Chapter 10

Myth

Introduction

The term “myth” has a variety of meanings, both in common parlance and
within academia. In everyday speech the term is often used pejoratively to
refer to a common but erroneously held belief. For a classicist, myth denotes
the stories of the Greek or Roman gods, of the Celts or of other ancient
peoples. In anthropology and in folklore (ethnology) the focus is often on the
stories of origin in an oral culture (cosmological and cosmogonic myths), 1
and the tales that indigenous peoples tell one another to describe and explain
the social, natural, and supernatural order. In sociology and cultural studies,
as well as in anthropology, the term myth is also used for the ahistorical
stories that are used to validate power relationships, which make the social
appear natural and pre-existent. Historians are interested in the process by
which historical events become imbued with symbolic significance so as to
heighten the emotional impact of the story at the expense of verifiable facts.
Within psychoanalysis and analytical psychology it is the symbolic rather
than the historical aspects of myth that are emphasized. Myths are seen to
exist before and beyond history, absorbing historical experience into a lan
guage of signs and archetypes, reappearing in dreams and in art as well as in
oral and written narratives. Linguists might focus on the structure rather than
the content of a myth, noting the limited number of narrative forms that are
endlessly recycled. Folklorists deconstruct myths into their constitutive elem
ents or motifs, which are numbered and indexed, and look at the ways in
which they are arranged and rearranged. Theologians and historians of
religion study sacred texts and are concerned with the ways in which people
pass on their moral and legal codes, cultural values, and historical experience
through these stories, although the notion that any element of a sacred text is
mythical rather than historical is seen as offensive and rejected by some
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believers. These sketches are oversimplified, and the disciplinary boundaries

seldom tightly drawn, but they serve to give an idea of the range of meanings
and approaches that can be adopted by those who study myth.
While many disciplines use the terms myth, folklore, fairy tale, and legend
more or less interchangeably, folklorists and mythographers seek to differenti
ate these terms.2 The overall category folklore is subdivided into myth, legend,
and folk or fairy tale. The term myth is reserved for sacred narratives explaining
the origin of the world and human beings. Legends are narratives that are held to
be true, but unlike myths are set in the post-creation era. Folk tales or fairy tales,
on the other hand, are understood to be fictional, and are often introduced with
formulae such as “Once upon a time.”3 When studying myths, the reader
therefore needs to be aware that the ways the term is being used may vary
from one text and one scholar to another. My approach in this chapter is to take
a broad rather than a narrow view of myth, and look to folktales, urban legends,
and family histories, as well as stories of origin, where these can help to deepen
our understanding of the place of myth in human society.

mythos (plural mythoi), a collection of myths.

motif, a type of myth or narrative element within a myth.
Motif-Index, a six-volume work (Thompson, [1932-6] 1955-8), employing
letter categories for different types of myth (e.g., A - mythological motifs;
A710 - creation of the sun, A740 - creation of the moon). Still widely used by
folklorists and mythologists.

Given this wide variety of usage it is difficult to suggest a single definition

of myth that can encompass all these perspectives. Robert Segal, in his
admirably clear and concise book Myth: A Very Short Introduction (2004),
divides approaches to myth into questions of origin, function, and subject
matter, with a loose definition based on the assumption that the myth is first
and foremost a story. It can take place in the past, present, or future, and its
main protagonists must be personalities - divine, human, or animal - rather
than abstract forces, such as Plato’s notion of the Good. These personalities
can be either the object or agent of actions. In terms of function, a myth must
accomplish something significant for its adherents, and whether considered
true or false, it is held to tenaciously by its supporters (Segal, 2004, pp. 3-6).
Although rather minimalist, in that most scholars of myth would wish to
add, subtract, or emphasize different elements, Segal’s definition has the
merit of setting out a lowest common denominator, which might be summed
up in the following sentence:
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A myth is (1) a story, (2) whose main protagonists are personalities, (3) which
accomplishes something significant for its adherents, (4) who hold to the myth
tenaciously.

Myth and Ritual

A nineteenth-century debate, that still has resonances in the contemporary

study of myth, was between those who held to the primacy of myth in the
development of religion and those who thought that ritual was more import
ant. Opinions regarding the exact relationship between these three terms
(religion, myth, and ritual) varied, but there was often little acknowledge
ment of their culturally constructed nature, so that the ideological underpin
nings of their use were not fully acknowledged.
To oversimplify once more for the sake of clarity, and to adopt Levi-Strauss’s
language of binary oppositions, there was a divide between Idealism and
Pragmatism, the German Romantic Idealism expounded by Johann Jakob
Bachofen (1815-87) and Max Muller on the one hand, and the French liberal
secularism of the Durkheimians on the other. The religion of the Vedas and
Indo-European myths were favored by the “myth school,” who opposed them to
the supposed ritualism of the Hebrew Bible and Semitic religions. 4 They gave
priority to myth in the study of religion and associated mythology with the
mind, abstracted from particular social forms and studied largely through texts.
The “ritual school” on the other hand saw ritual as the primary expression of
religion, temporally and methodologically. They favored performed, external
forms of religion that could be studied empirically in contemporary societies
over narratives that could be disassociated from their original context.

Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900), an Orientalist and follower of the German

Romantic movement. Max Muller’s father was the celebrated Romantic poet
Wilhelm Muller, whose verses were set to music by Schubert in some of his best
known Heder. Max Muller studied Sanskrit and his work on Sanskrit linguistics
remains a standard text. He became fascinated by the Vedas, the ancient texts of
Indian Brahmanical culture, seeing them as at least equal, if not superior, to the
Hebrew Scriptures. Based on philological evidence, Muller became convinced that
Classical and Northern European cultures were much more closely related to the
ancient Indic civilizations than to the Semitic cultures of the Near East, and was the
first to use the term Aryan to describe this cultural and linguistic affinity, although
disavowing the racial overtones the term later acquired. Muller taught at the
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University of Oxford in England from 1851 to 1875. In 1868 he become Oxford’s

first Professor of Comparative Theology, although his own religious impulse was
towards pantheistic paganism rather than Christianity. Muller distinguished be
tween “religion-as-such” and the various historical forms taken by religions, the
former representing the “true” philosophical root of all religions. Vedic religion was
seen as closest to this source of natural religion, and in it myth was thought to play a
central role. Belief in the centrality of myth led to a downplaying of the value of
ritual.

William Robertson Smith (1843-94), a Scottish philologist and scholar of reli

gion, best known for his classic work Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889),
and his editorship of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Smith lost a teaching position at
the Church of Scotland Aberdeen Free Church College for querying the literal
truth of the Bible. He subsequently became Professor of Arabic at Cambridge
University in England. Smith remained true to his Protestant roots, viewing the
personal moral, unmediated approach to God advocated by Calvin as the truest
form of religion. Ritualistic “primitive” religions were at a lower point on the
evolutionary scale, but nevertheless, the study of ritual was seen as essential if one
was to apprehend such religions. Myth was seen as an “explanation of religion,”
the core of which was comprised of ritual performance, although myths were
capable of taking on an independent existence. The earliest religions were thought
to have been ritualistic, myths developing at a later stage in human history.
Judaism had reached a stage in which myth and ritual combined, but was still
relatively primitive, whereas Christianity, and especially Protestantism, were seen
as anti-ritualistic and therefore more highly developed.

Sylvain Levi (1863-1935), a French Orientalist, particularly noted for his dic
tionary of Buddhism and his opposition to the Idealist school of myth associated
with Max Muller. As an observant Jew, Levi was sensitive to the implicit anti-
Semitism in the Aryanist elevation of the Vedas and devaluation of the Hebrew
Scriptures. He reacted by asserting the centrality and power of ritual in religion.
From 1889 to 1894 he taught in Paris at the Sorbonne, and in 1894 was appointed
Professor of Sanskrit at the College de France. He is probably best known among
Sanskritists and scholars of Hinduism today for his 1898 treatise entitled La
Doctrine du Sacrifice darts les Brahmanas. One of Levi’s pupils was Marcel Mauss,
a member of the new Durkheimian school of sociology, which favored the study
of ritual over myth, as ritual represented a form of religion that embodied human
relations, which could be studied empirically, rather than one based primarily
upon ideas, approached primarily through the study of texts.
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For Muller, who held to the idea of an idealized early form of religion that
was non-mythic and non-ritualistic, both myth and ritual were degenerate, if
necessary, forms of religion. Myth might be more central to religion than ritual,
but even so was no more than a “disease of language,” a dark shadow that
language throws on thought. 5 For Smith, on the other hand, ritual, and
subsequently myth, might be primitive, but contained within them the
seeds of later, more developed and interior religion. If Muller and Smith shared
an evolutionary perspective, others put religion’s golden age in the past. For the
Protestant founders of religious studies in France, the continued performance
of ritual was a sure sign that religion had fallen into “superstition” and was in a
state of decline. Mircea Eliade also saw contemporary religion as debased, but
for precisely the opposite reason, contending that “modern man” pays insuffi
cient attention to ritual and myth, leading to spiritual impoverishment.

Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). A Romanian by birth, Eliade held a chair in the

History of Religions at the University of Chicago from 1957 until his retirement in
1970. Eliade is best known for his works on yoga, shamanism, and Eastern
religions. He is associated with the Traditionalist School, founded by the French
metaphysician Rene Guenon, also known as Perennialism or Essentialism, as its
teachings are held to be timeless and universal. The key notion of the school is
that all authentic religions derive from a single primordial tradition, and that
contrary to the modernist idea of progress, the world is in a cycle of spiritual and
intellectual decline. When looking at the religious traditions of the world, there
fore, Eliade is concerned to discern their original pure form, and to distinguish this
from their current debased state.

The view that the links between myth and ritual are not always apparent in
modern religious rituals is shared by Amy Simes, who (following Eliade),
makes the point that “myths are restricted to either being read out as scriptural
stories, or portrayed pictorially in iconographic form in sacred buildings and
areas. In other words, the re-enactment of myths tends to be non-participatory.
The dramatic re-enactment of myths is much less common” (Simes, 2001,
p. 224).6 An exception to this is contemporary Paganism, in which “partici
pation in mythical re-enactment is almost essential” (ibid.). Although modern
Paganism exists in a variety of forms, most are in essence nature religions,
central to which is the celebration of the eight seasonal festivals that divide
the year into midsummer and midwinter, the spring and autumn equinoxes,
and intervening quarter days. Marking the passage of the seasons and the
development of an awareness of nature and its cycles is often enhanced by
celebrating these rituals out of doors. The “deeper meaning” of these Sabbats is
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expounded through myths, sometimes read out but more often acted out by all
those present. The choice of myth may be eclectic, drawing freely on classical,
Celtic, and Northern traditions, perhaps mixed with some elements of Native
American or of other “indigenous” mythologies. Some figures with long roots
in British culture, such as “the Green Man,” may also be identified with
classical figures, such as the Greek god Pan.
Although modern Pagans are aware of their own creative processes in
their use of myth and in their rituals, and tend to avoid the language of
authenticity and tradition, they also note that similar forms of celebration
are widespread historically and cross-culturally, and seem to arise naturally
from the nature of the celebration. It is hardly surprising that Spring festivals
in the Northern Hemisphere, for instance, contain elements such as a
chase and symbols of fertility such as a broom, and are generally light-hearted
and gay in character. Simes contends that within contemporary Western
Paganism, religion could not exist without the performance of ritual. The
myths are clearly “borrowed,” and although respected are not revered.
Their truths are symbolic, and their task is to enhance communal ritual
celebrations.

Malinowski and the Function of Myth

Bronislaw Malinowski (see chapter 4) made an important contribution to the

anthropological study of myth, and in many ways his theories mediate
between the various positions outlined in this chapter. He regarded myth
as ultimately false, even if essential to the study of religion. Although his
belief in the centrality of myth in human society links him to the “myth
school” associated with the Romanticism of Max Muller and the later work of
Joseph Campbell, at the same time the method for the study of myth
Malinowski outlined was embodied and pragmatic. To this extent his work
aligns him with the Durkheimians and the work of Marxist-oriented anthro
pologists such as Maurice Bloch, who wish to study the effects of ritual on
social and political life. Malinowski read Freud as a young man, and thought
of himself as a Freudian, but he sought to correct the Eurocentric bias of
Freudian theory and to challenge its claims to universality (in detail if not in
principle) based on his observations of non-Western cultures. In his attempt
to see myths through the lens of individual psychological motivations, albeit
with a social, collective dimension, Malinowski finds kinship with the work
of J un g, Eliade, and Campbell. Like Mary Douglas, and most of the anthro
pological work on myth stemming from the British structural functionalist
school, Malinowski insists on the importance of context in interpreting a
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myth. It is not enough to take abstract themes and look for human universals -
the imperative of biology is worked out in a social context; in other words,
although the origin of myths lie in our universal biology, we experience and
elaborate them in a particular social, historical context. To use linguistic
(Levi-Straussian) terminology, we need to study myth as parole,or observable
acts, rather than as langue, the abstract notion of a pre-existent language. 7

Malinowski’s theories of myth derive primarily from his detailed knowledge of the
Trobriand Islands off the East Coast of Papua New Guinea, where he lived in
1915-16 and 1917-18. He observed the close relationship between myths and
magic for the Trobrianders, for whom magic was an everyday necessity, accom
panying all practical activities. Malinowski is perhaps best known, in relation to
the study of myth, for viewing myth as a “charter for the present.” He outlined his
position in a talk given in Liverpool in honor of Sir James Frazer in 1925,
subsequently published as “Myth in Primitive Psychology.”8
There is no important magic, no ceremony, no ritual without belief; and the belief is spun
out into accounts of concrete precedent. The union is very intimate, for myth is not only
looked upon as a commentary of additional information, but it is a warrant, a charter, and
often even a practical guide to the activities with which it is connected. On the other
hand the rituals, ceremonies, and social organization contain at times direct references to
myth, and they are regarded as the results of mythical event. The cultural fact is a
monument in which the myth is embodied; while the myth is believed to be the real
cause which has brought about the moral rule, the social grouping, the rite, or the custom.
Thus these stories form an integral part of culture. Their existence and influence not
merely transcend the act of telling the narrative, not only do they draw their substance
from life and its interests - they govern and control many cultural features, they form the
dogmatic backbone of primitive civilization. (Strenski, 1992, p. 87)

Malinowski criticizes the view of myth on the one hand as primarily

symbolic, and on the other as historical explanation, and dismisses the notion
that it is merely a false reading of history. He makes it clear that myths serve
a similar function in so-called civilized and primitive societies, stating:

Myth as it exists in a savage community, that is, in its living primitive form, is not
merely a story told but a reality lived. It is not of the nature of fiction, such as we
read today in a novel, but it is a living reality, believed to have once happened in
primeval times, and continuing ever since to influence the world and human
destinies. This myth is to the savage what, to a fully believing Christian, is the
Biblical story of Creation, of the Fall, of the Redemption by Christ’s Sacrifice on
the Cross. As our sacred story lives in our ritual, in our morality, as it governs our
faith and controls our conduct, even so does his myth for the savage.9
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As a pragmatist, Malinowski looked to our experience as embodied human

beings as the source of our cultural life, including myths. Societies need
myths to codify, express, and enhance their social life. Myths that focus on
social themes encode morality and provide practical rules for the perform
ance of ritual and of technical aspects of life, whether it be building a canoe,
planting a garden, or deciding who to marry and who to avoid. Myths about
the physical world, on the other hand, help reconcile human beings to their
natural state. Malinowski accepted from Freud that myths operate below the
level of consciousness, arising from our deepest drives and impulses. The most
compelling of these instincts, according to Malinowski, is fear of death. For a
functionalist it is less important to look at what myths say than at what they
do - their function in society - and myths about the spirit world, the afterlife,
and communication with deities, whether they are “true” or not (and Mal
inowski thought not), prevent society from descending into chaos. 1 0

Myth and marriage in a matrilineal society

As an illustration of Malinowski’s insistence on the importance of context
to the study of myth we will look at his essay “Obscenity and Myth,”
first published in Sex and Repression in Savage Society (1927).11 In his discus
sion of matrilineal Trobriand society, Malinowski upholds Freud’s insight
into the close connection between dreams, the unconscious, myths, and
sexual obsessions, but rejects Freud’s claims for the universality of the Oedi
pus complex (see chapter 6). In a patriarchal society a boy might dream
of having sex with his mother and of killing his father - a figure of power
who might castrate him for competing for the mother’s attention. In a
matrilineal society, such as the Trobriands, however, it is the maternal
uncle and not the father who is the figure of power, and the sister rather
than the mother who is the forbidden object of desire. The patricidal
elements of the Oedipus complex are absent in Trobriand myths, and it is
the maternal uncle who appears in legendary cycles as the dangerous villain
and oppressive foe.
Every Trobriand sub-clan has its own myths of origin. None feature a man.
The ancestral figure is always a woman, sometimes alone, sometimes accom
panied by a brother or totemic animal. 12 In most matrilineal societies, where
descent is traced through women, physical paternity is less important than
the maternal line. In Trobriand myths, as in social life, the husband plays
little or no part in producing descendants, and it is a man’s sister’s children
who are his direct kin in terms of authority and descent. In Trobriand myths
this social reality is reflected and finds its justification. The ancestral woman
is “opened” by a fish while bathing or by water dripping from a stalactite
MYTH 275

while resting in a cave, and she gives birth to the first clan members without
the intervention of a husband or male consort.
Within the Trobriand matrilineal complex a man should pass on his
knowledge of magic to his nephew or his younger brother, often for a not
inconsiderable payment. He has a duty to protect them, but often does so
unwillingly. The relationship between a maternal uncle and his nephews is
invariably strained, and there is competition between brothers. Fathers, on
the other hand, have no obligation to pass on their magic to their sons, but
often do so willingly and without payment. In a fratricidal Trobriand myth
these tensions are clearly expressed. A hero figure possesses the most powerful
magic in the community. He can construct a canoe so that it can fly, bringing
him great success in the all-important trading expeditions. He also possesses
the most powerful garden magic, so that his garden alone survives a drought.
The other men in the community become jealous and encourage a younger
brother (or the maternal nephew), who also possesses the magic, to kill the
hero. Unfortunately the younger brother discovers that he possesses only part
of the magic, and the ability to make a canoe fly is lost forever. As Mal
inowski comments, there is a correspondence between the myth and the
social experience of living in a matrilineal society:

Thus in real life, as well as in myth, we see that the situation corresponds to a
complex, to a repressed sentiment, and it is at cross variance with tribal law and
conventional tribal ideals. According to law and morals, two brothers, or a
maternal uncle and his nephew are friends, allies, and have all feelings and
interests in common. In real life to a certain degree and quite openly in myth,
they are enemies, cheat each other, murder each other, and suspicion and
hostility obtain rather than love and union. 1 ’

Many anthropologists have been concerned not just with the ways in
which myths reflect the tensions that exist within society, but have examined
what myth does, following Malinowski’s pragmatic, functional program for
the study of myth in observable actions and social relations. One example of
the role of myth in enabling and justifying social change is that of the Bori
cult in northern Nigeria, to which we now turn.

