The poetry of myth

El Cabrero has been on the road this week. Instead of ranting about current events, I'm trying to settle accounts with the ideas of Joseph Campbell, the famous student of mythology. My short take is that when he's good, he's really good. And the converse.

Here's some classic Campbell:

Whenever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.

To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanently human meaning.

It's hard not to agree with a good bit of that, especially when you think about the lunacies of literalism, such as "creation science." I can't go all the way with Campbell and am allergic to his politics but he does have his moments.

JUST ONE LINK. Here's my latest rant on cuts to the Head Start program. Notice that I performed the charitable act of feeding a troll.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Symbolism, not history?

As I mentioned yesterday, I decided to read Joseph Campbell's famous book on myths, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I am not a Campbellite and have some political and other issues with him and his ideas, but he makes some interesting points.

One of his intellectual habits that probably shocks people who associate their religion with actual historical events is that for him the story is all, not what really happened.  At one point, after quoting the story of Jesus' Transfiguration, he writes,

We may doubt whether such a scene ever actually took place. But that would not help us any; for we are concerned, at present, with the problems of symbolism, not of historicity. We do not particularly care whether Rip van Winkle, Kamar al-Zaman, or Jesus Christ ever actually lived. Their stories are what concerns us: and these stories are so widely distributed over the world--attached to various heroes in various lands--that the question of whether this or that local carrier of the universal theme may or may not have been a historical, living man can be of only secondary moment. The stressing of this historical element will lead to confusion; it will simply obfuscate the picture message.

It is true that insisting on literal facts can kill the point of the story, but I think at some points what actually happened does matter, to the extent it can be known.

My main problem with Campbell is summed up in the phrase "local carrier of the universal theme." I think a respectful study of myths and folklore doesn't reveal a universal theme; it reveals all kinds of themes. He believed in a mono-myth. I prefer multi-myths.

SO HERE WE ARE IN BISMARCK. Well, I guess I can scratch "visiting North Dakota" off my bucket list. I tagged along when a delegation of WV legislators visited the state to learn about its Legacy Fund. We've been pushing for something similar here for a few years now. Here's coverage from the Bismarck Tribune. The hospitality has been great, as have the accents (a little like Minnesota). I think all of us who came have learned a lot--I just hope we seal the deal in the legislature.

GOOD NEWS FOR WV FAMILIES. Governor Earl Ray Tomblin announced today that he is requesting that federal health regulators allow the children of public employees to sign up for CHIP, the Children's Health Insurance Program.This move will save families and the state a lot of money. This is something my friends at the WV Center on Budget and Policy advocated in a recent report.

I would blog more, but this is a good local beer town. Don't wait up.

The power of myth

There's no getting around stories. We seem hardwired to tell them, hear them, and make them up (consciously or otherwise). A while back, a friend loaned me a book titled Winning the Story Wars: Why those who tell--and live--the best stories will rule the future by Jonah Sachs.

I think the title makes a good point. A great deal of politics is about controlling the narrative. I enjoyed the book, although I got a bit lost in the weeds. Sachs based a great deal of his ideas on those of Joseph Campbell.

I have to admit that I am not a Campbell fan. I dislike his politics and disagree with his view that somehow all cultures are part of a mono-myth. I don't think the whole human race is watching one movie. Still, I decided to check out his best known book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces. Official Goat Rope verdict: 35% very cool; 65% not so much.

Still he has some good lines in there. Like this one about myth from page 1:

Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, myths of man have flourished; and they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and mind. It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

SO HERE'S WHERE I'M OFF TO: North Dakota (!).

AND HERE'S ANOTHER ENDORSEMENT of creating a Future Fund for WV.

NOT THE NEWEST NEWS, but this protest against the Master of the Universe WV Attorney General was interesting.

MORE CLIMATE CHANGE TO DENY here.

NOTE: I'm on the road so posts may be irregular and links may be behind the times.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Myth-using a good word

I always kind of cringe when I hear the word myth used to signify commonly held but wrong belief, as in, for example, the myth of welfare dependency. I think of myths as stories that provide meaning to life. The word itself means something like plot in Greek. The more I think about it, though, wrongly held beliefs often do function as a kind of myth that does tell a story and provide meaning, even if it isn't accurate.

Today a friend of mine produced a well done blog post titled The "Welfare Dependency" Myth in West Virginia. It does a good job of pointing out that widespread dependency on such kinds of aid for families has in fact dramatically declined..

Still, the delusion of widespread welfare dependency does function as a dark myth that gives meaning to mean-spirited people who like to bash the poor, most of whom are seen as unworthy. This kind of myth justifies cutting such programs, sometimes even by claiming that this would really help poor people in the long run.

