1.1 What Do We Mean by Myth? The Study of Myth in General
Contemporary scholarly approaches to myth must critically engage some of the most salient twists, turns, developments, and obstacles facing myth studies since becoming a recognized academic area of study. This section identifies a tradition in order to systematically connect debates, ideas, methods, movements, and positions. To assess the historicity of certain approaches and claims regarding Plato’s myths, one must associate them with a modern history of knowledge production related to mythology. These connections help clarify the status of particular perspectives and aid in critically evaluating interpretations of myth in Plato scholarship. Contextualizing approaches to myth in social, cultural, and intellectual history enables one to draw distinctions between methods, concepts, and techniques from various disciplines, identify lineage, recognize far-reaching historical impact, and identify contemporary scholarly influence.
In the modern era, the word ‘myth’ has become a general term referring to revelation, folktales, sacred scripture, fairy tales, legend, epic, and even community hearsay.1 Myth is understood to narrate the exploits of humans (from ancestors until the present) and gods and a host of other supernatural beings.2 Some myths depict the history of a family or dynasty; the glory or demise of a city or civilization; the adventures or fate of different kinds of souls; the origins of the universe, the structure of the universe and the coming end of the universe. These plots, themes or motifs (the tropes differ in their roles based on their incorporation and application), in addition to a vast range of other recurring topics, often feature with story lines familiar to us such as ‘the death and resurrection of a god or hero’,3 ‘deliverance’,4 ‘recurrence’,5 ‘cyclical time’, ‘linear time’, ‘progress’,6 ‘regress’, reciprocity’, ‘alchemical transformation’, ‘salvation’, ‘damnation’ and, more generally, tragedy, comedy, romance, and satire.7 In some myths, these topics are exclusive, and in others they are combined.8
In his monumental study of myths and rituals, Mythography (1986), Doty lists the various conventional definitions of myth that have been constructed by different fields of study.The way each discipline understands and uses the word ‘myth’ is contingent on a range of social, historical and political factors, and awareness of the disciplinary influences on mythography and its development is indispensable for multi-faceted interpretations of the term. Different cultures, eras, and systems of thought build up their own categories for situating mythic phenomena and including or excluding different elements according to basic and static definitions (monomythic definitions).10 Knowing how to unite different perspectives involves deep consideration of evaluations produced by those perspectives. However, respecting each individual socially and culturally conditioned myth is a far more difficult task and a more vital and urgent interpretative matter (a polymythic hermeneutics).11 I argue that the first step must be to move away from reductive approaches to myth and appreciate them in their different varieties and contexts.
- 1.In comparative religious studies, myth is often understood in contrast to theology: the former is associated with Indigenous cultures or ‘primitive’ peoples, and the latter with monotheistic systems of belief or philosophically inclined cultures.
- 2.In the study of poetry, drama, and fiction, myth is interpreted in relation to ‘mythic elements’ or ‘legendary plots’.
- 3.In anthropology or ethnology, the phrase ‘mythic period’ is generally used to label, often negatively, periods in the history of a culture that resemble pre-modern ways of thinking and acting.
- 4.In political science, the appellation ‘myth’ is used to criticize ideologies such as democracy or socialism.
- 5.In sociology, the term is used vaguely for systems of beliefs and ritualized forms of behavior.9
Disciplinary nuances and developments particular to European and Anglo-American contexts have characterized readings of myth since the early phases of myth studies in the late seventeenth century. And social and political factors foregrounded a number of significant issues: the nature of religious truth; knowledge and interpretation of prehistory; the thoughts, ideas, and practices of Indigenous communities; the relationship between philosophy and myth framed within a debate about the relationship between science and religion; and the reinterpretation of imagination and artistic expression. These concerns and driving factors created the setting for movements in the middle of the eighteenth century; eventually myth became increasingly pivotal to intellectual and social life, ultimately influencing the Romantic Movement.12
Prior to the late seventeenth century, myth was generally equated with ancient Greek and Roman mythology.13 It was rarely studied for itself and was considered unimportant. Particularly in the eighteenth century, scholarly studies of myth were fundamental to the formation of modern fields of study: anthropology, literary criticism, folkloristics, psychology, and the history of religion. By the middle of the nineteenth century, mythography had confirmed its place as a serious and respected area of research.14 After the mid-twentieth century, interest in myth declined and it was no longer recognized and appreciated in the same way.
Examples of reductionism pervade the short academic history of myth studies. Some forms of reduction attempt to transcend the multifarious features of myth and determine its meaning and significance according to a dominant theoretical paradigm. Well-known examples include different forms of Christian theism, positivism, Romanticism, Euhemerism, psychoanalysis, structuralism, functionalism, and allegorical and historical determinist interpretations.16 Reductive approaches attempt to find a certain factor—literary, historical, linguistic, cultural, and so on—and project it as the key to discovering the meaning of the story or the single most essential aspect of myth. According to these approaches, one element must be isolated for special consideration in order to understand the narrative; that is, one factor decodes the other major and minor features. Consideration of archetypes in relation to myth, for instance, is insightful and fascinating but does not address cross-cultural differences and the intricate narrative details of mythology; one approach is never sufficient for analyzing the many networks of meanings and significance.17... from the Enlightenment down through the first half of the nineteenth century, myth was widely and increasingly thought of as a primary subject, even a synoptic one, a master field of the first importance. Myth was taken up because it was thought of as a key, variously, to history, to linguistics and philology, to religion, to art, to the primitive mind, and to the creative imagination.15
Similarly, reducing myth to certain structural features is limiting. Myth-creators summarize a range of events over a long period into a story, emplotting details to achieve logical coherence, and neglect temporal serialization.18 The study of a myth’s plot structure is necessary, but reducing the different meanings of a literary text to the plot leaves unaddressed many questions regarding the internal dynamics of a story.19 Exclusive structuralist approaches often privilege the plot at the expense of content and tend to modify, adjust, ignore, attenuate, or amplify other parts of the text in order to preserve the imagined authority of the plot. Understanding a text according to structure—or more accurately, one perspective of structure—is equivalent to a ‘theory of everything’ which implies that the multifarious range of narratives can be interpreted by using one criterion.20 One must also account for the inte...