the essential nature of myth—Page 3

belief, disbelief, and myth

No one alive today seriously believes that metallic octopus arms implanted in a person's back can be sources of power or that time can be reversed by circling the earth backwards. Moderns are too savvy; they instinctively understand that powers like these are dramatic inventions.

In dramatic works, these kinds of bald departures from fact are instances of a kind of human capacity for belief that was elegantly described by William Taylor Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria. Coleridge called that capacity, That willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith.

A person having poetic faith is capable of intellectually identifying with or vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another. In connection with myth, a person with poetic faith can imaginatively ascribe to a dramatic or literary work feelings and attitudes present in himself. He has empathy.

The phenomenon of temporary suspension of disbelief goes back as far as recorded time. Mankind has displayed a capacity to willingly suspend disbelief for as long as dramatic presentations have been enacted; indeed, you can't have one without the other.

The age-old need to experience awe, excitement, and variety is perennial. Moderns have the same need to understand and to marvel at life's mysteries as did their forefathers. Stories like Spiderman, Star Wars, and Superman merely reiterate that truth.

Obviously, myths and heroic stories share much in common, but not all mythical tales are stories about heroes. What, then, is the essential difference between a myth, an ancient heroic story, and a modern heroic story?

Myth

The cover of the first Superman comic book

A myth is a story about gods and the world that was intended by the culture that originated it to represent literal truth.

A myth does not require a temporary suspension of disbelief from an audience that takes them to be literal truth because that audience believes in the objective truth on which the story is based. On the other hand, a myth does require a temporary suspension of disbelief from an audience of another culture, one that takes the myth with a grain of salt.

Gods always play a role in myth because myth is the stuff of gods. Often heroes play a role in a myth, too; but not always.

heroic story

An heroic story is a story about a hero and his or her heroic deeds. It's a kind of adventure story. It may be profound or it may be fanciful; it may be ancient or modern. Gods may or may not have a role to play.

more about mythic and heroic stories

A story you believe to be real is much more powerful and intense than a story you only temporarily believe. But audiences from cultures other than the culture that originated a story tend to see it as literature or drama instead of as literal truth; they must temporarily suspend disbelief to sit through it. For that reason, for them a mythical or heroic experience is not as powerful or intense. Scholars from other cultures who study a myth or heroic story can be objective about it because they don't interpret it literally.

That's why it's likely that the Future you cited in a preceding section might be readier than the contemporary you to scoff at Spiderman, Star Wars, or Superman. For the Future you, temporary suspension of disbelief is as far a stretch to Spiderman as the stretch to ancient Greece may be for the contemporary you.

Mythical and heroic stories are hot stuff, each in its own time and place; the crowds love them, fear them, revere them. They feed the needs of their audience. They appeal to what's fundamental in all of us. If mankind is still fundamentally the same as in the past—and it is—it must be the contemporary audience that's out of touch with the ancient stories, not the other way around.

Perceptions of reality may change; tastes may change; cultural expectations may change; but people are always fundamentally the same. For that reason, mythic and heroic stories do not vary in essential ways. What people always need from them—what's most important to them—is always the same, too. Their underlying messages and meanings are imperishable.

So, who or what is out of tune and out of touch today? Is it the mythic or heroic stories of other cultures or is it the modern audience?

To like modern blockbusters but spurn ancient myths or heroic stories just because they're old is to apply a double standard. If contemporary cultures have a right to their own ephemeral cultural prejudices, so do other civilizations and other times. For us to ignore or complain about the stories of other places and times just because they're different is not only impertinent, it's short-sighted. When we apply a double standard, we are not only disparaging other cultures unfairly, we're selling ourselves short. We're missing a golden opportunity to learn and enjoy other bodies of literature, dramas, folkways, insights, and points of view. Respect them; they will still be here long after we're gone.

Look deeper. There's a lot to gain from understanding other cultures. Why throw out the baby with the bathwater?

mythology

Mythologies are groups of related myths that attempt to understand and explain something as well as to entertain. They are related to each other by virtue of a common culture, society, history, and belief system. They may attempt to explain seemingly mysterious natural processes such as lightning, thunder, or atomic energy; or they may attempt to familiarize a people with their own culture's history and customs and justify the reasons for them.

A few mythologies are exceptions to this rule. They have been deliberately constructed or fostered to achieve a cultural, political, or social end, but most are sincere, spontaneous statements of what real people have really believed. An example of an exception is the fascist mythos of the 20th century.

