Myth

Laurence Coupe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134107766
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Laurence Coupe offers students a comprehensive overview of the development of myth, showing how mythic themes, structures and symbols persist in literature and entertainment today. This introductory volume:

• illustrates the relation between myth, culture and literature with discussions of poetry, fiction, film and popular song
• explores uses made of the term 'myth' within the fields of literary criticism, anthropology, cultural studies, feminism, Marxism and psychoanalysis
• discusses the association between modernism, postmodernism, myth and history
• familiarizes the reader with themes such as the dying god, the quest for the Grail, the relation between 'chaos' and 'cosmos', and the vision of the end of time
• demonstrates the growing importance of the green dimension of myth.

Fully updated and revised in this new edition, Myth is both a concise introduction and a useful tool to students first approaching the topic, while also a valuable contribution to the study of myth.

PART I
Reading myth

INTRODUCTION TO PART I

It is always possible to read a literary or cultural text for its mythic interest. This inevitably presupposes that other texts are of related interest, since one is chiefly involved in tracing commonly accepted paradigms. Comparison and contrast thus come into play. But, of course, these activities in turn depend on how one reads myth in the first place: depend, that is, on which paradigms are of interest, and on how to interpret them. What is called ‘myth criticism’ is inseparable from what is called ‘mythography’. The latter has usually been a matter of giving priority to one particular paradigm; here I will be drawing attention to the implications of doing so.

In this part, I offer an exercise in myth criticism which begins and ends with Francis Ford Coppola’s film about the Vietnam war, Apocalypse Now (1979). By the logic just outlined, we will find that, rather than inviting a lengthy and detailed analysis, this work will soon lead us to others. For we cannot understand Apocalypse Now as a mythic text unless we refer it back to The Golden Bough; and it is almost impossible to deal with Frazer’s major work of mythography in this context without referring to the poem on which it had the most famous influence, Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Nor can the latter be situated without taking note of Eliot’s own case for ‘the mythical method’; which in turn makes more sense when we juxtapose it with the mythopoeic programme of his contemporary, Edgell Rickword.

Rickword’s interest in the Symbolist poet and visionary, Arthur Rimbaud, connects him with Jim Morrison, lyricist of the Doors. Moreover, the presence of their music on the soundtrack of Apocalypse Now invites us to ponder the relation between contemporary popular culture and mythopoeia. And by connotation our enquiry will extend to encompass also Michael Herr’s Dispatches, which explores the Vietnam war as a myth, and the theories of Mircea Eliade, which help situate both Eliot and Morrison.

Eventually, we will return to where we started, with Apocalypse Now, this time concentrating on the significance of its title. This will necessitate a brief account of the Book of Revelation and its influence. That will take us to the end of Part I, and in Part II we will reconsider some of the theoretical issues raised in a wider historical perspective. We will move from ‘reading myth’ to ‘mythic reading’: that is, we will make explicit the intimate connection between ‘mythography’, the interpretation of myth, and ‘mythopoeia’, the making of myths.

Broadly, Chapter 1 will focus on the paradigm of fertility myth, as expounded by Frazer, and on the way it is put at the service of a particular view of hierarchy in the poetry and criticism of Eliot. In Chapter 2 we will consider the resonance of the paradigm of creation myth, as expounded by Eliade; but we will approach this topic dialectically, by addressing the ‘chaos’ which is presupposed by ‘cosmos’. This dimension will be mainly represented by the poems and songs of Jim Morrison of The Doors. In Chapter 3, the paradigm will be that of the myth of deliverance, as variously expressed and explored in ancient and modern narrative, and in creative and critical work. Throughout, hero myths will be addressed where appropriate. Always the emphasis will be on the relation of all these to literary and cultural texts.

In what follows, it will be as well to bear in mind some distinctions which are normally observed in literary and cultural history: in particular, that between modernity and modernism, and that between postmodernity and postmodernism. We have already said that demythologization is associated with ‘modernity’. The name for the aesthetic movement which resisted this trend is ‘modernism’. Though the two terms are often used interchangeably, it makes much more sense to see them rather as dialectical opposites. Wherever myth has been pronounced dead, artists have risen up to proclaim it alive. One such was T. S. Eliot. But of course The Waste Land was a long time ago, and with the emergence of ‘postmodernity’, or ‘the postmodern condition’, we have witnessed, not a retreat from myth, but a much more pervasive sense of myth. Where Eliot sought to counter history by invoking antique form, for the ‘postmodernist’ artist such as Francis Ford Coppola the response demanded by contemporary culture is to blur the distinction between history and myth, as in Apocalypse Now.

