A Short History of Myth

by Karen Armstrong

  There was a new optimism in the West. People felt that they had more control over their environment. There were no more sacred, unalterable laws. Thanks to their scientific discoveries, they could manipulate nature and improve their lot. The discoveries of modern medicine, hygiene, labour-saving technologies and improved methods of transport revolutionised the lives of Western people for the better. But logos had never been able to provide human beings with the sense of significance that they seemed to require. It had been myth that had given structure and meaning to life, but as modernisation progressed and logos achieved such spectacular results, mythology was increasingly discredited. As early as the sixteenth century, we see more evidence of a numbing despair, a creeping mental paralysis, and a sense of impotence and rage as the old mythical way of thought crumbled and nothing new appeared to take its place. We are seeing a similar anomie today in developing countries that are still in the earlier stages of modernisation.

  In the sixteenth century, this alienation was apparent in the reformers who tried to make European religion more streamlined, efficient and modern. Martin Luther (1483–1546) was prey to agonising depressions and paroxysms of rage. Ulrich Zwingli (1484–1531) and John Calvin (1509–64) both shared Luther’s utter helplessness before the trials of human existence – a dis-ease that impelled them to find a solution. Their reformed Christianity showed how antagonistic the dawning modern spirit was to the mythical consciousness. In premodern religion, likeness had been experienced as identity, so that a symbol was one with the reality it represented. Now, according to the reformers, a rite such as the Eucharist was ‘only’ a symbol – something essentially separate. Like any premodern rite, the Mass had reenacted Christ’s sacrificial death, which because it was mythical was timeless, and made it a present reality. For the reformers, it was simply a memorial of a bygone event. There was a new emphasis on scripture, but the modern invention of printing and the new widespread literacy altered people’s perception of the sacred text. Silent, solitary reading replaced liturgical recitation. People could now know the Bible in greater detail and form their own opinions, but now that it was no longer read in a ritual context, it was easy to approach it in a secular manner for factual information, like any other modern text.

  Like most things in life, many of the modern discoveries were also problematic. The new astronomy opened up an enthralling view of the cosmos. Nicolas Copernicus (1473–1543) saw his scientific investigations as a religious activity that filled him with awe. But his findings were disturbing. Myth had made human beings believe that they were bound up with the essence of the universe, yet now it appeared that they had only a peripheral place on an undistinguished planet revolving around a minor star. They could no longer trust their own perceptions, because the earth that seemed static was actually in rapid motion. They were increasingly encouraged to have their own ideas, but they were more and more in thrall to modern ‘experts’ who alone could decipher the nature of things.

  In Britain, Francis Bacon (1561–1626) made a declaration of independence, to emancipate science from the shackles of mythology. In the Advancement of Learning (1605), he proclaimed a new and glorious era. Science would put an end to human misery and save the world. Nothing must impede this development. All the myths of religion should be subjected to stringent criticism and if they contradicted the proven facts they must be cast aside. Reason alone gave access to this truth. The first scientist wholly to absorb this empirical ethos was probably Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who synthesised the findings of his predecessors by a rigorous use of the evolving scientific disciplines of experiment and deduction. He believed that he was bringing his fellow human beings unprecedented and certain information about the world, that the cosmic system he had discovered coincided completely with the facts, and that it proved the existence of God, the great ‘Mechanick’ who had brought the intricate machine of the universe into being.

  But this total immersion in logos made it impossible for Newton to appreciate the more intuitive forms of perception. For him, mythology and mysticism were primitive modes of thought. He felt that he had a mission to purge Christianity of such doctrines as the Trinity, which defied the laws of logic. He was quite unable to see that this doctrine had been devised by the Greek theologians of the fourth century precisely as a myth, similar to that of the Jewish Kabbalists. As Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa (335–395), had explained, Father, Son and Spirit were not objective, ontological facts but simply ‘terms that we use’ to express the way in which the ‘unnameable and unspeakable’ divine nature adapts itself to the limitations of our human minds.100 You could not prove the existence of the Trinity by rational means. It was no more demonstrable than the elusive meaning of music or poetry. But Newton could only approach the Trinity rationally. If something could not be explained logically, it was false. ‘’Tis the temper of the hot and superstitious part of mankind in matters of religion,’ he wrote irritably, ‘ever to be fond of mysteries & for that reason to like best what they understand least.’101 Today’s cosmologists no longer believe in Newton’s rational god, but many Western people share his preference for reason and his uneasiness with myth, even in religious matters. Like Newton, they think that God should be an objective, demonstrable reality. Hence a significant number of Western Christians have problems with the Trinity. Like Newton, they fail to understand that the Trinitarian myth was designed to remind Christians that they should not even attempt to think of the divine in terms of a simple personality.102

  Scientific logos and myth were becoming incompatible. Hitherto science had been conducted within a comprehensive mythology that explained its significance. The French mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–62), a deeply religious man, was filled with horror when he contemplated the ‘eternal silence’ of the infinite universe opened up by modern science.