The Power of Myth

There is a line of argument which states that preliterate societies have myth,
but that literate societies have science and history. A variant of this argu
ment holds that all societies think mythically but that in post-Enlightenment
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societies history has almost replaced myth as a source of authority in thinking

about our past, and secular ideologies have trumped religion. Myths become
simply (untrue) stories or ways of thinking symbolically about our place in
the world. For Sir James Frazer, author of The Golden Bough,14 the myth of the
death and regeneration of the king is a primitive way of understanding both
natural cycles and political life. Religion, and the myths which form part of
it, are false, but they provided an explanation and instructions for our
ancestors and “primitive peoples.” 5 In his study Primitive Culture (1871),
E. B. Tylor, the Oxford-based anthropologist, 1 6 believed that whereas reli
gion becomes a form of metaphysics once its primary explanatory role is
usurped by science, myths are “too closely tied to the gods as agents in the
world to permit any comparable transformation” (Segal, 2004, p. 17).
According to Tylor, therefore, there can be no such thing as modem myths.
The empirical evidence we have cannot support the views of Frazer and
more particularly Tylor, with their assumption of the demise of myth. Myths
continue to thrive and to exert their power over contemporary societies. As
we illustrate in the last section of this chapter, the distinctions between myth
and history are not always clear-cut, and feminist scholars in particular have
taken an interest in the power of myth to shape our ideas and to legitimate
social structure. The Imperial Emperors of Japan justified their absolute
power through appeal to divine kingship, claiming descent from the sun
goddess, Amaterasu. In nineteenth-century Germany science and mythology
became entangled in the myth of Aryan supremacy, reaching its apogee in
the rise of Nazism and the Holocaust. The links between myth and power are
sometimes more subtle than in these two examples, but real nonetheless.
Peggy Reeves Sanday,1 7 in her book Female Power and Male Dominance,
argues that “there is a congruence between the gender of a people’s creator
god(s), their orientation to the creative forces of nature, and the secular
expression of male and female power” (1981, p. 6). In the case of the Hausa
of northern Nigeria, female power, with its muted but subversive potential, is
encapsulated in the Hausa creation myth.

Bori spirits and female power among the Hausa

The Hausa were Islamicized in the early years of the nineteenth century.
Before this time women could hold political office, own farms, or be self-
employed, but with the adoption of Islam women’s economic and political
status declined. They were regarded as political minors and became secluded
within the compound. 16 The segregation of the sexes became extreme and
Hausa female power “was pushed underground, where today it remains in the
form of a spiritual guerrilla movement” (Sanday, 1981, p. 36).
MYTH 277

The Hausa creation story recounted below shows both Islamic and pre-
Islamic influences. As with all myths of origin, being set in the past does not
imply that the myth itself is unchanging. While some myths may be ex
tremely conservative, altering little over the centuries (even if interpreted
differently at different times and places), others incorporate new elements to
reflect contemporary social and political concerns.

A few hundred years ago Allah made the universe from his own dung, and later
made humans and animals from the earth’s dirt. The first people were Adam
and Eve, who were told by Allah to produce many children to present to him.
As their offspring increased, Eve suggested to Adam that Allah might destroy
all of their children when they were presented. She decided to hide one-half of
the children. When Allah called for their presentation he said, “You have
hidden one-half of your children. I did not tell you to do this, but since you
have hidden them, they shall remain so forever.”19

We see here a distant and potentially harmful male god, or at least one
that women cannot trust. We might also note that in this creation story Eve
is not taken from Adam’s side, as in the Christian version of the myth in the
second chapter of the book of Genesis, giving an equivalence between men
and women. The banished children, or child ghosts, belong to a world of
spirits that collectively play a central role in Hausa daily life. 2 0 These spirits
or bori operate much as witches do in some sub-Saharan African groups (see
chapter 8). The banished bori spirit children are central to the operation of
the Bori cult, which admits men in minor roles, but which is controlled
mainly by women. Onwuejeogwu outlines the clandestine power of the bori
spirits, who have the ability to

inflict illness on hidden and unknown evil-doers; they are the fountains of
fortune and misfortune, wealth and poverty, happiness and sorrow. The char
acters of the individual spirits, as shown in their dance movements, are
attributes of particular human beings - anger, envy, love, passion, sensuality,
nobility, humility, restraint, ill health, health, violence, etc. The spirits control
the moral community by controlling the community’s economic activities and
its natural environment - epidemics, rainfall, storms, etc. (Onwuejeogwu,
1971, pp. 288-9) 21

Members of the Bori cult are those who become possessed by these bori
spirits, and who form a loose association based on their status as adepts. They
have a meeting house where officials of the cult live, where regular possession
rituals and other rites can take place, and where female members of the cult
278 MYTH

can initiate new members. The head of the Spirit Owners is generally a
woman, with both female and male assistants.
Sanday contends that it was through the Bori cult that Hausa women
consolidated and maintained their power through the years of Islamicization.
It gave women space to meet together, gain experience in holding office, and
to organize politically. Claims to religious experience, be it spirit possession,
visions, or locutions, are a common way in which women who are denied
authority by virtue of their sex gain access to political power. The creation
myth explained and justified this irregular form of female power: “Through
Bori and spirit possession, women wield their lost power. Because the
spirits are beings of great force and must be treated with submissiveness
and subservience, possessed women can defy not only the domestic authority
of their husbands, but also that of the political authorities” (Sanday,
1981, pp. 36-7). The corollary of this is that without a myth that authorizes
such female power, it is much harder for women to legitimate their claims
to any form of equality with men. The relative paucity of female images
in the creation myths and sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity has
led some feminist scholars, as well as the Western pagans described above, to
create their own myths, to reclaim female deities, or to rewrite versions of
patriarchal myths so as to empower women spiritually and socially.

The coming of Lilith

Many people who don’t read the Hebrew Scriptures or Christian Old Testa
ment are nevertheless familiar with the account of God’s creation of Adam
and Eve in the Book of Genesis, although perhaps less aware that there are
two version of the story, one in the plural (Genesis 1: 26-31) in which God
creates human beings, the other in the singular (Genesis 2:7-25), which
places the first man and woman in the Garden of Eden. Most Christians are
also unfamiliar with Jewish traditions of Lilith, Adam’s first, rebellious wife
who quarreled with Adam, refusing to be subservient (to “lie beneath”) him.
When Lilith saw that they could not get along with one another “she uttered
the Ineffable Name and flew off into the air of the world.” 2 3 Adam com
plained to God that Lilith had left him, and God sent three angels to bring
her back, saying “If she wants to return, good and well, and if not, she will
have to take it upon herself that every day one hundred of her children
should die.” 2 4 Lilith chose not to return, preferring to drown in the sea rather
than be subservient to Adam. The story goes on to explain the origin of the
protective amulets bearing the image of the three angels worn by newborn
babies to protect them from Lilith’s curse (or rather God’s curse on Lilith).
Like the bori ghost children, Lilith is thought to be of particular danger to
MYTH 279

women and infants. 2 5 Eve is then created not from the earth, like Adam, but
from his side, so that she is subservient to him.
In a popular Jewish feminist midrash (commentary) on Lilith and Eve,
Judith Plaskow (and others) rewrote the creation story in a way that validated
the female characters, rather than using Lilith as a means of frightening
women into obedient submission.2 6 As in the earlier Jewish versions of the
story, Lilith leaves the garden because of Adam’s refusal to accept their
equal status. Eve “occasionally sensed capacities in herself that remained
undeveloped” but was basically satisfied with her role as Adam’s companion
and helper, despite a disturbing closeness between God and Adam that seemed
to exclude her. Adam had persuaded Eve to help him strengthen the walls of
the Garden in order to keep Lilith at bay, telling her “fearsome stories of the
demon Lilith who threatens women in childbirth and steals children from
their cradles in the middle of the night.” However, in a battle between Lilith
and Adam, Eve caught a glimpse of her, and saw that she was a woman, like
herself. One day Eve climbed the apple tree she and Adam had planted, and
swung herself over the wall. Lilith was waiting on the other side, and they
talked for many hours, “laughed together, and cried, over and over, till the
bond of sisterhood grew between them.” Adam told God about Eve’s comings
and goings, and her changed attitude towards him. God too was confused,
“Something had failed to go according to plan.” The God in this feminist
version of the creation story is a God of process theology, 2 7 able to change and
to reflect on His unfolding creation: “1 am who I am . . . but I must become who
I will become.” The midrash ends with the words: “And God and Adam were
expectant and afraid the day Eve and Lilith returned to the garden, bursting
with possibilities, ready to rebuild it together.”
A myth is often distinguished from fiction and other forms of narrative
in not having an attributable author, but the genres become blurred
when dealing with texts that may have authors attributed to them
(Moses, for instance, is held in Jewish and Christian tradition to be author of
the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible), although they
contain elements, such as stories of creation, that by most definitions would
be described as myths. Whatever their age and provenance, myths can be, and
are, used to justify the status quo, and creating new myths and rituals can be
experienced as liberating for those who listen to and participate in them.