Since myths are something we apparently can't live without, the only viable course seems to be to come up with a better one.

I'VE BEEN THINKING THIS TOO. From the same source, here's another post about how Medicaid expansion can help deal with substance abuse, a major factor in prison overcrowding.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Living myths

A mask of Dionysus. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

It's an unfortunate turn of language these days that we use the word myth to denote falsehoods or misconceptions, as in "the myth of the free market" or whatever. I'm more inclined to the saying I've seen attributed to various people that goes something like "myths are things that never were but always are."

Thomas Mann, to whom some attribute the thought expressed above, put it like this:

For the myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious.

Some of the most powerful expressions of myth are those developed in Athenian tragedy, an art form that reached its pinnacle in the 5th century BC. As mentioned previously, tragedies were performed as a competition during the spring festival of Dionysus, a god associated with wine, growing things, and ecstasy.

The form developed over time from dithyrambs or choral singing in honor of the god to the recitation of stories from various mythic traditions. Over time, an actor was added to answer the chorus. The English word for hypocrite, by the way, comes from the word for this actor. The tragedian Aeschylus added a second actor, Sophocles a third, and Euripides still more, so that the product is recognizable to modern readers as a play.

Greek tragedies often portray people caught up in a long series of events which they imperfectly understand or understand only when it's too late. Sometimes, they show the disastrous results of excess or a lack of holy moderation which bring on the wrath of the gods.

Far from being something removed from real life, I see tragic themes being played out over and over again in history, politics, family and personal life. Over the next stretch of time, Goat Rope is going to take a look at the surviving tragedies and what they might say to us today.

GREAT FIRST LINE. This article about how Americans are landing on or falling through state and local safety nets says it all:

As millions of people seek government aid, many for the first time, they are finding it dispensed American style: through a jumble of disconnected programs that reach some and reject others, often for reasons of geography or chance rather than differences in need.

TALKING BUSINESS. Here are two items El Cabrero and amigos are working on right now. One is the need to take advantage of stimulus money to help WV deal with its budget problems and the other is about the state's unemployment insurance system and how we can improve it.

WALL TO WALL. Here's the latest edition of the Rev. Jim Lewis' Notes from under the Fig Tree. It's all about walls from wall to wall.

BABOONS are socially smart. Some even make good goat herders. Wait a minute! Don't read this.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

ANIMAL TRACKS

Mythical critters courtesy of wikipedia.

This is the last day (for now) of a series of posts about the nature of mythology that started last week. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts. As always, there are also links and comments about current events.

One of the most interesting theories of myth and religion I've run across is that of the German classicist Walter Burkert (born 1931). He's sometimes considered to be a structuralist or neo-ritualist (see yesterday and last week). He's written several books of which I'd particularly recommend The Creation of the Sacred. If you're a hard core Helenophile like El Cabrero, you might check out Greek Religion as well.

Here's the short version as I understand it. Myths and religion are as universal among humans as language. Like language, some elements that later became myth and religion may have antecedents in the course of early and even pre-human biological evolution.

Animals have their rituals, and early as well as modern humans have always found that repeated or ritualized actions can reduce anxiety in an unpredictable world.

Most traditional stories involve a dangerous quest that involves seeking a prize and evading dangers. If squirrels could talk, their stories might include the same things.

Many religions involve gestures and acts of submission and deference to more powerful beings, which is a basic behavior on the menu of many animals.

Many stories and rituals involve the idea of sacrificing a part for the whole, which is a common natural event, as when a predator picks out the weakest members of a herd or when a lizard's tail snaps off when grabbed by a bird.

In many cultures, people read signs or omens from the flight of birds or other natural events. At Goat Rope Farm, the hyper-alert goats do the same thing all the time.

Burkert doesn't believe that religion as such is genetic. Rather, as humans emerged into self consciousness, maybe certain legacies of evolution were at play when people created symbolic worlds of meaning to help them deal with the world. How could it be otherwise?

As he put it:

The idea of the supernatural emerges within the landscape of nature. If reality appears dangerous or downright hostile to life, religion calls for something beyond experience to restore the balance.

Final observation...El Cabrero is blessed (or cursed) to frequently observe wild and domesticated animals. I'm not saying we're just like them or vice versa. But we do seem to be part of the same continuum.

NEW FOREIGN POLICY DIRECTIONS for the Middle East is the subject here.

IT'S THE ECONOMY. This editorial kind of sums it up.

MORE ON THE NEW DEAL from SEIU's Andy Stern.

THE LAST WORD. From American Book Review, here is their list of the 100 best last lines from novels. Enjoy!

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MYTH MAKING

Gustave Dore's illustration of Little Red Riding Hood, courtesy of wikipedia.

