Parallel Myths

by J. F. Bierlein

  George Santayana (1863—1952)

  Spanish-born American philosopher.

  The primitive habit of thought survives in mythology, which is an observation of things encumbered with all they suggest to a dramatic fancy. It is neither conscious poetry nor valid science, but the common root and raw material of both.

  Alan Watts (1915-1973)

  Twentieth-century British writer and expositor of Zen Buddhism to the West.

  Every positive statement about ultimate things must be made in the suggestive form of myth, of poetry. For in this realm the direct and indicative form of speech can only say “Neti, neti” (Sanskrit for “No, no”), since what can be described and categorized must always belong to the conventional realm.

  Myth is a symbolic story which demonstrates the inner meaning of the universe and of human life.

  Thomas Mann (1875-1955)

  German novelist, winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature.

  It makes clear that the typical is actually the mythical, and that one may as well say “lived myth” as “lived life”…. The mythical interest is as native to psychoanalysis as the psychological interest is to all creative writing. Its penetration into the childhood of the individual soul is at the same time a penetration into the childhood of mankind, into the primitive and mythical…. For myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious…. What is gained is an insight into the higher truth contained in the actual; a smiling knowledge of the eternal, the ever-being and authentic; a knowledge of the schema in which and according to which the supposed individual lives, unaware, in his naive belief in himself as unique in space and time, of the extent to which his life is but formula and repetition and his path marked out for him by those who trod it before him.

  Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829)

  German romanticist critic and philosopher.

  Mythology is such a poem of nature. In its fabric the supreme values are actually shaped by art; all is connection and transformation, related and translated, and this relation and translation constitutes its peculiar procedure, its inner life, its method.

  F. Max Müller (1823-1900)

  German-born British linguist, scholar of myth, and translator of the Hindu scriptures.

  Mythology is inevitable, it is natural, it is an inherent necessity of language, if we recognize in language the outer form and manifestation of thought; it is in fact the dark shadow that language throws upon thought, and which can never disappear until language becomes entirely commensurate with thought, which it never will. Mythology, no doubt, breaks out more fiercely during the early periods of the history of human thought, but it never disappears altogether. Depend upon it, there is mythology now as there was in the time of Homer, only we do not perceive it, and because we ourselves live in the very shadow of it, and because we all shrink from the full meridian light of truth … Mythology, in the highest sense, is the power exercised by language on thought in every possible sphere of mental activity.

  Bruno Bettelheim (1903-1990)

  German-born American psychiatrist and interpreter of fairy tales.

  Plato—who may have understood better what forms the mind of men than do some of our contemporaries who want their children exposed only to “real” people and everyday events—knew what intellectual experiences make for true humanity. He suggested that the future citizens of his ideal republic begin their literary education with the telling of myths, rather than with mere facts or so-called rational teachings. Even Aristotle, master of pure reason, said: “The friend of wisdom is also a friend of myth.”

  Modern thinkers who have studied myths and fairy tales from a philosophical or psychological viewpoint arrive at the same conclusion, regardless of their original persuasion. Mircea Eliade, for one, describes the stories as models for human behavior [that] by that very fact give meaning and value to life.

  Robert Graves (1895-1985)

  British poet, author, and scholar of myth with Raphael Patai, Israeli scholar.

  Myths are dramatic stories that form a sacred charter either authorizing the continuance of ancient institutions, customs, rites and beliefs in the area where they are current, or approving alterations.

  Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942)

  Polish-born British anthropologist.

  I maintain that there exists a special class of stories, regarded as sacred, embodied in rituals, morals, and social organization, and which form an integral and active part of primitive culture. These stories live not by idle interest, not as fictitious or even as true narrative, but are to the natives a statement of a primeval, greater and more relevant reality, by which the present life, fates, and activities of mankind are determined, the knowledge of which supplies man with the motive for ritual and moral actions, as well as indications of how to perform them.

  Studied alive, myth … is not symbolic, but a direct expression of the subject matter; it is not an explanation in satisfaction of a scientific interest, but a narrative resurrection of primeval reality, told in satisfaction of deep religious wants, moral cravings, social submissions, assertions, even practical requirements. Myth fulfills in primitive culture an indispensable function: it expresses, enhances and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality; it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man. Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard worked active force; it is not an intellectual explanation or artistic imagery, but a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom.

  Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–)

  French anthropologist and founder of Structuralism.

  We are able, through scientific thinking, to achieve mastery over nature … myth is unsuccessful in giving man more material power over the environment. However, it gives man, very importantly, the illusion that he can understand the universe and that he does understand the universe.

