A Short History of Myth (9 page)

By the end of the nineteenth century, the sever
ance of
logos
and
mythos
seemed complete. Crusaders such as Thomas H. Huxley (1825–95) believed that they had a fight on their hands. People must choose between mythology and rational science, and there could be no compromise. Reason alone was truthful and the myths of religion truthless. But truth had been narrowed down to what was ‘demonstrated and demonstrable’,
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which, religion aside, would exclude the truths told by art or music. By treating myth as though it were rational, modern scientists, critics and philosophers had made it incredible. In 1882, Freidrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) proclaimed that God was dead. In a sense, he was right. Without myth, cult, ritual and ethical living, the sense of the sacred dies. By making ‘God’ a wholly notional truth, reached by the critical intellect alone, modern men and women had killed it for themselves. The Madman in Nietzsche’s parable in
The Gay Science
believed that God’s death had torn humanity from its roots. ‘Is there still an above or below?’ he asked. ‘Do we not stray, as though through an infinite nothingness?’
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Mythical thinking and practice had helped people to face the prospect of extinction and nothingness,
and to come through it with a degree of acceptance. Without this discipline, it has been difficult for many to avoid despair. The twentieth century presented us with one nihilistic icon after another, and many of the extravagant hopes of modernity and the Enlightenment were shown to be false. The sinking of the
Titanic
in 1912 showed the frailty of technology; the First World War revealed that science, our friend, could also be applied with lethal effect to weaponry; Auschwitz, the Gulag and Bosnia spelled out what could happen when all sense of sacredness is lost. We learned that a rational education did not redeem humanity from barbarism, and that a concentration camp could exist in the same vicinity as a great university. The explosion of the first atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki laid bare the germ of nihilistic self-destruction at the heart of modern culture; and the attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 showed that the benefits of modernity – technology, ease of travel and global communications – could be made instruments of terror.

Logos
has in many ways transformed our lives for
the better, but this has not been an unmitigated triumph. Our demythologised world is very comfortable for many of us who are fortunate enough to live in first-world countries, but it is not the earthly paradise predicted by Bacon and Locke. When we contemplate the dark epiphanies of the twentieth century, we see that modern anxiety is not simply the result of self-indulgent neurosis. We are facing something unprecedented. Other societies saw death as a transition to other modes of being. They did not nurture simplistic and vulgar ideas of an afterlife, but devised rites and myths that helped people to face the unspeakable. In no other culture would anybody settle down in the middle of a rite of passage or an initiation, with the horror unresolved. But this is what we have to do in the absence of a viable mythology. There is a moving and even heroic asceticism in the current rejection of myth. But purely linear, logical and historical modes of thought have debarred many of us from therapies and devices that have enabled men and women to draw on the full resources of their humanity in order to live with the unacceptable.

We may be more sophisticated in material ways,
but we have not advanced spiritually beyond the Axial Age: because of our suppression of
mythos
we may even have regressed. We still long to ‘get beyond’ our immediate circumstances, and to enter a ‘full time’, a more intense, fulfilling existence. We try to enter this dimension by means of art, rock music, drugs or by entering the larger-than-life perspective of film. We still seek heroes. Elvis Presley and Princess Diana were both made into instant mythical beings, even objects of religious cult. But there is something unbalanced about this adulation. The myth of the hero was not intended to provide us with icons to admire, but was designed to tap into the vein of heroism within ourselves. Myth must lead to imitation or participation, not passive contemplation. We no longer know how to manage our mythical lives in a way that is spiritually challenging and transformative.

We must disabuse ourselves of the nineteenth-century fallacy that myth is false or that it represents an inferior mode of thought. We cannot completely recreate ourselves, cancel out the rational bias of our education, and return to a pre-modern sensibility. But we can acquire a more educated attitude to myth
ology. We are myth-making creatures and, during the twentieth century, we saw some very destructive modern myths, which have ended in massacre and genocide. These myths have failed because they do not meet the criteria of the Axial Age. They have not been infused with the spirit of compassion, respect for the sacredness of all life, or with what Confucius called ‘leaning’. These destructive mythologies have been narrowly racial, ethnic, denominational and egotistic, an attempt to exalt the self by demonising the other. Any such myth has failed modernity, which has created a global village in which all human beings now find themselves in the same predicament. We cannot counter these bad myths with reason alone, because undiluted
logos
cannot deal with such deep-rooted, unexorcised fears, desires and neuroses. That is the role of an ethically and spiritually informed mythology.