The nature of myth is the theme at Goat Rope these days, although you'll also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Maybe you've noticed that many myths and folktales follow a sort of pattern. In a typical Appalachian Jack tale, the eponymous hero leaves home to seek his fortune. He finds out about or runs right smack dab into some problem. Along the way, he is tested by a stranger and does the right thing. The stranger then gives Jack some help along the way. He then beats the haint (or king or giant or dragon or witch or whatever), gets the girl and then goes home.

Lots of tales are different but there is usually a pattern.

The Russian scholar Vladimir Propp (1895-1970) collected and traced the patterns in Russian folktales. He found that most were built around a quest pattern and contained certain elements or functions--31 to be exact--and a certain number of stock characters (he came up with seven, including typically the good guy, the bad guy, and the girl). What makes tales vary from each other is more the sequence of elements or functions than differences about characters.

A similar schema could easily explain most of the movies I've seen...

One approach to myth that sees people as basically wired to come up with patterns and narratives is called structuralism. The best known structuralist theorist was Claude Levi-Strauss, who aside from some fieldwork in Brazil was mostly an armchair anthropologist.

Levi-Strauss is as far as I can tell almost impossible to read, but here's the Goat Rope version: people are wired to classify things, often into binary pairs of opposites like night/day, raw/cooked, living/dead, etc. Every society does it, although each does it differently.

The elements of such a system only make sense in the context of the system itself, like a letter only makes sense as part of the alphabet or a playing card only makes sense as part of a full deck or a pawn as part of a chess set. The parts are only understandable as pieces of the whole. One function of myth is to mediate between the pairs of binary oppositions.

Note: I'm probably not getting that right, but what do you expect from a goat herder?

Of all the theories of myth discussed in this series, I find structuralism to be among the most intriguing, although it's as impossible to prove as it is to read. I do think we're wired to think in binary terms even when we shouldn't and we seem pre-packaged for story and metaphor as well.

MORE ON IRAQ. Here's more on the cost, human and financial. Here's a local op-ed on the Iraq mess by Carli Mareneck. And here's coverage on the unraveling of the surge.

NEW PROGRESSIVE BLOG. Check out The Wonk Room.

COAL AND HEALTH. Here's more on the WVU study of health in coal counties.

YES, VIRGINIA, there is a runner's high.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

PUBLIC DREAMS?

Heracles, courtesy of wikipedia.

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) is probably the most popular interpreter of myths today. Campbell was the author of The Masks of God, The Hero With a Thousand Faces, and many other works. His works also inspired Star Wars creator George Lucas.

Campbell's public following grew by leaps and bounds with PBS's broadcast of The Power of Myth, a series of interviews between Campbell and Bill Moyers. Strongly influenced by Jung, he believed that all myths worldwide shared similar themes and spiritual insights. He sometimes spoke of a "monomyth," such as that of the quest of a hero, as if all humanity was basically watching the same psychic movie.

One problem with that approach is that it selectively picks from many diverse myths and imposes a general interpretation on widely diverse traditions with widely different systems of meaning.

He had a knack for catchy phrases such as this one:

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

Sounds good but doesn't hold up too well. Myths are enduring stories repeated over time, whereas dreams are physiological events, most of which are not remembered or retold. Myths provide a world of meaning for those who accept them, whereas most dreams are mental static that have little influence on daily life (although we arguably should pay more attention to them than we do).

The problem with overgeneralizing about myths is that in doing so one creates a more or less artificial construct that loses a lot of particularity. As one of El Cabrero's teachers used to say, you can't unscramble an egg. Instead of lumping all myths together into some gigantic stew, it might be more interesting to look at different traditions in their own terms.

THE SURGE IS WORKING? You decide.

THE TREE ARMY. Here's Bill McKibben on the relevance of New Deal era programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps today.

COAL AND/OR HEALTH. A new study by a WVU researcher finds that residents of the state's coalfields are more likely than other West Virginians to suffer from chronic heart, lung and kidney disease.

SOME DAYS YOU EAT THE BEAR... Here's Dean Baker on the credit crisis and corporate bailouts.

THE WIRE. Here's a critical view of El Cabrero's favorite TV show that talks about all the positive things in Baltimore and other cities that the show ignores.
Point well taken, but can somebody tell the folks at HBO to get that season 5 DVD out soon?

SPIDERS AND SNAKES. New research is studying the question of whether the common fear of snakes and spiders is an evolutionary inheritance or something learned.

LOOK TO THE ANT, THOU SLUGGARD! They invented farming 50 million years ago when we were just a twinkle in a primate's eye.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

UNIVERSAL DREAMS

Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is myth and what it means. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts. You'll also find links and comments about current events.