1
ORDER

DYING GODS

Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was inspired initially by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), which indeed informs the film throughout. The narrator, in the former named Willard and in the latter Marlow, takes a terrifying river journey. In the novella this is along the Congo in the days of the imperialist scramble for Africa; in the film it is through Vietnam to Cambodia during the American war against the Vietcong. He is trying to locate a mysterious figure, in both cases called Kurtz, whose mind has apparently been deranged by his years in the wilderness. Kurtz has become the object of native worship, and has encouraged the most barbaric practices. The film goes beyond Conrad’s tale in that Captain Willard of the US Army has received instructions to ‘terminate with extreme prejudice’ the command of Colonel Kurtz – that is, kill him – because his ‘methods’ are ‘unsound’. In other words, his mission is the murder of a man who has set himself up as a god. This murder is performed in parallel with the natives’ sacrifice of a buffalo. In both novella and film, Kurtz’s last words are: ‘The horror! the horror!’ But where Marlow returns to England to persuade the fiancée of this ‘universal genius’ that his final utterance was her name, Willard leaves Kurtz’s temple to be faced by his followers’ bowing down before him, as the new god. Refusing this role, he leaves the settlement; the final sequence, seen over the closing credits, shows it being bombed by American helicopters.

Coppola, then, gives to Conrad’s narrative the power of a mythic paradigm. Here the choice is that of fertility myth, and his guides are Sir James Frazer and Jessie L. Weston. Thus, it is no coincidence that his Kurtz, the man-god condemned to die, has in his possession those two works by them which deal with that very topic. Conveniently, when the camera pans the interior of Kurtz’s temple, it lingers on these volumes, ensuring the viewer registers their relevance. They are Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. If Conrad’s novella provides Coppola with his storyline, it is these exercises in mythography that provide him with his structure. We will call this the pattern of the dying and reviving god.

The Golden Bough appeared in twelve volumes between 1890 and 1915, and was subsequently abridged in one volume in 1922. Its subtitle, ‘A Study in Magic and Religion’, may suggest a straightforward work of documentation; but there is a lively narrative at work here. This monumental work is, one might say, structured like a detective novel, since it begins with a murder and then sets out to identify the murderer and, more importantly for Frazer, the motive and the method. Sabine McCormack, editor of an abridgement of Frazer’s lengthy and tortuous account, sets the scene:

At Nemi, near Rome, there was a shrine where, down to imperial times, Diana, goddess of woodlands and animals and giver of offspring, was worshipped with a male consort, Virbius. The rule of the shrine was that any man could be its priest, and take the title of the King of the Wood, provided he first plucked a branch – the Golden Bough – from a certain sacred tree in the temple grove and then killed the priest. This was the regular mode of succession to the priesthood. The aim of The Golden Bough is to answer two questions: why did the priest have to kill his predecessor, and why did he first have to pluck the branch? Because there is no simple answer to either question, Frazer collects and compares analogies to the custom of Nemi. For by showing that similar rules existed all over the world and throughout history, he hopes to reach an understanding of how the primitive mind works, and then to use his understanding to shed light on the rule of Nemi. In collecting analogies, Frazer does not look for total parallels, but breaks up the custom of Nemi into its component parts and examines each in turn. Indeed, one piece of evidence may be used for more than one aspect of the question.

(McCormack as in Frazer 1978: 18)

Thus, Frazer’s anthropology may be categorized as belonging to the ‘myth and ritual’ school of interpretation. As the epithet suggests, this approach to mythology explains the narrative in terms of the ceremony which, it is assumed, it either arose from or accompanied. As the kind of ceremony Frazer is most interested in is that of vegetation, the kind of myth he is most interested in is that concerning a fertility god and goddess.

Having chosen that model, he then chooses as the main example of his paradigm the Phoenician/Greek story of Adonis – which he takes to be analogous to a story that we have already encountered, that of Osiris. The myth tells us that, as a man, Adonis is mortally wounded by a wild boar, to be subsequently revived as a god by Aphrodite, the goddess of love and fertility (the Roman Venus). The idea is that she wishes to ensure that each year he will be reborn in the spring to be with her. Frazer describes the ritual interest of this story:

At the festivals of Adonis, which were held in Western Asia and in Greek lands, the death of the god was annually mourned, with a bitter wailing, chiefly by women; images of him, dressed to resemble corpses, were carried out as to burial and then thrown into the sea or into springs; and in some places his revival was celebrated on the following day. At Alexandria images of Aphrodite and Adonis were displayed on two couches; beside them were set ripe fruits of all kinds, cakes, plants growing in flower-pots, and green bowers twined with anise. The marriage of the lovers was celebrated one day, and on the morrow women attired as mourners, with streaming hair and bared breasts, bore the image of the dead Adonis to the sea-shore and committed it to the waves. Yet they sorrowed not without hope, for they sang that the lost one would come back again.