A good example of a mythology comes from the North. Norse mythology is a collection of beliefs and stories once shared by Northern Germanic tribes. It is a group of Scandinavian poems originally told by the forefathers of the people who today live in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and Iceland. These poems are the basis for Scandinavian mythology today.

Norse mythology has no one set of doctrinal beliefs. It was born and evolved in Germanic Europe. Norse myths today consist mainly of these Teutonic and Germanic elements but also include elements of Indo-European myths which were current in Scandinavia as long as a thousand years earlier.

The mythology was orally transmitted until it was written down in two old Icelandic literary works called the Icelandic Eddas. There are two Icelandic Eddas: the Elder Edda (or Poetic Edda ), which was written in the eleventh or twelfth century by an anonymous scribe; and the Younger Edda (or Prose Edda), which was written in part by Snorri Sturlson about a hundred years later. (Snori is a real person).

The Elder Edda is primarily of a collection of mythic poetry written in alliterative verse. The Younger Edda is a collection of ancient Scandinavian myths and legends, rules and theories of versification, poems, and the like. Many of the poems in the Younger Edda are based on poems in the Elder Edda.

—note— documents are not myths The Eddas are not a mythology, even though they are often referred to as such. Eddas are documents. The Eddas do contain myths—the poems on mythical subjects cited above; but they also contain poems on non-mythological subjects: religious subjects, facts, and accounts of the heroic deeds of the historic Germanic peoples. The Younger Edda even contains a primer on how to write Icelandic poetry. If you equate the mythic contents of a document with the non-mythic contents, you may get the wrong idea of the nature of myth.

• Read the 1936 translation of the Poetic Edda by Henry Adams Bellows: click here.
• Read the Rasmus B. Anderson translation of the Prose Edda: click here.

Individual myths in a mythology are interrelated; they share characteristics or things with one another. They may be stories about the same group of gods, men, creatures, places, settings, geographical regions, events, or about some other unifying factor.

Mythologies are also groups of stories that attempt to explain the unexplainable. Life is full of mysteries, whether they date from ancient or modern times. Some are about the physical universe and are tangible; others about the moral or spiritual world and are intangible. Most of these mysteries will never be solved, especially the important ones. One function of a mythology is to present these kinds of mysteries and to find plausible explanations for them. Even if the explanations are faulty or far-fetched, the myths tend to reduce the level of anxiety people feel over the ambiguity and risk of existence.

As with Norse mythology, mythologies are created spontaneously out of the character or history of a culture. No one deliberately sets out to write them down. They don't begin as literature but they end as literature. Most myths start life as oral tales which were recited to an audience and passed from mouth to ear and generation to generation. Eventually, the myths encapsulated a belief system and the belief system became an expression of the collective personality of a culture. After a long time a large group of caring individuals considered the body of myths sufficiently important to justify writing them down so they would not be lost to posterity.

Homer's stories, The Iliad and The Odyssey, are a case in point. Nobody knows where or how they originated. Perhaps starting in the twelfth eighth century B.C.E, they circulated orally through Greece and the Mediterranean Basin for hundreds of years as a collection of accounts. They evolved and gradually matured until finally Homer wrote them down, possibly in the eighth century BCE

Some scholars believe that Homer himself is a fiction; he might actually be a group of authors who captured oral versions of the tales; or he might be someone who was never identified. Others believe that he was a real person who did not originate the stories but who combined them into a continuous, homogeneous, smooth-flowing tale and wrote them down in beautiful epic poetic Greek. Others believe that the siege of Troy and Odysseus' sea voyage never took place, although the events portrayed in the stories may be based on fragments of the real experiences of actual warriors and sailors. That seems a reasonable presumption, since The Iliad and The Odyssey are stories about Greek gods in whom no one believes today.

• Learn more about mythology at the Encyclopedia Mythica web site. There you can peruse articles about Greek, Norse, Roman, Celtic and numerous other mythologies, see genealogical tables of Celtic, Egyptian, Greek, Japanese, Norse, and Roman gods, tour an image gallery, read about heroes, peruse ancient maps, and explore related non-mythological subjects such as folklore, Arthurian Legend, and witchcraft: click here.
• Compare The Muse Of Mythology's views of mythology with the views you'll find at the Wikipedia page on the same subject. Where do they differ? Where do they agree? click here.

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