The Structural Study of Myth

Claude Levi-Strauss is associated with a school of thought known as struo

turalism (see chapter 1). His work seeks to answer a question we can look at
280 MYTH

from two angles. Why, if human beings are infinitely creative, do they draw
on a limited cultural vocabulary when organizing their social life, their
kinship systems, their myths? And, looked at from another perspective,
what are the common elements or structures that can help us to make
sense of the bewildering variety of cultural forms that we do find? Are they
merely an arbitrary jumble, or is there a discernible pattern to them? The
answer comes from the human body and its basic, slightly asymmetrical,
binary form. We experience ourselves as a single entity, but in two parts -
with a left and a right brain, two arms and legs, two hands, two eyes and ears,
as well as in two genders, male and female. As with computer binary code
which has two modes, on and off, which through a variety of arrangements
can generate the most complex programs, so too the human mind makes
sense of the world through understanding similarity and difference. The
purpose of anthropology, according to Levi-Strauss, is not to understand
what societies “are” in their own terms (as Franz Boas sought to do), but to
discover how they differ from one another - following linguistics, looking for
contradictive or distinguishing features (Levi-Strauss, 1977, p. 63).
An illustration of Levi-Strauss’s use of binary oppositions can be seen in
his analysis of a myth from western Canada concerning the skate (a species of
flatfish) and the South Wind. In a time before the creation of the distinction
between humans and animals, all were extremely bothered by the winds,
which blew all the time making it impossible for them to fish or to gather
shellfish from the beach. The skate played a key role in capturing the South
Wind, who was liberated on condition that he promised to blow only at
certain periods or every other day, so that in between times creatures could go
about their activities. Levi-Strauss argues that the choice of a skate is not
arbitrary. It has very precise characteristics, being very large seen from above
or below, but extremely thin when viewed from the side. It can easily evade
capture by turning to present its thin side, creating a very difficult target. Like
a modern computer, the skate has two discontinuous states, one positive, one
negative. A skate might not appear to have much in common with a wind,
but both have a similar relationship with a binary problem. If the South
Wind blows one day in two it is “yes” one day and “no” the next. There is,
according to Levi-Strauss, a logical affinity (like Saussure’s linguistic associa
tive relations or paradigms) between the South Wind and the skate (Levi-
Strauss, 1995, pp. 21-3).
While Levi-Strauss draws indirectly on the work of his friend Roman Jakob-
son (1896-1982), the Russian linguist and co-founder of the European move
ment in structural linguistics known as the Prague School, 2 8 it was reading the
Swiss linguist and founder of semiotics, Ferdinand de Saussure, that provided
Levi-Strauss with the tools he need to realize his project.
MYTH 281

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) was interested in the study of language as a

system of signs, which he called semiology. His lecture notes, published posthu
mously as Course de linguistique generate (Course in General Linguistics) in 1916, was
one of the most influential works on linguistics of the twentieth century. Saussure
saw language as a system of signs that have meaning only in relation to one another.
Just as we distinguish words by their phonetic differences from one another, so too
we distinguish the ideas to which they correspond through distinctions. The sign
itself is arbitrary - there is no intrinsic reason why we might say “dog,” “le chien,” or
“das Hund.” There is no essence of “dogness” in the sign (as Plato might have held).
What these sounds have in common is what they refer to or signify, the idea or
concept of an animal in the category we label canine.

f signified = concept
[ signifier = sound-image

For Saussure language is social, we are born into a pre-existing language or

languages that we learn as a child. We may innovate and make individual
contributions to that language, but we are only understood by others insofar
as we obey the pre-existing rules of that language.

la langue (language) = whole linguistic system

parole (speech) = individual speech acts

Language can be studied in two ways, diachronically in relation to its historical

development, or synchronically , by looking at its different components and
their interrelations at a given moment in time.
The ambitious project realized by Levi-Strauss in his four-volume Mytho'
logiques (1964-72) (in English Introduction to a Science of Mythology, 1970-
1982), and in other shorter books, lectures, and essays, is to “crack the code”
of myths by looking for and making sense of their components, and seeing
how these relate to one another both within a single myth and as part of a
much wider complex of myths across a broad cultural area (such as the whole
of the Americas). For Levi-Strauss myths are an attempt by human beings to
resolve or mitigate the contradictions that are basic to our existence. They
give us a sense of understanding the world, even if the basic dilemmas
addressed (such as life/death, the exercise of power/dependence, male/fe-
male) are not capable of outright resolution.
282 MYTH

A related idea, of importance to Levi-Strauss’s analysis of myth was the idea of

associative relations or paradigms, represented by a vertical axis, and horizontal or
temporal relations, known as syntagms. The basic grammatical structure of a
language is determined by its syntagmatic structure, such as the subject-verb-
object relationship in a sentence such as the woman had a baby. Paradigmatic
analysis looks at the rules of substitution within a grammatical category, so we
could change the meaning but not the structure of the sentence by substituting the
subject, verb, and object to say the man bought a cow. Within a myth this can mean
that we have two parallel version of a plot, which represent a single mytheme or
narrative unit:

the man tricked his brother relations within the mytheme

| paradigmatic
the nephew killed his uncle —> syntagmatic

In “Harelips and Twins: The Splitting of a Myth” (1995, pp. 25-33), Levi-
Strauss notes the widespread association between twins, hares, feet, the weather,
and trickster figures/gods in many American myths. He dismisses the claim that
myths can only be understood within a specific localized cultural and historical
setting, treating the various narrative units of the stories as elements that can be
transferred and transformed over time. By comparing myths from different parts
of the continent Levi-Strauss succeeds in constructing a logical association
between seemingly unrelated elements. There is apparently a general belief
among Native Americans that twins result in the splitting of the body fluids
that solidify to form a child. The hare is an incipient twin - the slit lip
representing the potential splitting of the individual into two separate halves.
Twins are in a race to be born first, and therefore a birth where the feet appear
first, which endangers the life of both mother and child or children, is often
feared and mother and child/children may be killed. The hare as an ambiguous
character, somewhere between an individual and a twin, may be seen as a wise
deity or a trickster. Whereas for Mary Douglas (see chapter 2) an anomalous
figure who defies or contravenes symbolic boundaries is often seen as powerful
or dangerous, or both, for Levi-Strauss an anomaly is to be sought as a mediator
between boundaries, which are the site of contradiction. The hare
mediates between twins and singletons although, as Douglas observed, its status
as mediator remains ambiguous.
It is not by looking for an original, authentic version of a myth that we
find its meaning, according to Levi-Strauss, but by accumulating as many
versions as possible and looking for the metaphoric (paradigmatic) and
metonymic (syntagmatic) relationships between their various elements that
we come to an understanding of the whole.
MYTH 283

1 'he two dimensions in the structural study of language and of myth

! , la langue (language) parole (speech acts)
diachronic (historical) synchronic (atemporal)
paradigms syntagms
' metaphor metonym
< ------------------>

While many nineteenth-century thinkers were concerned with the question

of origins (see chapter 1), Levi-Strauss is more concerned with systematic
comparison. He does not, like Eliade, posit an original complete myth that is
subject to degeneration, any more than one might look for a perfect language.
Rather than try to reconstruct a composite mythical narrative from a number
of versions or, on the other hand, see each version of a myth as an isolated
story to be interpreted only from within its particular context, Levi-Strauss is
interested in the transformations and substitutions that exist within a myth
ical complex. It is more like trying to understand a conversation by collecting
different versions of an event, each of which helps to throw light on the
whole, but without supposing the existence of an original “authentic” version
of the story. He is not insensitive to history or to cultural specificity, as his
critics sometimes claim. It is rather that the anthropology that interests Levi-
Strauss is what he terms “the elaboration of that logic of the concrete” (1977,
p. 65) that goes beyond a phenomenological description of a society. By using
a rigorous methodology (outlined below), the ethnographer can hope to go
beyond or beneath emic descriptions of a society and discover the “hinges of
the ‘true’ system” which can “carry the investigation beyond the limits of
consciousness” (1977, p. 67).

Levi-Strauss’s method for the study of myth:

A myth must never be interpreted in isolation. No privileged explanation exists,
for any myth consists in an interpretation of several explanatory levels.

1 A myth must never be interpreted individually, but in its relationship to other

myths which, taken together, constitute a transformation group.
2 A group of myths must never be interpreted alone, but by reference: (a) to other
groups of myths; and (b) to the ethnography of the societies in which they
originate. For, if the myths transform each other, a relation of the same type
links (on a transversal axis) the different levels involved in the evolution of all
social life. These levels range from the forms of techno-economic activity to the
systems of representations, and include economic exchanges, political and
family structures, aesthetic expression, ritual practices, and religious beliefs/
284 MYTH

Despite the influence of structuralism on Anglo-American, as well as

French, anthropology, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, its popularity as a
method of interpretation has declined, and Levi-Strauss himself admits that he
represents a school which has few followers today, although the renewed
interest in cognitive anthropology can be seen as a continuation of the broader
project that seeks universal structures rather than particular description. The
results of the structural analysis of myth, with its mathematical symbols and
seemingly endless detail does not always repay the effort involved. As Wendy
Doniger put it in her largely sympathetic Foreword to the 1995 edition of Myth
and Meaning, “We must jump off Levi-Strauss’s bus one stop before he does.
And once we have jumped off, we usually find that we are not there yet. We
have to get on another bus (theological, psychological), or, indeed, several
buses. We need a lot of transfers on the mythic journey. But if we know where
to look, Levi-Strauss provides those transfers, too” (1995, p. xiv).

