Parallel Myths

Subsection 1 Summary: “The Discovery of Parallel Myths”

As European colonial powers expanded their borders, they were surprised to find many similarities between their own rituals and beliefs and those of the new cultures they encountered—parallels between Spanish Catholicism and the Incas of Peru, for example, or between the Plains Indians of North America and European Jews. A variety of explanations have been offered, from Divine revelation to non-European religions being “Satanic” versions of the true form. Some theorized that Native American tribes were actually descended from the lost tribes of Israel. Over time, however, as scholarship in this area grew, two more credible theories emerged: “diffusion” which posits that myths were created in a few centralized locations (India, for example) and then spread through cross-cultural contact; and a psychologically based theory “whereby the core elements of myth are products of the human psyche and thus universal to all human beings” (271).

Subsection 2 Summary: “Myth as a History of Prehistory: The Matriarchal Theory”

In reading myth as a prehistorical record, beginning with the creation of the world, two scholars, Swiss “classicist” Johann Jakob Bachofen and British writer Robert Graves, note within these stories a battle between the established matriarchal societies and an emerging patriarchy.

Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815-1887)

Bachofen, an archaeologist, studied ancient Greek mythology for clues to European history. He concluded that that history could be distilled into three stages: early barbarism followed by a matriarchy and then in turn by a patriarchy. In the first stage, barbarism (hetaerism), neither men nor women were dominant, no family order existed, and rape supplanted marriage. The Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite, was the dominant deity during this period “with no aspect of order or morality” (272). In self-defense, women were forced to unite into communities, ushering in a matriarchal age marked by early stages of civilization—arts, law, and agriculture. Worship of a “mother goddess” became prevalent, as did the emergence of Demeter, goddess of agriculture. Myths of the Amazons, a fierce tribe of female warriors, are representative of these cohesive female communities. Bachofen also saw the myth of Oedipus as a metaphor for these three stages: Oedipus kills the Sphinx (neither male nor female), implying the end of the barbaric stage; he marries his mother (matriarchal stage); and her downfall suggests the transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. Some psychologists trying to understand the roots of male aggression toward women have used this model around which to form their hypotheses, one being an overcompensation by men who resent their early dependence on their mothers.

Robert Graves

Graves argues that European mythology must be read through a matriarchal lens, a period marked by devotion to the earth mother goddess throughout Europe. During this period, the goddess’s rule was seen as absolute, although men were allowed to hunt, fish, farm, and defend the tribe “as long as they did not transgress matriarchal law” (274). The importance of the moon as a feminine symbol also represents the power of early matriarchies, a period when time was measured by the lunar cycles rather than the passage of the sun. The transition from lunar to solar time (and from worship of a moon goddess, Artemis, to a sun god, Apollo), Graves contends, is one striking example of the transition from matriarchal to patriarchal societies.

Subsection 3 Summary: “Transitional Thinking in the Interpretation of Myth”

Adolf Bastian (1826-1905)

Bastian, a physician by training, was one of the first to note the many parallels between myths of different cultures. He posited a dual theory of myth consisting of the “Elementary Thought,” a cognitive-based pattern of myths common to all human beings, and the “People’s Thought,” the subtle variations of those patterns unique to specific cultures. This theory echoes the Hindu concept of myth: the marga (the “universal path” similar to Bastian’s “Elementary Thought”) and the deshi-marga (the particular form of marga unique to a specific time and place).

Leo Frobenius (1873-1938)

A scholar of prehistoric art, Frobenius in 1898 announced his theory of cultural circles (“Kulturkreislehre”), a diffusionist theory that argued that all myths originated from a central “myth-producing” region stretching from West Africa to India. People from these regions, he believed, spread their stories across distances far greater than earlier diffusionists had thought possible—ancient Polynesians, for example, sailing as far as Peru or Hawaiians reaching the western United States.

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939)

A French anthropologist, Lévy-Bruhl advanced the idea that “traditional” or ancient cultures made no distinction between objective history and myth. For them, the two were one and the same. He also proposed the idea of “representations collectives,” the notion that certain mythical motifs were common to all peoples.

Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

Fascinated by the concept of the “civic myth,” Durkheim studied the ways in which societies use myth as a cohesive force as well as a moral persuasion. His theory of the “collective conscious” posited that all humans are hard-wired with certain patterns and archetypes and that different cultures shape these common patterns to fit their specific needs. Durkheim’s theories are considered hugely influential, and they informed the work of both Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell.

Bronislaw Malinowski

Malinowski, a Polish-born anthropologist, studied myth in primitive cultures. His research, much like Lévy-Bruhl’s, demonstrated that early cultures did not view myth as abstract or metaphorical but an integral part of their daily lives, much the way some Christians see Scripture as not allegorical but literal. He also believed, like Frobenius, that myths spread out from a centralized region.

Subsection 4 Summary: “Psychological Theories of Parallelism in Myth”

Pierre Janet (1859-1947)

In 1900, Janet, a contemporary of Freud and Jung, was in the early stages of his psychoanalytic career. At that time, the discipline had identified four specific functions of the unconscious mind:

• The “conservative” function, responsible for personal memory;
• The “dissolutive” function, managing the transition from conscious to unconscious—habits, for example;
• The “creative” function;
• The “mythopoetic” function, which replays those mythic stories and archetypes innate to all humans.

Janet’s approach to understanding the human psyche was to frame it in spiritual terms. In his mind, spirituality and science were not oppositional but complementary. He studied psychic mediums as well as a woman caught in the grip of “religious ecstasy.” He believed her symptoms to be related to the “mythic functions of the mind” (280). He viewed a healthy, functioning mind as balanced between emotion and logic with room enough to accommodate cognitive mythic structures.

In the early stages of human development, rituals become “rigidly fixed” and often “transactional” (performing a sacrifice to get something in return, for example). Over time, myths are constructed around these rituals to make them a permanent part of cultural practice. Inanimate objects—lakes, mountains, the sky—are anthropomorphized. Shamans are a necessary part of this stage as well, creating a bridge between humans and gods. When the gods stop speaking—or when humanity stops listening—myths are lost and become mere history as opposed to a living part of the objective world; or they are supplanted by other myths. Janet saw prayer as an internal dialogue between the self and one’s spirit, an individualistic form of communal ritual.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

The father of modern psychiatry, Freud saw dreams as the gateway to the subconscious and myth as an expression of a culturally “shared dream.” Dreams, he felt, were the mind processing repressed childhood memories, and since all people have childhood memories, parallel mythic structures emerge. Thus, for Freud, myth was less a collective unconscious expression and more individual. Freud used Greek myths in his descriptions of certain psychological conditions: the Oedipus complex or a narcissistic personality. Further, the parallels between Freud and Bachofen’s theories are striking in their details of cultural development—an early period of “infantile sexuality”; the establishment of a matriarchal society (for Freud, the “pre-Oedipal” period of an infant’s attachment to its mother); the “Dionysian period,” in which society reverts to hetaerism (for Freud, the male “phallic period”); the transition to patriarchy (in Freudian psychology, the male child’s shift from sexual attachment to the mother to identification with the father); and finally, repression of the matriarchy, in which its importance is “now available only in the myth” (285). In Freudian terms, this is characterized by the repression of childhood memories.

Bierlein then recounts the Myth of Oedipus as a useful corollary to Freud’s theories.

The Myth of Oedipus

Laius, king of Thebes, and his wife, Jocasta, have no heir; Desperate, Laius seeks the advice of the Oracle at Delphi, which warns him that any heir is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Laius orders Jocasta locked away, never to sleep with him again, but Jocasta wants a child, so she intoxicates Laius and seduces him, ultimately conceiving a son. Fearing the prophecy, Laius pierces the infant’s feet and leaves him on a mountain, alone, to die. However, the gods have ordained that Oedipus will live a long life, so a shepherd rescues the child. Later, he presents the baby to King Polybus and Queen Periboea of Corinth, who, also childless, adopt the baby. When Oedipus realizes that he is not the biological son of Polybus and Periboea, he visits the oracle, which repeats the prophecy. Determined not to harm the king and queen, he leaves Corinth.