  When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair.103

  This type of alienation has also been part of the modern experience.

  The cloud seemed to lift during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. John Locke (1632–1704) realised that it was impossible to prove the existence of the sacred, but he had no doubt that God existed and that humanity had entered a more positive era. The German and French Enlightenment philosophers saw the old mystical and mythical religions as outmoded. So did the British theologians John Toland (1670–1722) and Matthew Tindal (1655–1733). Logos alone could lead us to truth, and Christianity must get rid of the mysterious and the mythical. The old myths were beginning to be interpreted as though they were logoi, an entirely new development which was doomed to disappoint, because these stories were not and never had been factual.

  Paradoxically, however, the Age of Reason witnessed an irruption of irrationality. The great Witch Craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which raged through many of the Catholic and Protestant countries of Europe, showed that scientific rationalism could not always hold the darker forces of the mind at bay. The Witch Craze was a collective demonic fantasy that led to the execution and torture of thousands of men and women. People believed that witches had sex with devils, and flew through the air to attend satanic orgies. Without a powerful mythology to explain people’s unconscious fears, they tried to rationalise those fears into ‘fact’. Fearful and destructive un-reason has always been part of the human experience, and it still is. It emerged very strongly in the new Christian movements that attempted to translate the ideals of the Enlightenment into a religious form. Quakers were so-called because they used to tremble, howl and yell during their meetings. The Puritans, many of whom were succ
essful capitalists and good scientists, also had a tumultuous spirituality and traumatic conversion experiences, which many were ill equipped to sustain. A significant number fell into depressive states, and some even committed suicide.104 The same syndrome can be seen in the First Great Awakening in New England (1734–40). Everybody was attempting to be a mystic and achieve alternative psychic states. But the higher states of mysticism were not for everybody. It required special talent, temperament and one-to-one training. A group experience of untaught, unskilled individuals could lead to mass hysteria and even mental illness.

  By the nineteenth century, people in Europe were beginning to think that religion was actually harmful. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) argued that it alienated people from their humanity, and Karl Marx (1818–83) saw religion as the symptom of a sick society. And indeed the mythological religion of the period could create an unhealthy conflict. This was the scientific age, and people wanted to believe that their traditions were in line with the new era, but this was impossible if you thought that these myths should be understood literally. Hence the furore occasioned by The Origin of Species (1858), published by Charles Darwin (1809–82). The book was not intended as an attack on religion, but was a sober exploration of a scientific hypothesis. But because by this time people were reading the cosmogonies of Genesis as though they were factual, many Christians felt – and still feel – that the whole edifice of faith was in jeopardy. Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion.

  The new Higher Criticism, which applied the modern scientific methodology to the Bible itself, showed that it was impossible to read the Bible literally. Some of its claims were demonstrably untrue. The Pentateuch had not been written by Moses, but much later and by a number of different authors; King David had not composed the Psalms; and most of the miracle stories were literary tropes. The biblical narratives were ‘myths’ and, in popular parlance, that meant that they were not true. The Higher Criticism is still a bugbear of Protestant Fundamentalists, who claim that every word of the Bible is literally, scientifically and historically true – an untenable position that leads to denial and defensive polemic.

  By the end of the nineteenth century, the severance of logos and mythos seemed complete. Crusaders such as Thomas H. Huxley (1825–95) believed that they had a fight on their hands. People must choose between mythology and rational science, and there could be no compromise. Reason alone was truthful and the myths of religion truthless. But truth had been narrowed down to what was ‘demonstrated and demonstrable’,105 which, religion aside, would exclude the truths told by art or music. By treating myth as though it were rational, modern scientists, critics and philosophers had made it incredible. In 1882, Freidrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) proclaimed that God was dead. In a sense, he was right. Without myth, cult, ritual and ethical living, the sense of the sacred dies. By making ‘God’ a wholly notional truth, reached by the critical intellect alone, modern men and women had killed it for themselves. The Madman in Nietzsche’s parable in The Gay Science believed that God’s death had torn humanity from its roots. ‘Is there still an above or below?’ he asked. ‘Do we not stray, as though through an infinite nothingness?’106

  Mythical thinking and practice had helped people to face the prospect of extinction and nothingness, and to come through it with a degree of acceptance. Without this discipline, it has been difficult for many to avoid despair. The twentieth century presented us with one nihilistic icon after another, and many of the extravagant hopes of modernity and the Enlightenment were shown to be false. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 showed the frailty of technology; the First World War revealed that science, our friend, could also be applied with lethal effect to weaponry; Auschwitz, the Gulag and Bosnia spelled out what could happen when all sense of sacredness is lost. We learned that a rational education did not redeem humanity from barbarism, and that a concentration camp could exist in the same vicinity as a great university. The explosion of the first atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki laid bare the germ of nihilistic self-destruction at the heart of modern culture; and the attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 showed that the benefits of modernity – technology, ease of travel and global communications – could be made instruments of terror.