Joseph Campbell and the Monomyth

One of the most influential writers on myth in the English-speaking world is

Joseph Campbell. Although he had an excellent knowledge of many cultures,
and a lifelong interest in the native peoples of America, Campbell was
a theorist and a storyteller rather than an ethnographer. Like Mircea Eliade,
Rene Girard, or Claude Levi-Strauss, he was interested in looking for ultim
ate truths and meanings behind ethnographic details, and wished to embrace
the whole of human history in his purview. While he did not follow either
uncritically, the psychoanalytic ideas of Sigmund Freud 3 0 and more particu
larly Carl Gustav Jung, 51 play a major role in Campbell’s writing.

Joseph Campbell (1904-87). Brought up as a practicing Roman Catholic in New

York, Campbell became fascinated by Native American culture as a boy. He
studied languages and read widely in comparative mythology, retaining an interest
in many disciplines from archeology and anthropology to psychology and art, as
well as English literature, the subject he taught at Sarah Lawrence College from
1934-72. Campbell established his reputation as an original thinker through the
publication in 1949 of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which he posits the
existence of a monomyth - a universal pattern that lies beneath the heroic tales of
all cultures. Campbell went on to publish a four-volume study of mythology, The
Masks of God (1959-68), and numerous other books, articles, and edited works as
well as lectures and broadcast interviews, on the subject of comparative myth
ology. One of his phrases, “follow your bliss,” which expressed his belief in a
MYTH 285

guiding force in individuals’ lives, became a catch phrase among a generation of

North Americans.

The search for a grand scheme and unifying theory, which remained part
of Campbell’s goal and his popular appeal, has generally been greeted with
suspicion by anthropologists, who feel on more secure ground when looking
at the differences between cultures rather than possible underlying similar
ities. In the Foreword written on completion of the four-volume The Masks of
God, Campbell sets out the all-embracing scope of his study, which:

. . . has been the confirmation of a thought I have long and faithfully enter
tained; of the unity of the race of man, not only in its biology but also in its
spiritual history, which has everywhere unfolded in the manner of a single
symphony, with its themes announced, developed, amplified and turned about,
distorted, reasserted, and, today, in a grand fortissimo of all sections sounding
together, irresistibly advancing to some kind of mighty climax, out of which the
next great movement will emerge. (Campbell, 1991, p. 5)

The myth of the hero

The notion of a hero is central to virtually all cultures, and embodies a society’s
ideals. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces ([1949] 1990), Campbell argues that
certain archetypal patterns recur, and may indeed point to a single, original
myth that evolved over time. Borrowing a phrase from the Irish novelist
James Joyce, Campbell refers to the hero’s journey as the monomyth.

The hero’s journey can be divided into three stages, 32

Departure (or separation) —> Initiation —> Return

This basic pattern of the hero myth (further elaborated below) involves
introducing the hero to us in the ordinary world where he (or she) receives a
call to adventure, often through a meeting with a mysterious or miraculous
messenger. At first the hero is reluctant to accept the call, but is encouraged
by a wise old man or woman to venture forth and cross the first threshold
(Victor Turner’s “liminal space”), where he or she endures various tests and
hardships, meets with fabulous creatures, helpers, and obstacles. On reaching
the innermost cave the hero endures the supreme ordeal, and seizing the prize
is pursued back to the ordinary world. The returned hero, now a citizen of
both worlds, has the power to bestow blessings, treasure, or some boon on
fellow human beings.
286 MYTH

Vladimir Propp (1895-1970), a member of the Russian formalist school, who

studied folktales though breaking them down into narrative units or narratemes in
the way that formal linguistics breaks down sentences into morphemes. Propp was
particularly interested in Russian folktales, and identified 31 generic narratemes.
While not all were necessarily present in each folktale, their sequence is unvary
ing. Propp’s exposition of narrative sequences, outlined in his work The Morph
ology of the Folktale (1958), is one of a number of attempts to describe an
underlying pattern of hero myths. Other examples are Otto Rank’s The Myth of
the Birth of the Hero ([1909] 2000), Lord Raglan in The Hero (1936), and Joseph
Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).

While the hero myths of many cultures, as Campbell amply demonstrated,

follow this basic pattern, it can also be seen in novels, film, and other artistic
media. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is one obvious example from the world of
literature, with the hobbit, Frodo Baggins, and the man, Aragorn, both
taking parallel, intertwined heroic roles. Many artists pay tribute to Camp
bell’s monomyth as the direct inspiration for their own creations, including
George Lucas, creator of the science fiction Star Wars films; Richard Adams,
author of Watership Down, in which the hero is a rabbit; and the Wachowski
brothers in their film The Matrix. It may not escape the reader’s notice that in
each of these instances the hero is in fact male. The monomyth is primarily,
if not exclusively, a male story.

Stages of the hero’s journey

Although the details may vary, some sequences may be left out and others
elaborated, there is a basic pattern seen in many if not all hero myths and the
fictional tales derived from them. As noted above, the hero’s journey repli
cates the threefold pattern of a rite of passage, with movement from structure
to anti-structure, and back to structure. The characters in the monomyth
have universal appeal because they depend not on any one individual’s
external experiences or particular historical events, but upon universal arche
types linked to inner psychic growth and the development of humanity as a
whole.
Although the sex of the hero is unspecified, the sequence clearly pre
supposes a male hero, and at the level of psychological integration the
journey only makes sense from a male perspective. While Campbell
gives female as well as male examples of heroes, the stages of the journey
suggest that he is indeed committed to a male hero. There is the stereotyp
ical conquering nature of heroism that dictates a male hero, but also in the
MYTH 287

The Hero’s Journey

I Separation (departure)
1 The hero is introduced in the ordinary world of structure.
2 There is a call to adventure, which is initially refused.

3 The hero is encouraged by a wise old man or woman to accept the call.
4 The hero then crosses the first threshold into a fabulous world.
5 There are adventures and trials in which the hero meets various
helpers.
6 The hero finds him/herself in what is sometimes termed “the belly of
the whale” or the “innermost cave.”

II Initiation
7 The hero encounters a woman or women in the form of a goddess and/
or temptress.
8 There is some reconciliation or integration with the figure of the father.
9 The hero undergoes an ultimate test or endures a supreme ordeal.
10 He wins the sword, treasure, or boon, or gains esoteric or self-knowledge.

III Return
11 The stage of the return is initiated, but may at first be refused in a mirror
image of the initial call to adventure.
1 2 There is a magical flight during which the hero is pursued by malign forces.
13 The hero is rescued by an external force or agency.
14 The hero crosses the threshold into the ordinary world of structure, trans
formed by the experience of the journey.
15 As master of two worlds, the hero has the power to live in both, and can
dispense the benefits of this knowledge, or of the treasure or boons won, to
those in the ordinary world.

second or middle stage of the journey the hero meets (and has sex with) a
female god or temptress, and achieves reconciliation with the rival male god/
father figure.

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), Swiss founder of Analytical Psychology. Jung

rejected Freud’s emphasis on the libido and the dominance of sexuality in human
motivation, and developed a view of the human psyche based on the notion of the
collective unconscious, a common psychological disposition, which works through
dreams, myths, and symbols. According to Jung the mind works with a limited
number of archetypes, to which other ideas and experiences are assimilated in a
“complex.”
288 MYTH

The four basic archetypes outlined by Jung are:

• The shadow
• The anima
• The animus
• The self

The unconscious mind also works with a number of common symbolic forms,
which may be found as recognizable types in the dreams, myths, and stories from
many different cultures.
These symbolic types include:

• the Child
• the Superman
• the Hero
• the Great Mother
• The Wise Old Man
• The Trickster or Joker

Jung believed that psychological health is dependent upon being attentive to and
integrating these archetypes and symbols, and that we should therefore take ser
iously the dreams, myths, and religious inspiration of our own and other cultures.