(Frazer 1978: 130)

The meaning of such a ritual, and such a myth, is fertility. This, as we shall see, is what links it with the rule of Nemi.

If Frazer’s ‘myth and ritual’ theory is the basis of his anthropology, that theory is applied in a particular kind of procedure, known as the ‘comparative method’. All places and times, any odd scraps of evidence of ritual practice, are grist to the mill. Material may be gleaned from ancient Greece and ancient Egypt alike, and from ancient Greece and nineteenth-century rural England alike, without bothering with detailed contextualization or reservation. Anywhere there is evidence of something like a fertility ritual (for example, an effigy thrown into a river then fished out again), the overall pattern of death and regeneration may be inferred. Frazer is, that is to say, a ‘universalist’: he believes that we can make comparisons across cultures because the primitive human urge to myth-making is essentially the same.

Of course, his very claim to be able to do so suggests something of the spirit of modernity. The ceremonies and stories documented belong either to our archaic past or to the residual barbarism of the ‘folk’ imagination. Thus, though Frazer’s ostensible interest is mythographic not mythopoeic, his very condescension towards the evidence he universalizes betrays the myth at work: derived from the Enlightenment, it is the story of progress via rationality. We have already named this as the ‘myth of mythlessness’. That is one paradox at the heart of Frazer’s work. A related one is that, despite subscribing to his own narrative of improvement, he betrays a nostalgia for the world which produced the ceremonies and stories he recovers in such painstaking detail. That is, while Frazer’s official position is something very close to positivism, envisaging humanity as having progressed from magic, through religion, and so to science, he seems almost as fascinated by what he calls the ‘folly’ of the first two stages as by the supposed truth of the third.

But let us be sure how ‘myth and ritual’ interpretation and universalist comparativism work in practice. In short, we must register Frazer’s answers to Frazer’s own questions. Why does the King of the Wood have to die? Why does the successor have to pluck the branch? After twelve volumes, we have the answers. The god, or his impersonator, has to die precisely because his business is fertility. The community depends on him, or so it believes, for its own survival. If the god does not die he cannot be reborn to fertilize the goddess, and so there will be no new crops. The underlying principle is that of magic, which for Frazer is the origin of all myth-making and all religion. Indeed, he goes further, and credits magic with the beginnings of secular authority, and so of civilization itself; not only the first priests, but the first kings were evidently magicians. The succession to the title of King of the Wood was a matter of magic, elaborated as religious ritual.

According to Frazer, at the early, magical stage of thinking, nature is conceived as an impersonal force, to be manipulated. As magic evolves into religion, nature takes on the form of anthropomorphic deities, who must be allowed full scope to exercise their powers. Everything comes to hinge on guaranteeing the god his fertility. The residual logic is twofold. By ‘sympathetic’ magic, the death and revival of the god parallels or, to put it more strongly, causes the renewal of the land. (Frazer compares this with the act of pouring water on the ground in order to induce rain.) By ‘contagious’ magic, the god becomes a ‘scapegoat’ figure who carries away the sterility which might otherwise blight the crops. (Strictly speaking, this is ‘anti-contagious’ magic. Frazer illustrates contagious magic itself by the lover winning power over the beloved by casting a spell on clippings of her hair.) The logic is foolproof. And it tells us also why the King of the Wood must pluck ‘the Golden Bough’. This part of the tree, which is an oak, is clearly the mistletoe. It contains the power of Jupiter, Roman god of sky and storm, who periodically casts his full force into the tree in the course of a lightning flash. The successor to the title must pluck it in order to prove he has acquired the divine energy. It is only through this violent succession, anticipated by the violence of the thunderstorm, that the fertility of the land can be ensured. There is a magical connection between the drama of the dying and reviving god on the one hand, and the seasonal cycle on the other. The king is dead; long live the king.

If the basis of religion is the pattern of death and regeneration, then it is possible to conclude that the ‘higher’ faiths cannot claim exemption from this paradigm. Indeed, in the first edition of The Golden Bough it is quite obvious that Frazer began by regarding Jesus Christ as just another variant upon the model of the dying and reviving god. As the work progressed, however, he became increasingly evasive on this issue – as though Frazer, a mild agnostic, were fearful of excessive controversy. But the connection between fertility religion and Christianity did need spelling out, and his disciple Jessie L. Weston broached the issue directly. Or rather, she sought to demonstrate that narratives which had previously been taken to be purely Christian had in fact originated in vegetation ceremonies, or what she called ‘Nature Cults’.

