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Myth and Mythology
| Article
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12531 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1987 |
2,891 Words |
| Author
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Charles H. Long
Charles H. Long is the William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of
History of Religions at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill and professor of religion at Duke University. He
was a founding editor with Joseph Kitagawa and Mircea Eliade
of the Journal History of Religions. Among his numerous
publications are Alpha, The Myths of Creation and
Significations: Images and Interpretation of Religion. |
The interpretation and critique of myth constitutes one of the perennial concerns of Western culture. From the heritage of fifth-century Greece we have the distinction between mythos and logos and from the biblical tradition, the distinction between mythos and history. It thus appears that dominant rational modes of interpretation of human reality in the Western tradition have always been defined in tension, if not in opposition, to the reality portrayed by myth.
What is myth, or mythology, and why has it played such an ambivalent role in the history our culture? Mythology has two interrelated meanings. In one meaning, the word refers to the actual body of myths of a particular culture or to the total body of myths of all the cultures of the world. In the other meaning, the word refers to the study, interpretation, and understanding of these stories.
What is Myth?
Myths are narratives, stories about fantastic and extraordinary beings and of happenings that took place in a time and space that is radically different from out own. Australian aborigines call this mythic time and space Alcheringa, the Dreaming Time. Mircea Eliade refers to this locus of the myth as a primordial time and space, in illo tempore. The quality of distanctiation is an essential element in the structure of the myth. Because the situational locus of the myth is removed from the ordinary forms of culture that we experience, the norms, rules, and laws of our reality no longer apply. Fantastic and fabulous beings are possible within the realm of myth. For this reason, classical Greek philosophy undertook a critical assessment of myth and set forth the logos as a statement of the forms of order that are common to all human experience. The logos as an ordering principle enables one to understand in a reliable manner the norms, rules, and laws of nature and community; all forms of rationality in Western culture are derived from this logocentric principle.
The notion of history offers another understanding of commonality of human beings and events. History as a description of a temporal order always has reference to that which is publicly accessible. In both cases, logos and history, the stress on the observable and the commonplace clashes with the metarational experience. From the temporal standpoint of history, myth is untrue and does not refer to any aspect of reality.
A new and intense concern for the meaning of myth occurred in the modern post-Enlightenment
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