The gender of the hero

While heroes can in theory be of either sex and of any age, they are
predominantly young males (Luke Skywalker in Star Wars, Frodo Baggins
in The Lord of the Rings), even if adherence to Jungian principles would
dictate that they are undertaking the journey of the second half of life.
Adult men may also feature as heroes, or share this role with a younger
protagonist (as Aragorn shares the hero role with Frodo Baggins). Where the
hero is female she is almost always pre-pubescent (Alice in Wonderland,
Dorothy in The Wizard ofOz, or Lucy in C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and
the Wardrobe). It is as if the hero role is inimical to mature femininity.
If the woman is the hero the story may be more complex with rather
different messages. In many primate species it is young males who are the
most curious, who band together in single-sex groups, and journey farthest
from their natal home, before returning to take over the role of “husband”
and “father.” The hero of the monomyth fits a male life-course more easily
than a characteristic female one. Female chimpanzees, for instance, learn
primarily from their mothers and become more proficient tool-users than
MYTH 289

their brothers, who have a shorter concentration span and spend more of
their time with their male age-mates. Women in human societies are usually
given a more constricted geographical and social range than their male
counterparts, and take on adult domestic roles at an early age, helping to
fetch water, cook, farm, look after younger children, and so on. Bruce Lincoln
suggested that van Gennep and Turner’s stages of a rite of passage (see
chapter 6) fits male initiation more closely than female, and proposed an
alternative pattern, namely

enclosure —> metamorphosis/magnification —> emergence

representing a greater continuity between childhood and adulthood than is

the case for males. Initiation for women often reinforces a domestic role in
which they are subject to husbands, fathers, and older women (Lincoln,
1991) - this might be heroic, but does not involve the type of outward
journey and return characteristic of the monomyth.
Writing on medieval women mystics, Caroline Walker Bynum (1987)
observes that the life trajectories of medieval women saints and mystics are
less marked by sudden and dramatic conversions and reversals than those of
their male counterparts, and that a high proportion of female saints had
decided on a religious life in early childhood. Unlike male saints, whose
heroic journeys often involve a dramatic call and conversion (one might
think of Saint Paul being struck blind when he heard Jesus calling him on the
road to Damascus, or Saint Francis stripping off his fine robes before the
Bishop of Assisi), women tend to grow slowly into their vocation. This may
be because men in most societies and at most times have had greater power
than women to shape the course of their own lives. Both men and women in
the Middle Ages in Europe tended to see female saints as models of suffering
and male saints as models of action. 34
Where women do embark on a heroic journey they often do so in disguise.
They need to find some strategy to deny or detract attention from their sex
(as with Joan of Arc, who dressed and lived as a man), or they may stress their
harmless female nature so as to divert attention from their actions (as many
women mystical writers did, including the twelfth-century Rhineland abbess,
Hildegard of Bingen). 35 Virginity or celibacy may be stressed (as with Queen
Elizabeth I of England, the “Virgin Queen”), rejecting or surmounting
accepted female role models. As women are seldom authorized to teach or
hold positions of authority, they commonly need to wait until they are
post-menopausal, or use the authority of visions or claims to supernatural
guidance in order to bestow the boon or share the wisdom that they have won
on their journey.3 6 Women can and do change the world, but their heroism
290 MYTH

often has more to do with the qualities of endurance, patience, determin

ation, and compassion, than with dramatic feats of bravery and magical
intervention. A woman in myth is more likely to be cast in the role of
goddess or temptress, wise woman or witch, than hero of the tale.
A version of the heroic journey that is intended to be more inclusive than
those of Campbell, Rank, or Raglan is Carol Pearson’s schema, which further
develops Jung’s notion of Archetypes. Pearson is the author of numerous
books aimed at popularizing the concept of Archetypes, making them rele
vant to people in their everyday lives. In The Hero Within (1999) Pearson
chooses six of the commonest Archetypes that relate both to personality
types and to the stages of the hero’s journey (our life’s journey from infancy
through maturation to old age). They are framed so as to be equally relevant
to women and men. As well as a plot structure, each narrative unit/Arche-
type is associated with the gifts and tasks that we recognize from the mono
myth. The six Archetypes presented here can also be divided by pairs into the
stages of Separation (Orphan, Wanderer), Initiation (Warrior, Altruist) and
Return (Innocent, Magician).

The Heroic Journey 37

Archetype Plot Structure Gift Task
Orphan How I suffered or Resilience Survive difficulty
Birth survived
Wanderer How I escaped or found Independence Find yourself
my own way
Warrior How I achieved my goals Courage Prove your worth
or defeated my enemies
/
Altruist How I gave to others and Compassion Show generosity
f how I sacrificed
Innocent How I found happiness or Faith Achieve happiness
Death the promised land
Magician How I changed my world Power Transform your life

Anthropologists have, by and large, paid less attention to the psycho

logical, symbolic aspects of myth that so fascinated Carl Jung, Joseph Camp
bell, and Carol Pearson, and have focused more on questions of structure,
function, context, and memory.
MYTH 291

History, Myth, and Memory

For Levi-Strauss mythology is static - the same mythical elements are

combined over and over again in a closed system, whereas history is open
(1995, p. 40). This distinction is not, however, as rigid as may at first
appear. History may contain mythical elements which, through various
arrangements, can be used to form an original account. Levi-Strauss looks
at the example of two books written by Tsimshian chiefs from the Pacific
coast of Canada recording the history of their respective groups. Men of
Medeek (1962) is a supposedly verbatim account collected from Chief
Walter Wright and the other is a book by Chief Kenneth Harris (1974).
They can be contrasted with works based on data collected from the
Tsimshian, but structured by a non-native, such as Boas and Tate’s Tsim
shian Mythology. In works organized by anthropologists we have an arrange
ment of material that starts with cosmological and cosmogonic myths, and
only much later legendary tradition and family history. Wright’s and Har
ris’s works, on the other hand, start with a mythical, or perhaps historical,
account of the destruction of a city and the scattering of its inhabitants.
The accounts share an “explanatory cell” - a fight and murder arising from
adultery, but the protagonists and details vary. Levi-Strauss calls this a
“mini-myth” in which different (metaphoric) transformations occur.
When one element is transformed, the other elements should be rearranged
(metonymically) to fit. Both histories are also highly repetitive with the
same type of event used several times. In each account these similar events
take place at different places, affect different people, and may refer to
different historical periods.
Levi-Strauss refers to these accounts as representing an intermediary level
between myth and history: “It shows us that by using the same material,
because it is a kind of common inheritance or common patrimony of all groups,
of all clans, or of all lineages, one can nevertheless succeed in building up an
original account for each of them” (1995, pp. 40-1). By trying to simply put
together a “hodge-podge” of traditions and beliefs belonging to many different
peoples, much as Frazer did in The Golden Bough, the historical character of the
material is lost. As Levi-Strauss makes clear:

This makes us lose sight of a fundamental character of the material - that each
type of story belongs to a given group, a given family, a given lineage, or to a
given clan, and is trying to explain its fate, which can be a successful one or
a disastrous one, or be intended to account for rights and privileges as they exist
in the present, or be attempting to validate claims for rights which have since
disappeared. (Levi-Strauss, 1995, p. 41)
292 MYTH

This tendency to historicize our myths and to mythologize our history is

not unique to indigenous peoples and traditions, although Levi-Strauss does
see myth in pre-literate and history-literate societies as serving different
purposes. Mythology in societies without writing seeks to ensure that, “the
future will remain faithful to the present and to the past. For us, however, the
future should always be different, and ever more different, from the present”
(ibid., p. 43).
Structural studies of myth had a brief spell of popularity within British
anthropology. One of the foremost proponents of structural methods of
analysis was Edmund Leach in Cambridge who applied Levi-Strauss’s pre
scriptions, tempered with English common sense. Biblical myths were ana
lyzed in terms of a set of (unconscious) binary oppositions, such as life and
death, mortal and immortal, with a mediating category (virgin mothers,
incarnate gods), which is “unnatural,” “holy,” the focus of taboo and ritual
observance.3 8 Using the analogy of computer language, with its elements of
redundancy (repetition of the same basic plot with different details), and of
the “bit” (the narrative unit of information that can be reused in different
contexts), and of psychoanalysis, with the assumption of unintelligibility at
the conscious level, the role of the structural anthropologist is to “crack the
code” by laying bare the underlying structure of the stories. Leach takes the
view that myths can be understood as “the expression of unobservable
realities in terms of observable phenomena,” 3 9 but that whereas for believers
there is a “sender” of the message, at least when talking about the Bible, for
anthropologists there are only “receivers.” 40

The importance of context

As can be seen from the discussion of the Tsimshian above it is clear that
Levi-Strauss does not, as is sometimes claimed, ignore the role of history in
his analysis, but he is less concerned with the historical and ethnographic
context of a particular myth than most anthropologists, or the context he
refers to privileges culture over contemporary interests in political concerns.
A very similar point concerning the “butterfly collecting” approach to myth
that characterizes so much of the field of mythology was made by Mary
Douglas (1996, p. 48). In her account of the tale of Little Red Riding
Hood, Douglas aims to demonstrate the sensitivity to cultural and historical
detail necessary to “interpret other people’s myths” (ibid.), and to critique
theorists who “like to gather up the materials of so-called myths from here
and there and anywhere, without regard to sources or to how or why the
stories were told, to say nothing of how and why they have been preserved or
collected” (ibid.).
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Douglas, like William Robertson Smith before her, wants to know the
context of a myth before interpreting it: “Who tells it? To whom? On what
occasion? What sort of ceremonial is it used to explain?” (Douglas, 1996,
p. 39). In other words, to what genre does the myth belong? The Red Riding
Hood story is strictly a fairy tale rather than a myth, but it is useful in
illustrating the sort of information needed in order to make sense of myths.
In the version of the tale told as a child’s bedtime story a little girl takes
cakes to her grandmother, and on the way meets a wolf who asks her where
she is going. The wolf runs ahead to kill and eat the grandmother, taking the
old lady’s place in bed. When Little Red Riding Hood arrives a conversation
ensues in which the child remarks on the differences between the grand
mother and the wolf: “Grandmama! What big ears you have!” “Grandmama!
What big teeth you have!”- at which point the wolf jumps out of bed to eat
her, but Little Red Riding Hood is saved by the appearance of a woodcutter,
who kills the wolf, and splits open its stomach to rescue the grandmother.
According to Verdier (1980, cited in Douglas, 1996), however, in the
original nineteenth-century French versions of the tale the wolf and the girl
take turns in eating parts of the grandmother (and the girl does not have a red
hood). In fact, the wolfs role is rather minor and accidental. In each of the
versions of the tale recorded there is a choice of routes to the grandmother’s
house. The girl, or young woman around the age of puberty, is given the
choice of the way of pins or the way of needles, a well-understood metaphor
in its original context for the choice between girlhood (associated with pins)
and mature womanhood (associated with needles, with its sexual innuendo of
threading the needle). The conversation with the wolf can also be inter
preted as a passage to womanhood. The wolf invites the girl to get into bed
with him, and she complies, noting how big, strong, and hairy he is (Douglas,
1996, p. 43). As well as eating her grandmother, the girl performs various
domestic tasks, much as she would in her own kitchen. The story would have
been understood as a form of female initiation, but also acknowledges that
there is a time when the grandmother can no longer thread the needle, and
her place is taken (she is consumed by) the younger woman. Without such
historical and cultural details of peasant life in nineteenth-century France
interpretations of the tale remain impoverished.

