Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals

By William G. Doty

This new edition of William Doty's critically acclaimed study provides a comprehensive guidebook to the many schools of interpretation in this burgeoning field

William Doty's popular text has been hailed as the most comprehensive work of its kind. Extensively rewritten and completely restructured, the new edition provides further depth and perspective and is even more accessible to students of myth. It includes expanded coverage of postmodern and poststructuralist perspectives, the Gernet Center, mythic iconography, neo-Jungian approaches, and cultural studies, and it summarizes what is new in the study of Greek myth, iconography, French classical scholarship, and ritual studies. It also features a comprehensive index of names and topics, a glossary, an up-to-date annotated bibliography, and a guide to myth on the Internet.

Presenting all major myth theorists from antiquity to the present, Mythography is an encyclopedic work that offers a cross-disciplinary approach to the study of myth. By reflecting the dramatic increase in interest in myth among both scholars and general readers since publication of the first edition, it remains a key study of modern approaches to myth and
an essential guide to the wealth of mythographic research available today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9780817388263

Book preview

MYTHOGRAPHY

MYTHOGRAPHY

The Study of Myths and Rituals

SECOND EDITION

William G. Doty

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa and London

Copyright © 2000

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

All rights reserved

First edition published 1986

Manufactured in the United States of America

1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9  .  08  07  06  05  04  03  02  01  00

Cover illustration, Widening Gyre, and interior illustrations by Rachel Dobson. Used by permission.

Cover and interior design by Charisse Antonopoulos

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Doty, William G., 1939–

       Mythography : the study of myths and rituals/William G. Doty.—2nd ed.

       p. cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 0-8173-1005-3 (cloth)

    ISBN 0-8173-1006-1 (pbk.)

    1. Myth—Study and teaching. 2. Ritual—Study and teaching. 3. Myth and ritual school. I. Title.

    BL304.D58 2000

    291.1′3—dc21

                                     99-6781

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data available

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-8826-3 (electronic)

CONTENTS

Preface: A ReadMe File for the User

Acknowledgments

PART 1 - ACCESS TO TOOLS AND DEFINITIONS

CHAPTER 1 - Myth around the Clock: From Mama Myth to Mythographic Analysis

Myth the Mother

Positive and Negative Uses of Myth

The Myth- Terms of Our Analyses

Hermeneutics and Interpretation

The Range of Definitions

CHAPTER 2 - The Nature of the Mythical Beast: A Comprehensive, Polyphasic Working Definition (Part 1)

(1) Network of Myths

(2) Culturally Important

(3) Imaginal

(4) Stories

(5) Metaphoric and Symbolic Diction

(6) Graphic Imagery

(7) Emotional Conviction and Participation

(8) The Primal, Foundational Accounts

(9) The Real, Experienced World

(10) Humankind's Roles and Relative Statuses

CHAPTER 3 - Maieutic, Creative Myth: Conveying Values and Systems of Interpreting Reality (Definition, Part 2)

(11) Convey Political and Moral Values

(12) Systems of Interpretation

(13) Individual Experience within Universal Perspectives

(14) Intervention of Suprahuman Entities

(15) Aspects of the Natural and Cultural Orders

(16) Rituals, Ceremonials, and Dramas

(17) Secondary Elaborations

CHAPTER 4 - The Noble White Man: Why Myths Seem Déclassé in Today's Glitz Culture

Those Primitive Savages Lacked Scientific Truth

Myths, Science, and Truth(s)

Phenomenologically Existential Mythicity

The Greeks Are Still Very Much with Us

Myth and/versus Biblical History

The Smart and the Proper: When Do We Do What We Say We Do?

PART 2 - MYTHOGRAPHY: HISTORICAL SCHOOLS AND ISSUES

CHAPTER 5 - Comparativism and the Functional Contexts of Myths and Rituals

Sociofunctionalism: Myth as Cement and as Charter

How Myths Serve Society

Levels of Operational Vitality

Functional Contexts of Myths and Rituals

Reducing Anxiety and Communicating: Two German Functionalists

Polyfunctional and Polysemantic Meanings

CHAPTER 6 - Myth on the Psychoanalytical Couch: Freud and Beyond

Sigmund's Mythology

MANIFEST CONTENTS VERSUS LATENT CONTENTS

THE PRIMAL HORDE, CIVILIZATION, AND RELIGION

A MYTHOLOGICAL READING OF FREUD

ETIOLOGICAL BIAS

MYTHOLOGICAL INTERPRETATION

Post-Freudian Mythography

Psychosociology

Psychoanthropology

CHAPTER 7 - The Imaginal, Archetypal Turn: Jung, Hillman, and Further Beyond

Jungian Archetypes and Amplifications

Archetypal Myth

The Animated Mythological Terrain of James Hillman

Other Semi-/Hemi-/Neo-Jungian Myth Studies

Psychologically Affective Myths and Rituals

CHAPTER 8 - Mything Links: Mythlitcrit and Cultural Studies Analyses (Marx Was a Smoothie)

The Literary Importance of The Golden Bough

Myth-and-Ritual Criticism

Mythicosymbolism and Monomythicism

Northrop Frye's Myth

Mythic Figures in Literature

Mythicity and the Modern/Postmodern

Gould's Intentions of Mythicity

Cultural Studies of Cultural Studies

CHAPTER 9 - The Enframing Prime-time Context Is All: Structuralisms, Semiotics, and Cultural History

Structuralism and the Concepts of Structure

Protostructuralist Structuralists

Lévi-Strauss: The Myth and the Mythed

Sequential and Semiotic Structuralists

The New French Cultural History

Bonnefoy/Doniger's Encyclopedia

Biogentic Structuralism

PART 3 - EMBODIMENTS, RITES, AND CEREMONIALS

CHAPTER 10 - The Cosmological/Symbological Human/Social Body

Biofunctional, Biogenetic Approaches

Joseph Campbell's Mythography

The Local and the Universal

Ethological Questions

The Cosmological Human Body

Biogenetic Colors

Mythologically Attuned Bodies

The Human Social Experience

BLISS AT THE MOTHER'S BREAST

GENDER DIFFERENTIATION

THE FAMILY AND THE CLAN

DUALITIES, POLARITIES, AND THEIR MEDIATION

CHAPTER 11 - Yesterday's World Wide Web? Ritual as Culture's Symbolic Nexus

The Historical Ritual-Dominant (Myth-and-Ritual) School

Emphasis upon the Priority of Ritual

Victor Turner's Ritual Studies

THE MEANS OF ANALYSIS

RITUALS REFLECT SOCIAL STRUCTURES

RITUALS INFLUENCE SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS

THE TRICKSTER AND THE LIMINAL/LIMINOID

TURNER UPDATED

CHAPTER 12 - Sacrificial Scapegoating the Origin of Myth/Religion? Ritualizations as Necessary Gestures toward Being Human

