The answer to these questions is mythology. In fact the answer to many questions like the ones above is mythology, something that will become clear as the course progresses. For now, we can say that the Native people in Eastman’s story were inhabiting a mythology that valued the multiplicity of stories while the missionary was inhabiting a mythology that valued only one story. But what does it mean to inhabit a mythology, and what does mythology have to do with truth? To get some answers, we need to do a little intellectual history. We need to go back to Plato.
Plato the Demythologizer
Plato and Aristotle, detail from The School of Athens by Raphael, 1510
Plato (left) and Aristotle, detail from The School of Athens, Raphael, 1510
Often called the “Father of Western Thought” and for good reason, Plato (429–347 BCE) was not the first philosopher, but he was the thinker whose influence is the broadest and deepest. A twentieth-century philosopher named Alfred North Whitehead famously said that Western philosophy “consists of a series of footnotes to Plato” (39). Accordingly, we must turn to Plato to understand contemporary notions of myth, and given the ubiquity of Western culture, it is this understanding of myth that comes into play most often. What made Plato so influential was that he changed humanity’s way of thinking from myth to truth. As a Greek, Plato inherited a culture that was rife with myth, from Homer’s epics the Iliad and the Odyssey to Hesiod’s Theogony. He knew these stories well and appreciated their didactic and entertainment value.
As a philosopher, however, Plato had inherited something more—his teacher Socrates’ love of truth. For both Socrates and Plato, truth was something that existed in ideal form and thus stood above human beings and our flimsy and ever-changing opinions. Truth was eternal and unchanging, and our highest duty was to reach for that ideal form. To do that we had to purge all fable and falsehood because they cloud our vision of the truth. Sound familiar? That’s the same language the missionary used in the Eastman story. The technical terminology that we use to describe Plato’s dramatic change in Western culture is that he moved it from muthos to logos, two Greek words that correspond roughly to myth and truth. We can go directly from that observation to our popular understanding of myth as falsehood, as in “the myth of the perfect girl/guy.”
So in condemning the Native people for their rejection of his story, the missionary is invoking Plato’s logos or truth against their muthos or fable and falsehood. But that leaves another question unanswered: what about the Native understanding of mythology and how did they allow for many stories instead of only one? Interestingly enough, this answer also involves Plato, or at least Plato is a marker we can use.
Oral and Literate Cultures, or The Medium is the Message
There was something else significant happening with Plato’s seismic shift from muthos to logos and that was the effects of writing upon the human psyche. Writing had begun in Sumeria around 2600 B.C.E. and perhaps even earlier in China, but it would be many centuries before the technology was perfected into books that could be widely used. Plato was just beginning to see the effects of writing upon culture and memory in his time. Even now, most of human history has taken place in oral cultures not literate ones. It might seem that the differences between a culture that communicates through word of mouth and one that uses writing are minimal, but studies have shown that they are actually quite profound. In fact the differences between orality and literacy may be responsible for the very different ways we understand the world.
To attempt to understand an oral culture, that is, a culture without writing, we have to exercise our imagination. Take a moment and do this: subtract all technology from your life. There are no phones (even analog phones if you remember those), tablets, computers, cars, or even large buildings. If you have shelter, you likely made it yourself, and you can eat but only what you kill or grow. You likely live in a community, and you have language and culture, but if you go on even a day’s journey, you are cut off from your society and all it affords you. What is important to you now? The answer is food, water, shelter, and safety. How do you acquire these things? You acquire these things by learning them from others, your community. How do you do that? You do that through language, your most important tool, more important, even, than fire. What will the language look like, and how will it work? Here is where it the answer gets especially interesting and relevant to our course. The language will not be like the language we use now because our language is based on writing. For example, there would be no lists. Lists are a
function of writing. There will be no maps. Maps are a kind of writing. In fact language will not look like anything; rather, it will sound like something. Those sounds will take the form of words, and those words will take the form of story. Imagine trying to tell someone who is going to take a journey about the way and the dangers along it. You could tell them that there is a panther that stalks a certain hill (but which hill?), that there is water at the base of a cliff (but which cliff?), and that there is shelter in a cave on the north side of the mesa (but which mesa?). If you cannot write all this down, it quickly becomes too much to remember. What you need is a form of language that will string all this information together in a memorable way. What you need is a good story, and when you live in an oral culture, the more stories you hear, the more information you have. You can go directly from that fact to the Native people’s openness to the missionary’s myth and surprise at his rejection of theirs.
The Meanings of Myth
The meanings of myth range from “fable and falsehood” to “the deepest truth,” and thus the student of myth can easily become lost in this semantic sea. It may be helpful, then, to see these various meanings in relation to one another and to where they “live” in terms of mythology, culture, and consciousness.
Myth exists on a continuum that we might see as follows: The archeology of myth – individuals and culture
The Archaeology of Myth: Individuals and Culture Greg Salyer, Ph.D.
The first and most important thing to understand in any discussion of myth is where one is on the continuum, and there are points between those marked here. This continuum is also why defining myth is so difficult.
Myth: The Story behind the Stories
Despite the stark differences between the missionary and the natives in the Eastman story, there is one striking similarity that was alluded to before; namely, they both are inhabiting a mythology. Notice that they do not have a mythology; rather, it has them. They both have stories, and they are both confused because the story behind their stories, the story that has them, is different. Put another way, the stories they are telling about the Garden of Eden or the origin of corn are different because the mythology informing them is different. One (the missionary’s) assumes a world divided by truth and falsehood while the other (the natives’) assumes a world that is not divided at all but is overflowing with meaning. Those separate assumptions come from another story, a deeper, frequently imperceptible one, that we call myth.
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