One of the most popular psychological theories of myth is that of Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961). Once a close associate of Freud who was designated as the "crown prince" of psychoanalysis, Jung broke with Freud's theory of the centrality of libido or the sex drive as the major force of human motivation (see discussion of Freud's view of myth yesterday).

While Freud concentrated on the personal unconscious, Jung believed that some aspects of psychic life had an "impersonal" or objective quality that cannot be derived from an individuals past experiences. He believed that this pointed to the existence of a collective unconscious shared by all people. (He also at times dabbled in the notion of a national unconscious for different ethnic groups, which damaged his reputation and brought on accusations of being a Nazi sympathizer.)

The collective unconscious contained certain primordial images or archetypes, an idea he derived from

the repeated observation that, for instance, the myths and fairy-tales of world literature contain definite motifs which crop up everywhere. We meet these same motifs in the fantasies, dreams, deliria, and delusions of individuals living today. These typical images and associations are what I call archetypal ideas.

The archetype was

an irrepresentable, unconscious, pre-existent form that seems to be part of the inherited structure of the psyche and can therefore manifest itself spontaneously anywhere, at any time.

Jung believed that the similarities between various myths are the result of the influence of the collective unconscious. Myths therefore originate in the psyche and allow people to experience the unconscious. He believed that the decline in the centrality of myth in the modern age contributed to the psychological problems of many people:

Among the so-called neurotics of our day there are a good many who in other ages would not have been neurotic--that is, divided against themselves. If they had lived in a period and in a milieu in which man was still linked by myth with the world of the ancestors, and thus with nature truly experienced and not merely seen from the outside, they would have been spared this division within themselves.

While still enjoying great popularity, Jung's ideas are miles away from the drift of modern scientific psychology. Likewise, many scholars of mythology shy away from grand theories which not only over-generalize but also pass over the uniqueness of different mythological traditions.

BOGEYMAN TIME? Here's Jacob Hacker on "socialized medicine."

THE SHADOW SIDE OF BANKING and the need for greater regulation thereof is the subject of Paul Krugman's latest column.

IS THE NEW DEAL RELEVANT TODAY? Uhhh...yes.

AN OLD ZEN KOAN ASKS "Does a dog have Buddha nature?" This one might.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MYTHS OF THE PSYCHE

Antigone Leads Oedipus out of Thebes by Charles Francois Jalabert. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

Mythology is a perennially fascinating subject. There have been any number of modern interpretations of the meaning of myths. Classical scholar Elizabeth Vandiver divides these into "what" and "why" theories.

"What" theories, which were discussed here last week, try to explain myth in terms of other things, such as expressions of rituals, social solidarity, explanations of natural and historical events, etc. "Why" theories of myths are broader in scope and tend to focus on the universal function of myths for the human mind.

The person who did the most to open that can of worms was none other than Sigmund Freud, who turned to myths in developing his theory of psychoanalysis, specifically the myth of Oedipus as recounted in the Greek tragedian Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannus.

To recap that myth, an oracle foretells that Oedipus is destined to kill his father and marry his mother. Laius, the father, orders the infant exposed, but unbeknownst to him, a shepherd takes pity and spares the infant, who is raised by another couple elsewhere he believes to be his parents. When he learns of the oracle, he flees his home and kills a belligerent person on the way. Reckon wonder who that guy was?

He becomes tyrant (nonhereditary ruler) of Thebes when he solves the riddle of the Sphinx, a monster terrifying the town. He also gets to marry the Jocasta, widow of the king. When a plague breaks out, Oedipus swears to get to the bottom of it. The blind seer Tiresias says the plague is due to a hidden crime, which turns out to be... When the truth is revealed, Jocasta kills herself and Oedipus blinds himself. (There's a bunch of stuff going on with seeing/not seeing.)

For Freud, the only possible reason why this myth is compelling to modern as well as ancient readers is that it reveals a universal conflict in the human psyche that begins in childhood and has ramifications throughout life. He believed the Oedipus complex was a universal human trait.

Most people today wouldn't go that far, although it seems to fit for some people. Scholars of mythology in particular point out that this kind of mythic theme is far from universal across cultures and the Oedipus myth itself occupied only a minor place in the Greek mythic cycle. For that matter, other myths are at least as compelling as that of Oedipus.

When El Cabrero first discovered Greek tragedy, I was much more impressed by Aeschylus' tragedies of Orestes, who killed his mother to avenge his father's death and had to deal with the wrath of the Furies in the wake of that primal transgression. He didn't even rate a complex. No fair!