Myth and memory

If Levi-Strauss has demonstrated the ways in which Tsimshian chiefs create
personal histories that make use of what appear to be mythical motifs, we
might ask what role memory plays in the creation of such stories, and where
294 MYTH

and how history becomes myth. Literacy does not seem to preclude the
incorporation of mythological elements in recorded histories. In my own
family we possess a family tree that confidently traces back one line of
forebears for several generations, before declaring “ . . . descended from
Adam.” This was a common trope in the nineteenth century, a Scottish
and Welsh variant of which was to record descent from St Anne, the
maternal grandmother of Jesus. Genealogical studies have shown us the
ways in which in literate and oral traditions generations become telescoped,
individuals merged and split, minor lines become assimilated into major
lines, and some individuals disappear while others assume a greater promin
ence. One study that can help us to understand the way in which historical
events and experiences become mythologized and ritualized is Rosalind
Shaw’s accounts of the slave trade among Temne-speaking communities in
Sierra Leone, West Africa (1997, 2002).
Slave trading among the Temne is rarely mentioned in verbal accounts,
but survives in historical memory in the form of rogue spirits, witches, the
visions of ritual specialists, and the imagery of divination techniques. Witch
craft among the Temne is not a “traditional” phenomenon but, in its present
form, thoroughly modern, receiving its shape from the historical experience
of the transatlantic slave. In Temne cosmological thinking there are three
invisible places that intersect with the visible world - the “Place of the
Dead,” the “Place of Spirits,” and the “Place of Witches.” When Shaw
asked about these three invisible worlds, the former two elicited little specific
description. The Place of Witches, by contrast, was consistently described as
“an urban world of wealth and rapid global mobility” (Shaw, 1997, p. 875). It
was envisaged as

a prosperous city where skyscrapers adjoin houses of gold and diamonds; where
Mercedes- Benzes are driven down fine roads; where street vendors roast “beef
sticks” (kebabs) of human meat; where boutiques sell stylish “witch gowns”
that transform their wearers into animal predators in the human world . . .
where electronic stores sell tape recorders and televisions (and more recently,
VCRs and computers); and where witch airports dispatch witch planes - planes
so fast, I was told, that “they can fly to London and back within an hour” - to
destinations all around the globe. (Shaw, 1997, p. 857)

At one level these images draw on motifs found in much of sub-Saharan

Africa. Corrupt regimes consume large amounts of the country’s resources
while the poor die for lack of basic necessities. Wealth is acquired at other
people’s expense - and witchcraft is the idiom commonly used to explain this
“eating” of one’s neighbor, one’s family, one’s people, with whom one should
MYTH 295

by rights share.41 There is also a more specific historical dimension to the

Temne witch-cities. In much of Cameroon Mount Kupe is seen as a place of
witch-markets and zombies, which has its roots in the experience of planta
tion workers, stripped of their autonomy and forced to work for a master.
Among many peoples in Sierra Leone, technology is thought to result from
witchcraft powers, which Europeans have learnt to exploit in order to
achieve material success. Development requires not less witchcraft but
more - Africans too need to discover the secret of harnessing such powers.
The problem is that Europeans are unwilling to share their knowledge, 4 2 or
anything else for that matter. Among the Temne the term for “European
ness” “designates a range of anti-social behavior - living a secluded life,
exchanging abrupt greetings, not stopping to talk, not visiting others, eating
large quantities of meat, and eating alone without inviting others . . . Such
qualities of seclusion, selfishness, and greed are also precisely those that
characterize witches” (Shaw, 1997, pp. 860-1).
European contact with the Temne goes back four or five centuries. Their
people had been reduced to consumable entities, exchanged for wealth in the
European slave trade. Much of the capital that fueled the Industrial Revolu
tion in Britain and the rest of Europe, and the growth of the American
colonies, came from the wealth generated by New World plantations depen
dent on African slave labor. Local wealth in Sierra Leone was created by the
exchange of raw materials, and in particular slaves, with European traders.
While the earliest accounts of divination in the region from the late fifteenth
century make no mention of witchcraft, by the seventeenth century it
appears that diviners would identify the relatives of a sick or dead person as
witches, many of whom, particularly those from poorer families, would be
enslaved. The African slavers were thereby “absolved,” as the witch-victim
of the slave trade had been transformed into the aggressor. The role of
divination in supplying “witches” for the international slave trade was
noted by English agents, but they reversed the direction of influence, seeing
witchcraft and divination as cause rather than effect. With the abolition of
slavery the practice of identifying and enslaving witches declined, and spirits
rather than witches were more often named as the cause of sickness or death.
Shaw suggests a parallel between the European slavers, consuming the
local population, the diviners, and other wealthy locals who benefited from
the slave trade, and today’s elites who, self-evidently witches by virtue of
their wealth, are not those publicly accused of witchcraft. Now as in the past,
it is the poor and powerless who are convicted of being witches. It is said that
although they “may appear weak and unimportant in this world . . . they are
‘big persons’ in the invisible city” (Shaw, 1997, p. 868).4 3 Shaw concludes
that: “Built into the Temne imagination through an extended historical
296 MYTH

experience that has tied transregional commercial flows and foreign com
modities to a traffic in human lives, the witch-city is a Sierra Leonean
‘cosmology of capitalism’ (Sahlins, 1988) that ‘remembers’ this experience
in its construction as a startling commentary on global modernity” (Shaw,
1997, pp. 869-70).
Although it may seem as if we have strayed a long way from the tales of
gods and heroes that are commonly the subject of mythology, Shaw’s analysis
provides an important pointer to the ways in which historical events are
incorporated into a people’s cultural memory. The Place of Witches, the
fabulous witch-city, described by the Temne may seem to be the stuff of
fables and dreams - a mythological place if ever there was one, but has its
roots in a complex set of relationships that are modern, global, and grounded
in recent historical experience. While the Tsimshian Native American
chiefs used literary narratives to produce their mytho-histories, the Temne
use oral narrative and ritual to reproduce their memories of slavery.44

The urban myth

Urban myths have much to teach us concerning the ways in which narratives
can slide between myth and history. They usually have a clear narrative
structure - a plot, characters, a time and location - with enough extraneous
detail to add authenticity to the tale. Many urban myths contain elements
that have the quality of a Jungian archetype, such as the stranger/angel who
appears in time of trouble and leads the traveler though a place of danger to a
place of safety before disappearing. Whatever the mode of transport the basic
form of the narrative, repeated in numerous times, places, and cultural
settings, is the same. Other tropes are more culturally specific. The belief
that shaking the hand of a stranger can make a man’s penis disappear causes
periodic panic in parts of West Africa. Other urban legends, such as the story
of the person who wakes after an encounter with a stranger to find that a
kidney has been removed, are persistent and widespread. 4 5
The urban myth or legend is a form of folklore often taken as fact.
Stories are repeated verbally, in newspapers and other media and, increas
ingly, by email. Urban myths are not based on direct experience but believed
as they come from a trusted source. The incidents described are often
said to have happened to a “friend of a friend” (FOAF). The term “urban” is
used to distinguish such tales from “traditional folklore,” although it is not
a very useful distinction as there is considerable continuity between
“traditional” and “modern” forms of the genre, with evidence of such tales
dating back to the work of the fifth-century Greek historian Herodotus.
MYTH 297

The concept of the urban legend was popularized by the work of Jan
Harold Brunvand in his 1981 book The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American
Urban Legends & Their Meanings.
Urban myths play on or reflect people’s fears, often fear of change, new
technology, or encounters with strangers. They may well have a basis in fact.
Just as Sierra Leonean politicians and elites, and the experience of the slave
trade may be mediated by the image of the witch, so the commercial world of
organ transplants and international trade in body parts, and a loss of individual
control within an increasingly technological health system, is mediated by the
image of the seducer-stranger who removes the innocent victim’s kidney.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes (2002), in her account of the illegal trade in organs
for transplant, recalls how rumors of body-snatching among the poor of Recife
in Brazil had precisely the character of an urban legend. Scheper-Hughes
initially wrote of them in this fashion, as a reflection of “the normal, accepted,
everyday violence practiced against the bodies of the poor and the marginal in
public medical clinics, in hospitals, and in police mortuaries, where their ills
and afflictions were often treated with scorn, neglect, and general disrespect”
(2002, p. 34). 46 The rumors of organ theft began to appear with variations from
many other parts of South and Central America, then from Africa, India, Asia,
and Europe. In Poland and Russia it was said that poor children’s organs “were
being sold to rich Arabs for transplant surgery” (p. 35). In sub-Saharan Africa
the tales were of blood-sucking vampires stealing organs. It was said that
firemen or paramedics driving red combi-vans would drive around “looking
to capture unsuspecting people to drug and kill in order to drain their blood or
remove their organs and other body parts - genitals and eyes in particular - for
magical medicine (muti) or for more traditional medical purposes” (ibid.).4 7
In Italian versions of the story the kidnap vehicle is a black ambulance.
These metaphoric substitutions, as Levi-Strauss would put it, do not alter the
basic story line and, as with other myths, by collecting all the possible
variants a picture emerges that is not just psychologically relevant but, as
Scheper-Hughes demonstrates, points to all too real practices.

