Don’t Know Much About® Mythology (6 page)

The controversial but growing connection between mythology and religion reached a new height with the late-nineteenth-century work of Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). Born in Glasgow, Scotland, he was a classical-scholar-turned-anthropologist, who believed that myths began in the great cycle of nature—birth, growth, decay, death, and rebirth. Frazer’s theory, which formed the basis for his twelve-volume masterwork
The Golden Bough
(it appeared between 1890 and 1915), developed from his attempt to explain an ancient Italian ritual called the king of the woods at Nemi, a place near Rome. According to the legend, the king of the woods held an uneasy grasp on the throne, because he was always threatened by challengers who wanted to kill him and take his place. The challenger had to break off a golden bough—hence the title of his study—from a sacred tree in the grove. The death of the king and his replacement by a younger, more virile successor ensured the fertility of the crops.

Frazer’s central idea was that all myths were part of primitive religions that centered on fertility rites, and he collected and coordinated hundreds of myths and folktales from all over the world. Frazer was most intrigued by what he called the “Great Mother,” and her relationship with a younger male consort who was often sacrificed as a sacred king. According to Frazer, this theme of the dying and reborn god appears in almost every ancient mythology, either directly or symbolically. Some of the most significant examples he singled out were Ishtar and Tammuz from Mesopotamia, and Isis and Osiris in Egypt, but he also made a connection between this idea and Jesus and Mary.

Much of Frazer’s work is now dismissed by modern scholars, and aspects of
The Golden Bough
have been discredited—including most of the story of the king of the woods at Nemi. But at the time, Frazer’s work was revolutionary. He gave credibility to mythology as a serious study that explained the primitive roots of religion. He also profoundly influenced a whole generation of anthropologists and, perhaps just as important, a generation of writers. James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and William Butler Yeats were among the twentieth-century writers whose work was shaped in part by Frazer’s ideas. (Eliot’s famed poem
The Wasteland
makes reference to
The Golden Bough
, though Frazer reportedly said he couldn’t make sense of it.)

Closely related to Frazer’s ideas were those of the so-called
ritualists
, who believed that all myths are derived from rituals or ceremonies. One of the first scholars to develop this theory was Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928), a British classicist of the late 1800s and early 1900s, who argued that people create myths in order to justify already-established magical or religious rituals. “Gods and religious ideas generally reflect the social activities of the worshipper,” she wrote in a 1912 book about Greek religion,
Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion
.

A colleague of Frazer, Harrison disagreed with many of his ideas. One of her key contributions was to emphasize the importance of female divinities. “The Great Mother is prior to the masculine divinities,” she argued, introducing an idea that is being revived with the so-called Goddess worship, which has enjoyed renewed popularity in recent years. Harrison’s theories, while clearly influential, have also been diminished, because it is difficult to say what came first—the ritual or the myth.

When does myth become religion? And what’s the difference?

For most people, the answer to this question might be this simple formulation: “If I believe it, it is religion. If you believe it, it is a myth.”

For most of the past two centuries, people educated in the world of science and the rational explanation for the workings of the universe readily dismissed myths as the primitive beliefs of backward people who didn’t know better. But to the ancient people of Mesopotamia, Greece, Egypt, India, or China, myths were not myths at all, but religion. They dictated life and formed the basis of the social structure.

As best-selling religious historian Karen Armstrong writes in
A History of God
, “It seems that creating gods is something that human beings have always done. When one religious idea ceases to work for them, it is simply replaced. These ideas disappear, like the Sky God, with no great fanfare.”

Consider the Lord’s Prayer, or the “Our Father,” familiar to millions of Christians the world over as the prayer taught by Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew:

“
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.”

Some might consider this idea heretical, but if you know that prayer, stop for a moment and substitute “Zeus” or “Re” for “Our Father.” The entreaties that Christians make in this familiar prayer to their divinity are simple yet universal desires that have been part of ritualized prayers across many diverse religions for thousands of years.

Similar prayers of entreaty can be found in almost every religion and culture.

For instance, this is a traditional African prayer from Sudan:

Prayers are—in a most fundamental and ancient way—the essence of belief in the supernatural world. Prayers found in Egyptian tombs are more than five thousand years old. In modern America, a majority of people claim that they believe in prayer and say they pray regularly. The essential underlying question is: If myths were once created to answer fundamental questions and solve problems outside the control of mortals, when did these myths morph into religions?