Official Goat Rope verdict: myths, like any other kind of story, can convey deep psychological insights, but they are best understood as much as possible in their own terms and as part of the symbolic universe of which they are a part. And not every compelling story reflects a universal truth of human nature.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and even when it isn't it isn't always what Old Sig thought.

SAD MILESTONE. The AP reports that US military deaths in Iraq have reached 4000.

THIS IS NO SHOCK, but good jobs are getting harder for workers at lower education levels to find.

LONGEVITY GAP. As the gap between rich and poor widens, so does the gap in life expectancies across socio-economic lines.

YOU HAVE TO CLICK ON THIS LINK if only to see the freaky mantis shrimp.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

DIS-MYTHED

Image courtesy of wikipedia. Have you hugged a centaur today?

The theme lately at Goat Rope is the nature of myths. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts. You'll also find links and comments about current events.

One approach to understanding mythology is to see it as forming the basis of a given society. For sociology pioneer Emile Durkheim, myths and related rituals and symbols are an expression of social existence that represent the understandings, beliefs and practices of a group. They are in large measure the glue that holds a society together, continually renewing traditional understandings and norms.

In fact, Durkheim worried that such traditional understandings and practices were undermined in modern societies, which resulted in feelings of normlessness or anomie.

The anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski expressed similar views of myths based on his fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands. He tended to see them as charters of social practices which promote the continuity of the social order.

Obviously, there is some merit in this approach, but it too has its limits. Even in modern societies such as our own, many people continue to study and appreciate the myths of ancient societies even though they are now divorced from our own rituals and practices.

Karl Marx tended to view myths both as a reflection of a given society and as part of the ideological system that supported existing social relations. Yet he was also aware of the continuing appeal of myths such as those of the Greeks. He gets the last word on the subject today (there will be more on myths here next week):

Is Achilles possible in a time of gunpowder and shot? Or is the Iliad possible in a time of the printing press or printing machine? Do not the necessary conditions of epic poetry, songs and legends and the muse, disappear with the coming of the printing-press handle?

But the difficulty does not lie in understanding how Greek art and epic poetry are linked to certain forms of social development. The difficulty is that they will still provide us with aesthetic pleasure and in certain respects serve as a standard and an unattainable ideal.

A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does not the naivete of the child give him enjoyment, and must he not himself strive for a higher level to reproduce the child's truth? Does not the nature of the child in every epoch represent the epoch in its natural truth? Why should not the historical childhood of humanity, where it had unfolded most beautifully in a stage that will never recur again, not exert an eternal charm? There are ill-bred children and precocious children. Many of the ancient peoples belong to this category. The Greeks were normal children. The charm their art has for us is not in conflict with the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. Its charm is, rather, the result of the fact, with which it is rather inseparably linked, that the immature social conditions, under which it arose, and could only arise, can never recur again.

In other words, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes a myth is just a good Big Story and even if we can't live there the land of mythology is a nice place to visit.

1929? Here's Paul Krugman on the forgotten lessons of the crash.

EATING ONE'S HOUSE. From the Economic Policy Institute, here's a snapshot on how the housing slump may effect consumption and the overall economy.

PREDATORS. Also from EPI, here's a summary of a new report on how growing inequality has contributed to predatory lending practices and here's the full report.

MORE ON THIS WEEK'S UNHAPPY ANNIVERSARY can be found here.

ANTI-WAR EVENTS are occurring all around the nation and WV this week. Here's coverage from one such in Lewisburg.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MYTH-CONCEPTIONS

The theme at Goat Rope lately is myths, what they are and what they mean. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts. You will also find links and comments about current events.

There are several different kinds of myths. Etiological myths explain why things are the way the are or how the world came into being. Creation stories are an example. Charter myths explain how institutions or rituals came into being.

In Greek mythology, for example, marriage as an institution came about as a promise the goddess Hera made an extremely amorous Zeus agree to before got to sleep with her. (Obviously, he didn't read the fine print...) Myths also can provide moral guidance or examples of good or bad behavior.

There are any number of theories of myths, some of which hold up better than others. Euhemerism is of ancient origin and gets its name from a Macedonian sage who believed that myths were basically exaggerated stories of real people that got more elaborate with the retelling or else were poetic descriptions of natural events. Goat Rope verdict: well yeah, there's some of that, but if that's all you see, you're missing out.

One of the most bizarre theories was that of the 19th century scholar Max Muller, who considered mythology "a disease of language." He also believed that all myths were basically solar in origin and were about the literal struggle between light and darkness. Whatever. It's hard to believe now that people took that seriously (but they did).

A stronger theory holds that myths are explanations of rituals. Both by nature are things that are repeated. Myths have been around as long as human speech and rituals have probably been practiced longer than that--in fact they can be seen as a vestige from the animal kingdom.

