Hello and welcome back to #MythMonday! The first part of this introduction to my theory of myth went over Joseph Campbell’s four functions of mythology and my own conception of components that work together to make a functioning myth. In this installment, I’d like to discuss myth in the context of the philosophical frameworks we use to help our limited minds successfully interact with an unlimited universe.
My (non-philosopher) conception of frameworks revolves around the fact that the unmediated universe is just too complex, and frameworks are what we use to reduce that complexity. An example I use (I’m pretty sure I read this somewhere but I can’t remember where, so if you recognize it please let me know so I can give credit where due) is that of the solid desktop on which my computer is resting right now. In one framework, this solid piece of hotel furniture is made of solid wood topped with solid marble. This is easy to prove; if I bang my hand against it hard enough, my hand hurts. It is objectively and experientially solid. But, in another framework, my desk is a collection of tiny subatomic particles with so much empty space between them that the particles of my hand would have more than enough room to slip between those of the desk, were there not an invisible electromagnetic force preventing it. Both of these things are true. The desk is indeed solid, and it is also indeed mostly empty space. Any difficulty I might have getting my mind around that seeming contradiction is not the fault of the desk, which is just sitting there in all its deskness doing its desk thing — it is the fault of the difficulty my mind has in trying to hold the tension between a multiplicity of truths.
(Note: I am NOT a quantum physicist, so I would like to apologize in advance to any quantum physicists reading this for how badly I may have mangled this idea. Please don’t @ me — I never have and never will claim to be anything other than a mythologist telling a story.)
Anyway. Something can be absolutely true in one framework and absolutely false in another, and both truths are valid. This is an important concept, and we’ll come back to it.
Philosophers across the ages have opined at length about these kinds of frameworks. Now, I am a mythologist and not a philosopher (and would as such be banned from Plato’s ideal Republic — and we won’t even bother to address the fact that I’m a woman and therefore subhuman), and so I shall leave those discussions to the experts. I will, however, pilfer the concept of a framework so I can make use of it for my own purposes 😀
From a mythological perspective, the important frameworks are those which give structure to our experience not of the physical but of the mythical world. As I mentioned last week, I find it useful to characterize that structure as the ways one human consciousness interacts with things BEYOND it, WITHIN it, and BETWEEN it and another consciousness.
Analyzing the way we conceive of things BEYOND our human consciousness is the remit of fields like religious studies or theology. Analyzing the way we conceive of things WITHIN our human consciousness is the concern of psychology, particularly identity studies. Analyzing the way we conceive of things BETWEEN our human consciousness and another falls under things like sociology and ethics.
But mythology? Mythology has its fingers in all of these pies, and then some. The three components — religion, psychology, and lore — combine to provide a myth, a map for a human consciousness to follow as it navigates the world.
The thing about maps, though, is that the map is not the territory. It’s a framework. It’s something limited which we impose on the unlimited universe in order to reduce its complexity. So, even if the shape is very good — the map is accurate and complete — there must still be things which are simplified, de-emphasized, or even overlooked. Eventually, when our endlessly-questing human mind encounters one of these things, it is jolted into an unfamiliar awareness of the existence of the map (and its difference from the territory). At that point, we have three options: to pretend those things don’t exist (this is insisting that the map IS the territory), to change the framework to account for the new information (this requires a framework flexible enough to allow the map to be edited), or to find a new framework (this necessitates finding a completely different map, which almost always results in the rejection of the old one).
Once upon a time in a simpler world, the lore that people received from their families/tribes/cities/cultures was all neatly integrated within a traditional framework that defined the religious and psychological components of myth in a way that allowed it to successfully perform all four of Campbell’s mythic functions. Those frameworks worked pretty well; the map they provided was coherent, internally consistent, and gave people what they needed to find themselves in the world and understand their places in it. Eventually, though, in many places around the world in many different ways, the progression of human thought bumped into things that weren’t explainable by those old frameworks, and they began to falter and die.
