Traditional prose narrative that enables people to discuss preternatural topics. This
definition of myth is useful if two conditions are met: First, one must dismiss the current
popular notion that a myth is a false belief; and second, one must accept the idea that the
creation and transmission of traditional myths is, or was, an attempt to deal with, but not
necessarily explain, the unknown.
“Myth” may be one of the most misused words in the language. This stems from
Christianity’s attempts to discredit competing ancient pantheons, labeling others’ beliefs
“false mythologies” and calling Christian beliefs “the true religion.” The idea of myth-asfalse-belief has carried over into secular use and now refers to something a number of
people assert as fact that can be shown, usually by reference to scientific analyses, to be
false, as in newspaper or magazine articles with titles like “Myths about Cancer” or
“Myths about AIDS” that discuss people’s incorrect beliefs.
The concept that myth is false belief is further supported by the attitude that people
who lived a long time ago used myth to “explain” natural phenomena, as in the sun being a fiery chariot pulled
through the sky; in fact, some basic mythology books end stories with the comment
“…and that is how the Greeks explained the passage of the sun through the sky.” Because
we are dealing with people we believe to have been not as advanced as we are—
“primitive” people, as we often call them—we are willing to believe that they could have
thought that these stories explained natural phenomena. But it is highly unlikely that
myths were meant to explain anything; it is more likely that they were metaphors—
concrete images used to stand for abstract things. The passage of the sun was
unexplainable to the ancient Greeks, in astronomical terms, so they used a poetic device
to refer to that passage.
If we accept the possibility that myth operates similarly to metaphor, the definition of
myth as traditional prose narrative used to discuss preternatural topics begins to clarify its relationship to other areas of folklore. A myth is traditional because it is handed down
through the generations, and it is a prose narrative because it tells a complete story. The
words “traditional” and “narrative” connect myth with the other major folk narratives,
folktale and legend, but the key words in this definition are preternatural and discuss.
Something that is preternatural exists within a natural system but cannot be explained by
any method available within that same system; it therefore appears to be beyond, or
different from, the natural.
In the myth of the fiery chariot, for example, people observed a natural phenomenon
but could not explain what it was or how it did what it did. They could observe its
warmth and its sky-spanning movement; therefore, they related it to fire, also warm, and
to a chariot, something in which they traveled long distances. However, because the
phenomenon was observable, the Greeks had to talk about it (even if only to their
children), and the myth of the fiery chariot allowed them to discuss a phenomenon that
they could observe but not explain. We now have the astrophysical, meteorological, and
astronomical knowledge to explain the sun’s warmth and its apparent passage across the
sky.
On a more complex level, the passage of the seasons occasioned narratives in which
emotional states were equated with what were for the ancients preternatural phenomenon.
In both the Greek (Demeter and Persephone) and the Norse (Freya and her husband)
myths, for example, winter occurs because two people who love each other—mother and
daughter or husband and wife—are separated. The separation causes the woman (a
fertility figure in each case) such sadness that plants stop growing and the weather gets
colder; reunion causes warm weather to return and plants to resume their growth. The
equation of fulfilled love with spring, and loneliness with winter, creates a metaphor in
which emotional states are logically equated with their respective seasons of fecundity or
dormancy. Again, the passage of the seasons is a natural, not a preternatural, event for
most people today and needs no metaphor by which it may be discussed.
This same definition of myth as a narrative that allows people to discuss preternatural
topics can also be applied to narratives that discuss some of what we still consider
abstract or philosophical concepts. The problem of disorder (some might say evil) in
society has confronted humanity from a very early time. The Scandinavians blamed
Loki—half-giant, after all, and therefore at least partly aligned with the forces of chaos—
for much of the disorder in Asgard; the Greeks blamed Pandora, whose curiosity led her
to open the fatal box. We, today, have made less headway in this area than we have in the
area of natural phenomena; we, too, have a variety of “theories” about the causes of
evil/disorder/chaos. These theories can be genetic (children can inherit criminal
tendencies from parents), sociological (a child who grows up deprived is more likely to
become a criminal than one who does not), religious (“the devil made me do it”),
situational (the people a person spends time with can lead him or her into trouble),
psychological (only insane people commit serious crimes like murder), and popular
cultural (violence on television promotes violence in the culture), to name but a few.
What most of these theories have in common, and what all of the traditional mythological
accounts have in common, is that disorder (chaos) or evil comes from outside; the
ancients did not then, and we do not now, like to think that evil is an inherent part of the
human condition, and so we create myths or theories to discuss and perhaps account for
“where [externally] it comes from.”
Myth, then, is metaphor, and it “works” like that other great repository of metaphor,
poetry, allowing the user to relate two different items, one often concrete and the other
often abstract, or one familiar and local and the other unfamiliar and remote, so that the
concrete or familiar-local one helps us understand the abstract or unfamiliar-remote one.
C.W.Sullivan III
References
Campbell, Joseph. 1970–1976. The Masks of God. 4 vols. New York: Viking Penguin.
——. 1984. Myths to Live By. New York: Bantam.
Stone, Merlin. 1976. When God Was a Woman. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.