the wellspring of our knowledge

LIT 229 Module Four 1

Introduction: Myth and… Given its nature as the wellspring of our knowledge about ourselves and the world, myth should be found in all our ways of knowing, and it is. The phrase “ways of knowing” is shorthand for those collections of beliefs, assumptions, discourse, values, and practices that offer their own approaches for understanding the world and our place in it. This description of ways of knowing sounds much like myth because myth itself is a way of knowing. The point here is not to overlay myth onto all ways of knowing but to illuminate the relationship of myth to them. For this module, we will analyze the role of myth in three prominent ways of knowing: psychology, religion, and science. These three operate on a deeper layer than particular genres for myth like art, literature, and film (will explore the latter two later) and thus promise to illuminate myth by their own lights. Myth and Psychology At the heart of psychological ways of knowing sits a story. It is—like our most profound and provocative stories—erotic, strange, traumatic, and Greek. Oedipus is the son of Laius and Jocasta, the king and queen of Thebes. A prophecy declares that the young Oedipus will grow up to commit the most horrible crimes imaginable—the murder of his father and incest with his mother. Desperate to forestall these events, King Laius binds the boy’s feet (Oedipus means “swollen foot”) and leaves him to die on a mountainside. As fate literally would have it, shepherds find the boy, rescue him, and take him to the king and queen of Corinth, who raise him as their own. Oedipus eventually hears the prophecy himself from the Oracle at Delphi and leaves his known family at Corinth and heads, fatefully, to Thebes. On the way there, he quarrels with a man who refuses to give way on the road, eventually killing the man. Unknown to Oedipus, this man is Laius, his father. Upon arriving at Thebes, he answers the riddle of the Sphinx, who is terrorizing the city, and is rewarded with the throne of the dead king and his wife Jocasta, who is Oedipus’s mother. Upon hearing that the prophecy had indeed been fulfilled, Jocasta commits suicide, and Oedipus blinds himself and goes into exile.

2 LIT 229 Module Four

Freud Gives Birth to a Way of Knowing In this myth, Sigmund Freud saw the central drama of the human psyche and by extension a primal feature of the new discipline of psychology. He writes in his Interpretation of Dreams that Oedipus’s:

destiny moves us only because it might have been ours—because the Oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so. (295)

Without delving too deeply into Freud’s Oedipus complex, we can see that the myth provides a story—Freud would say the story—for human thought and behavior by doing what any good story does, namely, creating tension through conflict and then releasing it through some kind of resolution. The tension is created when the infant becomes aware of his gender difference from his mother and similarity to his father, and that awareness connects to his emotional and physical dependence upon his mother, which Freud understands as erotic. The father, then, becomes a competitor for the mother’s love, but because he is stronger, he always wins. The infant’s desire is for the mother, but jealousy and fear are directed at the father who competes with the infant for the mother’s love. These emotions are surging in the what Freud called the id, the unconscious area of the psyche that operates according to pure pleasure, but the turbulent features of the id cannot be sustained in the ego, the aspect of the psyche that operates according to the reality principle, much less the superego, where societal norms come to bear. Tension abounds within and without as the child deals with these contradictory impulses. It can be released by two mechanisms: repression, which offers only a temporary solution since the emotions reappear elsewhere in other forms such as dreams; and identification, where the child founds his identity in the ego and superego and thus conforms to the reality principle and society’s norms (Freud 53). Freud’s application of the Oedipus myth as a way of knowing is a unique phenomenon in Western culture, exposing, as it does, the process of using one myth to answer most questions about human nature and behavior. While Freudian analysts are increasingly hard to find (not least because they are expensive and treatment lasts for years), Freud’s theories are psychology’s creation myths, and almost all practicing psychologists employ some version of Freud’s “talking cure” to move from repression to identification.