We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realise the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as suffi
ciently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a ‘resource’. This is crucial, because unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius, we will not save our planet.

In 1922, T. S. Eliot depicted the spiritual disintegration of Western culture in his landmark poem
The
Waste Land
. In the myth of the Holy Grail, the wasteland is a place where people live inauthentic lives, blindly following the norms of their society without the conviction that comes from deeper understanding. How was it possible to put down creative roots in the ‘stony rubbish’ of modernity where people had lost touch with the mythical underpinning of their culture? Instead of understanding the inner coherence of their tradition, they know ‘only a heap of broken images’. By means of poignant, lapidary
allusions to the mythology of the past – to European, Sanskrit, Buddhist, biblical, Greek and Roman myths – Eliot laid bare the sterility of contemporary life: its alienation, ennui, nihilism, superstition, egotism and despair. As he confronts the imminent demise of Western civilisation, his narrator concludes: ‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins.’ The broken insights of the past that he has gathered together in his poem can save us. When we have pieced them together and recognised their common core, we can reclaim the wasteland in which we live.

Eliot’s poem was prophetic. It has been writers and artists, rather than religious leaders, who have stepped into the vacuum and attempted to reacquaint us with the mythological wisdom of the past. In their attempt to find an antidote to the sterility and heartless cruelty of some aspects of modernity, painters, for example, have turned to mythological themes. On 26 April 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, Nazi planes, under the orders of General Franco, attacked the Basque capital of Guernica on its market-day, killing 1654 of its 7000 inhabitants. A few months later, Pablo Picasso exhib
ited
Guernica
at the International Exhibition in Paris. This modern, secular crucifixion shocked his contemporaries, and yet, like
The Waste Land
, it was a prophetic statement, and also a rallying cry against the inhumanity of our brave new world.

It is a painting that is suffused with compassion, the ability to
feel with
the agony of others. Sacrifice had inspired some of the earliest mythical speculations. In the Palaeolithic period, human beings had felt a disturbing kinship with the animals that they hunted and killed. They expressed their inchoate distress in the rituals of sacrifice, which honoured the beasts which laid down their lives for the sake of humanity. In
Guernica
, humans and animals, both victims of indiscriminate, heedless slaughter, lie together in a mangled heap, the screaming horse inextricably entwined with the decapitated human figure. Recalling the women at the foot of the cross in countless depictions of Jesus’s crucifixion, two women gaze at the wounded horse in sorrowful empathy with its pain. In prehistoric society, the Great Mother had been an implacable huntress, but in Picasso’s picture, the mother, who holds the limp body of her dead
child, has become a victim, uttering a silent scream. Behind her is a bull, which, Picasso said, represented brutality. Picasso had always been fascinated by the spectacular rituals of the bullfight, Spain’s national sport, which had its roots in the sacrificial ceremonial of antiquity. Picasso’s bull does not look savage; he stands with the other victims, swishing his tail and surveying the scene. Perhaps, it has been suggested, he has reached that moment in the bullfight when he stands back from the act ion to consider his next move. But as a sacrificial victim himself, the bull, symbol of brutality, is doomed. So too – Picasso may be suggesting – is modern humanity, which – though Picasso could not have known this – was only just beginning to explore the full potential of its self-destructive and rationally-calculated violence.