Definitions and Attitudes and Functions

Girard: Violence, the Sacred, and the Sacrificial Scapegoat

RENÉ GIRARD

THE THEORY: A COMPRESSED VERSION

TRACING THE THEORY'S HERITAGE AND FUTURE

GIRARD'S NATURAL BORN KILLERS

DEVELOPING GIRARDIAN MYTHOGRAPHIES

Contemporary Antiritualism and the Postmodern

How Rituals Serve Society

Ludic Liminality

PART 4 - MYTHIFIED EXISTENCE

CHAPTER 13 - Making Do in a Decentered Cosmos: Signs of Our Myths and Tales

Social and Cultural Semiotics

Transformation and Transmission of Mythic Materials

Universalizing Fairy Tales and Myths

CHAPTER 14 - Don't Myth (with) the Boat: Our Deconstructed, Fictive-Mythic Universe

From Realism on Down

The Sacred as Fictive Mythicity

Mythographic Moralities

FURBISHING THE CREATIVE MYTHOGRAPHER'S TOOLKIT

I - Glossary

II - Questions to Address to Mythic Texts

III - The New Mythical Iconography

IV - Myth on the Internet

V - Selected Introductory Bibliography: Access to Individual Mythological Figures and Topics

1 - General Introductions to the Study of Mythology

2 - The Historical Development of Mythographic Perspectives

3 - Collections of Myths

4 - On Defining Myth and Ritual

5 - Sociofunctionalism; Comparativism

6 - Ritual Studies Materials

7 - Anthropological-Ethnographic Studies

8 - Psychological Perspectives

9 - Philosophical Perspectives

10 - Religious and Theological Approaches

11 - Archetypal Criticism and Myth Analysis of Literature

12 - Linguistic-Narratological-Semiotic Structuralism

13 - Transmission and Themes of Myths and Folklore

14 - Feminist/Gender-Studies Aspects

15 - Modern Appropriations of Myth; Contemporary Culture Analysis

16 - Myth and Ritual and the Arts

17 - Exploring the Individual Mythostory

18 - Advanced and Specialized Studies

19 - Anthologies, Monographs, and Collections of Essays

20 - Journal Issues with Thematic Emphasis on Myths/Rituals

21 - Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, Handbooks

22 - Bibliographies

23 - A Mythographer's Basic Book List

Bibliography

Index

Preface: A ReadMe File for the User

The analysis of myths has constituted one of the most dynamic branches of research in the human sciences for at least thirty years.

Jean-Claude Schmitt, The Medieval West and ‘Mythic Thought’

There is no one definition of myth, no Platonic form of a myth against which all instances can be measured. Myths . . . differ enormously in their morphology and their social function. . . . What I have tried to point out is . . . the persistent and distorting application of a false preconception, namely that myth is a closed category with the same characteristics in different cultures. . . . General theories of myth and ritual are no simple matter.

G. S. Kirk, Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures

There is a kind of intellectual frontier within which he must be who will sympathize with myth, while he must be without it who will investigate it, and it is our fortune that we live near this frontierline and can go in and out.

Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom

README FILES WILL BE FAMILIAR to everyone who has ever purchased a new program for a computer. No longer necessary to load forty-nine esoteric subroutines before you can start working; Be sure you have turned off [this, that, the other] possibly competing program!; Do not ever try to run System A before System B has been installed! Generally, such files bring the esoteric protocols of the software designers into sync with the ways ordinary mortals are likely to operate.

Mythography may not be a household word, but it is not a difficult one to add to one's vocabulary. First some brief historical background, then the reader will be ready to get on board the mythographic ship real time!

The ancient term for the compilation of mythological accounts is mytholography, the activity of late-classical figures such as Kallimachos. The most compendious and useful is that of the Athenian grammarian Apollodoros, whose Bibliotheca (Library) (first century C.E.) founded the myth-handbook tradition. Then in Mythologies, by the fifth/sixth-century Fabius Planciades Fulgentius (1971), the tradition became snippet-like, and full of fantasy etymologies.

Mythography originally named the work of writers who generated written forms of myths from accounts in poetry and literature and public life. These forms were not restricted to myths as narrative accounts, but included all sorts of lists, etiologies, local legends, and especially genealogies (see Henrichs 1987). Interest in thematic comparisons and then in local variants followed.

Students of early Greek myth remind us that while one may speak readily enough of the mythology of a people, actual praxis always reflects mythologies, transmitted and understood within various contexts and a wide range of interpretations, of which any compilation is in itself but another. In the medieval period, mythography was largely ruled by Neoplatonic-Christian allegorists, comprehensively surveyed in Jane Chance's Medieval Mythography. The mythic sphere itself does not necessitate specific religious canons, although certainly various mythological images and figures can be regarded religiously enough, indeed. Only those who have not worked in myth analysis would see myths as matters of concern only to children. Those who have recognized the signs of immense importance in these materials that surround us in our language no less than in the latest incarnation of Herakles in the 1997 Disney film Hercules recognize immediately the contemporary relevance of such themes.

Increasingly since the first edition of this book appeared in 1986, a number of other scholars have joined me in using mythography as a general description for the study of myths and rituals, the application of critical perspectives to traditional mythological materials (it used to cover iconography as well, but as the academic specialties developed, iconography has appropriated its own turf). My focus is not upon materials from antiquity, except in giving a cursory overview of some of the exciting mythographic studies of Greek culture in the last couple of decades. Rather, attention is directed to modern approaches to myths and rituals in the major schools of interpretation.

And ours is certainly a time of great interest in myths and rituals:

• A general search for myth and mythology in the CD-ROM version of the International Modern Language Association Bibliography produced 7,437 hits for 1981–98.

• Books in Print requires eleven four-column microprinted pages to list the over one thousand books currently available in the field at the time of this revision.

• At London's British Library in 1996, I came across an extensive exhibit entitled The Mythical Quest: In Search of Adventure, Romance, and Enlightenment that included mythologically inspired paintings and other artworks, and a wide range of video and film programs.

• Noting that In the last decade, there has been a tremendous increase of interest [in] mythology and symbolism, the editor of a new annual serial, SAGA: Best New Writings on Mythology, Jonathan Young (1996: xi), has gathered a wide range of materials treating various aspects of mythological studies today in the initial volume.

