The Modern Construction of Myth

4 Myth as an Aspect of “Primitive” Religion

[ 4 ] Myth as an Aspect of “Primitive” Religion Although the romantic or transcendentalist conception of myth dominates the first half of the nineteenth century and endures in belletristic and religious circles to this day, it loses its cultural hegemony in the latter part of the century to its anthropological or folkloristic counterpart. This may be described provisionally as the conception of myth as a kind of narrative that others, ancient or “primitive,” remote in time or in space, have regarded as sacred. Where practitioners of the transcendental version exalt the power of the contemporary imaginist to create or re-create myth, folkloristic theorists assume either that Western modernity has outgrown myth or else that what myth may have become in the modern world is no proper concern of theirs. This conception of myth bears some obvious marks of its descent from eighteenth -century attitudes toward “fable” before the term’s romantic transformation. Where the romantic construction is primarily the work of philosophers and poets in rebellion against Enlightenment rationalism, the folkloristic version is primarily that of students of archaeology, law, history, sociology, psychology, and anthropology proper—thinkers who accept in principle the Enlightenment aspiration toward the empirical investigation of civil institutions. But even though the new theorists descend in certain respects from Enlightenment traditions of social thought, their speculations about “myth” are also characterized by a striking discontinuity from it. This discontinuity is, in the first place, quite literally chronological. With the 78 The Modern Construction of Myth exceptions of Comte (discussed briefly below) and the anti-romantic line from Hegel to Marx traced in the preceding chapter, no important non-romantic theory appears between Dupuis’s Origin of All Cults in 1795 and Tylor’s Primitive Culture in 1871. And this temporal hiatus harbors a congeries of intellectual and cultural shifts quite sufficient to guarantee that any return to Enlightenment values in mythography will be return with a difference. One of these shifts stems from the romantic movement itself. Even while nineteenth-century practitioners of the human sciences remain indifferent to the transcendental claims of romantic individualism, they adopt virtually without remark the earlier view of myth as Vichian key, that is, as the repository of a culture’s social values. When this successful romantic transvaluation of story combines with historical relativism and with the new expansion of the temporal scale of human development, the result is the launching of intensive ethnological investigations of the sacred stories of “primitive” societies.1 In recent years a number of valuable studies have foregrounded the ideological bent of this new ethnology.2 Most of its ideological aspects are not the direct business of this study, but there is one large exception; namely, the outbreak among “armchair” anthropologists of theorizing about “primitive” religion. The extent of this obsession gives rise to the suspicion that, behind the shift to empirical modes of argumentation, the appeal of “primitive” religion is motivated by the same anxieties that produced the romantic invention of myth. In any case, to conceive of myth as sacred story is inevitably to link it closely to religion. Hence it isn’t surprising that beginning with Comte, myth in its anthropological sense is widely perceived as a subordinate feature of the religion of exotic societies. Why and how myth is regarded as a subset of religion remains to be specified in particular cases, but the fact of their close connections requires a certain amount of attention in the chapter that follows to theories of “primitive” religion as well as myth. My roughly chronological account of these theories also turns up a curious small-scale repetition of Enlightenment thinking followed by romantic reaction. The initial cognitive theories of Auguste Comte, E. B. Tylor, and Herbert Spencer gradually reveal their dark undersides and give way to the emotive theories of Robertson Smith and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl that stimulate, if they do not express, a second wave of romanticism. Even the ideas of two of the most influential thinkers in this sequence, J. G. Frazer and Émile Durkheim, both self-professed paladins of Enlightenment, are so bent by the force field of the emotive theories fashionable by the turn of the century that they are turned, in specific instances, against their originators’ rationalism. The chapter concludes with an account of the rise of the first so-called “myth and ritual” school out of Nietzsche, Frazer, and (surprisingly perhaps) Durkheim. It begins, however, with the anomalous and amphibious theory of F. Max Müller. Some of...