As Walter Burkert wrote in The Creation of the Sacred,

Religion may well be older than the kind of language we know, insofar as it is bound to ritual, which entails fixed behavioral patterns marked by exaggeration and repetition and often characterized by obsessive seriousness--patterns which are prominent even in the most modern varieties of religions communication. In principle, ritual reflects a preverbal state of communication, to be learned by imitation and to be understood by its function. It seems to be more primitive and may be more ancient than speech; it clearly has analogies in the behavior of animals.

Sir James Frazier, for example, developed the idea in The Golden Bough that myths remain long after the ritual has disappeared. He believed that many were based on the ritual of the killing of a sacred king and his replacement by a younger contender. Those views are no longer generally accepted but they did influence a group of scholars called the Cambridge ritualists.

No doubt they were onto something. Greek tragedy, for example, developed as part of the festival of Dionysus. Sometimes the connection is fairly easy to see. The Homeric hymn of Demeter, which recounts the abduction of Persephone by Hades, god of the underworld, may reflect ancient marriage rituals (the distinction between marriage and abduction being closer than we imagine today).

In other cases, however, the connection is harder to see and the insistence on the derivation of myth from ritual can become a restrictive dogma.

DELUSIONS OF COMPETENCE. In a recent speech defending the indefensible Iraq war, President Bush declared that "The world is better, and the United States of America is safer." But if you prefer something more reality based, here's Leonard Pitts Jr. on the subject.

RURAL AMERICA and stereotypes thereof are the subject of this item that originally appeared in Orion.

A BETTER WAY. This piece from the AFLCIO blog lays out an agenda for shared prosperity.

SPEAKING OF ECONOMICS, here's a conservative critique of market fundamentalism.

WHAT SHOULD GO IN AN OUTDOOR SURVIVAL KIT? Here's a good list.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MYTH-TAKES

The theme at Goat Rope lately is myths and what they mean. You will also find links and comments about current events. If this is your first visit, please click on the week's earlier posts.

As discussed previously, myths are the Big Stories that convey deep meanings.

One interesting aspect of mythology is that most cultures don't recognize their own myths as myths. Rather, they are seen as stories that convey how things really are.

On this fifth anniversary of the Bush administration's unnecessary war in Iraq, I've been thinking about the myth used to justify it. It's a very old myth, one that theologian Walter Wink has called "the myth of redemptive violence," which underlies and tries to justify every system of domination. The myth, expressed in Babylonian mythology in the story of Marduk, who overcomes and kills Tiamat and creates the world from her body, involves the overcoming of primordial forces of chaos by an act of violence that establishes order.

Thus violence is seen as part of the natural order of things, the savior god that makes social life possible and which demands obedience.

According to Wink,

This Myth of Redemptive Violence is the real myth of the modern world. It, and not Judaism or Christianity or Islam, is the dominant religion in our society today...

It is the ideology of conquest, the original religion of the status quo. The gods favor those who conquer. Conversely, whoever conquers must have the favor of the gods. The common people exist to perpetuate the advantage that the gods have conferred upon the king, the aristocracy, and the priesthood. Religion exists to legitimate power and privilege. Life is combat. Any form of order is preferable to chaos, according to this myth. Ours is neither a perfect nor a perfectible world; it is a theater of perpetual conflict in which the prize goes to the strong. Peace through war; security through strength; these are the core convictions that arise from this ancient historical religion, and they form the solid bedrock on which the Domination System is founded in every society.

This myth was powerfully invoked by this administration in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to justify the invasion of a country which had nothing to do with the attacks and the results have been disastrous for the country and the world.

THE MYTH OF REDEMPTIVE VIOLENCE IN ACTION in Iraq is the theme of this review.

MORE ON THE CREDIT/HOUSING MELTDOWN can be found here.

MASSEY ENERGY was cited in an incident related to the death of a coal miner in Kanawha County.

BE NOT ANXIOUS. It's often easier said than done, as this book review notes.

URGENT ANCIENT HOBBIT UPDATE here.


GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

MYTHING OUT

Botticelli's Birth of Venus.

The theme at Goat Rope this week is myth and what it means. If this is your first visit, please click on yesterday's post. You'll also find links and comments about current events.

My working definition of myth is a story that conveys deep meaning.

Throughout history, narrative has been the most common means of making sense of the world. We're all caught up in stories, even when we sleep. Myths in the sense of BIG STORIES were especially important in non literate societies where there weren't a lot of other ways of recording and storing information, but they are alive and well today, although ours probably aren't as cool as the old ones.