  Logos has in many ways transformed our lives for the better, but this has not been an unmitigated triumph. Our demythologised world is very comfortable for many of us who are fortunate enough to live in first-world countries, but it is not the earthly paradise predicted by Bacon and Locke. When we contemplate the dark epiphanies of the twentieth century, we see that modern anxiety is not simply the result of self-indulgent neurosis. We are facing something unprecedented. Other societies saw death as a transition to other modes of being. They did not nurture simplistic and vulgar ideas of an afterlife, but devised rites and myths that helped people to face the unspeakable. In no other culture would anybody settle down in the middle of a rite of passage or an initiation, with the horror unresolved. But this is what we have to do in the absence of a viable mythology. There is a moving and even heroic asceticism in the current rejection of myth. But purely linear, logical and historical modes of thought have debarred many of us from therapies and devices that have enabled men and women to draw on the full resources of their humanity in order to live with the unacceptable.

  We may be more sophisticated in material ways, but we have not advanced spiritually beyond the Axial Age: because of our suppression of mythos we may even have regressed. We still long to ‘get beyond’ our immediate circumstances, and to enter a ‘full time’, a more intense, fulfilling existence. We try to enter this dimension by means of art, rock music, drugs or by entering the larger-than-life perspective of film. We still seek heroes. Elvis Presley and Princess Diana were both made into instant mythical beings, even objects of religious cult. But there is something unbalanced about this adulation. The myth of the hero was not intended to provide us with icons to admire, but was designed to tap into the vein of heroism within ourselves. Myth must lead to imitation or participation, not passive contemplation. We no longer know how to manage our mythical lives in a way that is spiritually challenging and transformative.

  We must disabuse ourselves of the nineteenth-century fallacy that myth is false or that it represents an inferior mode of thought. We cannot completely recreate ourselves, cancel out the rational bias of our education, and return to a pre-modern sensibility. But we can acquire a more educated attitude to mythology. We are myth-making creatures and, during the twentieth century, we saw some very destructive modern myths, which have ended in massacre and genocide. These myths have failed because they do not meet the criteria of the Axial Age. They have not been infused with the spirit of compassion, respect for the sacredness of all life, or with what Confucius called ‘leaning’. These destructive mythologies have been narrowly racial, ethnic, denominational and egotistic, an attempt to exalt the self by demonising the other. Any such myth has failed modernity, which has created a global village in which all human beings now find themselves in the same predicament. We cannot counter these bad myths with reason alone, because undiluted logos cannot deal with such deep-rooted, unexorcised fears, desires and neuroses. That is the role of an ethically and spiritually informed mythology.

  We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realise the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a ‘resource’. This is crucial, because unless
there is some kind of spiritual revolution that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius, we will not save our planet.

  In 1922, T. S. Eliot depicted the spiritual disintegration of Western culture in his landmark poem The Waste Land. In the myth of the Holy Grail, the wasteland is a place where people live inauthentic lives, blindly following the norms of their society without the conviction that comes from deeper understanding. How was it possible to put down creative roots in the ‘stony rubbish’ of modernity where people had lost touch with the mythical underpinning of their culture? Instead of understanding the inner coherence of their tradition, they know ‘only a heap of broken images’. By means of poignant, lapidary allusions to the mythology of the past – to European, Sanskrit, Buddhist, biblical, Greek and Roman myths – Eliot laid bare the sterility of contemporary life: its alienation, ennui, nihilism, superstition, egotism and despair. As he confronts the imminent demise of Western civilisation, his narrator concludes: ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’ The broken insights of the past that he has gathered together in his poem can save us. When we have pieced them together and recognised their common core, we can reclaim the wasteland in which we live.

  Eliot’s poem was prophetic. It has been writers and artists, rather than religious leaders, who have stepped into the vacuum and attempted to reacquaint us with the mythological wisdom of the past. In their attempt to find an antidote to the sterility and heartless cruelty of some aspects of modernity, painters, for example, have turned to mythological themes. On 26 April 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, Nazi planes, under the orders of General Franco, attacked the Basque capital of Guernica on its market-day, killing 1654 of its 7000 inhabitants. A few months later, Pablo Picasso exhibited Guernica at the International Exhibition in Paris. This modern, secular crucifixion shocked his contemporaries, and yet, like The Waste Land, it was a prophetic statement, and also a rallying cry against the inhumanity of our brave new world.