• Pacifica Graduate Institute, near Santa Barbara, has the first freestanding Mythological Studies M.A. and Ph.D. programs in the nation, with substantial enrollment; Indiana University has just inaugurated an interdisciplinary graduate program, Mythology Studies, to complement their interdisciplinary graduate minor in Mythology Studies.

• And there have been many excellent publications in the field since my first edition (I did a sort of catch-up survey in Doty 1991), as well as extremely useful and data-packed CD-ROMs such as Pegasus and Mythology (where over 350 pages from my own works can be accessed electronically). At the time of publication, it appears that my next book will appear—perhaps only—as a CD-ROM.

• With respect to Internet resources, a search on AOL NetFind on 23 December 1998 yielded 6,783 matches for myth and mythology; NorthernLights located 21,492 available articles for the same range. (Note section IV of The Mythographer's Toolkit below for ways to begin using Internet resources.)

The study of the history and applicability of mythographies is part of the history of ideas, so that remaining aware of why we approach myths and rituals the way we do at any given moment must remain central. My focus here will be largely methodological, but that does not mean mechanical—methodologies involve worldviews, and worldviews both create hermeneutical (interpretive) systems and are created by them. A culture myths-out its social fabric as it is mythed/molded by it, so that it is a matter for serious social, intellectual, ecological, and moral attention. Perhaps few individuals are aware philosophically of mythic systems, but those who are recognize that the very concept of an individualistic self-made mythology is a late-Romantic fantasy that denies the very material manner in which worldview, ethics, and hermeneutical principles are all enfleshed, embodied, in the primary stories that a culture tells and in the rituals that it enacts (note that I operate with a wide spectrum of mythic-ritualistic processes or happenings in view, rather than treating myths and rituals as polar or contradictory).

For my money, too much of our mythographic history has been marked by the assumption that only a single approach will predominate, so that myths or rituals are considered to have only one function, to be of only one type, and so forth—we can refer in these cases to monomythic mythographies and reductionist ritologies. For instance, the mythological is considered in such approaches to be but a preliminary stage that optimally can lead to scientific thinking. Or rituals represent reality as enacted, myths only ideally. Accordingly, myths are only psychological, or they are just a way of passing on outdated values.

My own publications in the interdisciplinary humanities (Doty and Klein 1990; J. T. Klein and Doty 1994) may well alert readers that my own preference is instead for a multilayered, multifunctional mythography that folds in ritual studies as well as iconography, and I return to that perspective repeatedly. Although it has been heeded by analytic mythographers only rarely, the sentiment of Percy Cohen's statement may stand as a sort of totemic golden bough or motto: "There are many theories of myth, but they are not necessarily rival theories: the reason for this is that different theories often explain different statements about myth. Particular theories may, of course, explain several statements about myth and they may therefore compete, partly or wholly, with other theories" (1969: 338, my emphasis).

Cohen's point is that theorists should make clear which aspects of myth their own theory is designed to clarify. But because most theorists aim at myth in general, or at ritual in general, it is important for methodological and historical surveys to perform a sort of archaeology of mythography, and so remind us that definitions of myth change as mythographic approaches change (see Edmunds 1990: 1).

Centuries of Protestant ritoclasm (the rejection, even abolishing, of ritual) crumbled when mid-twentieth-century religionists and secularists alike began to reclaim the importance of bodily movement, scents, and sounds, as opposed to the rationalistic emphasis upon talking alone. The term West Coast summarized an entire generation's recovery of the whole person, and few educational institutions were not changed by the subsequent Get Relevant! attempts to reclaim a body/mind fusion so long denied by Enlightenment dualisms. Subsequently, monotheisms of religion no less than of philosophy and pedagogy have transformed into polytheisms, multivalent methodologies, and postmodernist hermeneutics that refuse the simple arithmetics of the stock market, and demand personal/communal accounting of the ways by which we honor our inherited ritual/mythic resources.

Beyond Just Do It! seminars and publications, serious students want depth and perspective, and this volume will help them find some of the marvelously rich Wal-Marts of mythographic information now available. While my presentation is often chronological, I do not suggest that the most recent approaches are more or less competent than others, or that any approach used in isolation is more productive than a multiperspectival method. The success and strength of a multidisciplinary, synoptic (comparative and inclusive) approach depends upon recognizing the most and least useful elements of each component, and then asking how the various methods can be interwoven meaningfully.

Formerly, psychoanalytical theories have stressed the individual while deemphasizing the social context; and the products of structuralist analysis could be halted prematurely at the level of the para-algebraic coding of individual items. But today things have changed in the direction of more self-consciously involved applications of information, so that the proof of the pudding is always in the productiveness of the method or theory within a complex and multileveled approach, and in the ways it helps us understand how the mythic or ritual pattern satisfies its original adherents, and how it might structure meaning within our own contexts. Earlier assumptions about original adherents are now challenged repeatedly as participant-ethnographies correct and replace enormous volumes of ingressor-dominated accounts of what those primitives thought and believed. At last, we begin to understand just how traditional scholarship has squelched the voices of peoples presumed to be primitive.

While the origins and history of Western mythography (and Eastern: see Birrell 1993) have been treated recently in several books and encyclopedias (see, for instance, Detienne 1986, Bonnefoy 1991, Chance 1994), I believe that no volume other than this one provides as comprehensive an overview of the approaches to the study of myths and rituals current today. This book can serve as an initial English-language bibliographic resource, not only through its references but also by means of the annotated bibliography in the Toolkit at the end of the book. Most references from the first edition have been repeated, even if no longer referred to in this volume; all references are also available electronically on Ginette Paris's CD-ROM, Mythology. In-text references include last name of author, date, and pages. Endnotes from the first edition have been excised or included in the text itself in this revision.

A number of words/concepts that are compounds including myth- are explained in the Glossary (located in the Toolkit section) and in the second part of Chapter 1. Focus in the text cannot be upon the bricks of mythological or ritual traditions—the mythological microunits, or mythemes, or the ritual symbols and microunits, ritemes—but is more concerned with the various ways these have been charted, organized, and considered integral to coherent systems of belief, to symbologies and ritualizations. When manageable, references to typical rituals or myths have been provided, but to give illustrative applications of each method would have necessitated adding a second volume (E. K. Maranda 1973 and Snyder 1979 are useful illustrations of mythographic studies that apply several approaches to one myth; Brunel's Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes, and Archetypes is a gold mine; Doty 1999c is my own most extended explicitation of a single myth).

The eight chapters of the first edition have become fourteen here. Some materials were regrouped and expanded, so that the definitional probe is now in two of the four chapters of Part I. Extensive new information has been added throughout, and a number of student-oriented aids should make this edition more immediately useful to students.

Acknowledgments

VARIOUS SECTIONS OF THE FIRST EDITION of this book were strengthened by critiques of members of a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar at Harvard University. And I gratefully acknowledge coworkers on and contributors to Mythosphere: A Journal for Image, Myth, and Symbol, published by the Gordon and Breach Publishing Group with support from the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Alabama. That College, and especially Deans James D. Yarbrough and Hank A. Lazer, have been supportive of my work throughout recent years of severe economic retrenchment in state funding.

Undergraduate and graduate students have shared their suggestions for improvement, and of course I am a different writer today than I was nearly two decades ago, writing the first edition in the Massachusetts woods, a thousand feet above Amherst (where I was teaching Classics and Comparative Literature), then at Goddard and Hampshire Colleges. The work of revision would have taken much longer and been much more of a chore had it not been for the meticulous research support of Jon Berry, now my student in an Interdisciplinary Ph.D. program, and the secretarial skills of Debbie St. John, who spent many hours cleaning the electronically scanned text of what we term MG-1. Gray Kochhar-Lindgren's comments and Dan Noel's extraordinarily helpful scouring of the entire manuscript were much appreciated. And I may as well thank the occasion for my new Toyota RAV4, namely, being appointed as the Goodwin-Philpott Eminent Scholar, Program in Religious Studies, Department of History, Auburn University, during 1997–98.

Cover artist Rachel Dobson contributes artworks for each of the four parts of the book as well, each accompanied by one of Northrop Frye's four tropes/archetypes of literature. The choices were determined by Rachel on the basis of her impression of Frye's work in the first edition of Mythography; they are not to be understood as indicating that Part I is all about spring-like matters, or Part III about fall, etc.

My initial dedication in 1986 to Joan T. Mallonée is, well, at least doubled for this second edition, as we celebrate over thirty-five years of learning and loving together. I think she'd agree with me that relationships are like myths . . . at least in the insightful terms of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1995: xii): We should not think that myths, coming to us from very far away in time or in space, can only offer us already-played-out games. Myths do not consist in games finished once and for all. They are untiring; they begin a new game each time they are retold or read.

Permissions

Permission to quote is gratefully acknowledged as follows:

Material from The Snow Poems, A. R. Ammons, copyright © 1977 by A. R. Ammons. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.; permission renewed June 14, 1999.

Material from William G. Doty, Mythophiles' Dyscrasia: A Complex Definition of Myth. Journal of the American Academy of Religion 48/4 (1981): 531–62. Used by permission of Robert P. Scharlemann, editor.

Material from Eric Gould, Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature. Copyright © 1981 by Princeton University Press. Scattered quotes reprinted with permission of Princeton University Press; permission renewed June 23, 1999.

A chart from Ronald L. Grimes, Ritual Criticism: Case Studies in Its Practice, Essays on Its Theory, copyright © 1990. Used by permission of the University of South Carolina Press.

Materials from Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Copyright © 1969 by Victor W. Turner. Used by permission on Aldine Publishing Company, New York; permission renewed June 16, 1999.

PART I

ACCESS TO TOOLS AND DEFINITIONS

CHAPTER 1   Myth Around the Clock: From Mama Myth to Mythographic Analysis

CHAPTER 2   The Nature of the Mythical Beast: A Comprehensive, Polyphasic Working Definition (Part 1)

CHAPTER 3   Maieutic, Creative Myth: Conveying Values and Systems of Interpreting Reality (Definition, Part 2)

CHAPTER 4   The Noble White Man: Why Myths Seem Déclassé in Today's Glitz Culture

The dawn, spring, and birth phase. Myths of the birth of the hero, of revival and resurrection, or creation and (because the four phases are a cycle) of the defeat of the powers of darkness, winter, and death. Subordinate characters: the father and the other. The archetype of romance and of most dithyrambic and rhapsodic poetry.

—Northrop Frye, The Archetypes of Literature

CHAPTER 1

Myth Around the Clock: From Mama Myth to Mythographic Analysis

Myth study [in the 1960s] has not so much the purity and integrity of an homogeneous regional cooking as it has the syncretistic flavor of international cuisine: a dash of Cassirer, a dollop of Freud, a gram of Frazer, a minim of Graves, a pinch of Harrison, a smidgen of Jung, a taste of Thompson, all intriguing flavors in themselves, excellently cooked, but, still and all, not really a style.

Herbert Weisinger, The Agony and the Triumph: Papers on the Use and Abuse of Myth

Mythology has been interpreted by the modern intellect as a primitive, fumbling effort to explain the world of nature (Frazer); as a production of poetical fantasy from prehistoric times, misunderstood by succeeding ages (Müller); as a repository of allegorical instruction, to shape the individual to his group (Durkheim); as a group dream, symptomatic of archetypal urges within the depths of the human psyche (Jung). . . . Mythology is all of these.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (my emphasis)

Myth is one of the genres of experience, a way that imagination wraps us in fantasy even as we dream or live out a day. It accounts for the deepest level of emotion, understanding, interpretation, and valuing in experience. Because it is so deep, it is collective in tone, full of memory that goes back so far as to feel antecedent to personal life and even to human life. In it, unfamiliar plants, animals, geographies, and notable events may take their place regardless of any connection to actual experience. . . . Mythology is a certain kind of story that describes the stratum of myth in imaginal experience. . . . It can open up a particular kind of vision, so that we see what otherwise would be hidden beneath a layer of literalism or personalistic fiction.

Thomas Moore, Developing a Mythic Sensibility

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, I was in high school bands when rock became popular. Rock Around the Clock was a fundamental reorientation of our culture: from the restrained, polite expression of the upwardly mobile, to the inclusion of everyday interests and values. Only in my late fifties did I begin to appreciate that old stuff (early rock music) as opposed to the classical music in which I was steeped to the extent that I not only performed it for twenty-five years, but did public radio programming and announcing. Myth Around the Clock here refers to the long-term presence of things mythological, to the manifold ways in which every one of us is affected daily by some sort of mythological or ritual influence.

Our first task is to gain an overview of the many ways myths and rituals can be studied. This chapter treats terms and definitions, and acknowledges problems which can arise in that enterprise. Following the tracking of some beginnings is a study of subsequent historical meanings of myth. Next comes the proposal of a comprehensive definition, the development of which will constitute the bulk of the following two chapters.