On the road on his way out of town, he encounters King Laius, who orders Oedipus to stand aside. Refusing to be intimidated, Oedipus stands his ground. When the king’s chariot charges him, he kills the charioteer with a spear. The horses rear, and Laius is thrown from the chariot, the fall killing him instantly. Oedipus journey on to Thebes only to be confronted by the Sphinx, a monstrous creature who asks him a riddle that has confounded every traveler trying to enter the city. Oedipus solves the riddle, the Sphinx plunges down a gorge in a rage, and Oedipus is hailed as a hero by the citizens and chosen as their new king. Jocasta marries Oedipus, thus fulfilling the prophecy.

Such a crime as patricide and marrying one’s mother, however, could not go unpunished, and the gods beset Thebes with a terrible plague. The oracle tells Oedipus that when the killer of King Laius is found, the plague will end. After months of investigation, the crime remains unsolved until the blind seer, Teiresias, reveals the truth—that Oedipus killed Laius, his father, and married his mother, Jocasta, even conceiving a daughter, Antigone, with her. Oedipus contacts Queen Periboea to verify his own birth. When Teiresias’s revelation is confirmed, Jocasta hangs herself, and Oedipus gouges out his eyes.

Carl Gustav Jung

Trained as a physician and neurologist, Jung became a disciple of Freud, who regarded him as his protégé and heir apparent. The two ultimately parted ways, however, when Jung questioned several of Freud’s ideas, including his theory of the Oedipal complex in infants. He still believed in the importance of dreams, although he saw them as a collective expression of the subconscious rather than an individual one. Jung’s theory of the “collective unconscious”—that every human being carries in their mental blueprint the same unconscious elements that are then manifested in dreams—was influenced by Bastian, Durkheim, and Lévy-Bruhl. Archetypes—recurring symbols or character types—Jung believed were always present in the subconscious (“preexistent forms”), and all humans recognized and responded to them. They provide, he believed, a direct link between the outer world and man’s inner psyche. Jung’s own concept of God was murkier. Raised by a Protestant father, he may have viewed God simply as a spiritual power made evident through the collective lens of the archetype. Jung’s work has continued to resonate, decades after his death. Co-opted by both traditional, organized religions and loosely affiliated spiritualists, his study of the collective unconscious and of archetypes provides scholarly support to the field of spiritual faith deemed by Freud “as a phase to be ‘outgrown’” (295).

Subsection 5 Summary: “A Modern Nonpsychological Approach: Structuralism”

Claude Lévy-Strauss

A third approach to myth—structuralism—emerged in the wake of cultural (Frobenius, Bastian, Lévy-Bruhl, and Durkheim) and psychological (Janet, Freud, Jung) analysis. Lévy-Strauss argued that the key to understanding and codifying human behavior lay in “unravel[ing] the invariant structures of human thinking” (296). Structuralism—owing a debt to the work of Lévy-Bruhl and Durkheim—posits that parallel myths are a result of preexisting “molds” in all human brains, which, like a blank slate, are filled with similar but culturally specific content.

Bierlein breaks down structuralism into three main characteristics:

• A structure is not a “collective cultural function” (297) as theorized by Durkheim but rather a manifestation of the human thought process, a manifestation of which that society or culture is unaware.
• Since all human beings have the same internal hardwiring, parallel myths represent common evocation of those similarities.
• Human beings think in “dialectical terms” (binaries such as good/evil, light/dark), and when encountering unfamiliar or cognitively dissonant myths from one culture, they will mix and match them with those of another until they find the right fit.

Lévy-Strauss compared myths to music, arguing that myths must be read “in totality” rather than piecemeal, much like a musical score. Structuralism also has its share of critics who claim that its theories “rob myth of its ‘truth’” (298), that it is unnecessarily complicated, and that, in the end, it is “dehumanizing,” too cold and sterile, reducing the wonder of myth to the autonomic functions of the brain.

