Myth: What Is It?

On a homeschooling forum some of us were discussing C.S. Lewis and myth, and the notion that Genesis 1-11 is a "myth."

From The Mailbag:

I think I need to understand Myth better.

 I think I might be able to help you with that.

A "myth" is a story.

It aims to structure some aspect of experience by giving you a way of imagining  things you otherwise couldn't imagine.

You know, for example,  that a human being has the capability for being both rational and  irrational. Why? Freud cast the problem in terms of the play between  ego, id, and superego. But before Freud, the ancients imagined the same  basic dynamic in terms of the influences of planets that were governed  by spirits or gods. Just as Mars waxed and waned in red brightness in  the night sky, so your aggressive anger might wax and wane. So they  imagined (and truly believed) that Mars, the spirit of the red planet,  exerted an influence on humans and on history.

Similarly, they  saw the gods Apollo and Dionysus as fellow-gods with opposite  temperaments: one was the god of light and reason and music, the other  of wine, carousing, and cacophony. These gods held sway not just in  people but in places where one might perhaps detect (if one were  sensitive to such things) the spirit of the place, a spirit of Dionysus  or Apollo.

Notice that the "phenomenon" is more or less the same: aspects of human nature that are at odds with each other, or appear to  be. But how we understand them after Freud differs from the older  mythology. But all Freud and the Greeks were up to was offering  imaginative "hooks" on which to hang our observations of the world.

So myth basically structures the imagination, which is where you process  your experiences of the world. Something happens to you for good or  evil: you attribute it (using the myth you believe in) to the influences of God or angels, Satan or demons. Or you see your life as a story that you are living out, in which God or gods or nature are waiting  breathlessly to see whether you'll tell a lie or the truth.

Aesop told fables, a "short-form" of mythology. In them he imagines a world of  animals where virtue triumphs over sloth, where cleverness and  judiciousness survive while stupidity and shortsightedness perish.  Nothing he describes "ever happened," and nobody could say that his  moralizing is always true (most often the race actually IS to the  swift!). but the truth of his observations is nevertheless held to be a  desirable truth, one that might be actualized and given greater strength if we make it part of the arbor of our imaginations and let it grow  there.

Tolkien was deeply concerned about the absence of a  coherent mythology for England. He rightly noted that there were lots of stories about the English dating from Beowulf, but not a coherent story that contained the full meaning and purpose of what it meant to be  English, nothing that grasped the imagination and said, "This is who you are." So he wrote one, rooting it at first in an invented language  based on the Germanic and Scandanavian roots of the English language and I think Finnish. First a language, and then a mythology growing out of  it (because once you have a language you need people to speak it, and  you need to have things worth saying that they must say in it).

People  refer to Middle Earth as a "novel" or a "trilogy of novels," but it's no such thing, really. The novel is multi-voiced, polyvocal chanting about giving a voice to some idea or  other, or a few ideas, and incarnating them in characters and their  relations.

The myth is not so easily reduced: it creates a world in the  imagination that you're invited to inhabit. Its aim is not to represent reality but to become real as the audience hears it, has faith in it,  and lives it out.

To believe in it is to inhabit it.

To inhabit it is to grant that it is true.

Comments

[Victoria]

Tolkien. Is. God.

[Victoria]

That is all.