together by a craftsman in a couple of hours.85

  This was, of course, a reductive view of Middle Eastern paganism. But the history of religion shows that, once a myth ceases to give people intimations of transcendence, it becomes abhorrent. Monotheism, the belief in only one god, was initially a struggle. Many of the Israelites still felt the allure of the old myths, and had to fight this attraction. The
y felt that they were being torn painfully from the mythical world of their neighbours, and were becoming outsiders. We sense this strain in the distress of Jeremiah, who experienced his god as a pain that convulsed his every limb, or in the strange career of Ezekiel, whose life became an icon of radical discontinuity. Ezekiel is commanded by God to eat excrement; he is forbidden to mourn his dead wife; he is overcome with fearful, uncontrollable trembling. The Axial prophets felt that they were taking their people into an unknown world, where nothing could be taken for granted, and normal responses were denied.

  But eventually this distress gave way to serene confidence, and the religion that we now call Judaism came into being.

  Ironically, this new self-assurance came after a great catastrophe. In 586 the Babylonian King Nebuchadrezzar conquered the city of Jerusalem and destroyed the temple of Yahweh. Many of the Israelites were deported to Babylonia, where the exiles were exposed to the towering ziggurats, the rich liturgical life of the city, and the massive temple of Esagila. Yet it was here that paganism lost its attraction. We see the new spirit in the first chapter of Genesis, probably written by a member of the so-called Priestly School, which can be read as a poised, calm polemic against the old belligerent cosmogonies. In calm, ordered prose, this new creation myth looks coolly askance at the Babylonian cosmology. Unlike Marduk, Israel’s god does not have to fight desperate battles to create the world; he brings all things into existence effortlessly, by a simple command. The sun, moon, stars, sky and earth are not gods in their own right, hostile to Yahweh. They are subservient to him, and created for a purely practical end. The sea-monster is no Tiamat, but is God’s creature and does his bidding. Yahweh’s creative act is so superior to Marduk’s that it never has to be repeated or renewed. Where the Babylonian gods were engaged in an ongoing battle against the forces of chaos, and needed the rituals of the New Year festival to restore their energies, Yahweh can simply rest on the seventh day, his work complete.

  But the Israelites were quite happy to use the old Middle Eastern mythology when it suited them. In the book of Exodus, the crossing of the Sea of Reeds is described precisely as a myth.86 Immersion in water was traditionally used as a rite of passage; other gods had split a sea in half when they created the world – though what is being brought into being in the Exodus myth is not a cosmos but a people. The prophet we call Second Isaiah, who was active in Babylon in the middle of the sixth century, articulates a clear, unequivocal monotheism. There is no stridency; he has no doubt that Yahweh is the only god; the antagonism has gone. Yet he evokes the ancient creation myths that depict Yahweh fighting sea-monsters to bring the world into being, just like any other Middle Eastern deity, equating this victory over the primal Sea with Yahweh’s parting of the Sea of Reeds at the time of the Exodus. Israelites can now expect a similar show of divine strength in their own time, since God is about to reverse the exile and bring them home. The Babylonian author of The Epic of Gilgamesh brought ancient history and mythology together, but Second Isaiah goes further. He links the primordial actions of his god with current events.87

  In Greece, the Axial Age was fuelled by logos (reason), which operated at a different level of the mind from myth. Where myth requires either emotional participation or some kind of ritual mimesis to make any sense at all, logos tries to establish the truth by means of careful inquiry in a way that appeals only to the critical intelligence. In the Greek colonies of Ionia, in what is now Turkey, the first physicists tried to find a rational basis for the old cosmological myths. But this scientific enterprise was still couched in the old mythical and archetypal framework. In a way that was reminiscent of the Enuma Elish, they saw the world evolving from some primordial stuff, not because of a divine initiative, but according to the regular laws of the cosmos. For Anaximander (c. 611–547), the original arche (principle) was quite unlike anything in our human experience. He called it the Infinite; the familiar elements of our world emerged from it in a process governed by alternating heat and cold. Anaximenes (d.c. 500) believed that the arche was infinite air; while for Heraclitus (fl.c. 500) it was fire. These early speculations were as fictional as the old myths, because there was no way they could be verified. The poet Xenophanes (fl. 540–500) realised this and reflected upon the limitations of human thought. He tried to write a rational theology, dismissing the anthropomorphic myths about the gods, and positing a deity who conformed to the science of the phusikoi: an abstract, impersonal force, moral but motionless, all-knowing and all-powerful.