[Organ-stealing stories] were told, remembered, and circulated because they

were true at that indeterminate level between the real, the surreal, and the
uncanny. They expressed an intuitive sense that something was amiss, signaling
the chronic “state of emergency” of the world’s subcitizens living in a negative
zone of existence where lives and bodies are experienced as a constant crisis of
presence (hunger, sickness, injury) on the one hand, and as a crisis of absence
and disappearance on the other. (Scheper-Hughes, 2002, p. 36)
298
298 MYTH

By paying attention to the timing, geopolitical distribution, and specific

details (mythic variants) of the stories, Scheper-Hughes noted that the
stories circulated in times of upheaval and crisis. Evidence began to emerge,
reported in respectable medical journals, of a global, illegal trade in human
organs and other body parts. As Scheper-Hughes notes, “Indeed, wild rumors,
like metaphors, do sometimes harden into ‘ethnographic facts’ ”(p. 38).
facts”’(p.

Conclusion

The relationship between myth and history is evidently complex. The

The The notion
of myth itself and
and its
its study as a discrete phenomenon
phenomenon is dependent upon a view
of history as recorded fact and the development of a post-Enlightenment
view of the world to which myth can be opposed. Myths appear to gain
salience when they have both psychological relevance and possibly some
basis in fact. They then take on easily remembered, stereotypic forms. While
there are specific cultural details and resonances to myths, such as cannibal
istic witches in Africa, werewolves in Northern Europe, angels in white
among Christianized peoples, or trickster hares in the Americas, they are
also capable of crossing cultural, religious, and geographic boundaries. Liter
acy and history have not, as sometimes supposed, “done away with myth” or
rendered myths obsolete. On the contrary, human societies constantly refi
gure their history so as to resemble myth, condensing some details, elaborat
ing others, using repetition and formulaic devices that are simultaneously
flexible and conservative. Myths become reservoirs of human experience.
They are reflections of our present and our past, a mirror to our fears and
anxieties, and a guide to our hopes
hopes for the future.

Notes
Notes

1 See chapter 5, p. 108, for definitions of these terms.

2 For standard, folkloristic definitions of these terms see Bascom (1965).
3 See Dundes (1996).
4 This distinction is related to the stereotypical distinction often made by Chris
tian (especially Protestant) theologians between Judaism as a religion of ritual
and Christianity as a religion of faith. Judaism is seen as a form of externalized
religion, Christianity as an “inner” religion (within which contemplation is
regarded as its highest expression).
SnexxWW
5 See StvewWt WsewsAoxx \y\ YA?jW
s WsevsAo'o. Wyh avA
awk YAethoA
YAeWA A996,, vv
w -• Sh-YY
bb-’A.
h \t cm\A
eoAWeW ai%we&
AVgaeA Wav
Wai We ceXeWxovt
eeWaixow A We YAass
Uass oxot ToeWvst
WtoAsi xAWwt kWns-
wWn Cwc\s-
tianity is the dramatic re-enactment of a myth, but that participation is usually
MYTH 299

formal and restrained, internal rather than expressive, and most believers would
probably resist the designation of the Eucharistic celebration as myth.
7 For a discussion of these terms see the section on “The Structural Study of
Myth,” p. 281.
8 Reproduced in Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays (1954), edited by
Robert Redfield, and in Malinowski and the Work of Myth (1992), edited by Ivan
Strenski.
9 Strenski (1992, p. 81).
10 For a good discussion of Malinowki’s pragmatism, as well as other aspects of his
work on myth, see Strenski’s introductory essay in Malinowski and the Work of
Myth (1992).
11 Reprinted as chapter 4 in Strenski (1992).
12 Cf. the discussion of Peggy Reeves Sanday’s work in chapter 5, which also stresses
the parallels between myth and social structure.
13 Strenski (1992, p. 66).
14 See chapter 1, pp. 13-14.
15 Segal (1994, p. 75) makes the interesting point that for Smith, as for Frazer, myth
serves to explain ritual, whereas for the French literary scholar Rene Girard,
author of Violence and the Sacred, the function of myth is to disguise and not
explain. The myth-ritual of the scapegoat disguises the tensions within society by
focusing them on an acceptable victim (see chapter 6, pp. 163-4).
16 See discussion of Tylor in chapter 1, p 13.
17 See discussion of Sanday’s work in chapter 5, pp. 118-22.
18 Onwuejeogwu (1971, pp. 288-9) in Sanday (1981, p. 35).
19 Faulkingham (1971, pp. 104-5) in Sanday (1981, p. 36).
20 Tremeame (1968).
21 Cited in Sanday (1981, p. 35).
22 Cf. Bowie and Davies (1990); Petroff (1986).
23 Louis Ginzberg (1913), in Ruether (1985, p. 71).
24 Ibid.
25 According to Tremearne (1968, p. 243), “[Bori spirits] are ready for their human
victim before his birth, and will be certain to get him in the end.”
26 Judith Plaskow, “The Coming of Lilith,” originally written at the Feminist
Theologizing Conference, Granville, Ohio, 1972. Reprinted in Ruether (1985,
pp. 72-4).
27 Among the classic texts of process theology is Alfred North Whitehead’s (1978)
Process and Reality.
28 Jakobson also read the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, and sought to develop a
structuralist understanding of the ways in which a language’s structure serves its
basic communicative function. In 1949 Jakobson moved to Harvard University,
and in the 1960s developed a broader interest in communication science as a
whole.
29 Structural Anthropology, Volume II (1977, p. 65). Robert Segal makes the point
that Levi-Strauss is a kind of myth-ritualist, but with a twist. Instead of seeing
300 MYTH

myth and ritual as parallel expressions, he sees them as binary opposites (personal
communication).
30 See chapter 6, pp. 161-3 for a discussion of Freud.
31 As he paid lavish tribute to Jung, Campbell is sometimes identified as more
straightforwardly Jungian than is actually the case. Jung saw the task of the
second half of life as integrating the external world of adulthood with the
internal world one left behind as a child. Campbell’s monomyth ostensibly
follows a Jungian conception of an adult rather than a childhood journey,
although this is not followed through consistently.
32 Cf. Arnold van Gennep’s threefold stages of a rite of passage, separation-transi
tion-incorporation (see chapter 6, p. 147ff. ).
33 As Segal notes (personal communication), the hero’s journey fits and symbolizes
the journey of the discovery of the collective unconscious that is at the heart of
Jungian psychology (albeit, nominally at least, for both genders).
34 Bowie (1989, p. 33), Bynum (1987, p. 131).
35 See Bowie and Davies (1990).
36 Elizabeth Petroff has a very interesting discussion on the role of visions and the
sense of the self in her introduction to Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature
(1986).
37 From Pearson (1999).
38 Leach, “Genesis as Myth” (1969, p. 11). See also the discussion of Mary Douglas
and anomalies in chapter 2, pp. 45-6.
39 A quote from the German theologian J. Schniewind, in Leach’s essay “Genesis as
Myth” (1969, p. 7), originally published in 1962.
40 Cf. Bowie (2003) for a discussion of the personal beliefs and attitude to religion
of anthropologists who study religion.
41 Bayart (1993), refers to the “politics of the belly” to describe the metaphoric link
between politics and cannibalism, mediated through the image of the witch. See
also Geschiere (1997), Mbembe (2001), and chapter 8.
42 There are parallels here with the “cargo cults” of Oceania, which sought to
discover the magic key that would unlock the secret of European technological
dominance. See Lawrence (1964) and Trompf (1991).
43 Girard refers to this process as “scapegoating.” (See the discussion in chapter 6
on ritual violence.)
44 For Lord Raglan the mythic heroic pattern is specifically defined as that which is
non-historical, and is contrasted with the pattern of indisputably historical
heroes (Segal, personal communication).
45 Some myths are both persistent and harmful, such as the widespread belief that
having sex with a child or a virgin can cure a man of H1V-AIDS.
46 French folklorist Campion-Vincent also wrote of these rumors as the “literary
inventions of semiliterate people who lack the skills to sort out the credible and
realistic from the incredible and fantastic” (quoted in Scheper-Hughes, 2002, p. 36).
47 The use of children’s body parts in “traditional” African ritual has gained
increased visibility after the discovery of the torso of a child in the River Thames