Novelists have also turned to mythology to explore the modern dilemma. We need think only of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
, published in the same year as
The Waste Land
, in which the experience of Joyce’s contemporary protagonists corresponds to episodes in Homer’s
Odyssey
. Magical realists – Jorge Luis Borges, Günter Grass, Italo Calvino, Angela Carter
and Salman Rushdie – have challenged the hegemony of
logos
by combining the realistic with the inexplicable, and everyday reason with the mythical logic of dream and fairy tale. Other novelists have looked into the future. George Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(1949) warns against the dangers of a police state in which might alone is right and the past is constantly modified to fit the present. The precise implications of Orwell’s message have been much debated, but, like the great myths of the past, it has entered popular consciousness. Many of its phrases and images, including the title itself, have passed into ordinary speech: Big Brother, Doublethink, Newspeak and Room 101 are still used to identify trends and characteristics of modern life, even by people who have never read the novel.

But can a secular novel really replicate traditional myth, with its gods and goddesses? We have seen that, in the pre-modern world, the divine was rarely regarded in the metaphysical terms imposed upon it by Western
logos
, but was usually used to help people to understand their humanity. As people’s circumstances changed, the gods often receded, taking a
marginal place in mythology and religion; sometimes they disappeared altogether. There is nothing new in the godless mythologies of contemporary novels, which grapple with many of the same intractable and elusive problems of the human condition as the ancient myths, and make us realise that – whatever the status of the gods – human beings are more than their material circumstances and that all have sacred, numinous value.

Because the novelist and the artist are operating at the same level of consciousness as mythmakers, they naturally resort to the same themes. Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
can be seen as a heroic quest and initiation that has gone wrong. Published in 1902, just before the West began its great disillusion, the novel describes the sojourn of the ultra-civilised Mr Kurtz deep in the African jungle. In traditional mythology, the hero left the security of the social world behind. Often he had to descend into the depths of the earth, where he would meet an unsuspected aspect of himself. The experience of isolation and deprivation could result in psychological breakdown, which led to vital new insight. If he
succeeded, the hero returned to his people with something new and precious. In Conrad’s novel, the labyrinthine, sinister African river recalls the subterranean tunnels of Lascaux, through which the initiates crawled back into the womb of the earth. In the underworld of the primeval jungle, Kurtz does indeed look into the darkness of his heart, but remains stuck in his regression and dies spiritually. He becomes a shaman
manqué
, with no respect but only contempt for the African community that he abuses. The mythical hero learned that, if he died to himself, he would be reborn to new life; but Kurtz is caught in the toils of a sterile egotism, and when he finally appears in the novel, he has the obscenity of an animate corpse. Obsessed with his own fame, Kurtz seeks not heroism, but only barren celebrity. He cannot make a heroic affirmation of life: his dying words are ‘The horror! The horror!’. T. S. Eliot made Kurtz’s last words the epigraph of
The Waste Land
. Conrad, a true prophet, had already looked into the triviality, selfishness, greed, nihilism and despair of the twentieth century.

Thomas Mann also used the motif of initiation
in
The Magic Mountain
(1924), which takes place during another tragic juncture in Western history. He confessed that this had not been his original intention, but when a young Harvard scholar pointed out to him that the novel is a modern example of ‘The Quester Hero’, he immediately realised that this was in fact the case. The mythology of the heroic quest was embedded in his subconscious and he drew upon it without realising what he had done. The Davos sanatorium of Mann’s novel was to become ‘a shrine of the initiatory rites, a place of adventurous investigation into the mystery of life’. Hans Castorp, his hero, is a searcher for the Holy Grail, symbol of the ‘knowledge, wisdom and consecration’ that gives meaning to life. Castorp ‘voluntarily embraces disease and death, because his very first contact with them gives promise of extraordinary advancement, bound up, of course, with correspondingly great risks’. And yet, at the same time, this modern initiation shares the chronic triviality of the twentieth century. Mann saw the patients in the sanatorium forming a ‘charmed circle of isolation and individualism’. Where the traditional seeker wanted to bene
fit his society, Castorp was engaged in a solipsistic, parasitic and ultimately pointless quest.
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He spends seven years on his magic mountain, dreaming his grand dream of humanity, only to die in the First World War, which can be described as the collective suicide of Europe.