aulsmith moves on to mythology

Sometime in the fall I got really tired of reading about World War II and picked another non-fiction category that is crowding my shelves: mythology. I think this is going to last a while, so I'll post some observations here.

My first problem with attacking my mythology books was understanding where they were coming from. My previous exposure to mythology was mostly Edith Hamilton (Mythology) and Bulfinch's Mythology. So I expected books like Fraser's The Golden Bough to be a literary discussion of the slaughtered god myth through many cultures, something along the lines of Roger Loomis's The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol. Fraser's first chapter was daunting and clearly aimed at some other purpose. I got confused and tried Mircea Eliade who was even more confusing.

Time for an overview. I found Robert Segal's Myth: A Very Short Introduction. This was an excellent introduction to most of the books sitting on my shelves. It is now clear to me that there isn't a consistent approach to myth; in fact, there isn't a well-accepted definition of myth. It also helped me clarify what I'm really looking for: an approach to why stories persist and how they change. (This is really related to questions that arise from the World War II material). This is very different from what most of the "big names" in mythology are interested in. Most of them think they already know the answer to that question (though there is little agreement) and they are asking different questions.

Clearly I'm out in left field doing my own thing. I'm not sure where I'll end up, but you're welcome to trek along if you're interested.

The next thing I did after reading the Very Short Introduction was to go back to Shalom L. Goldman's audio course Ancient Near Eastern Mythology. I had stopped listening to this because I was expecting an Edith Hamilton-like introduction to the mythology stories of the Near East, which it isn't. However, I could now appreciate it as an eclectic use of various views of mythology to give a portrait of how the Near Eastern cultures looked at life.

This also led me to a short overview of Biblical archaeology and its relation to the stories in the Bible. What I learned was that there was a paradigm shift in Middle Eastern archaeology in about 1992. At that time, many archaeologists acknowledged, that after about a century of looking, almost nothing had been found from earlier than ca. 700 BC to confirm the stories in the Bible. So most archaeologists after this period agree with George Gershwin "The things that you're liable to read in the Bible, they ain't necessarily so." The most useful book I found on this side issue was The Bible Unearthed by Israel Finkelstein.

Another side interest led me to some interesting insights. I just finished Justin Fox's The Myth of the Rational Market. Here he's using "myth" more in the sense of "a widely held belief that isn't true" than in the sense of a pervasive story that defines a culture. However, he did talk about how the idea of a rational market arose, how economists found it useful, and, most interestingly, how they passed it on to business schools, where the limitations of the idea, which were pretty well understood by economists, got lost.

I can see where wanting things to be simple and so losing track of ideas that originally limited the scope of a story may play a very important role in the development of a mythology, both in terms of simplifying a story to its psychological essence and also in bringing people together into a group that can believe in a clearly nonsensical idea (like getting rid of Jews will solve Nazi Germany's problems)

Today I finished Owen Davies Paganism: A Very Short Introduction. Here's what I garnered from this book:

1. There is almost no extant evidence for the pagan practices of Northern Europe except what's in the Eddas and in Tacitus. So I can stop looking for the magic book that will explain German and Celtic mythology.

2. A lot of what we think we know about pre-Christian pagan practices in Europe was made up in the 19th and early 20th century, so it's a mythology about mythology. I'd already read Hutton's Triumph of the Moon so this wasn't a complete surprise, but the fact that I was still looking for a "good" book on the Celts means I hadn't really understood the depths of our historical ignorance. Still, it's always enlightening to find out what people believe is true, even if it's not.

3. The Nazis weren't really pagans but nominal Protestants ... hmm, I'll need some more on that one.

4. Made up stuff about the long ago past is very useful in giving a people a reason to think that they have things in common. It was used extensively in Central and Eastern Europe to form national identities from parts of the Austro-Hungarian and Turkish empires. It can have a reasonable outcome (Lithuania and Latvia) or a very negative one (Serbia and Bosnia-Hertzogovena).

I next visited Jungian archetypes, which was generally unhelpful. Jungians feel that while an understanding of mythology is helpful in dream interpretation, the analyst is really working on getting the patient to construct their own mythology to help themselves out of their predicament. Man and His Symbols. This led to a large detour into recovered memory "therapy" where the analyst supplied the mythology of child abuse and actually made patients worse Making Monsters and a bunch of books on gurus and deluded religious fanatics, one of which I'm still reading Feet of Clay.

However, today's book The Celts: A Very Short Introduction got me back to mythology. While this books does take a short glance at The Tain as an introduction to Celtic literature, it's more concerned with what is in fact that different mythologies about the Celts over the centuries, starting with the views of the Ancient Mediterranean peoples and ending up with the Celtic revivals of today. He also discusses various archaeological remnants of what might be termed prehistoric Celtic life.

It was in the archaeological section that I found the most interesting information, which was that the people who lived in Western Europe in prehistoric times had a long period during which they threw pieces of armaments into bogs and lakes, presumably as some kind of ritual, now lost. This, of course, brought to mind the anarchist rant from Monty Python and the Holy Grail about aquatic females handing out swords not being a good basis for government. Still, I was very interested to find such an ancient connection to Arthurian myths.

Hi aulsmith,

Are you still reading mythology? It's a topic I'm very interested in as well and it would be great to compare notes and book suggestions. I'm currently in a Buddhist Studies class and just read some of The Jatakas: Birth Stories of the Bodhisatta and Buddhacarita for class.

Librattyteen,

Thanks for stopping by.

In the time since my last post I've read part of Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained, who says that trying to come up with universal tale types misses the whole point of how we make up religious stories. One of the things I was trying to do was come to some understanding of what the content of a good myth would be. But now I'm questioning that goal.

I also read Henry Adams' Mont St. Michel and Chartres, which, while purporting to be about architecture, is really a very wide-ranging look at the thought system of the 12th century in Europe, including their mythology. He includes big sections of Roland and the Arthurian romances in the book. This got me interested in those stories again, but now I'm wondering if I want to spend time reading different translations of stories I know really well, instead of reading new stories.

I've also just finished Explaining Hitler, which like the Myth of the Rational Market, is about how we construct simplified realities (which seem to me to be related to myths somehow) out of complex data.

So I'm still interested, but I'm not sure how I want to move forward.

Looks like you're currently doing the mythologies of big religions. I've dabbled in that but I'm usually quite content with the summary rather than reading the originals. Sometimes I can't even get through the summary. A couple of years ago I started the Ramayana section of Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists and just could not plow through it. If you're going to be posting stuff about your Buddhist reading somewhere, let me know and I'll try to drop by.

That's the problem with myth - it's such a broad category! I am hoping to get into Joseph Campbell when I get home, even though I know many scholars don't take him seriously.

The link to my reading journal at Club Read is on my profile page. :) I'm starring this so please keep posting!

Looks like you're currently doing the mythologies of big religions. I've dabbled in that but I'm usually quite content with the summary rather than reading the originals. Sometimes I can't even get through the summary.

Allow me to most heartily recommend Ramayana: Divine Loophole, a brief and wonderfully illustrated synopsis of the tale by Sanjay Patel (a Pixar animator). It's a Cliffs Notes, but a very pretty one. (When I read it, I'd already read a more conventional translation of the full story, so I don't know how good it would be for someone who doesn't know the story, but it's so attractive that I have to recommend it anyway.)

9: Thanks! I'll check it out. I was able to get the basic story out of the Coomaraswamy, so this will probably do just fine.