LIT 229 Module Four 3

The Student Becomes the Master It might appear that no one could engage myth as deeply as Freud, but a meeting he had in 1906 produced a collaboration with another psychologist who took the application of myth in a vastly different but equally profound direction. Carl Gustav Jung was 30 when he met with Freud in Vienna, and they talked for most of the day without pause. Jung would agree with Freud about the importance of the unconscious to the development of the human psyche, but instead of seeing it populated with repressed desires generated by the id, Jung saw a deeper level of the unconscious that was made of archetypes or symbols shared by all human beings in what he termed the collective unconscious. Jung also would modify Freud’s Oedipal complex to apply to female infants in what he termed the Electra complex. Though the archetypes consist of many images, a few are especially potent in Jung’s psychology: the persona, the shadow, the anima, the animus, the great mother, the wise old man, the hero, and the self. Even though you may not recognize some of these names, it should be clear that they all have mythological qualities. One useful but incomplete way to understand archetypes is to do what we are doing in this class: reading a lot of myths, looking for common images, and attaching meaning to them that is consistent with their use. By moving the psychological applications of mythology beyond one myth (Oedipus) and one location (the individual psyche), Jung expanded the influence of mythology upon psychology (and vice versa) far beyond Freud. Much like Socrates and Plato, Freud and Jung inaugurate a new way of knowing. Unlike Socrates and Plato, Freud and Jung ground their model in myth. While there are obviously entire realms of psychological knowledge that have different relations or even little relation to myth, the most common practice in therapy remains mythological, and that is to tell the psychologist your story and have the psychologist tell it back to you. Psychology’s connection to mythology remains strong. Myth and Religion The relationship between myth and religion is sometimes difficult to untangle. At its deepest level, religion is about experiencing awe and even fear in the face of the unknown universe and connecting that experience to a sense of place in the world. That description is very much like that of Campbell’s mystical function of myth. Religion is also about connecting our disparate experiences into a way of seeing or knowing that makes sense and provides meaning and direction for our lives, echoing again Campbell’s other functions of myth. On the more practical and experiential level and in terms of the practice of a particular religion,

4 LIT 229 Module Four

myth typically recedes into the background to do its work, especially in Western religions for reasons we have already seen having to do with Plato. Oral cultures have no reason to hide their myths, since they are founding stories of the people and continue to serve all four functions. Whether implicit or explicit, the relationship between myth and religion is deep and broad. Rather than attempt to cover this entire landscape, we will focus instead on a particular practice, that of ritual, in part because ritual that has a unique relationship to myth. We could describe that relationship in terms of a script (myth) and a play (ritual). The script tells the story usually with one narrator; the play acts out the story with the characters having their own roles. Scholars have enjoyed arguing about which comes first, and the myth and ritual school has argued for the primacy of ritual, like the script being recorded after the actors work out the play. For our purposes here, we can view myth and ritual as two sides of a singular event, one involving a telling, the other involving a showing. After focusing on ritual in terms of religion, we can now focus on one theory of ritual to see its relation to myth. Three Stages of Ritual Arnold van Gennep was, like many anthropologists of his time, actually a folklorist concerned with understanding the “folkways” of primal cultures. The idea here was to draw upon the particulars of ethnographers in the field who were collecting information on myths, rituals, and social dynamics, then inductively create a theory based on those specifics. Van Gennep’s theory was simple and powerful. He wrote in The Rites of Passage that such rites have three stages: separation, initiation, and return. Separation involves removing the inductee from his everyday world, which is safe, predictable, and knowable, because change cannot occur when everything stays the same. Initiation involves introducing the inductee to a new world, one that is unsafe, unpredictable, and unknown and requires the participant to find his own way, thereby developing individual traits of power, courage, and self-reliance, among others. Return involves reintroducing the inductee to his original community where he is now a full-fledged member by virtue of his rite of passage and where he can benefit the community by his lessons learned in the initiation.