Subsection 6 Summary: “Philosophical Perspectives on Myth”

Paul Ricoeur (1913- )

French Christian philosopher Paul Ricoeur sees myth as the human attempt to reconcile the finite and the infinite, the world we “know” as an objective reality and the world of the divine. The incarnation of Jesus as the son of God, he believes, is the ideal bridge between these two poles. He is also interested in the shift from a “mythos” worldview (one based on a universally accepted truth) to a “logos” worldview (one in which humanity questions its own place in the universe). As humans transitioned from mythos to logos, they lost their sense of place and became “fragile.”

Karl Jaspers (1883-1969)

An influential existential philosopher, Jaspers devoted his studies to the “independent and parallel development of the world’s great religions over a comparatively short period in history” (300). He argued that the beginning of humanity’s logos phase was marked by a transition from polytheism to monotheism. This phase, which he termed the “axial period,” happened in a relatively short time span (about 500 years) and across vast geographical distances: Confucius and Lao-Tse in China; the Buddha and the Upanishads (scriptures) in India; the prophets Elijah and Jeremiah in Palestine; and a host of Greek philosophers and thinkers, from Homer and Plato to Thucydides and Archimedes. All these disparate thinkers advanced the idea of a single, universal God, a transition that “necessitated a transformation of the function of myth” (301). No longer were the gods an anthropomorphized collection of overseers to be bargained with through a series of rituals; the single God was now an object of philosophical and ethical speculation. Jaspers lived long enough to witness the modern scientific revolution, and he saw it as the “modern myth,” an empirical way to explain the natural world, although an incomplete way. Science explains how the world works but not why.

Subsection 7 Summary: “The ‘History of Religions’ School of Myth”

Mircea Eliade (1907-1986)

A Christian, Eliade saw myth as profoundly human, as part of our consciousness, and as a way to imagine a transcendent reality. He distanced himself from the psychological interpretation of myth, seeing it as “a second Fall from grace” (303). Societies, he believed, could only be properly understood through the lens of their “sacred” practices, their institutions, their ethics, and their common history of seeing themselves as part of a divine, transcendent reality. Eliade was a diffusionist, acknowledging Frobenius’s theory of geographical hubs from which all major myths were produced and disseminated.

Subsection 1 Summary: “Modern Questions of Faith”

Christian Myth

The Christian scholar Father Andrew Greeley cites in his book Myths of Religion the Ceylonese art historian and “metaphysician” A. K. Coomaraswamy: “Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words” (305). He also notes that many Christians are uncomfortable with the word myth, especially as it pertains to Jesus. They feel it has the connotation of “legend” or fiction, but Greeley argues that “myth,” used in the historical, scholarly context, is a more apt description of the divinity of Jesus than any other word in the English language.

The notion of a “myth” as a falsehood is a remnant of the 19th century, when the word conjured images of pantheons of gods and goddesses, flying chariots, and hybridized monsters battling ancient heroes. Christians are reluctant to imagine their own faith as similar in any way to these fantastical stories of the past. Yet, Christian myths answer the most basic human questions: Who am I? What is my place in the universe? They seek to answer them in a more profound way than simple empiricism can.

Jewish Myth

Myth, unlike “legend,” transcends the “local,” the empirical fact, and speaks to a larger, metaphorical truth, a truth relevant to all people. The Jewish exodus from Egypt, for example, becomes a metaphor about all people’s struggle to escape from “the bondage of obscurantism” and acknowledges the desperate human need to be seen (306).

Bierlein seeks to dispel the misconceptions many Christians, Jews, and Muslims have about the word “myth” and how it applies to their faith. Rather than suggesting that the various prophets and their teachings are false, “myth” does the opposite. It codifies those teachings as the most profound of truths, truths that answer basic existential questions and serve as moral guideposts. He recounts the story of two women, both Christian, with very different reactions to the study of myth. One woman sees myth as a tool of the devil and refuses to allow any books on mythology in her home, while the other finds her faith validated and even fortified by the truths myths contain. If we acknowledge the existence of God, Bierlein continues, then myths establish man’s indelible part in that divinity.