One reason why we may be mythologically challenged today is that we've inherited the relatively modern Western idea of the distinction between fact and fiction, with fiction have the connotation of falsity. The problem with that is that we can only make use of facts when they're part of a cognitive, emotive, and socio-linguistic process which organizes and interprets them.

In overvaluing "facts" at the expense of narrative, we've kind of become like Dickens' character Gradgrind in the novel Hard Times, who wanted to create “a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact.”

Stories, on the other hand, can convey truths that no shopping list of facts can do, which is why people like Jesus frequently conveyed teachings in parables.

Another fairly modern tendency that gets in the way of our understanding of myths and narrative is literalism. You can't really get a lot out of stories or myths if you take them all literally, which is one reason why fundamentalisms tend to be legalistic and spiritually impoverished.

My advice is to respect the world of facts but also to lighten up every so often and appreciate the truths in humanity's BIG STORIES. Don't myth out.

THE COST of the unnecessary war in Iraq is the theme of three items from The Nation. Here are articles on the war and the recession; war and the working class, and the economics of war and peace.

CLIMATE CHANGE AND SOCIAL CHANGE is the theme of this item by Bill McKibben.

DO PEOPLE BECOME MORE CONSERVATIVE AS THEY AGE? Maybe not.

RECESSION HITS THE STATES. Here's the NY Times on how many states are slashing services in the wake of the deepening economic downturn.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

JUST A MYTH?

Nicolas-André Monsiau's The Twelve Olympians, courtesy of wikipedia.

El Cabrero thinks it's unfortunate that the word myth has come to mean something widely believed but untrue. Would that widely held beliefs were as cool as real myths...

The word, by the way, comes from the Greek term that means something like a spoken story. Classicist Elizabeth Vandiver defines myths as "traditional stories a society tells itself that encode or represent the world-view, beliefs, principles, and often fears of that society."

According to the scholar Walter Burkert, "Myth is a traditional tale with secondary, partial reference to something of collective importance."

Here's my shot at it: myths are stories that convey deep meaning.

Among human cultures, myth is about as universal as language, to which it is obviously intimately related. Humans seem to be hardwired for story or narrative and we construct them all the time, often unconsciously (which is literally the case when it comes to dreams). When I teach the occasional sociology class, I usually point out that humans have three main ways of making sense of the world: narrative, reasoning, and science, with narrative holding pride of place.

I don't think we can do without myths any more than rituals--when we don't have real ones, we seem pretty good at coming up with cheesy ones.

Some scholars separate myths from other kinds of traditional tales by suggesting that myths are mostly concerned with gods and religious rituals, while legends are traditional tales rooted in facts and folktales are entertaining narratives about things like unusual people or talking animals. In many and maybe most cases, they're pretty intertwined and hard to separate.

More on all this tomorrow.

UNHAPPY ANNIVERSARY. This week will mark the fifth year of the unnecessary war in Iraq. Here's Linda Bilmes with an op-ed on its mounting costs.

MICROLENDING and its limits are the subject of this New Yorker item by James Surowiecki.

THE END OF AN ERA? Let's hope so. Here's a piece that suggests the age of economist Milton Friedman is coming to an end.

DON'T PANIC is the theme of two recent books.

BACK TO THE ORIGINAL SUBJECT. Here's a nod to the uber-bard Homer from the Washington Post.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SYMBOLS AND MYTHS

The theme of this week's Goat Rope is the nature of faith, which is an interesting subject whether you have any at the moment or not. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

Yesterday's post was about symbols, which are always a part of faith. A friend emailed me to point out that the most recognized symbol in the world today is McDonald's golden arches. Holy fetishism of commodities, Batman! That point goes to Marx...

According to the influential 20th century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, faith is about whatever concerns us ultimately and is always symbolic. This is true of traditional religion as well as of things like nationalism or the goal of "success":

everything which is a matter of unconditional concern is made into a god. If the nation is some one's ultimate concern, the name of the nation becomes a sacred name and the nation receives divine qualities which far surpass the reality of the being and functioning of the nation. The nation then stands for and symbolizes the true ultimate, but in an idolatrous way.

Success as ultimate concern is not the natural desire of actualizing potentialities, but is readiness to sacrifice all other values of life for the sake of a position of power and social predominance. The anxiety about not being a success is an idolatrous form of the anxiety about divine condemnation. Success is grace; lack of success, ultimate judgment. In this way concepts designating ordinary realities become idolatrous symbols of ultimate concern.

Symbols are united with myths. Unfortunately, the term myth is sadly abused in current speech, where it means something that just isn't true. Myths are stories often of God or the gods that convey meaning to human life. We can't do without them:

Myths are always present in every act of faith, because the language of faith is the symbol.

