Despite some recent attempts to renew them, it seems that during, the past twenty years anthropology has increasingly turned from studies in the field of religion. At the same time, and precisely because the interest of professional anthropologists has withdrawn from primitive religion, all kinds of amateurs who claim to belong to other disciplines have seized this opportunity to move in, thereby turning into their private playground what we had left as a wasteland. The prospects for the scientific study of religion have thus been undermined in two ways. . . .
Of all the chapters of religious anthropology probably none has tarried to the same extent as studies in the field of mythology. From a theoretical point of view the situation remains very much the same as it was fifty years ago, namely, chaotic. Myths are still widely interpreted in conflicting ways: as collective dreams, as the outcome of a kind of esthetic play, or as the basis of ritual. Mythological figures are considered as personified abstractions, divinized heroes, or fallen gods. Whatever the hypothesis, the choice amounts to reducing mythology either to idle play or to a crude kind of philosophic speculation.
In order to understand what a myth really is, must we choose between platitude and sophism? Some claim that human societies merely express, through their mythology, fundamental feelings common to the whole of mankind, such as love, hate, or revenge or that they try to provide some kind of explanations for phenomena which they cannot otherwise understand--astronomical, meteorological, and the like. But why should these societies do it in such elaborate and devious ways, when all of them are also acquainted with empirical explanations? On the other hand, psychoanalysts and many anthropologists have shifted the problems away from the natural or cosmological toward the sociological and psychological fields. But then the interpretation becomes too easy: If a given mythology confers prominence on a certain figure, let us say an evil grandmother, it will be claimed that in such a society grandmothers are actually evil and that mythology reflects the social structure and the social relations; but should the actual data be conflicting, it would be as readily claimed that the purpose of mythology is to provide an outlet for repressed feelings. Whatever the situation, a clever dialectic will always find a way to pretend that a meaning has been found.
Mythology confronts the student with a situation which at first sight appears contradictory. On the one hand it would seem that in the course of a myth anything is likely to happen. There is no logic, no continuity. Any characteristic can be attributed to any subject; every conceivable relation can be found. With myth, everything becomes possible. But on the other hand, this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding similarity between myths collected in widely different regions. Therefore the problem: If the content of a myth is contingent, how are we going to explain the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar?
It is precisely this awareness of a basic antinomy pertaining to the nature of myth that may lead us toward its solution. For the contradiction which we face is very similar to that which in earlier times brought considerable worry to the first philosophers concerned with linguistic problems; linguistics could only begin to evolve as a science after this contradiction had been overcome. Ancient philosophers reasoned about language the way we do about mythology. On the one hand, they did notice that in a given language certain sequences of sounds were associated with definite meanings, and they earnestly aimed at discovering a reason for the linkage between those sounds and that meaning. Their attempt, however, was thwarted from the very beginning by the fact that the same sounds were equally present in other languages although the meaning they conveyed was entirely different. The contradiction was surmounted only by the discovery that it is the combination of sounds, not the sounds themselves, which provides the significant data. . . .
To invite the mythologist to compare his precarious situation with that of the linguist in the prescientific stage is not enough. As a matter of fact we may thus be led only from one difficulty to another. There is a very good reason why myth cannot simply be treated as language if its specific problems are to be solved; myth is language: to be known, myth has to be told; it is a part of human speech. In order to preserve its specificity we must be able to show that it is both the same things as language, and also something different from it. Here, too, the past experience of linguists may help us. For language itself can be analyzed into things which are at the same time similar and yet different. This is precisely what is expressed in Saussure's distinction between langue and parole, one being the structural side of language, the other the statistical aspect of it, langue belonging to a reversible time, parole being nonreversible. If those two levels already exist in language, then a third one can conceivably be isolated.
We have distinguished langue
and parole by the different time referents which they use. Keeping
this in mind, we may notice that myth uses a third referent which combines
the properties of the first two. On the one hand, a myth always refers
to events alleged have taken place long ago. But what gives the myth an
operational value is that the specific pattern described is timeless; it
explains the present and the past as well as the future. This can be made
clear through a comparison between myth and what appears to have largely
replaced it in modern societies, namely, politics. When the historian refers
to the French Revolution, it is always as a sequence of past happenings,
a non-reversible series of events the remote consequences of which may
still be felt at present. But to the French politician, as well as to his
followers, the French Revolution is both a sequence belonging to the past
as--to the historian--and a timeless pattern which can be detected in the
contemporary French social structure and which provides a clue for its
interpretation, a lead from which to infer future developments. Michelet,
for instance, was a politically minded historian. He describes the French
Revolution thus: "That day . . . everything was possible. . . . Future
became present . . . that is, no more time, a glimpse of eternity." It
is that double structure, altogether historical and ahistorical, which
explains how myth, while pertaining to the realm of parole and calling
for an explanation as such, as well as to that of langue in which
it is expressed, can also be an absolute entity on a third level which,
though it remains linguistic by nature, is nevertheless distinct from the
other two. . . .
Whatever our ignorance of the language and the culture of the people where it originated, a myth is still felt as a myth by any reader anywhere in the world. Its substance does not lie in its style, its original music, or its syntax, but in the story which it tells. Myth is language, functioning on an especially high level where meaning succeeds practically at "taking off" from the linguistic ground on which it keeps on rolling. . . .