Myth the Mother

The sort of glaze that comes over our eyes when someone chants In the beginning . . .  is fazed only slightly by recent scholarly translations of the initial verse of that late-biblical source responsible for what now begins the Tanakh/Hebrew Bible. Bereshith/Genesis 1.1 is translated more adequately with a processive verbal form: When the gods began creating . . . , or in the striking rendering by Doria and Lenowitz, At the first of the gods' godmaking skies and earth, the earth was all mixed up—darkness on top of deepness; so the gods' spirit swooped down on the waters (1976: 37). That glaze on our eyes surely is related to the veneration our culture ascribes to anything that goes way back—especially to anything that goes way back to the beginnings.

Those familiar with the mythographer Mircea Eliade will recognize the theme he often repeated, of the importance of the cosmogonic myth, the account of first beginnings that remains a potential source throughout the life of a culture, a powerful source that, in the many examples which Eliade cites, can be renewed and made present repeatedly in retellings of the cosmogonic myth and in rites (see extracts in Beane and Doty 1975). While I do not consider the cosmogonic myth to have the absolute priority of place that Eliade assigned to it and its kin, there is no doubt that Western civilization since the days of the Greeks—who used to compile lists of the first finders of all sorts of cultural practices or objects—has been devoted to the psychic reality of Beginnings rather than of Now as the appropriate place to start. Even our narrative tales are structured not from a present instant backward, but by Once upon a time there was . . . ; and the habit reaches even into academe: woe betide the graduate student whose dissertation does not begin with a review of previous research (a pattern established by the German Forschungsbericht).

Following this tradition, mythography begins literally at the beginning—or at least at the beginning of words. With the mother, whose Proto-Indo-European root appears to be *ma-, identified by the second edition of the American Heritage Dictionary as an imitative root derived from the child's cry for the breast (a linguistic universal found in many of the world's languages . . . ); and it begins with the similar root of the word myth, the Proto-Indo-European root of which is *mu-. The Greek stem is apparently the noun my-, pronounced muh or moo, and referring to a muttering sound made with the lips. So from the similar ma- and mu-, or as I will arbitrarily connect them, Mother Myth, we have the noun mythos in Greek, as the term for what was made as a sound with the mouth, that is, for word (cf. the French cognate mot). Mythos came to designate a particular organization of words in story form.

In Homer and the early Greek poets, mythos signified the ways words are treated on the surface level of the text, their ornamental or fictional use, or the beauty of arrangement of the words in a literary work. Plato (strictly, Aristokles, surnamed Platon) considered myth to be an art of language alongside of and included within poetry. He cited mythic stories even while he suggested that the creativity of the poet-artist ought to be regulated closely by the state. Plato shifted to the mythic or legendary mode, or at least to extended metaphors, just at those points where his rational discourse needed to be amplified emotionally or aesthetically—that is to say, at those points where the logical mode exhausted rather than elucidated the subject (see especially Friedländer 1958: ch. 9; Detienne 1981: chs. 4 and 5). In his Poetics, Plato's pupil Aristotle (strictly, Aristoteles) used mythos more restrictively to refer to what we now call plot or fabula, treating the organization of words and actions of a drama into a sequence of narrative components as the most important dramatic element.

Mythos—word or story—could be combined with an equivalent Greek noun for word, namely logos (related to the verb legein, to speak). The result: mythologia (English: mythology), literally words concerning words. However, historically, apart from its place in mythologia, logos gained the sense of referring to words comprising doctrine or theory, as opposed to mythos for words having an ornamental or fictional, narrative function. When Greek philosophical and scientific discourse began to claim that its rationality (its logos) had supplanted mythological thinking (identified as mythos, although that same discourse was still heavily indebted to mythological thinking), the mythological came to be contrasted with logic (the logos-ical) and later with history in the sense of an overview or chronicle of events (epos or historia, not necessarily chronologically distant from the present).

Mythology as the imaginative rather than the historical resulted from this course of linguistic development, and it influenced the Latin adaptations of these terms. Hence mythos came into Latin as fabula, the basis of both fable and fabulous (and as indicated above, it is used also in Romance languages as a synonym for plot). Now the emphasis is purely upon the poetic, inventive aspects of mythological creations. Precisely this fictional aspect has colored the majority of approaches to mythology, especially when knowledge in the sciences (science is from scire, Proto-Indo-European *skei-, to know by separating things rather than showing their commonalities; cf. scission, scissors from the same root) is conceived of as being based in the concretely experienced, the empirical, the study of that which can be measured and quantified. In these cases the realm of science is considered to be the opposite of the mythological (or the religious, or the metaphysical), which is considered to be the realm of fiction, fantasy, the imagination. Such technical treatment of myth as the nonscientific may be what brought the term myth into modern usage—as late as 1830 in English, 1815 in German, 1818 in French (on the role of the concept in French intellectual history, see Detienne 1981, 1996). Fritz Graf (1993: 55–56) reminds us that the construct obtained its current usage in the Enlightenment, and that by failing to examine it carefully, it is entirely possible that in speaking of ‘myths’ in non-European societies we are projecting our own conceptions, which go back to fifth-century Athens, onto those societies.

One of the underlying intentions of this book is to question this distinction, to raise qualifications to such a separation between science and mythology as both terms usually are conceived. I suggest that our myths are fictional, to be sure, but that fictional need not mean unreal and certainly not non-empirical; myths are mysterious (another side-formation from the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European stem, *mu-), but they are not incomprehensible, and the most statistically driven science is shaped by the values of the underlying mythical orientations of cultures. Fiction is a sort of interpretation of the world, notes Mark Schneider, and in this context is neither pejorative nor congratulatory, but simply refers to the fact that interpretation and explanation, like any other human artifacts, have to be made (1993: 45).

But that is to anticipate somewhat; the main point I want to convey here is that the heavy burden of our cultural background lies upon the all too frequent weighting of mythology with the sense unreal, fictional. Precisely such a rationalizing approach to myths has dominated the study of mythology, even as it has excluded myth from philosophical or scientific exploration. Later phases of a myth's situation within a culture are marked by increasing rationalization, so that most theories of myth and ritual derive ultimately from the tendency to rationalize, to substitute abstract social or philosophical-scientific meanings for the graphic imagery of narrative myths and performed rituals.

Bruce Lincoln notes an agonistic (combat-related) use of mythos in Greek myth and epic: it is speech that is raw and crude, but forceful and true (in Hesiod, Theogony); it denotes a blunt and aggressive act of plain-speaking: a hardboiled speech of intimidation (in Homer, Iliad) (1996: 3–4, with reference to R. Martin 1989). Highly male gendered, it is an act of speech that in its operation establishes the speaker's domination of interlocutor and audience alike (5).