Most great religious traditions eventually criticize their mythic elements, such as stories that depict God or the gods acting like humans. Most religions eventually recognize that many of their sacred stories have meanings that are true but metaphorical rather than factual and literal. Tillich calls a myth that is recognized as such a "broken myth." Still you can't get rid of them:

All the mythological elements in the Bible, and doctrine and liturgy should be recognized as mythological, but they should be maintained in their symbolic form and not be replaced by scientific substitutes. For there is no substitute for the use of symbols and myths: they are the language of faith...

Symbols of faith cannot be replaced by other symbols, such as artistic ones, and they cannot be removed by scientific criticism. They have a genuine standing in the human mind, just as science and art have. Their symbolic character is their truth and their power. Nothing less than symbols and myths can express our ultimate concerns.

LIES AND LIES. A study by two nonprofit investigative groups found that the road to the Iraq war was paved by hundreds of "false statements."

DEBT CRISIS. Here's Chalmers Johnson on how excessive war spending and national debt is damaging the country and economy.

REBUILD USA. Here's an op-ed from the Huntington WV Herald Dispatch by Tim Millne about the wealth squandered in Iraq and the need to reinvest in our own infrastructure.

RECESSION. Here's Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz on how we should respond to a slowing economy.

OLD BEN. Here's a fun New Yorker article about Benjamin Franklin and his famous almanac.

JAH LIVE. Here's one about a new Smithsonian exhibit on Rastafarianism.

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER. WV Supreme Court Justice Larry Starcher is calling for an investigation of recent conduct there in the wake of the case involving Massey Energy and CEO Don Blankenship. Here's his memo and here are more links from WV Uberblog Lincoln Walks at Midnight..

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

FRANKENSTEIN: LIVING THEMES, UNSOLVED PROBLEMS

This public domain image comes courtesy of www.moviewallpapers.net.

El Cabrero hopes you have enjoyed Frankenstein Week at Goat Rope. If this is your first visit, please click on the earlier entries, which discuss current events in addition to Mary Shelley's novel.

To wrap it up,this story is a gold mine of themes and inter-related stories which literary scholars refer to as “intertextuality.” Here are some examples:

*The story echoes the philosophy of Jean Jacques Rousseau, a key influence on the French Revolution and the later Romantic movement. For Rousseau, people are good by nature but are corrupted by society.

*The subtitle of the book is “The Modern Prometheus,” referring to the myth which was the subject of an ancient Greek tragedy by Aeschylus and a verse drama by Percy Shelley himself. In the myth, the titan Prometheus fashions humanity and gives it the gift of fire. In the book, Victor dreams that "A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me." It didn't quite work out that way. Victor had plenty of troubles and Prometheus was chained to a rock by Zeus. An eagle or vulture would tear out his liver each day. At night, the wounds would heal only to be reopened.

*The creature is also compared to Adam in the Biblical narrative and resembles Satan from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which is one of the books the creature read. (See yesterday's discussion of a monster's reading list.) Like Milton's Satan, he reached a point where he said, in effect,

So farewell hope, and with hope farewell fear,
Farewell remorse; all good to me is lost.
Evil, be thou my good.

Here are a few of the lasting human themes of this story I came up with:

*The tragic tendency of people to overreach their proper limits, cross forbidden boundaries, and bring about their own destruction (a common theme in myths, literature, history, and... uhhh...politics);

*The dangers of scientific and technological research unchecked by ethical considerations;

*The danger of bringing a being into the world without caring for it;

*The unintended consequences of human action;

*The relationship between emotion and intellect and the dangers of the unchecked will to knowledge (another mythic theme);

*Today, the book reminds me of the increasingly blurry line between the living and the non-living.

Official Goat Rope verdict: Mary did pretty good.

EFCA GOES TO THE SENATE. The Employee Free Choice Act, which passed the U.S. House in March 241-185, is moving to the Senate, where it may come up for a vote as soon as June 20--WV Day. EFCA would effectively restore the right of US workers to form unions by recognizing representation when a majority of workers sign cards indicated their willingness to join. It would also increase penalties on companies that harass, intimidate, or retaliate against workers who try to organize. Among WV's delegation, only Shelley Moore Capito opposed it.

JR. JET SET. According to The Week Magazine,

Wealthy New York City parents are hiring private jets to take their children to summer camp, says The New York Post. Charter company Revolution Air has set aside more than 20 jets for the service, which charges $8,000 per child and offers a special menu of ice cream, chicken fingers, and peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches...

THE PENTAGON'S latest assessment of President Bush's Iraq strategy paints a grim picture that tells us what we already knew: the "surge" isn't helping matters.

NEW NOTES. For the Rev. Jim Lewis' latest "Notes from under the Fig Tree," click here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED