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Myth, Religion, and the Real World
| Article
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12532 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1987 |
4,335 Words |
| Author
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Brian K. Smith
Brian K. Smith is professor in the departments of religious
studies and history at the University of California,
Riverside. His article "Memory and India's Identity Crisis"
appeared in the May 1994 issue of The World & I. |
Words, like the people who use them, are not value-free. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote a century ago, with his usual forcefulness, "This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things are called is incomparably more important that what they are."
What do we mean when we call a story a myth? What values underlie the term in common parlance? And is it time for a revaluation of myth, or at least a careful reflection on the word's connotations and consequences?
The prevalent popular meaning of myth disguises not at all the prevailing value we place on narratives so labeled. Myths, as we all know, are "false stories." Authoritative arbiters of semantics, like the Oxford English Dictionary, tell us so: "Myth. A purely fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural persons, actions, or events and embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical phenomena." So do reference works on usage like Roget's Thesaurus, which lists such synonyms for myth as "fabrication," "fiction," "thing imagined," "concoction," "forgery," and "fantasy."
Myths, as we speak of them in ordinary speech, are, at best, amusing untruths (many of which used to be called "old wives' tales") and, at worst, outright deceptions. (The "myth of the holocaust" is a phrase recently coined to transform accounts of the death of six million Jews into a wily invention on the part of an international conspiracy of Zionists.)
Myth, in sum, is the label we give stories that we don't wish to believe. It is no accident that we apply the term most frequently to categorize the religious narratives of people other that ourselves. We say that Africans, Asians, and other peoples have myths: we assume that we possess true reports, factual accounts, and real history.
Scholars of myth have contributed, often unwittingly, to this popular conception of myth. Ernest Cassirer (and later Susan Langer, among others), for example, argued that myth was a product of the creative imagination, like dance, music, and the plastic arts. However, if understood as an aesthetic rather than an intellectual creation, myth could also, simply reinforce the notion that these stories spring forth from the heart and soul, rather than the head and mind.
Freud and his followers also reinforced the popular linguistic usage of myth. For them, a myth was analogous to a dream--a
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