Setting aside Karl Marx’s famous statement that “Religion…is the opium of the people,”
religion
is an organized system of beliefs, ceremonies, practices, and worship that may center on one supreme God or Deity, or a number of gods or deities. The earliest recorded evidence of religious activity dates from about 60,000 BCE, and today there are thousands of religions in the world. The eight major ones are Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Shinto, and Taoism. But throughout history, mythologies and religions have shared some basic traits and characteristics:

Religious rituals
are central to both mythic belief systems and religion. Every tradition has some basic practices that include acts and ceremonies by which believers appeal to and serve God or other sacred powers. The Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, is filled with elaborate instructions for the ritual sacrifice of animals, practices not very different from the animal sacrifices that were common in ancient Mesopotamia or Greece. Christians around the world participate in a ritual in which bread and wine are believed to be transformed into the body and blood of Jesus, which was shed in a rite of sacrifice, an act that also has very ancient roots.
Prayer is probably the most common ritual. When praying, a believer or someone on behalf of believers addresses words and thoughts to an object of worship. Most major religions have a daily schedule of prayer.
Many religions also have rituals intended to purify the body. For example, Hindus consider the waters of the Ganges River in India to be sacred, and every year, millions of Hindus purify their bodies by bathing in the river, especially at the holy city of Varanasi. The common practice of Christian baptism—either infant or adult—is another widely practiced ritual with deep roots in mythical practices. The mother of Achilles dipping her infant son into sacred waters is not so different from the Christian priest anointing an infant’s head with holy water to consecrate and protect the newborn, or the Hindu pilgrims who travel to the Ganges River for a dip.


 


Belief in a deity.
“Who knows this truly, and who will now declare it, what paths lead together to the gods?” the ancient Rig-Veda of Hinduism asks. “Only their lowest aspects of existence are seen, who exist on supreme mystical planes.”
Like ancient myths, most religions believe in one or more deities who govern or greatly influence the actions of human beings as well as events in nature. While Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are monotheistic—believe in one god—Hinduism teaches that a world spirit called Brahman is the supreme power but that there are numerous other gods and goddesses. (Confucianism is one of the few significant atheistic religions.)


 


Sacred stories.
The Bible, Koran, Bhagavad-Gita, Popol Vuh. Every religion has its collection of sacred or divine stories, which, in essence, are myths. After all, myths were first told to describe how the sacred powers directly influenced the world.
As Ninian Smart writes in
The World’s Religions,
“Experience is channeled and expressed not only by ritual but also by sacred narrative or myth…. It is the story side of religion. It is typical of all faiths to hand down vital stories: some historical; some about that mysterious primordial time when the world was in its timeless dawn; some about great founders, such as Moses, the Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad; some about assaults by the Evil One…. These stories are called myths. The term may be a bit misleading, for in the modern study of religion, there is no implication that a myth is false.”


 

This is the essence of one problem between believers of different faiths and traditions. Jews and Christians who hold on to the Bible as the divinely inspired word of God don’t necessarily allow that the Mayan Popol Vuh, a collection of sacred stories, is anything more than an invention, superstition that is far beneath their own “holy writ.” Arguments over these sacred stories even split people with shared religious traditions. For instance, Catholics and Protestants don’t even agree on what should be in the Bible. The portions of the Bible known as the Apocrypha are considered sacred by Catholics, but are less than divine according to Protestant belief. Many Jews and Christians believe that the Creation accounts in Genesis provide the literal and historical explanation for the beginning of the universe and life on earth. Other believers accept the scientific explanations for the creation of the universe and view the biblical account as a metaphor, accepting the message contained in the stories without treating the specific details as literal truth.

In other words, the difference between myth and religion may exist only in the eye of the believer—or the nonbeliever. And Ninian Smart’s conclusion brings this chapter nearly full circle. Myths are the sacred stories that may convey essential truths, even if they come in the guise of tales about ancient gods behaving badly.

Are myths all in our minds?

Beyond exploring the sacred, spiritual, or religious component at the heart of myths, the twentieth century brought one more significant explanation for the source of mythology. With the beginnings of modern psychology, pioneers of psychological thought, such as Sigmund Freud, maintained that myths originate in the unconscious mind. Freud called myths “the dreams of early mankind,” and he frequently made reference to mythic characters, most famously in the term “Oedipus complex,” which drew on the story of the Greek king Oedipus who killed his father and then married his mother, and which was set forth in Freud’s landmark
The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900).