For better or worse, at this point in time those traditional frameworks have largely been eclipsed by the Western, Aristotelian, Cartesian, scientific way of imposing structure on the universe. There is no doubt that science is the dominant concept most humans use to explain their world today. Even those who would deny it still define themselves in opposition to it, and there is nothing in the modern spectrum of human thought that doesn’t have to contend with it.
This is not all bad. The scientific framework has resulted in a truly vast improvement in the overall quality of human life. It serves well enough to support Campbell’s second and fourth functions of myth; its interpretive image of the universe is reasonably complete, and it doesn’t do too badly with psychology in a deterministic sense. But, because it either totally denies the mystic sphere or relegates it solely to biochemistry, and because the relativistic nature of the scientific method is only partially effective in defining interpersonal ethics in the sociological realm, as a mythic framework the strictly scientific worldview is incomplete.
Unfortunately, the success of this dominant but incomplete framework has completely denatured the older, traditional ones. Joseph Campbell mentions several times how Catholic doctrines of things like the Assumption just can’t hold up in a scientific world. Think of the body of Mary, being transported physically into Heaven upon her death. Where is Heaven? Somewhere out in space? Even traveling at the speed of light, the Mother of God would still be in the galaxy. Nobody can really believe that and still use a cell phone, at least not without a tremendous degree of conscious or unconscious cognitive dissonance. The problem is that, once something that lays claim to ultimate truth is shown to be partially untrue, that calls into question all of its other truths as well.
This leaves humans kind of mythically adrift. Science is the most reliable way to answer questions about HOW the world works. But if we ask a scientific atheist WHY the Big Bang happened, we may receive in answer a complaint about it not being a valid question. Of course it isn’t valid — it’s outside that framework! Or, even less mythically satisfying, we might be answered with the flatly existential argument that there is no WHY. But WHY has been an extremely important question to human culture for as long as there has been human culture, and those traditional frameworks — while nowhere near as good with the HOW — actually cared a lot about the WHY. They were also incomplete, but in a different way. Their maps illustrated a different part of the universe.
The scientific paradigm is no more capable than most of the mythic frameworks that preceded it of acknowledging its incompleteness. Lawrence Hatab in his wonderful book Myth and Philosophy discusses this conflict between ostensibly “objective” rationality and science on one side and ostensibly “subjective” myth on the other, and argues that “neither side can claim exclusive possession of truth.” Remember how the desk was both solid and empty space? Something can be false in the scientific framework and true in a mythic one — and both truths are valid.
In a way, science has (as Joseph Campbell once remarked of Yahweh) forgotten it’s a metaphor. It’s a superb map, to be sure, and it lets us navigate the world very, very well – but it is not the territory. Like all maps, it has edges. It is incomplete. Anything outside its boundaries — including, unfortunately, some of the most enduring and important human questions — is deemed invalid.
As a result, because they do still provide certain answers, the older, denatured traditional frameworks are still shambling around, dead but still active, sort of like zombies (and perhaps in a way engaged in the eating of brains 😆). The versions of traditional myths which have been able to recognize their metaphorical position and present their truths about WHY while ceding to more-capable frameworks certain truths about HOW are the ones which are most able to support all of Campbell’s functions in today’s society.
But making that shift requires discarding some central portions of the truths those frameworks once held. When we start adding in thorny questions of cultural identity or survival that get bound up with the mythic guidance they once provided, especially in times and places where it feels like that identity is under relentless attack in the flattening, technological, scientific world, not everyone can handle making the shift away from physical truths without losing faith in those that that remain.
Right. That was definitely WAY more than enough long-haired mythology theory for a single blog post 😉 Next time we’ll look at some ways that modern stories, particularly ones which arose after the victory of the scientific method in the battle to accurately describe the physical world, are beginning to illustrate things not included on the map of the scientific framework.Â