John Ahern revisits the haunts of his youth (???),
Let’s say I collaborate with a friend of mine who lives in Buffalo. We decide to chose the first man each of us sees on the Main Streets of our respective towns wearing a leather jacket or the first girls we see wearing pink or the first boys we see with caps backwards. Suppose we give these pairs of people pieces of paper to write a story on. They oblige us and write a story. Now, suppose these two people, one from Grand Junction, CO, and Buffalo, NY, both write stories about a fisherman in the Gulf of Mexico who, after 40 days of not catching anything, finally reels in an enormous marlin. It then gets eaten by sharks.
Now, suppose I and my friend in Buffalo had never heard of Hemingway and never read The Old Man and the Sea. We would still be very suspicious of these two characters. What are the odds that they just happened to write the same story? Why did they do this? Maybe we were set up by the CIA, which overheard our cellphone conversation and planted men in leather jackets or girls wearing pink or boys with caps backwards. Maybe they purposefully conspired to write the same story. It’s all undoubtedly another ploy of the IRS to get my money. The chances of them writing such a similar plot with such similar characters just coincidentally are low.
This is not an experiment and it is not meant to be plausible. It is only meant to track normal human reactions. I think anyone would be surprised at the outcome of this situation, if it happened to come about. Two people in geographical locations who, in all likelihood, neither know nothing of the other person’s existence nor care, both write stories and both stories happen to be the same. There are two options. Either this is all a totally coincidental or the themes in both these stories are so common to the common experiences of these two individuals that they both wrote stories that imitated a reality in common.
Of course, most people who walk down Main Street probably haven’t read Hemingway. If their highschool even bothered teaching it, these leather-jacket-pink-cap-backwards pedestrians probably read Spark Notes. It’s not likely this is a common point of experience between two randomly chosen people in two different cities, and, even if it were, it wouldn’t be likely that it left such a huge impression on both so as to inspire them to rewrite it.
Here’s the question. Can we extend the logic to mythology? When we see trios—Zeus, Poseiden, and Hades, Odin, Hoenir, and Lodur, Gabriel, Raphael and Michael, Peter, James, and John, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun (OK, OK, maybe not)—that come from peoples who seem to have far less in common geographically and culturally than even I and my friend in Buffalo, what conclusions can we come to? Is this coincidental? Or is there some common truth that they all are attempting to represent? What about dragons? Floods? Rex quondam rexque futurus? Swords stuck in odd places, in trees, under stones, under trees, in stones? Guys with patches? Old men who are chained or asleep until the end of time? What reason have we to assume, simply from an anthropological perspective, that we now know the childishness of what the democracy of the dead unanimously decided to be truth? There’s some common ground here, unless you’re willing to lay your bets that a whole canon of largely harmonious themes is coincidental. What is it?
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Posted at 3:23 pm EST on the 27th of January 2010 by John R. Ahern. Under Philosophy, Sundry as History, Myth, Platonism, Universals There are 15 replies. |
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Well, I agree. I definitely think there’s truth to myths– the question is, what truth? I think it’s safe to say they’re probably corruptions of things that really happened.
In reference to our conversations about THS, I think Lewis takes it too far and gives more credit and importance to myths than they deserve. If they’re not in the Bible, they still could have happened– but they’re not really terribly important. If they influence you to become a Christian (like in Lewis’s case) that’s fantastic, but we really can’t assign any theological importance to them, the way Lewis tries.
Fantasy is great, and Lewis is a genius; but I feel insulted when he wants to say that it’s cynicism that prevents us from believing in myths he holds dear (which aren’t Biblical).
Dragons integrate qualities of three predators — big cats, snakes, and carnivorous birds. These were the primary hunters of pre-homo sapiens primates, and thus the archetypical dragon or leviathan is a biologically explained psychological enemy, common to many human stories. All myths and narrative commonalities can be similarly accounted for in the evolutionary paradigm.
I wonder — as an old-earther, do you also ascribe to Archetypal literary criticism?
My German Fairy Tales professor (incidentally, he goes by John A. ^_^) mentioned the other day that the number 3 is very important in fairy tales. He made a point of noting that the Grimm brothers chalked stuff like this up to the Trinity, but that these fairy-tale 3s existed before Germany was Christianized. Interesting, I thought to myself. Maybe that’s because the Trinity is real–so real that it affects people who don’t even know about it.
Is that what you’re saying here, too? Some things are so real that they affect people who don’t even know about them?
Hehehe. Also, as Dr McM likes to point out in his literature classes, the fairy tales are always about the third brother. :)
You seem to be reacting to a very specific perspective: “What reason have we to assume, simply from an anthropological perspective, that we now know the childishness of what the democracy of the dead unanimously decided to be truth?” Does that perspective actually exist, and if it does, where? I don’t think most anthropologists think myths are childish, or even that they don’t designate/represent something true.
I agree with Hannah on this one. There’s an obvious commonality in these myths, but what’s not obvious is what the truth is behind them or what we should do with them. Stories gets garbled remarkably quickly. Sometimes history seems like and enormous game of “telephone”
For instance, the flood myth. We have the true story and a bunch of false ones, and it’s hard to see what the false ones convey other than to back up that a real flood probably did happen. Beyond that the only trustworthy information we’re going to get will come straight from the source (the Bible, of course).
On the other hand, supposing the grain of truth in these stories, they are going to be useful in learning to tell good stories. Because most of the good stories that get told use bits and pieces of these things.