  Joseph Campbell (1904-1987)

  American scholar of myth.

  Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, the myths of man have flourished, and have been the living inspiration of whatever else appeared out of the human body and mind. It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social form of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries of science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

  Hans Küng (1928-)

  Contemporary Roman Catholic theologian.

  … myth, legend, images and symbols may not be criticized because they are myths, legends, images and symbols…. Thus, even when the mythical element is simply eliminated [from Christianity]—as becomes evident in the theology of the Enlightenment and liberalism—it is at the expense of the Christian message, which is thrown out together with the myth.

  Carlos Fuentes (1928-)

  Contemporary Mexican author and essayist.

  Myth is a past with a future, exercising itself in the present.

  Louis-Auguste Sabatier (1839-1901)

  French Protestant theologian.

  Creer un mythe, c’est a dire entrevoit derriére la réalité sensible une realité supérieure, est le signe le plus manifeste de la grandeur de Väme humaine et la preuve de sa faculté de croissance et de developpement infinis.

  To create a myth, that is to say, to venture behind the reality of the sense to find a superior reality, is the most manifest sign of the greatness of the human soul and the proof of its capacity for infinite growth and development.

  Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976)

  German theologian and “Form Critic” of the Bible.

  The real point of myth is not to give an objective world picture; what is expressed in it, rather, is how we human beings understand ourselves in our world. Thus
, myth does not want to be interpreted in cosmological terms but in anthropological terms—or, better, in existentialist* terms. Myth talks about the power or the powers that we think we experience as the ground and limit of our world and of our own action and passion. It talks about these powers in such a way, to be sure, as to bring them within the circle of the familiar world, its things and forces, and within the circle of human life, its affections, motives and possibilities. This is the case, say, when it talks about a world egg or a world tree in order to portray the ground and source of the world in a graphic way or when it talks about the wars of the gods from which the arrangements and circumstances of the familiar world have all arisen. Myth talks about the unworldly as worldly, the gods as human.

  What is expressed in myth is the faith that the familiar and disposable world in which we live does not have its ground and aim in itself but that its ground and limit lie beyond all that is familiar and disposable and that this is all constantly threatened and controlled by the uncanny powers that are its ground and limit. In unity with this myth also gives expression to the knowledge that we are not lords of ourselves, that we are not only dependent within the familiar world but that we are especially dependent on the powers that hold sway beyond all that is familiar, and that it is precisely in dependence on them that we can become free from familiar powers.

  … Myth talks about gods as human beings, and about their actions as human actions, with the difference that the gods are represented as endowed with superhuman power and their action as unpredictable and able to break through the natural run of things. Myth thus makes the gods (or God) into human beings with superior power, and it does this even when it speaks of God’s omnipotence and omniscience, because it does not distinguish these qualitatively from human power and knowledge but only quantitatively.

  In short, myth objectifies the transcendent into the immanent, and thus also into the disposable, as becomes evident when cult* more and more becomes action calculated to influence the deity by averting its wrath and winning its favor.

  Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

  American Protestant theologian.

  A vision of the whole is possible only if it is assumed that human history has meaning; and modern empiricism is afraid of that assumption. Meaning can be attributed to history only by a mythology.

  —Reflections on the End of an Era

  Myth alone is capable of picturing the world as a realm of coherence and meaning without defying the facts of incoherence. Its world is coherent because all facts in it are related to some central source of meaning; but it is not rationally coherent because the myth is not under the abortive necessity of relating all things to each other in terms of immediate rational unity.

  —An Interpretation of Chnstian Ethics

  The essential truth in a great religious myth cannot be gauged by the immediate occasion which prompted it; nor apprehended in its more obvious intent. The story of the Tower of Babel may have been prompted by the fact that an unfinished temple of Marduk in Babylon excited the imagination of the surrounding desert people, who beheld its arrested majesty, to speculate on the reason for its unfinished state. Its immediate purpose may have been to give a mythical account of the origin of the world’s multiplicity of languages and cultures. Neither its doubtful origin nor the fantastic character of its purported history will obscure its essential message to those who are wise enough to discern the permanently valid insights in primitive imagination.

  —Beyond Tragedy

  Paul Tillich (1886-1965)

  German-born American Protestant theologian.

