The Absence of Myth

Notes

Notes 1. THE ABSENCE OF MYTH 1. Jung, however, appears far less accepting of this fact. In his Memories, he bemoans the loss of a “cosmologically meaningful” life, which has left us with spiritual poverty and impoverishment. “Knowledge does not enrich us; it removes us more and more from the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth” (252). 2. These are perhaps three overused, clichéd citations, but by no means are expressions of mythlessness reserved for poets and philosophers. It might be worth mentioning that Joseph Campbell, more commonly remembered for stimulating a widespread interest in myth, often referred to mythlessness in his writings. For example : “We live, today, in a terminal moraine of myths and mythic symbols, fragments large and small of traditions that formerly inspired and gave rise to civilizations” (Historical Atlas 8). “What we have today is a demythologized world” (Campbell and Moyers 9). “Today all of these mysteries have lost their force; their symbols no longer interest our psyche” (Hero 390). “The scientific method has released us, intellectually, from the absolutes of the mythological ages; the divine authority of the religiously founded state has been completely dissolved” (“Symbol without Meaning” 191). “For there are no more intact monadic horizons: all are dissolving. And along with them, the psychological hold is weakening of the mythological images and related social rituals by which they were supported” (Inner Reaches of Outer Space 16–17). 225 3. See Theorizing About Myth, The Myth and Ritual Theory, and the six-volume Theories of Myth series among Segal’s publications. 4. William Doty’s Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals provides a most comprehensive overview of myth, covering all major approaches to myth as well as offering extensive resources for further research. Though it is interesting to observe that Doty does not really address an absence of myth as a reality in its own right, which no doubt reflects on the willingness of many myth theorists to engage with this as well. In his book, mythlessness appears primarily in quotation marks, or expressed as the “myth of mythlessness ,” intended to imply that an absence of myth is just another myth. “We cannot escape myth,” Doty writes (454). “[M]ythic paradigms remain fully regulative of the worldview presented, even when the form of the materials may be expressly antitraditional in nature” (417). And yet in his foreword to Loyal Rue’s book, Doty writes, “I suspect few of us who work regularly with public audiences can shirk any longer the necessity of acknowledging the loss of religious/mythic centers in our own audiences’ experiences” (xi). It is this kind of equivocal stance toward myth that complicates the argument for an absence of myth, as I discuss. Nonetheless, such an equivocation necessitates a discernment between differing fundamental notions of myth so as to understand not only how myth is absent, but also to try and get a glimpse into the motivations behind this kind of equivocation. 5. The Hebrew and Christian tradition “possesses what myth never possessed, a moment of exclusion, demanding a choice between the true and the false” (Clémence Ramnoux, “Philosophy and Mythology” 347). 6. Wendy Doniger, after Mircea Eliade, calls Plato the “first great demythologizer” though, as Eliade notes, Xenophanes attempted to “demythicize” myths before Plato (O’Flaherty 26; Eliade, Myth 1). 7. “[T]he purpose of myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real)” (Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth” 229). 8. Doniger: “I am less interested in dictating what myth is (more precisely, what it is not, for definitions are usually exclu226 ��� NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 sivist) than in exploring what myth does” (Implied 1). Lincoln: “I will not attempt to identify the thing myth ‘is’; rather, I hope to elucidate some of the ways this word, concept, and category have been used” (ix). This calls to mind Meike Bal’s statement about mirrors: “Rather than interpreting the mirror as such, [. . .] it seems to make more sense to look not at what mirrors mean but, in a performative conception of semiotics, what they do” (225). Bal is drawing from Richard Rorty, who finds the accurate mirroring of nature to be epistemologically problematic and suggests an alternative approach to philosophy, namely, sustaining an open conversation (see Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature...