Building Religions 9: More Myth

Building Religions 9: More Myth

When considering the relationship between myth and culture, there is one thought to keep in mind: myths lie. I don't mean this in the basic sense that they describe historically untrue events, although that's certainly accurate. What I mean is that even the idea that they teach some timeless spiritual or psychological truth is deceptive, because myths are no less the products of history than any other human creation.



Myths can express the present conditions of a culture by projecting that present into the mythic past. In other words, they say something about how things are but claiming that they've always been that way, thereby preserving the status quo. In the case of myths with subversive or revolutionary content, the projection into the past serves to strip them of any risk to the present: things may have been different once, the myths say, but that was a long time ago. Even if you write myths that radically oppose the values of the culture that tells them, it's very likely that they will have undergone a similar process of neutralization. What survives is the culture's dominant voice, the one that uses myths to reinforce its own authority.

As cultures change and different authorities rise or fall, their stories change to make sense of their new circumstances. Claude Lévi-Strauss described the mechanism of this change as bricolage, which is (very roughly) the assembly of something new out of readily-available pieces. (The French sounds much better than "macgyverism," which is probably the nearest pop-culture-friendly English translation.) In other words, myths can creatively recombine images that are already familiar to a culture in different ways in order to respond to new situations. When they do, the new form may still bear traces of the older one, even if their purpose is to reject the past interpretation.

For example, there are Gnostic retellings of the Biblical creation myth in which the serpent's goal is to remind Adam and Eve of their forgotten divinity and free them from the illusion of mortal existence. If you were to read the myth alone, without any familiarity with its canonical counterpart, it would still hold together as a story, but if you know both of them, you can see how it's been constructed out of elements of the older one. By looking at the differences, you can start to answer the question of what factors prompted the change, and understand something about the people who created the new myth.

That's not to say that the "original" form of a myth is more authentic, purer, or even more significant. In fact, hunting for original forms is generally a pointless task: stories arise, change, and adapt to history. Each version is appropriate for its time and place, and for the people who tell it. When creating myths, it can be important to imagine their history, but it's more important to think about what questions or concerns a particular telling resolves for the culture that believes in it.