Thanks to the perspective initiated by Wilhelm Nestle and followed by F. M. Cornford, Bruno Snell, W. K. C. Guthrie, and other scholars early in this century, the developmental schema mythos-to-logos has been presumed by (largely male-dominant) scholarship. Hence Lincoln's summary comparison comes as a surprise: "Mythos is a blunt speech suited for assembly and battle, with which powerful males bludgeon and intimidate their foes. Logos, in contrast, is a speech particularly associated with women, but available to the gentle, the charming, and the shrewd of either sex. It is a speech soft and delightful that can also deceive and entrap (10). Bolle, Buxton, and Smith (1993: 715; cf. Vernant 1983: 205–6) also observe that the unquestioned validity of mythos could be contrasted with logos, the word whose validity or truth can be argued and demonstrated."

Such findings clarify not only how easily assumptions with respect to gender or social control are constituted, even for noble causes: Nestle's creation account for Western civilization, as Lincoln terms it (2), sought to combat Nazi craziness. But it also alerts us to semantic contexts quite possibly alien to our own. These are not words with fixed meanings (11), as Roland Champagne (1992: 187) bears out in reporting on the research of Marcel Detienne: there are separate meanings in the word ‘myth’ for Hesiod (the story of human beings), Herodotus (an absurd and nonsensical discourse), Aristotle (the plot of a tragedy), and Plato (the derived way of talking about existing Ideas).

The closer students of myth examine the originative scenes, the more artificial seems the mythos-to-logos pattern, but it has held sway as part of the attitude by which, within our own experience, the materialist, natural-sciences emphasis upon mathematics and abstract rationality came to be thought naturally more sophisticated than attention to narrative or idea. From a different perspective, Robert Parker is more likely on target when he suggests that we should consider the history of mythology not as a decline from myth into non-myth but as a succession of periods or styles, developing out of one another, as in art (1987: 189).

Our current style is clearly less ordered by the desire to demonstrate the rationality of mythic reference. In fact, the contemporary philosophical scene is frequently quasi-antirationalistic, because, as Paula Cooey summarizes:

Reason, far more narrowly and less morally defined than Kant would have intended, has itself taken on connotations of the censorial. . . . [It] has become a domain of elite interpreters, now primarily academicians, whose knowledge is so specialized and esoteric that intelligent lay people have little or no access to knowledge. Defined even more narrowly in a positivistic, scientific context as technological ratiocination . . . and abstracted from any historical context, the exercise of reason has often masked authoritarian ideological concerns, such that one necessarily comes to regard appeals to reason as suspicious and to view the authority vested in both reason and science as troubling and problematic. (1994: viii)

Sophisticated rationalizing or ridiculing of myths is by no means a purely modern phenomenon. It began in late Hellenic allegorization of Homeric mythology (Thales, ca. 624–547 B.C.E.), and reached a peak with Euhemeros of Messene (330–260). In his novelistic travel book entitled Sacred Scripture (Hiera anagraphê), Euhemeros claimed to have seen, supposedly on an island in the Indian Sea, an ancient temple of Zeus in which a golden column displayed magnificent deeds of Ouranos, Kronos, and Zeus—who were portrayed as mortal and fairly ordinary human heroes rather than as gods. By the time of Euhemeros, these three figures were regarded as powerful deities, so he concluded that the gods of popular worship originally had been mere human kings and conquerors to whom humankind expressed appreciation by offering them the worship due to gods. When later their human status was forgotten, they were regarded as having been deities from the beginning.

The rationalistic anthropology of Euhemeros was not paid much heed by his Greek contemporaries—after all, Greek religion included few rigidly exclusive distinctions between gods and human heroes (Dowden 1992: 50–51 quotes Artemidorus's Oneirocritica [Dream Interpretation] to remind us that Greeks perceived many levels of mythological reality—indeed, so important a mythological account as the Defeat of the Giants can be referred to as full of nonsense and rubbish). But the euhemeristic attitude was revitalized and developed by Roman writers. Later it became an important apologetic tool in the hands of Christian writers, who used euhemeristic analysis to demonstrate the secondary nature of the Greek pantheon, while contrasting Greek deities with Jesus Christ, who was regarded as a nonlegendary, nonmythological figure of history. Neither the Middle Ages nor the Renaissance found it necessary to utilize different approaches (Ruthven 1976: 5–10, bibliog. 84–100; Pépin 1991).

The fourth-century Palaiphatos (see Stern 1996) was repeatedly influential because his own brand of mythological rationalization made earlier stories palatable. Not as essentially agnostic as Euhemeros, Palaiphatos never treats the Olympian deities, and rarely mentions gods at all. As a technical term, euhemerism now refers to attempts to trace the human precursors of mythical deities, or specific practices behind mythical situations, an analysis that found many favorable echoes in earlier anthropology. A modified euhemerism appeared much later in the work of F. Max Müller (1823–1900), who regarded myths as representing false etiologies (explanations of origins), especially as cultures sentimentalized and personalized natural forces. Accordingly, the sun's progress, made analogous to the human life cycle, was personalized as the course of a sun deity across the sky.

In each case, mythologies were thought by Müller to have been inventions intended to explain underlying causes for natural phenomena. He also proposed, with respect to the evolution of language, that the original mythological terms first had been understood metaphorically, but later were understood to refer to real persons or deities. So Kephalos (head of light) and Prokis (fading dew, bride of Kephalos) were personalized and worked into a mythological story about a mortal youth and his bride. Consequently, Müller saw mythology as a problem: humankind ought to be able, by means of philology (tracing the derivations of the terms), to push through such confusion to a clearheaded thinking that could overcome this mythological disease of language.

Not only Müller, but Sir James Frazer (whose work will be discussed in Chapters 8 and 9) and many other nineteenth-century scholars, regarded myth almost exclusively as a problem for modern rationality. Many of the attempts at explaining myth that we will survey (sociofunctionalism in Chapter 5, the ritual-dominant school in Chapter 11, psychological approaches in Chapters 6 and 7) are rooted in euhemeristic substitutions of one thing for another. For a mythic story about the family of the gods, we may substitute historical reflections of the founding political dynasties; for a mythic account of primeval earth-shaping, we may substitute modern geological eras; and so forth.