Reading Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920), we see how Frazer’s anthropology can help solve long-standing puzzles of literary interpretation – in this case, that the medieval legend of the Holy Grail is not anticipated by Christian orthodoxy:

Some years ago, when fresh from the study of Sir J. G. Frazer’s epoch-making work, The Golden Bough, I was struck by the resemblance existing between certain features of the Grail story, and characteristic details of the Nature Cults described. The more closely I analysed the tale, the more striking became the resemblance, and I finally asked myself whether it were not possible that in this mysterious legend – mysterious alike in its character, its sudden appearance, the importance apparently assigned to it, followed by as sudden and complete a disappearance – we might not have the confused record of a ritual, once popular, later surviving under conditions of strict secrecy?

(Weston 1920: 3–4)

Weston’s assumption is that the fertility ritual documented by Frazer was transformed in time into a ‘Mystery Cult’. Certainly, it is true that in the centuries immediately before and after Christ, the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean region witnessed a religious displacement. The collective festival ensuring the revival of the crops, and so the survival of the community, was intermittently adapted into a new kind of ceremony. In this kind, the individual initiate sought liberation from the chains of earthly life, putting trust not in a fertility god such as Adonis or Osiris, but in a ‘mystery’ god such as Attis.

The story of Attis, which originated in the ancient land of Phrygia (eastwards across the Aegean Sea from Greece, and north-west of Syria), may be easily summarized. He is a shepherd driven mad by the goddess Cybele’s love for him; in his frenzy he castrates himself, only to be taken up by her as her eternal consort (often depicted riding with her on a chariot drawn by lions). The cult, which spread throughout Greece and then to Rome, centred on an annual, spring ritual in honour of Attis: this would involve devotees’ castrating themselves, and there would also be group flagellation by priests dressed as women. After this, the participants would celebrate the rebirth of the god. Recounted like this, the ritual seems more bizarre than that of Adonis, but Weston’s main concern is that there was a much stronger emphasis on initiation. Those dedicated to Attis were distinguished from the populace generally by their willingness to emasculate themselves. In other words, there were two levels of worship: ‘exoteric’ (by which the community at large benefited from Attis’ rebirth) and ‘esoteric’ (by which the chosen few participated in the secret of his divinity). In this respect, the worship of Attis brought it very close to ‘the Eleusian mysteries’ – Eleusis being the site of a temple in honour of Demeter, goddess of corn, where a two-stage initiation was held. The first involved symbolism of vegetation; the second took a less tangible form, but supposedly led to a profounder, more spiritual insight.

For some time, evidently, Jesus Christ was identified as a mystery god, effecting salvation on two levels. For the many he would be just another dying god of vegetation; for the few he would be the object of secret devotion. The link between the two levels would be the ‘Messianic’ or ‘Eucharistic’ feast, in which the bread and wine could be regarded not only as the harvest and the vintage, but also as spiritual nourishment. Hence the symbolism of the Grail:

It has taken me nine or ten years longer to complete the evidence, but the chain is at last linked up, and we can now prove by printed texts the parallels existing between each and every feature of the Grail story and the recorded symbolism of the Mystery Cults. Further, we can show that between these Mystery Cults and Christianity there existed at one time a close and intimate union, such a union as of itself involved the practical assimilation of the central rite, in each case a ‘Eucharistic’ Feast, in which the worshippers partook of the Food of Life from the sacred vessels.

(Weston 1920: 4–5)

Weston’s conclusion, made with due acknowledgement to Frazer, is that the Grail legend derived from the ‘Mystery Cult’ just as surely as the ‘Mystery Cult’ derived from the ‘Nature Cult’. The later literary form of romance, which in the case of the Grail narratives involved the quest of a knight for the lost cup containing Christ’s sacrificial blood, was firmly rooted in fertility religion – only it had developed by way of a detour through mystery. What was constant was the idea of the body and blood of the saviour offering new life, whether the communal life of fertility or the individual life of enlightenment.

The parallel with Frazer’s material is striking. We know from Frazer that there is no question that the existing King of the Wood has to be replaced by a violent usurper – probably a desperate, runaway slave – full of new potency for the fertilization of the goddess. Otherwise life will ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I READING MYTH
• PART II MYTHIC READING
• BIBLIOGRAPHY