Review: "A Short History of Myth"

In her brief but compelling book, "A Short History of Myth," the historian of religion Karen Armstrong presents a succinct introduction to mythology. She traces its function and development for human society from the dawn of history up to the modern scientific view of myth as false, and the absolute need for a return to mythic thinking in the post-modern world. While her introductory definition of mythology draws heavily on the work of Mircea Eliade and his notions of hierophanies and the "eternal return," as well as the ever-popular monomythologizing of Joseph Campbell, it does not however fall pray to the faults of either a rabid comparative mythology that refuses to acknowledge the importance of distinct cultural contexts in the development of myth, or the even more insidious notion that mythology represents a primitive mentality and un-rational explanation of natural phenomena. Instead, Armstrong describes myth as an art form or "counter-narrative," which allows man to "cope with the problematic human predicament" and "live more intensely" in the world (1-6). As such, her definition of myth harks more towards the idea that myth describes not history, but a symbolic or metaphoric relationship that orients mankind in reality. Looking at the earliest examples of religious expression in Neanderthal graves, Armstrong posits five important aspects or functions of myth: they are rooted in the experience and fear of death, are inseparable from ritual actions and re-creations, force their participants to go beyond the extremes of their experience, prescribe how humans ought to behave, and speak of a transcendent reality that mankind is always seeking for in order to affirm their existence (4-5). Starting from the earliest religious myths of hunter-gathering societies, replete with shamanistic behavior and supreme sky gods, Armstrong takes us through the violent mother deities and dying consort gods that accompanied the discovery of agriculture, the cyclic wars and floods that described the conquest of the gods of order over chaos during the rise of the city-states, the blossoming of the ethical sages and religions around the axial turn of the first millennium, the immanent descent into the historical doctrines and mysticisms of the big three monotheistic religions, and the inevitable death of myth at the hands of Western rationalism and science in the modern age. While her discussion of this history of mythology once again relies on Eliade's own theories in his "Patterns In Comparative Religion" and "Myths, Dreams, and Mysteries," Armstrong's glance at the modern uses of mythology strikes home, critiquing fundamentalists who would interpret the Bible literally, the lack of stories that help us understand the nihilistic despair of modern warfare and terrorism, and the misplaced worship of pop-culture icons, suggesting that "myth must lead to imitation or participation, no passive contemplation" (135), or worse, sterile rationalization. In order to offer some sense of hope, and to suggest a place where myth may indeed be thriving, Armstrong wraps up with a discussion of the use of mythic themes in modern literature and art, from T.S. Elliot to Malcolm Lowry. While she laments that the modern novel is at best profane and far removed from the spiritual and ritual context that engendered mythology, she suggests that reading can still be highly transformative and orienting, and that "if it is written and read with serious attention, a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another..." and that if "professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythical lore, [then] our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world" (148-9). Despite this pronouncement that myth is primarily dead it may however be possible that we still live under the thrall of mythological tropes even today, in the guise of movie action heroes, the need for an edenic eternal youth, the desire to demonize our strangers and enemies, even in the scientific quest itself to know all that there is to know and build all that there is to build. But nonetheless, mankind seems to want to remain blissfully (or brutally) unawares of this eternal return to the mythic condition, and it may indeed be as of yet unwritten works of literature, and art, that could allow us to once again understand our selves in this world.