  Mythological language seems to be equally old, combining the technical grasp of objects with the religious experience of a quality of the encountered that has highest significance even for daily life, but transcends it in such a way that it demands another language, that of the religious symbols and their combination, the myth. Religious language is symbolic-mythological, even when it interprets facts and events which belong to the realm of the ordinary technical encounter with reality. The contemporary confusion of these two kinds of language is the cause of one of the most serious inhibitions for the understanding of religion, as it was in the prescientific period for the understanding of the ordinarily encountered reality, the object of technical use.

  The language of myth, as well as the language of the ordinary technical encounter with reality, can be translated into other kinds of language, the poetic and the scientific. Like religious language, poetic language lives in symbols, but poetic symbols express another quality of man’s encounter with reality than religious symbols.

  * This refers to the philosophy of the meaning of human existence. In this context, one might also say “in terms of human feeling and experience.”

  * The word cult is used here to mean a system of practice or worship. This is not the same, necessarily, as the popular use of the word.

  13. Parallel Myths and Ways of Interpreting Them

  THE DISCOVERY OF PARALLEL MYTHS

  The great historical encounters between Europeans and the various peoples of Africa, Asia, and the Americas had many wide-reaching consequences. Perhaps the most interesting—and, to the early explorers, astounding—result was the recognition that cultures vastly separated from them by time and geography had religious practices and myths strikingly similar to their own.

  When the Spaniards first arrived in the New World, for example, they were amazed by the many parallels that existed between the indigenous religions and Roman Catholicism. In comparing the faith of Spain with that of the Aztecs of Mexico, the nineteenth-century American historian William Prescott wrote in his book The Conquest of Mexico:

  A more extraordinary coincidence may be traced with Christian rites, in the ceremony of naming their children. The lips and bosom of the infant was [sic] sprinkled with water and “The Lord was implored to permit the holy drops to wash away the sin that was given to it before the foundations of the world; so that the child might be born anew.” We are reminded of Christian morals in more than one of their prayers, in which they used regular forms. “Wilt thou blot us out 0 Lord forever? Is this punishment intended not for our reformation but for our destruction?” Again, “Impart to us, out of thy great mercy, thy gifts which we are not worthy to receive through our own merits.”

  … The secrets of the confessional were held inviolate, and penances were imposed of much the same kind as those enjoined in the Roman Catholic Church.

  The conquistadores found many parallels to Catholicism among the people of the Inca empire of Peru and Bolivia. This account is from Gerald L. Berry’s Religions of the World:

  Rites of baptism and confession were practiced. Infant sacrifice was replaced by a ritual in which blood was drawn but the life spared (a practice which should be compared to that of circumcision of males). There is a trace in the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Old Testament of the Inca custom of offering a son for the sins of the father. The Incas had a Holy Communion ritual, using a sacred bread called the “sancu” sprinkled with the blood of a sacrificial sheep [Author’s note: the “sheep” was probably a llama].

  On the Great Plains of North America, nineteenth-century American artist and traveler George Catlin lived among a number of different tribes, and he found that the rituals of these tribes resembled those of the Jews as given in the Old Testament. The following is from Catlin’s Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians:

  I am deduced to believe thus from the very many customs which I have witnessed amongst them, that appear to be decidedly Jewish; and many of them so peculiarly so, that it would not be impossible, or at all events, exceedingly improbable that two people in a state of nature should have hit upon them, and practiced them exactly alike.

  … The first and most striking fact amongst the North American Indians that refers us to the Jews, is that of worshipping in all parts, the Great Spirit, or Jehovah, as the Hebrews were ordered to do by divine precept. Instea
d of a plurality of gods, as ancient pagans and heathens did—and their idols of their own formation. The North American Indians are nowheres idolaters—they appeal at once to the Great Spirit, or Jehovah, and know of no mediator, either personal or symbolical.

  The Indian tribes are everywhere divided into bands, with chiefs, symbols, badges, etc., and many of their modes of worship I have found exceedingly like those of the Mosaic institution. The Jews had their sanctum sanctorum [the “holy of holies”], and so it may be said that the Indians have, in their council or medicine houses, which are always held as sacred places. Amongst the Indians as amongst the ancient Hebrews, the women are not allowed to worship with the men—and in all cases also, they eat separately.

  In their bathing and ablutions, at all seasons of the year, as a part of their religious observances—having separate places for the men and women to perform these immersions, they resemble again [the Jews]. And the custom amongst the women, of absenting themselves during the lunar influences [menstruation] is exactly consonant to Mosaic law…. After this season of separation, purification in running water, and anointing, precisely in accordance with the Jewish command, is requisite before she can enter the family lodge. Such is one of the extraordinary observances amongst these people in their wild state….