Generally, then, various mythographic sciences sought to replace concrete and embodied, poetic, mythic imagery with abstractions, particularly those of contemporary philosophy or psychology. The analysis in this book will trace how such approaches developed, as well as demonstrate what they may continue to contribute to a complex mythography that is not just based upon euhemeristic principles, substituting one set of abstract categories for another set of mythic images or ritual actions, but recognizes the actual semantic, ideological, and mythopoeic valences of specific historical contexts.

Positive and Negative Uses of Myth

Before we survey the varieties of mythographies, we need to touch down briefly into our own most immediate social setting, where to say myth or ritual is to say so many different things to so many different people that we almost founder in the things at the start. The terms are used with a multitude of different meanings in the many disciplines where they are studied today, even when scholars attempt to avoid the casualness of everyday speech. From such academic contexts to various journalistic contexts, meanings range from primary culture creativity to irrational expression (Frank 1989: 95). We can list some of the fields of inquiry where the terms are central:

• in the study of religions, especially the study of primitive religions or non-Western religions, where there is often a tendency to refer to their myth, but to our theology, or self-evident beliefs

• in analyzing mythic elements or legendary plots in the study of poetry, drama, and fiction

• in the anthropological and ethnological analysis of cultures other than one's own—where we have an unfortunate history of referring to the premodern as the mythic period later superseded by something more akin to our own more rational practices

• in political science, within many treatments of the myths of democracy or of socialism, where ideology is an important topic

• in sociology, both with respect to belief systems and their creation and with respect to ritualized forms of behavior—which are also of interest in clinical psychology

And the list could be extended much further.

In many of these instances myth and ritual are positively approached: they are seen as really existing, important social entities that express and mold cultures. Myth is understood as referring to the fundamental religious or philosophical beliefs of a culture, expressed through ritual behavior or through the graphic or literary arts, and forming a constitutive part of a society's worldview. But alongside such generally positive uses are the negative implications that surface when someone denigrates an issue or an opponent. Often when we read, for instance, about the myth of the upper class, or the myth of youth, or the myth of psychology, we are to understand myth as having a negative, pejorative connotation. Indeed, the phrase But that's just a myth! is used all the time to justify personal actions that go against societal norms.

Such a negative use of the term myth is hardly a modern invention, inasmuch as ancient Greek rationalists also considered themselves to be above such crude concepts as myths. But there is a definite echo of modernity in the vehemence with which negative uses manifest themselves today, especially when myth is thought to refer to the nonscientific, but science to the rational, the empirically provable. Today myth tends to be lumped together with religion or philosophy or the arts as a superfluous facet of culture considered enjoyable, but not particularly useful. In this sense myth suffers from the same ambiguity that prevails with respect to the arts or aesthetics in general today: an interior decorator may be called in to supply the finishing flourishes to a new office building, but the building contractor is thought of as the more important worker, and customers are seldom aware of the symbolic significance of the type or shape of the building.

And finally there is the negative sense of myth by which one refers to a derogatory stereotype. I have stressed this point ever since students in one of my Myth and Ritual classes proposed making a film on the mythic patterns of male-female relationships at the two colleges of the university where I was teaching (at that time the colleges were exclusively male or female in student population). The film's book, which I had asked to see before the actual filming took place, focused upon male and female stereotypes of the behaviors of the other sex: long lines of wolf-fanged men charging a women's dormitory, prissy coeds afraid of drinking a single beer, and the like. Myth had been understood by my students as referring to a joking caricature or stereotype of the other sex. To be sure, there were deep mythic patterns involved, and I encouraged the students to seek out the underlying sociomythic models leading to their proposed scenario. But essentially their original focus had been upon dating and interactional habits in a very immediate and limited fashion, not upon underlying societal models and tensions. Myth had been understood as deceit, as a falsifying construct—an understanding that is mirrored in many dictionaries, where myth is first described from an ultra-rationalistic or scientific perspective, as primarily fictitious.

At one level I agree with that definition: I see myths as a particular kind of fiction, and I see myths and other literary fictions as having an important function in our society—that of modeling possible personal roles and concepts of the self. But fictitious in everyday diction usually signifies unreal, and carries a negative connotation (being opposed to reality), with a further connotation of something superfluous or unnecessary. It is this negative connotation that we often confront in book titles when an author wishes to expose what he or she thinks is actually happening, as opposed to what is superficially apparent. Any number of political exposés, for instance, are entitled The Myth of———.

However, such a negative connotation is only a much-reduced, secondary development with respect to the fundamental, socially creative ways in which important myths function in real life. The sphere of myth includes primary, foundational materials. It provides information about the structure of the society or its customs in a narrative form. It is experienced at some point in its development as both true and crucial to those who perceive through it their experienced world (see C. Geertz 1973: 129). And the events of the primal narrative are most often assumed to take place in a foundational period (in illo tempore: the primal times, the times of beginnings and creations; the times when new patterns are established and old ones reformulated—times that need not be chronologically distant, yet usually are).

Mythic themes may be present in a less than foundational way, just as other thematic materials may guide literary composition. But ultimately mythic narratives themselves are special. They are not little but big stories, touching not just the everyday, but sacred or specially marked topics that concern much more than any immediate situation. And myths generally concern repeated (archetypal) themes that humans face over and over again, rather than problems that are relevant only to one person or one group or at one particular period of life. We have many myths about sexuality as a basic human perplexity, for example, but few about masturbation or how far to go on a first date. Preference for softball teams, chess leagues, Web surfing, or hiking clubs varies according to any generation's fads, but underlying any of these examples, long-term initiation and age-cohort ceremonials recur across the planet.

I find it helpful to distinguish between myth in the sense of narrative, that is, mythic story or thematic pattern, and mythicity. The latter term refers to a generalized orientation to the experienced world based upon a myth or series of myths (developed by E. Gould 1981, discussed below in Chapter 14). Mythicity is precisely what we intend when we casually refer to mythology (in Thomas Moore's words) as a certain kind of story that describes the stratum of myth in imaginal experience. It helps us see myth in ordinary life (1996: 21). At the same time, myths and rituals possess the ability to transcend an ordinary situation and transfer the participator into a shadowy, only partly understood realm of deeper reality [which] links myth and ritual (Townsend 1972: 194).

Somehow the issues here involve the really real. Myth is the mediator between the evanescent awareness of [humankind's] own consciousness and the permanence of being itself (Townsend 204). For myth as narrative, or for mythicity, the question is where a myth actually is situated within the dynamics of a culture. We must attempt to recognize whether a myth under study is so vital or alive that it shapes and in-forms the culture directly and immediately, or if it has become secondary or tertiary, so that only its themes and characters still appear, and it is no longer represented within the intensely vibrating matrix of the original power-packed story but functions merely as thematic material that might serve as boiler-plate text in a later work.