Hannah and Sarah — You have to face some uncomfortable options, then. I mean, it’s all very well with the flood because you can point to Bible and say “It happened to the whole world, of course everybody has a myth about that.” But the others are slightly different—if you admit that there’s truth behind the some of the Greek gods or Greek myths or something like that, you’ve already gotten yourself halfway to C. S. Lewis’ position, which is that these things are, in a way, Platonic (in a veeeeeeeeeerry broad sense) representations that make their way into other religions. To put it another way, how on earth did Greece know about the three archangels? Or Apollyon? I would of course agree that putting these myths on the same level as the Bible is absurd. They are distorted by inaccuracy and sin at every turn and just as likely to have diabolical as angelic origins. I think the question is, where do these stories represent something true and where something false? And, just because it isn’t essential, theological truth we’d be looking for doesn’t mean it’s necessarily gnostic truth (if such a thing exists).
James — That dragon theory seems like a modern-science-informed interpretation of some pretty straight-forward passages of Scripture. I could just say, I think when it says “fire-breathing dragon”, it means “fire-breathing dragon”. But that might sound a trifle young-earthy. :-P (Being old earth gives me a lot more time for exciting things to happen. I like that.)
Nick — I wasn’t meaning to imply that the field of anthropology is full of people who think myths are childish, although I think that insofar as they’re influenced by logical positivism, they inevitably do. I don’t know…I’m not familiar with the field, but I have heard that LP, though its influence remains, has definitely waned in popularity. I am saying, from the perspective of studying humans, how can we assume these myths are childish? Here, I’m simply attacking the notion that this is (a) something comparable to Medieval superstition or looking up your horoscopes in the daily newspaper or (b) not profitable for any real truth beyond simply an understanding of the culture it came out of and perhaps some dull didactic application.
I think we need to consider the possibility that these really carry an element of truth, perhaps one that, above all, our present culture would do well to learn from. The mistake would be to formulate doctrine from the knowledge of that truth, much like the wilder moments of St. Thomas’ angelology or Neo-Platonists like Bernard Sylvester. Be that as it may, could these common mythical themes be key to understanding the nature of revelation in pre-Abrahamic-covenant times? Or perhaps, more broadly, the way in which early human cultures can pick up on subtle aspects of divine revelation simply through general revelation?
I’m not completely against saying that there are myths that did happen but don’t feature in the Bible. But I am against Lewis’s elevation of them. You ask the same question I did– what’s true, and what’s false?
There’s enough cool stuff in the Bible that I don’t find other myths to be exciting, interesting, or worth devoting much time to (on my own part). I think studying mythology and fairy tales is an excellent pursuit; provided one does not take it too far when relating discoveries, theories, or ideas to other people (as I am inclined to believe Lewis did in the Space Trilogy).
Frankly, I think you want us to disagree with you more than we’re doing, and so you’re projecting things onto us that we don’t believe. :P
James Jordan has some interesting stuff on the Zodiac which you should look up, by the way.
“To put it another way, how on earth did Greece know about the three archangels? Or Apollyon?” ~John Ahern.
Simple. The Jewish Diaspora after the Assyrian invasion: the Jews spread throughout the world, many coming to Greece (hence the Hellenistic Jews).
Hannah: As a Tolkienist, I think that myths are reflections, however faulty, of the Great Myth (a myth is a story of the supernatural interacting with the natural), and therefore one may gain insight to the Great Myth by looking also at the myths (I know I have). Not all Christians can use myths in the way; perhaps this falls into what Paul was talking about in Romans 12: to believe and serve Christ with what He has given us, the measure of faith He has given. You worship Christ with your mind, not Lewis’, and I worship Christ with the mind that He has given me, a mind closer to Lewis’ in regard to Myth and myths. Lewis worshiped God according to the mind that God gave him, a mind that can worship with myths.
I hope that made sense.
SDG!
“I bet one legend that keeps recurring throughout history, in every culture, is the story of Popeye.” – Jack Handy.
Isn’t your usage of pink for girls stereotypical? Tsk tsk tsk.
It would lead us to wonder…
This is a very fascinating topic for me. Being a fan of history and theology I delight in looking at cultural archetypes and see how they coincide with the Biblical account of creation, the flood, and various other oddities and worldwide events in history. This is why the Silmarillion is one of my favorite books.
St. Athanasius touches on this subject in ‘On the Incarnation’ when he talks about the methods of revelation. He states that there are three main ways, apart from sharing God’s image, by which God reveals Himself; creation, prophets and the law. Additionally, Romans 1:19-20 declares that truth is evident within man and through creation. If, then one can gain a knowledge(though not, perhaps, a saving knowledge) of God apart from Scripture, why shouldn’t it also be true that one can gain a knowledge of history in this way?
Just because Scripture does not touch on a specific topic does not mean that what another source says should be disqualified. It is true that myths should be taken with a grain of salt, but this should not lead to the wide spread idea that myths hold little to no truth. I would agree with John R. Ahern that the modern culture has developed an unhealthy disbelief of myths. As a general rule, I think it is better to give myths the benefit of the doubt. Innocent until proven guilty as it were.
I also found Nathan Speare’s comment about how we worhip God to be quite fascinating. I had never really heard about worshipping God in quite that way.
(Just for this post I’m going to define myths as specifically creation stories)
The problem that people have with myths is that there isn’t a ‘formula’ of sorts for figuring out how much of a myth is true. Some myths are completely true (Genesis) and others have very little truth at all (the creation story that the Mayans believed in comes to mind…)
My idea that might explain why society likes to laugh at myths (Of any sort. Not just creation stories.)
People generally like easy answers. All or nothing. Believing in all the myths isn’t that pleasant a thought, and since many contradict each other, it’s not a very sensible thought either. So I think that many choose to believe that there can’t be any truth at all, or that there’s so little that it’s of negligible importance.
Granted, that’s a rather broad statement, but I think that there is some amount of truth to it. Just like the myths. (;