Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

MYTH

A story or narrative that conveys the fundamental structure of knowledge upon which the ideologies and customs of a particular culture rest. Though myth is frequently invested with elements of the fantastic, and generally associated with religious and ritual practice, scholarship has clearly extended its understanding of myth (from Gk. mýthos) beyond earlier associations with noble savages and primitive mentalities. Notwithstanding its customary fictional character, consensus proposes that the power of myth lies in its capacity to construct worldviews wherein origins, identities, and behaviors are established and legitimated. Thus, analogous to its many and diverse religious expressions, myth simultaneously embraces the numerous post-Enlightenment formations of the sciences, social sciences, and humanities clearly affiliated with our endeavor to define a person, family, or culture.

“Mythology” designates a body of myths associated with particular cultures. The term concurrently refers to a designated academic field concerned with the study of myth and mythologies: history of religions and comparative religions, biblical studies, linguistics, cultural anthropology, sociology, psychoanalysis, classics, literature and literary theory.

In addition to cultural identification, ethnological and literary sensibilities suggest comparative analyses and the classification of myths according to principal themes. Customary categories include cosmology (myths about the origins of the universe, the gods, and humanity; e.g., creation stories, flood stories, and stories about the fall of mankind); myths about the afterlife and apocalypse (e.g., Homer’s description of the land of the dead in the Odyssey, or the end of the Age of Kali in Hindu scripture); myths about dying and rising gods (e.g., Osiris, Dionysus, and Christ); myths about the Goddess or Great Mother (e.g., Mesopotamian Inanna-Ishtar and Greek Demeter); myths about heroes and heroic quests (e.g., Gilgamesh, Moses, Odysseus, Aeneas, Buddha, Parcival, and Hiawatha); and myths about important places and objects (e.g., Mt. Sinai, Delphi, Golgotha, and Mohammed’s Cave).

Reflection on the meaning of myth occurs as early as the 6th century b.c.e. in the philosophical work of Thales of Miletus, followed 200 years later in the work of the 4th-century Greek mythographer Euhemerus, and subsequently addressed in the early 2nd century c.e. by the Neoplatonic and Christian allegorists. However, the systematic collection and analysis of myth does not emerge until the period of the Enlightenment in the second half of the 18th century when hundreds of travel narratives began flowing into Europe detailing bizarre rituals and mythologies from around the world. These materials furnished data for comparative analyses between the new-found mythologies and the well-known and textually-based stories of the Hebrews, Greeks, and Romans, thereby facilitating the systematic study of mythology. Early studies focused upon the language of myth in association with supposed primitive mentalities, proposing that its linguistic attributes reflect graphic instances of primal irrationality. Scholars were reluctant to identify such privileged myths as the Hebraic and Greco-Roman mythologies with the language of irrationality. In the context of literary studies, the Romantic movement sought to displace this disquieting association, suggesting that myth signals a primeval and poetic language fundamental to humanity and its organic development. Cultural anthropology likewise addressed such difficulties. Anthropologists such as Sir James Frazer, E. B. Tylor, Franz Boas, Emile Durkheim, and Bronislaw Malinowski generally proposed that primitive mythology mirrors the fundamental elements of modern civilization, and that its proper comparative study should assist in the development of our own contemporary understanding of humanity’s cultural and social formations. These observations were also welcomed and studied by such classicists as Gilbert Murray, Jane Harrison, A. B. Cook, and F. M. Cornford, and similarly engaged by such historians of religion as Franz Cumont and Rudolf Otto. Moreover, the trajectory finds its way into the studies of modern psychology where analysis turns more directly to the constitution of the human psyche. Both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung recognized motifs and patterns essential to the mythic and subconscious worlds: Freud’s “Oedipus complex” and “Elektra complex,” Jung’s “archetypes” and “collective unconscious.” In the field of cultural anthropology, Claude Lévi-Strauss continues the anthropological study of mythology, introducing the important structuralist component to the analysis of myth, while Joseph Campbell’s highly popular theories on the relationship between mythology and universal archetypes carry forward the psychoanalytic perspectives of Jung. In the field of the history of religions, the analysis of mythology is advanced in Mircea Eliade’s work on mythic and existential time, while studies in literature and literary theory maintain a focus upon the poetic nature of mythic language exemplified in such diverse critical perspectives as Northrop Frye’s formalism and Roland Barthes’ structuralism/poststructuralism.

Congruent to the influx of foreign mythologies into late-18th-century Europe, exploration also recovered ancient Egyptian and Babylonian artifacts that shortly thereafter generated the decipherment of hieroglyphics and cuneiform writings. A new library of Near Eastern antiquity emerged, and scholars discovered discomforting similarities between the stories of these pagan religions and the sacred texts of Judeo-Christianity. Until this time, scholarship resisted any comparison that might compromise the privileged position of these sanctioned texts, but German scholarship, in particular, moved forward in the application of its higher criticism. In the wake of Johann Salomo Semler’s (1725-1791) contested distinction between dogma (theology or the teachings of the Church) and religion (historical experience), J. G. Eichhorn (1752-1827) drew attention to similarities between the creation and flood stories in classical and biblical narrative, using the word “myth” for the first time to describe them. These stories were not records of actual happenings, but the expressions of a religious and pre-scientific consciousness. Although “myth” became one of the most contentious of higher critical terms, biblical scholarship continued to use the comparative study of mythology as a means to elucidate its understanding of biblical history. Nowhere was this more in evidence than in the work of David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874), whose demonstration of early Christian myth in Das Leben Jesu generated a new era of scholarship focused upon the issue of mythology and Christian history. Despite many attempts to delimit if not erase the proximity of the mythological to the Christian gospel, success was not forthcoming; it became evident that the perception which Christianity shared with the rest of the 1st-century Mediterranean world was a perception fastened to the mythological. Efforts then focused upon the act of interpretation as a means to address the truth of Christianity’s mythic quality, culminating early in the 20th century with the introduction of demythology by the German NT scholar Rudolf Bultmann. These analyses sought not to eliminate the mythological but to recast its message in the language of Heideggerian existentialism, a hermeneutical procedure whereby the essential substance (Sache) of the early Christian proclamation (kḗrygma) was divested of its mythological element and invested with the language of postenlightenment sensibilities, thereby preserving the essence of the Christian gospel.

Although subsequent studies have not appreciably advanced our understanding of the relationship between Judeo-Christian literature and the language of myth, there is renewed effort to reassess demythology’s narrow understanding of myth, and to address the issue of Christian origins in view of contemporary cultural anthropological observations and postmodernist theories of language and literature.

Bibliography. R. Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York, 1958); M. Detienne, The Creation of Mythology (Chicago, 1986); M. Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York, 1963); T. Gaster, Myth, Legend and Custom in the Old Testament (1969, repr. Gloucester, 1981); G. S. Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Function in Ancient and Other Cultures (Berkeley, 1970); I. Strenski, Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History: Cassirer, Eliade, Lévi-Strauss and Malinowski (Iowa City, 1987); J.-P. Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece (New York, 1990).

Michael L. Humphries

Prayer Tents Bible References - Prayer Tents

MYTH

Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible (2000)