The following is an excerpt from the introduction to Myth Education explaining just what it is that I mean when I use the term "mythology."
Defining Mythology
The terms myth and mythology get tossed around a lot, but
their colloquial usage can be quite different from how we use them within the
context of this book. For example, MythBusters was one of the greatest
television programs of all time: it saved lives, taught people to think in terms
of the scientific method and to challenge unproven claims, and showed us all
how neat things look when caught on high speed camera. One thing they failed to
do on MythBusters was to ever actually take on a myth. The way they use
the term on MythBusters, and in fact, the way we hear it most often in
our daily lives, a myth is a popular idea that is not based on evidence.
The ideas that it is easy to shoot fish in a barrel, that you can’t fly a lead
balloon, or that you can make your muscle car more aerodynamic by rotating the
body 180 degrees are all myths. Or, to put it another way: they are bullshit.
The myths we are talking about in this book
are not bullshit. Maybe. I mean, probably, yes, they are largely untrue tales
in a literal sense, but myth and mythology in this context are
more than just that. In my years of teaching courses on mythology I’ve
developed a working definition. It’s not a definition that you’ll find in a
dictionary and certainly there is plenty about it that most (if not all) other
mythographers would disagree with, but for my purposes in class and the
purposes of this book it should do just fine.
Mythology is the set of
stories (myths) that a particular culture believes to be true and which that
culture uses as a means of understanding both themselves and the world around
them.
That’s the
basic definition but it needs to be teased out a bit for clarity.
“The set of
stories” that makes up a mythology is a big tent. A big, porous tent that
allows room for all sorts of things. No mythology, not even something like
Christianity or Islam, can be condensed into a single book. Yes, many
mythologies have a single text (Bible, Koran, Book of Mormon, Dianetics etc.)
as the core of their beliefs, but it would be lunacy to suggest that any one
text collects the complete and total history and variety of philosophy of a
single person, let alone a complex and mutable culture. If the Bible were truly
the last word on Christian belief, there would be no need for the enormous
industry of people writing devotionals, philosophy papers, and even novels.
There is more to Christianity than the one book. That’s true for every culture.
Especially when you account for the fact that in the history of the world only
a fraction of the mythic tales that have been told and believed have even been
written down. We know Homer’s version of The Iliad because it was
written down but that does not make it the only version. It doesn’t even
necessarily make it the best or most definitive version, just the one that made
it down to us through the ages—the received form of the myth. The
received mythology is all we have to work with. There are times when we can
look at the received versions of stories and characters and make educated
guesses about what they may have looked like in older, unpreserved forms, but
such analysis can often prove difficult, if not impossible. The one thing we
know for certain is that we don’t, and likely never will, have a full,
comprehensive insight into the evolution of these mythologies. Stories change
over time as they are transmitted orally. They change intentionally or
unintentionally when they are translated for new audiences. We can often say
what the most popular or most significant version of a myth is, but that
doesn’t make it the only one. It is not a closed set, it is a wide open one.
Myths are culturally specific. The myths of
the Greeks are not the same as the myths of the Egyptians. That’s fairly
obvious but what’s less obvious, perhaps, is that even when one culture draws
their myths from another culture, they are not the same. The Romans took a lot
of their myths from the Greeks but they made them Roman. And not just the facile
stuff like “Zeus” becoming “Jupiter,” but the tone, the intention, the meaning
of the stories change and become distinctly Roman. Figures from one culture are
syncretized with another to form something new that may or may not end up being
greater than the sum of its parts. To complicate things even further, cultures
change internally and with them so do the myths. The stories told and the gods
worshipped in northern Egypt in 4000 BCE are not the exact same ones as those
of southern Egypt in 4000 BCE, or those in northern or southern Egypt in 2000
BCE or in 40 BCE or in 2017 CE. To understand the myths you need to know the
culture they are coming out of, and in order to understand the culture you need
to know their myths. They are as inextricably linked as they are ever changing.
Truth is an elusive beast, so when I say
that these people believe these stories to be “true,” it’s a loaded statement. “True”
does not mean the same thing to every culture at every time or to every person
within them. Take modern Christians for example: some believe the Bible is
literally true, right down to how the sun revolves around a flat earth. Others
believe that it is metaphorically or spiritually true—some of your more liberal
Christians will even say that it doesn’t matter if Jesus was an actual
historical man or not because the truth of the teachings is all that matters. And
then, between the two extremes, you have those who believe parts are literally
true (Jesus was fully and historically god and man) whereas other parts are
metaphorically true (the world wasn’t created in seven twenty-four-hour periods
but was created by a single, benevolent god). This is true of virtually every
other culture’s relationship with their myths as well. Did Erik the Red believe
that each peal of thunder came from Thor or did he believe that the tales of
the gods were meant to show us how to live? Some Egyptians may have believed
that the sun was rolled over the horizon each morning by a dung beetle whereas
others didn’t take it quite as literally. Truth comes in many forms. And,
importantly, this definition of mythology does not say anything about the
actual truth value of these beliefs, only that it has some degree of perceived
truth value by the believer. So, when I call Christianity, Islam, Hinduism or
any other belief system a “mythology,” I am not calling it either true or
untrue, just saying that the believer finds a degree of truth in it. “Myth” is
not a pejorative.
Myths serve the function of helping people
understand the workings of the universe as well as their own inner workings. We
are largely talking about pre-scientific cultures who did not have, for
example, a knowledge of plate tectonics or the Earth’s molten core to explain
earthquakes and volcanoes. They didn’t have medical diagnoses to explain why
people had seizures or why some people were attracted to the opposite sex,
whereas others were attracted to members of their own sex. So, we use myths.
They explain not only why the sun rose in the sky this morning, but also what,
if anything, we need to do to help make sure it does again tomorrow. Some myths
serve clearer functions and offer better explanations than others but they all
reveal something about the way the people telling or the people hearing the
stories perceived the world.