  Very few people were interested in Ionian physics, the first manifestation of the Axial spirit in Greece. Before the passion for philosophy took strong root in the fourth century, the Athenians had developed a new type of ritual, the mimesis of tragedy, which solemnly reenacted the ancient myths in the context of a religious festival, but at the same time subjected them to close scrutiny. Aeschylus (c. 525–456), Sophocles (c. 496–405) and Euripedes (480–406) all put the gods on trial, with the audience as the judging tribunal. Myth does not question itself; it demands a degree of self-identification. Tragedy, however, put some distance between itself and the traditional mythology, and queried some of the most fundamental Greek values. Were the gods really fair and just? What was the value of heroism, of Greekness, or democracy? Tragedy came to the fore in a time of transition, a period when the old myths were beginning to lose touch with the new political realities of the city-states. A hero such as Oedipus is still committed to traditional mythical ideals, but they do not help him to solve his dilemma. Where the mythical hero could fight his way through to victory or, at least, to some degree of resolution, there are no such solutions for the tragic hero. Enmeshed in pain and perplexity, the hero must make conscious choices and accept their consequences.

  Yet for all its iconoclasm, tragedy was cast in traditional ritual form. Like any religious rite, it represented a movement from isolated sorrow to communal sharing, but for the first time the inner life was involved in the religious life of the polis. The dramas were performed during the festival of Dionysos, the god of transformation, and may have played an important role in the initiation of Athenian youths and their attainment of full citizenship. Like any initiation, tragedy forced the audience to face the unspeakable, and to experience extremity. It is close to the ideology of sacrifice, because it leads to katharsis, an interior purification resulting from the violent invasion of heart and mind by the emotions of pity and terror. But this new form of sacrifice was imbued with Axial compassion, because the audience learned to feel the pain of another person as though it were their own, thereby enlarging the scope of their sympathy and humanity.

  Plato disliked tragedy, because it was too emotional; he believed that it fed the irrational part of the soul, and that humans could only achieve their full potential through logos. 88 He compared myths to old wives’ tales. Only logical, rational discourse brings true understanding.89 Plato’s theory of the Eternal Ideas can be seen as a philosophical version of the ancient myth of the divine archetypes, of which mundane things are the merest shadow. But, for Plato, the Ideas of Love, Beauty, Justice and the Good cannot be intuited or apprehended through the insights of myth or ritual, but only through the reasoning powers of the mind. Aristotle was in agreement with Plato. He found the old myths incomprehensible: ‘For they make the first principles gods or generated from gods, and they say that whatever did not taste of the nectar and ambrosia became mortal … but as regards the actual application of these causes, their statements are beyond our comprehension.’ Aristotle was reading myth as though it were a philosophical text. From a scientific perspective, these myths are nonsense, and a serious seeker after truth should ‘turn rather to those who reason by means of demonstration’.90 It seemed that the study of philosophy had caused a rift between mythos and logos, which had hitherto been complementary.

  Yet this was not the whole story. For all his impatience with myth, Plato allowed it an important role in the exploration of ideas that lie beyond the scope of philosophi
cal language. We cannot speak of the Good in terms of logos, because it is not a being but the source of both Being and Knowledge. There are other matters, such as the origin of the cosmos or the birth of the gods, that seem subject to blind causality and so contaminated by the irrational that they cannot be expressed in coherent arguments. So when the subject matter falls below philosophical discourse, we must be content with a plausible fable.91 When he writes of the soul, for example, Plato falls back on the old oriental myth of reincarnation.92 Aristotle agrees that, while some of the myths about the gods are clearly absurd, the basis of this tradition – ‘that all the first substances were gods’ – is ‘truly divine’.93

  There was, therefore, a contradiction in Western thought. Greek logos seemed to oppose mythology, but philosophers continued to use myth, either seeing it as the primitive forerunner of rational thought or regarding it as indispensable to religious discourse. And indeed, despite the monumental achievements of Greek rationalism during the Axial Age, it had no effect on Greek religion. Greeks continued to sacrifice to the gods, take part in the Eleusinian mysteries, and celebrate their festivals until the sixth century of the Common Era, when this pagan religion was forcibly suppressed by the Emperor Justinian, and replaced by the mythos of Christianity.

  vi

  The Post-Axial Period (c. 200 BCE to c. 1500 CE)