notes on mythology
What drives our interest in mythology? What is the role of mythology in cultural spaces? What is it about particular mythologies that attract particular groups of people? How and why do these myths serve as rationale? Why does mythology have such a mobilizing capability? What is the difference between truth and fiction? We can recognize when something is truly incredulous, but seemingly extremely complex rituals are compartmentalized as ordinary– why is this?
The subject of mythology is deeply intertwined with a broader sense of the myth. Myth exists at the intersection of many different interests– historical, cultural, anthropological, psychoanalytical, so on and so forth. A litany of thinkers have done intensive work on the subject of myth. Others produce and study the mythologies themselves. In the desperate search for understanding, mythologies are and were once produced, and today, they are interpreted, analyzed, contextualized in a greater metadiscussion on myth.
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Myth is a hall of mirrors. It is close to becoming many things, but not quite– myth is truth, but it is also lie, and yet at once, it is neither of those things. Myth does not exist in any particular, binary opposition to anything. Instead, it subverts, interrelates, plays, and controls through language. Wherever interpretation (or language) begins, myth is produced. Just as science is one such way to interpret reality, so is myth. Myth and science are related in this way. Myth is also closely related to belief, and by extension, ritual. These relationships are complex– one does not come before the other, there is no “progression into” of myth, ritual, and belief. Rather, these concepts exist in a delicate interdependence upon one another. Myth also plays at the boundaries of truth and fiction, but is not constrained to either side. The field of semiotics is a good example of the study of where myth bleeds into reality.
This vague, “indescribable” nature of myth is precisely what lends itself to its interdisciplinary nature, and is why some of the greatest thinkers of our time are attracted to its power and prospects. Much the same could be said of language, as Barthes astutely observes– myth is a type of speech. Just as natural as talking is, so too is the presence of mythology in the minutia of our daily lives. It is in part due to this “naturalness” of something inherently unnatural (manmade language) which allows for mythologies to hold vivid, “realistic” (however unrealistic the contents of any given mythology may be) affective power over any given individual. This is why myth serves as such a strong backbone of culture.
In the broadest sense, mythology is narrative. Mythologies are as alive as the minds that construct and live in them. They are dynamic. Like most everything else in the manmade world, mythologies are tied to the mental and material circumstances of experiencing human life on Earth. They, like myth, also interlinked with the concepts of ritual and belief, but exactly how they are is a subject of contention. Often at the border of human experience, pushing the boundaries of what is known and unknown, mythologies seem to closely follow. The subject of many mythologies are surrounded by the themes of death, illness, desire, eroticism— areas in which our psychologies are most potent, and most likely to betray our rational senses. It is precisely at this moment, the unexplainable, incomprehensible moment, in which mythologies find their playground. This unstable state– as evident in the oft cited extrasensous capabilities of religious or mythological experiences (or in the supernatural nature of mythologies, so on and so forth)– shapes our drive to belief and ritual, in the name of mythology.
Modern day thinking has positioned mythology in opposition to scientific research, but both of these things share a common goal, and a similar preoccupation with truth. In this sense, scientific rationality is no less “mythological” than mythology is “scientific”. The story of the atom is no less valid than the story of the people, so to speak. Both the myths and the sciences are preoccupied with much the same phenomena. Religion often plays at these boundaries of science and myth, ritual and belief. New religious movements in particular tend to co-opt scientific ideas in their myths. As the role of the natural sciences has come to occupy a centralized position in the modern world, it has created, however ironic, a need for legitimacy in mythology. It has become harder and harder to accomplish culturally legitimate exegeses of mythology in the shadow of such a legacy. However, despite our increasingly “secularized” world, modernity has bound us up in an impossible tangle of indecipherable myths and rituals.