He then addresses the question of what happens to societies in the absence of myth, and whether the mere knowledge of it can suffice without the embedded, ritualistic practices. He argues that without active participation in these rituals, social cohesion and moral guidance suffer. It’s not enough to simply know that these mythic truths are encoded in our DNA. Without the spark of communal revelation—found most often in religious practices—those truths will lay dormant: “[…W]ithout the ‘benchmark’ of revelation, our religious experience would not be communal, and would be subject to ‘caprice’” (310). When the gods fail to speak, societies will find new myths, new revelations. Following with several theological definitions of myth, Bierlein concludes with Swiss Protestant theologian Karl Barth, who argues that the fundamental purpose of myth is to create an intimate relationship between man and God.

Subsection 2 Summary: “The Demythologization of Judeo-Christian Culture”

Causative and Purposive Thinking

The scientific revolution has removed “accident” and mystery from our understanding of the world and replaced it with a causative approach—that is, every phenomenon must be “reduced” to its cause. Myth provides the “purpose” that the objective observations of science cannot. While science has no doubt improved human life (in some respects), other factors, such as suicide and mental health problems, reflect a lack of a collective purpose. Industrialism has reduced humanity—glorious and purposeful in the mythical context—to cogs in a machine. Myth and science, Bierlein suggests, are not mutually exclusive but simply two different approaches to understanding the natural world. Science relies on the senses, but myth relies on feeling, answering questions that are beyond the range of the senses.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)

A German philosopher and student of history, Hegel posited that all history is linear, advancing forward to a “utopian end,” and that it is an “observable process.” He believed that for every period in history, a “dominant people” drove civilization forward and acted as the gatekeeper of the culture. Traditional cultures saw little value in history-as-observable-phenomenon, rather viewing it as a series of repeating mythical events. Hegel saw history as a predictable equation, thus removing the mystery from it.

The New Hegelians

After Hegel’s death, a group of his followers—influenced by Scottish philosopher David Hume—sought to analyze Christianity rationally. As empiricists, they believed that myth could not be objectively proven and was therefore not a valid part of any “revealed religion.” They began to put forward the controversial idea of a demythologized Jesus, a mortal man stripped of his divinity. Some even argued that the Gospels were fraudulent and that Jesus never existed.

German Form Criticism of the Bible

A group of German biblical scholars—including the “medical missionary” Albert Schweitzer—examined and analyzed the Bible purely as a historical text, viewing its mythical “trappings” as a result of historical circumstances. Schweitzer’s The Quest for the Historical Jesus speculated that Jesus was merely a Jewish preacher and that when his teachings—foretelling the coming of the Kingdom of God—failed to come true, he “died an embittered man” (320).

Positivism and Logical Positivism

The founder of positivism, August Comte (1798-1857), argued that all phenomena could be examined through the lens of science, including human behavior. Comte saw positivism as the third (and final) development in human history, following the “theological” and “philosophical” stages. Science was the ultimate phase in human cognitive development. He even created his own demythologized religion, described as “Catholicism without Christianity” (321). Logical positivism is the 20th-century descendant of Comte’s philosophy, and one of its notable adherents is Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Die Wissenschaft des Judentums: The “Science” of Judaism

Prior to the European Enlightenment—as well as its Jewish counterpart, the “Haskalah”—Judaism was a religion steeped in mythology, but by the 18th century, the forces of scientific rationalism had begun their demythologizing crusade, especially in Germany. “Reform Judaism” took its place alongside Catholicism and Protestantism as a modern, assimilated religion. Reform Jews stopped referring to themselves as a “nation,” and services were held in a “temple” rather than a synagogue. The focus of this demythologizing movement was Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), who founded the Science of Judaism, an attempt to study Jewish history from a communal, sociological perspective without integrating the spiritual. One oppositional voice to this trend was Solomon Schecter (1850-1915), a British Jew who argued that communal practices and spirituality need not be divorced from each other, but that natural science’s insistence on its own version of “truth” was the greatest danger to traditional Judaism.

The Legitimacy of the Supernatural

By the 1960s, 150 years of Hegelian insistence on reason and science had reached their apex. However, by the 1970s and 1980s, renewed interest in mythology and religion illustrated a pushback against that demythologization. The human need for myth, for spirituality, and for a sense of the divine in our mortal world, Bierlein argues, cannot be suppressed or eliminated.