Modern Myth

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Modern Myth

• M. Roser i Puig

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Definitions

• From http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth
• In the academic fields of mythology, mythography,
  or folkloristics, a myth (mythos) is a sacred
  story concerning the origins of the world or how
  the world and the creatures in it came to be in
  their present form.
• The active beings in myths are generally gods and
  heroes.
• Myths often are said to take place before
  recorded history begins.
• In saying that a myth is a sacred narrative, what
  is meant is that a myth is believed to be true by
  people who attach religious or spiritual
  significance to it.
• A myth in popular use is something that is widely
  thought to be false. This usage, which is often
  pejorative, arose from labeling the religious
  myths and beliefs of other cultures as being
  incorrect, but it has spread to cover
  non-religious beliefs as well.

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Myths interpreted From http//www.livingmyths.com
/What.htm

• Mythology has been used by poets, playwrights and
  artists for centuries. The nineteenth century,
  however, saw the rise of scientific rationalism,
  and social realism in the arts. Myths were in
  danger of being demoted to the status of
  antiquated tales about non-existent gods.
• With the rise of psychology, myths found a new
  status. Freud saw them as expressing repressed
  impulses commonly found in the personal
  unconscious. For example the myth of Oedipus
  expressed a boys socially unacceptable desire to
  kill his father and sleep with his mother.

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Myths interpreted (Cont.)

• Claude Levi-Strauss, a structuralist
  anthropologist, saw myths as stemming from a
  human need to make sense of the world and to
  resolve cultural dilemmas. These dilemmas are
  embodied in the structure of myths, which is made
  up of opposites, such as good-bad, night-day. For
  Levi-Strauss, myths are a kind of universal
  language. While the events of myths vary, the
  basic structures, like grammar, are similar in
  myths worldwide - because people are similar.
• On another level of 'making sense', myths explain
  the world, making it manageable. For example, the
  myths worldwide in which human beings are
  fashioned from clay by a divine potter, such as
  the Egyptian Ptah, fulfil our need to know how
  and why we came to be here. Other widespread
  myths explain death and the seasons.

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Myths as Magic

• Another view focuses on myth as magic. Stories of
  hero gods descending into the Underworld in the
  west, and emerging in the east, reflect the
  setting and rising of the sun. Myths in which an
  ageing goddess is reborn as a youthful virgin
  reflect the return of spring after winter.
• This kind of myth must have reassured early man.
  More important, it is likely that the repeated
  telling of stories symbolizing the rising of the
  sun, the return of spring, or the ripening of
  crops was a magical way of making these things
  happen.

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Myths Worldwide

• Many commentators have noted the similarities
  between myths in different cultures. One theory
  is that this can be explained by migration, trade
  contact, and the exchange of myths between
  conquerors and conquered. There is certainly some
  truth in this, for example in the interweaving of
  Aztec and Mayan myths. However, this can hardly
  explain similarities such as the appearance of
  Trickster gods the infant Hermes stealing
  Apollos cattle, the Norse Loki cutting off the
  golden tresses of Thors wife Sif, or a similarly
  mischievous deity of the North American Winnebago
  Indians.

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Jung's Archetypes

• The exploration of myths found a new dimension in
  the work of Carl Jung. Whereas Freud saw the
  unconscious as being entirely personal, the
  product of a lifetimes repressed sexual urges,
  Jung identified a layer of consciousness below
  this the collective unconscious. This is a vast
  psychic pool of energized symbols shared by
  humanity as a whole. It is filled with
  archetypes symbolic figures, such as the
  Trickster mentioned above, the Mother, and the
  Father.
• These figures also represent the animus and
  anima the undeveloped and largely unacknowledged
  opposite-sex parts of, respectively, the female
  and male psyche. Another important archetype is
  the Shadow, which embodies all that we deny in
  ourselves and project onto people we dislike.
  These archetypes form the dramatis personae of
  myth. Thus myths offer a way for cultures to
  explore their collective impulses, and to express
  them creatively, rather than harmfully.

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Myths, Dreams and the Individual

• Jung recognized dreams as doorways between an
  individual and the collective unconscious. Many
  dreams, he said, expressed archetypes that might
  otherwise be projected onto the waking world as
  irrational fears, delusions or hatreds. Joseph
  Campbell, who has developed this idea, writes
• Here we can begin to see a way of working with
  myths on a personal level, for our own
  development.
• Campbell and other writers have also pointed out
  that myths are still emerging and developing in
  the present day. On the social level we see this
  in the recurrence of mythical archetypes in
  popular culture, for example in the Star Wars
  films.

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J.A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms (19??)

• In general a Myth is a story which is not true
  and which involves (as a rule) supernatural
  beings or at any rate supra-human beings.
• Myth is always concerned with creation. Myth
  explains how something came to exist.
• Myth embodies feeling and concept.
• Many myths or quasi-myths are primitive
  explanations of the natural order and cosmic
  forces.
• Classical writers had ready-made mythologies.
• Others have not been so fortunate and others have
  felt a great need to invent or somehow contrive a
  mythology which shall be the vehicle of their
  beliefs.

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Myth Help or Hindrance?
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Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1987)

• In myth the signifier is already formed by the
  signs of the language... Myth has in fact a
  double function it points out and it notifies,
  it makes us understand something and it imposes
  it on us.
• Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its
  function is to talk about them simply, it
  purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives
  them a natural and eternal justification, it
  gives them a clarity which is not that of an
  explanation but that of a statement of fact.
• In passing from history to nature, myth acts
  economically it abolishes the complexity of
  human acts, it gives them the simplicity of
  essences, it does away with all dialectics, with
  any going back beyond what is immediately
  visible, it organizes a world which is without
  contradictions... Things appear to mean something
  by themselves...

12
Milton Scarborough, Myth and Modernity
Postcritical Reflections (Albany NY SUNY Press,
1994)

• "...theories and criteria of truth are already
  and necessarily myth-dependent and are,
  therefore, both ill-suited and inappropriate as
  criteria for appraising myth. Rather than
  theories or criteria judging myth, myths help
  generate and lend credibility to theories and
  criteria." (109)
• "The ultimate assessment of myth must be of a
  kind suited to the nature of myth as giving
  expression to apprehensions of the life-world and
  as functioning to provide an orientation for
  living in that world. Within those strictures
  myth is neither true nor false in a theoretical
  sense but viable or not viable for the tasks
  (both theoretical and otherwise) which confront
  us. This viability is not determined in
  intellectual terms but in the very process of
  living, by whether or not one is energized,
  whether or not problems are being solved, whether
  or not life is integrated at a variety of levels,
  whether or not it is endowed with a significance
  that pulls one toward the future in hope." (110)

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The negative side of Myth

• http//www.hse.gov.uk/myth/index.htm
• http//www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/
  myths/index.html
• Myth and Celebrities

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Literary Uses of Myth

• Characters and Archetypes
• Don Quixote
• Don Juan
• In Poetry
• Fantastic Worlds
• As Political Tool
• Gender specific?

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Questions

• Have we lost the ability to see, value and use
  Myth?
• Is Myth incompatible with modern life?
• Does Myth still work? Where? How?
• Should Myth disappear?