Now for a concrete example of the method we propose. We shall use the Oedipus myth, which is well known to everyone. I am well aware that the Oedipus myth has only reached us under late forms and through literary transmutations concerned more with esthetic and moral preoccupations than with religious or ritual ones whatever these may have been. But we shall not interpret the Oedipus myth in literal terms, much less offer an explanation acceptable to the specialist. We simply wish to illustrate--and without reaching any conclusions with respect to it --a certain technique, whose use is probably not legitimate in this particular instance, owing to the problematic elements indicated above. The "demonstration" should therefore be conceived, not in terms of what the scientist means by this term, but at best in terms of what is meant by the street peddler, whose aim is not to achieve a concrete result, but to explain, as succinctly as possible, the functioning of the mechanical toy which he is trying to sell to the onlookers.
The myth will be treated as an orchestra score would be if it were unwittingly considered as a unilinear series; our task is to reestablish the correct arrangement. Say, for instance, we were confronted with a sequence of the type: 1,2,4,7,8,2,3,4,6,8, 1,4,5,7,8,1,2,5,7,3,4,5,6,8 . . . , the assignment being to put all the l's together, all the 2's, the 3's, etc.; the result is a chart:
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We shall attempt to perform the
same kind of operation on the Oedipus myth trying out several arrangements
of the mythemes until we find one which is in harmony with the principles
enumerated above. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that the best
arrangement is the following (although it might certainly be improved with
the help of a specialist in Greek mythology):
| Cadmos seeks his sister Europa, ravished by Zeus | |||
| Cadmos kills the dragon | |||
| The Spartoi kill one another | |||
| Labdacos (Laios' father) = lame(?) | |||
| Oedipus kills his father, Laios | Laios (Oedipus' father) = left-sided (?) | ||
| Oedipus kills the Sphinx | |||
| Oedipus = swollen-foot (?) | |||
| Oedipus marries his mother, Jocasta | |||
| Eteocles kills his brother, Polynices | |||
| Antigone buries her brother, Polynices, despite prohibition |
We thus find ourselves confronted with four vertical columns, each of which includes several relations belonging to the same bundle. Were we to tell the myth, we would disregard the columns and read the rows from left to right and from top to bottom. But if we want to understand the myth, then we will have to disregard one half of the diachronic dimension (top to bottom) and read from left to right, column after column, each one being considered as a unit.
All the relations belonging to the same column exhibit one common feature which it is our task to discover. For instance, all the events grouped in the first column on the left have something to do with blood relations which are overemphasized, that is, are more intimate than they should be. Let us say, then, that the first column has as its common feature the overrating of blood relations. It is obvious that the second column expressed the same thing, but inverted: underrating of blood relations. The third column refers to monsters being slain. As to the fourth, a few words of clarification are needed. The remarkable connotation of the surnames in Oedipus' father-line has often been noticed. However, linguists usually disregard it, since to them the only way to define the meaning of a term is to investigate all the contexts in which it appears, and personal names, precisely because they are used as such, are not accompanied by any context. With the method we propose to follow the objection disappears, since the myth itself provides its own context. The significance is no longer to be sought in the eventual meaning of each name, but in the fact that all the names have a common feature: All the hypothetical meanings (which may well remain hypothetical) refer to difficulties in walking straight and standing upright.
What then is the relationship between the two columns on the right? Column three refers to monsters. The dragon is a chthonian being which has to be killed in order that mankind be born from the Earth; the Sphinx is a monster unwilling to permit men to live. The last unit reproduces the first one, which has to do with the autochthonous origin of mankind. Since the molesters are overcome by men, we may thus say that the common feature of the third column is denial of the autochthonous origin of man.
This immediately helps us to understand the meaning of the fourth column. In mythology it is a universal characteristic of men born from the Earth that at the moment they emerge from the depth they either cannot walk or they walk clumsily. This is the case of the chthonian beings in the mythology of the Pueblo: Muyingwu, who leads the emergence, and the chthonian Shumaikoli are lame ("bleeding-foot," "sore-foot"). The same happens to the Koskimo of the Kwakiutl after they have been swallowed by the chthonian monster, Tsiakish: When they returned to the surface of the earth "they limped forward or tripped sideways." Thus the common feature of the fourth column is the persistence of the autochthonous origin of man. It follows that column four is to column three as column one is to column two. The inability to connect two kinds of relationships is overcome (or rather replaced) by the assertion that contradictory relationships are identical inasmuch as they are both self-contradictory in a similar way. Although this is still a provisional formulation of the structure of mythical thought, it is sufficient at this stage.
Turning back to the Oedipus myth,
we may now see what it means. The myth has to do with the inability, for
a culture which holds the belief that mankind is autochthonous (see, for
instance, Pausanias, VIII, xxix, 4: plants provide a model for humans),
to find a satisfactory transition between this theory and the knowledge
that human beings are actually born from the union of man and woman. Although
the problem obviously cannot be solved, the Oedipus myth provides a kind
of logical tool which relates the original problem--born from one or born
from two?-- to the derivative problem: born from different or born from
same? By a correlation of this type, the overrating of blood relations
is to the underrating of blood relations as the attempt to escape autochthony
is to the impossibility to succeed in it. Although experience contradicts
theory, social life validates cosmology by its similarity of structure.
Hence cosmology is true.