LIT 229 Module Four 5

The Monomyth and Ritual Joseph Campbell recognized the value of van Gennep’s theory and saw it played out consistently in the hero myths he had read. Applying this understanding of ritual, Campbell developed his own theory of the monomyth, the basic pattern of nearly every heroic journey. While Campbell goes into great detail about the various elements of the monomyth, as you can see in this accompanying image, the foundational structure is that of separation from the known, crossing the threshold into the unknown, and returning to the known. While not every myth is enacted in a ritual and not every ritual is scripted by a myth, the dynamic between the two, and between myth and religion itself, is deep and profound. Myth and Science In the Eastman story that we read in Module One, the dismissal of myth as “fable and falsehood” could just as well have come from a scientist as a missionary. The beginnings of the move from muthos to logos, effected by Plato, was actually inaugurated by philosophers before Socrates who were the first scientists. It is for these reasons that myth is popularly understood as the opposite of science or “mere falsehood.” The Scientific Method While we want to be careful not to overlay myth onto ways of knowing that are not mythological (it would be anti-scientific to do so, for one), we can look at the functionality of both to observe similarities. Fortunately, one of the features of the scientific way of knowing is precision in the method, which is as follows (Crawford):

6 LIT 229 Module Four

Table 4.1

At the formal level, we can already begin to see that the method has the features of a quest. Scientists would be quick to point out that the quests are usually small (the particular behavior of a molecule in a specific environment) and often inconclusive (a null hypothesis). Still, there is something existential about the process, especially if we interpret the steps symbolically with an eye toward the four functions of myth.

Define • Define a question

Observe • Gather information and resources

Explain • Form an explanatory hypothesis

Test • Test the hypothesis by performing an experiment and collecting

data in a reproducible manner

Analyze • Analyze the data

Interpret • Interpret the data and draw conclusions that serve as a starting

point for a new hypothesis

Publish • Publish the results

Retest • Retest (frequently done by other scientists)

LIT 229 Module Four 7

The Structure of Scientific Ways of Knowing A more profound relationship exists between myths and scientific paradigms. In his influential book titled The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, historian and philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn explored why there were such strong disagreements between social scientists and natural scientists. He came to the following conclusion:

Attempting to discover the source of that difference led me to recognize the role in scientific research of what I have since called “paradigms.” These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners. Once that piece of my puzzle fell into place, a draft of this essay emerged rapidly. (Kuhn viii)

A paradigm is a pattern or a model, and looking back through the history of science, Kuhn saw not one model but many. His point is painstakingly made and far too subtle to explicate here, but we can see briefly how a paradigm is related to myth. First of all, if we return to the scientific method and look more closely, we can see that while it is an excellent tool for providing answers, it also contains some unanswered questions. For example: Where do our questions come from? What counts as data and why? Why do we choose a particular hypothesis and not another, and how many possible hypotheses are there? What beliefs and assumptions guide our analysis and interpretation of the data? What assumptions and beliefs do other scientists bring to our hypothesis? For Kuhn, these questions remain in the background and are usually unasked, much less answered. Kuhn’s book is an attempt to ask and answer those questions, and the result is that science operates under paradigms, a particular set of scientific practices informed by the beliefs of a scientific community existing at a particular point in time. As is evident from this brief description, a paradigm looks and acts quite a bit like myth. Finally, the science of cosmology is a direct competitor of myth for understanding how the world came to be and for finding our place in it. That is why “the myth of the Big Bang” is one of the creation myths mentioned in the text. The formal and functional similarities are striking. Before he died, Joseph Campbell saw great mythological promise in the new knowledge created by the sciences. In fact, he believed that scientific discovery would provide the basis for a new mythology, a new paradigm that would advance human consciousness.

8 LIT 229 Module Four

Conclusion Psychology, religion, and science—arguably our most profound ways of knowing today—all have strong connections to and resonances with myth. We should also note that if we include myth as another way of knowing, we can see that the way we know ourselves and the world resonates with our beginnings in oral culture because we still draw upon narrative in one form or another to carry our deepest beliefs and orient ourselves in the cosmos.

LIT 229 Module Four 9

Works Cited

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968. Print. Crawford, Susan, and Loretta Stucki. “Peer Review and the Changing Research Record.” Journal of American

Society for Information Science 41.3 (1990): 223–28. Print. Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. Ed. James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1962. Print. Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Modern Library, 1950. Print. Van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. Print. Jung, Carl Gustav. Man and His Symbols. Garden City: Doubleday, 1964. Print. Jung, Carl Gustav. The Theory of Psychoanalysis. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1970. Print. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Print.