It’s all the rage these days. Misunderstanding myth, that is. In the Was Jesus Wrong post at Chrisendom, the comment string contained a lot of misunderstanding of myth. Many believe that if the creation story in Genesis is wrong, then Christianity falls apart. And by wrong, they mean factually, scientifically wrong. If there was not a single, original man and woman (aka Adam and Eve) created some 6000 years ago — and most scientific evidence says there wasn’t — then how can Christianity be taken seriously? My answer is that these people totally misunderstand myth.
Here are some thoughts from Richard Heinberg’s Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age …
In most conversation, the word myth is interchangeable with lie. We speak of exposing myths, dispelling them, and laying them to rest. This equation of myth with fiction is not particularly new; indeed, it can be traced back at least as far as the sixth century B.C., when the earliest Greek philosophers undertook a critical evaluation of Homeric mythology.
Indeed, the early Greeks faced a dilemma not unlike our own. “[T]heir culture was suffused with rituals and stories of great antiquity, but the meaning behind those traditions had largely evaporated. How to make sens of them?” Sound familiar? It sounds like modern Christianity to me. Ritual and stories that hold no pertinent meaning for modern man and are clung to in desperation to retain the “true meaning” (whatever that means). Indeed, Heinberg says
Mythology is inseparable from religion, and so Western civilization’s changing attitudes toward the mysterious and universal sense of the sacred have also deeply affected both popular and scholarly ideas about the nature of myth.
There has been a long history of condescending attitudes towards myth and tribal peoples which culminated in the idea that all religion must be approached with a skeptical attitude and that trying to understand the philosophical meaning of a culture’s myths was useless. But “they had ignored or eliminated the vivifying principle in the object of their study—a principle that would be defined by the next generation of mythologists as the sense of the sacred.”
Recently, a new appreciation of myth has developed which sees them as “ways of conveying universal truths” and are, therefore, “profoundly meaningful.” The work of Carl Jung is especially relevant in this context. “For Jung, the characters and actions of myth are simply expressions of universal archetypes.”
The French philosopher René Guénon considered all traditions as “paths for the practical realization of innate spiritual principles in the lives of human beings” and warned that excessive materialism threatens to “destroy the West if it does not recover itself in time and if it does not consider seriously a ‘return to the source.’” Mircea Eliade took this thought even farther and “emphasized the primacy of the experience of the sacred in all traditions.” Jung, Guénon, Eliade and others have reacquainted us with the ancient idea that “every event was meaningful” and that “even the most mundane activities had an overarching significance and were performed … as part of a cosmic drama.”
Sacred is, I think, also misunderstood today. “To say that a thing or an act is sacred is to imply that it has relevance in a universal plane of values and ideals, and that it is therefore a point of contact between two worlds.” The ancients considered matter itself to be sacred and, to them, the sacred dimension was experienced reality and not just speculation.
As long as researchers denied its importance and based their explanations entirely in earthly terms, we were effectively denied the possibility of fully understanding or benefiting from myth. Worse, by discounting the sense of the sacred we disassociated ourselves from a universal, timeless dimension of significance whose point of access lies deep within the human psyche, where the individual and the collective, the ancient and the modern, merge indistinguishably.
So, back to myth … Jung and Joseph Campbell, in particular, tended to see myth “as allegories for inner processes of spiritual transformation—that is, as stories that are symbolically but never factually ‘true.’” Myths, then, serve to “connect two realities—the visible and the invisible, Earth and Heaven.” Others, such as Immanuel Velikovsky, argue that “myths may contain more than metaphorical content” and originated as descriptions of factual events but have been metamorphosed into mythical events and heroes.
In any case, the great problem with which we must deal is the “worldwide similarity of mythic themes.”
As Campbell and Eliade have shown, there is really only one story, translated in the traditions and circumstances of myriad peoples. It is the myth of a lost idyllic Time of Beginnings, and of a hero’s journey to restore the world to its pristine condition of paradisal splendor.”
How could this have happened? Heinberg says there are only two possibilities. Either the fundamental themes were distributed among the world’s peoples before they had migrated to their present location or “similar motifs … occurred independently to people already living far apart.”
Jung, I think, would agree with the latter and reason that it was due to the archetypal content of the myths which is, essentially, hardwired in our brains because of our humanity. And this is one of the primary reasons myth should be important to us, modern, people. If basically all cultures have the myth of a Paradise, or “Garden of Eden,” then it is part of our humanity and denying or excluding this part of ourselves—our human heritage—is dangerous. We lose touch with an important aspect that unites the physical with the spiritual.
So, whether or not Adam and Eve existed is not the correct question. The correct question is: what do we do with the myth? How do we integrate it—incorporate it—into our lives today? Those who say the Garden of Eden is useless child’s play and those who say it is only a factual, historical place are both missing the point and totally misunderstanding the purpose and power of myth. It is an essential and undeniable part of our psyche and so requires that it be recognized for what it is—a way to understand and convey universal truths.
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