Several of the issues noted in the last three paragraphs will resurface in the rest of this chapter. Others (such as where myth is in a society—its level of mythic vitality) will resurface in Chapter 5. In turning now to matters of defining myth, we parlay aspects of that social game we all have learned to play along with In the beginning . . .  I mean, of course, the classical gambit of defining what it is that one intends to discuss or analyze. In the next sections I begin to draw the net tight by noting how many ways myth is used in our culture. Then, in the next two chapters, the two parts of A Comprehensive, Polyphasic Working Definition, I propose a complex articulation of a mythological corpus and the ways mythologies exercise their powers.

I develop my complex definition early on rather than waiting until the end of the book because I do not think a reader ought to have to keep guessing at the author's position. But it puts me at something of a disadvantage, inasmuch as my definition was attained only after years of working with various mythographic approaches and after utilizing what seem to me to be their lasting values. To some extent, then, the reader gets here the end results before the presentation of the data—but requests for reprints of this section in the first edition have outweighed by far those for other parts, so it has obviously been found useful in many classrooms, and I want to invite readers into the picture early on: you may find it most useful to see which of the elements of the definition work for you, which do not, and which elements I seem to have omitted.

The Myth- Terms of Our Analyses

While the Glossary, new to this edition, defines a number of myth- compounds that are not discussed here, we can clarify several terms at this early point in the book. This section examines related terms and/or points to more extended discussions in subsequent chapters.

Types of myths: among the classifications of myths that myth studies treat as privileged are the cosmogonic, cosmological, and theogonic types. The first refers to the origins of the universe, the second to the more philosophical explication of its existence and structures, and the third to the coming into existence of suprahuman (traditionally divine) powers. These types of myths refer primarily to earliest or primal times, the times and occasions of absolute beginnings, and hence they are often myths of establishment, origins, creation, initial occurrences, or, in a large number of Native American myths, emergences from a series of preliminary underground levels of existence. They importantly organize and explicate our cultural appropriation of the world and our historical experience within it. In Townsend's excellent discussion of Myth and Meaning, such activities are deeply cosmological in that they convert a humanly chaotic world into a humanly intelligible cosmos (1972: 195; one project of my own involves developing a monograph on such myths).

This is not the place to try to name exhaustively all the types of mythological stories or the varieties of rituals and ceremonials (a convenient overview of myth types: Bolle, Buxton, and Smith 1993: 720–26), but among other types we will encounter here are the important hero/ine myths by which a culture models its ideal of human development. (Well, until recently: today we are increasingly aware of the dysfunctional patterns that many traditional hero myths have presented; all the more useful are new mappings such as that of Mark Gerzon's Choice of Heroes [1992], which observes changes in American hero models from the earlier Frontiersman, Soldier, and Expert to the Healer, Companion, Mediator, and Colleague of the late twentieth century—I chart the changes in Doty 1992a.)

The very human body may be taken as a microcosm of the macrocosm, which entails the reverse as well, what I refer to as the cosmobod motif in which the created world is generated out of a protohuman, such as the Chinese P'an Ku (as we will see in Chapter 10). Other types of origin myths proliferate so quickly that one can merely point to one of the reference collections arranged according to such themes, such as Leeming (1990), or according to types of myths, such as Jordan (1993): either raises the question about what sorts of mythic models are to be charted, especially in terms of possible archetypes, whether conceived as preexisting psychological patterns in Jungian psychology (discussed in Chapter 7) or as crucial underlying plots or structurations of various genres of world literature (discussed in Chapter 8).

At any rate, societies emphasize different types of model myths at different times. Myths vary in cultural viability across the society's history, so that one must always be alert to the process by which something develops mythic status (mythicization), or loses it in merely secondary/tertiary influences, as in most contemporary literature or television. As opposed to mythophilic (pro-myth) partisans, there are also mythoclastic movements that seek to demythologize or demythicize, meaning not so much stripping away the myths as depotentiating them. As we will see in Chapter 8, contemporary Western societies normally presume a myth of mythlessness, according to which myths and mythic worldviews have been surmounted by rational science.

On the other hand, a group may set forth a mythical reconstruction of history that can justify or support its existence: Sally Perkins (1991) shows just such an instance in the positing of a primordial matriarchy within the public rhetoric of early feminists (see also Gubar 1979); and Nicole Loraux is quite austere in regarding "the material Great Goddess [as] a fantasy, a powerful fantasy with an astonishing capacity to resist criticism. . . . Her reality is that which a fantasy takes on when reality testing cannot make it disappear" (1994: 36, 38; see also Eller 1995 and Motz 1997).

We will also see (in Chapter 9) how a sort of algebraic reduction of mythology to binary oppositions became a mythic construct that drives Claude Lévi-Strauss's exhaustive analysis of New World myths. In just such a manner, suggests James Robertson in American Myth, American Reality, "science, based on the metaphor of evolution, tied to all the imagery and promise of progress, became by the beginning of the twentieth century a new American myth. . . . Science was as sweeping and encompassing a mythology as Christianity had been for earlier generations" (1980: 280, my emphasis).

The term monomyth represents a primary and influential figure or motif—such as that of a particular type of heroine or hero—that (1) a mythographer emphasizes so strongly that the figure becomes remarkably characteristic of her or his analysis (Joseph Campbell's hero monomyth); or (2) represents a frequently occurring figure that appears to be prototypical within a given period (the cowboy, say, or the post-Vietnam avenger).

Some root metaphors or primary myths can characterize a people's mythologies, creating a feeling of identity and providing guidance through social changes (see Girling 1993). One instance would be what might be described as the American myth, a construct that would include features such as the forging of a nation out of a chaotic New Land, the heroic settlement of its frontiers, and the slow and fractious institution of representative democracy. This pattern will be discussed in Chapter 8, but it is the sort of patterning that discloses how closely mythological and religious perspectives are linked. This, of course, is just what one can discern at the time of any presidential election, when one only needs to listen to one or two speeches about the political platforms of the two primary American parties to realize how readily the political-ideological elides into religious rhetoric and calls for absolute, nonquestioning belief (in addition to Girling, see Flood 1996).

My term individual mythostory, on the other hand, refers not to a national characteristic so much as the self-crafting of autobiography. Most autobiographies have at least an implicit mythostoried account of the person's origins, strongest and weakest suits, and individual features (Daniel Noel reminds me that national stories can function in like manner). David Wulff (1997: 411) provides a prescient example in