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Hi Torch,
In understanding the Gods it may help to look at some of the mythology behind them.
I have posted a piece here by Richard Cavendish from the Book Mythology An illustrated Encyclopedia.
The Gods have many different meanings and reality's to us as individuals and cultures, past and present.
They differ acording to our personal and cultural needs, our ways of understanding and interacting with them.
What they mean to us and others, how we relate to them as a part of everything within the all as we move through life.
Blessings Ron Fox.
MYTHOLOGY
Interest in mythology has grown steadily throughout the last hundred years, powered by the realization that myths are not childish stories or mere pre-scientific explanations of the world, but serious insights into reality. They exist in all societies, of the present and the past. They are a part of the fabric of human life, expressing beliefs, moulding behaviour and justifying institutions, customs and values.
It is consequently impossible to understand human beings without an understanding of their myths. This is reflected in the wide range of disciplines from which comparative religion, the history of religions, language and literature stem from.
The study of mythology also including such subjects as anthropology, archaeology, religious studies, comparative religion, and the history of religions, language and literature.
Myths are the imaginative traditions about nature, history, and destiny of the world, the gods, man and society. They should as such be treated as concepts, which deserve serious attention because of what they mean to those who believe in them as statements about fundamental issues of life.
One of the disadvantages of the old-fashioned derogatory use of the word myth, to mean a foolish story or a false idea, is the implication that myths are trivial.
The reality is the reverse. It is the things which people regard as important that find a place in their mythology.
At the same time it is impossible to ignore the fictitious clothing which mythology wears. A common rough definition of myth is ‘a story about the gods’. Another, broader one is ‘a sacred story’. Neither of these definitions is adequate, but certainly many myths are narratives about the exploits of gods and supernatural beings.
These myths are stories, not histories. The events related in them did not really happen, yet they may contain a truth of a different and deeper kind.
Few people still believe, for example, that the human race is descended from Adam and Eve, the first man and woman who lived in the beautiful Garden of Eden and were tempted by a devious serpent. The story is generally agreed to be fiction, but not fiction without meaning. No longer accepted as literally true, as it once was, the story is felt to be poetically true. It says something profound about the human condition, something which cannot be stated as effectively in any other way. It is this, which distinguishes the story from the mass of trivial fictions and entitles it to be called a myth.
A religious myth is a way of conveying a sacred truth, but not all myths are religious. Some are primarily social and historical, and the gods may play far less important rolls in them, or no roll whatever. These myths explain the history and rational of a community, instructions, custom or social development. By telling the story of a people, for instance, a myth supports their sense of solidarity and purpose, of confidence and pride in themselves. The Romans borrowed most of their religious myths from the Greeks. Their own myths were largely concerned with the history of Rome: how the city was founded, how it survived critical dangers and grew strong, and what qualities Romans of the past had displayed which Romans of the present ought to emulate. Though it may be based on actual events, a myth of this kind is again a story with a moral, rather than a history. No attempt is made to distinguish between real and unreal events. The telling of myths is an older art than the construction of histories and the value of myth does not depend on historical accuracy.
Definitions of myth as a ‘story’ fail because a good many myths are not stories at all.
The mythology of some societies includes the assignment of different functions or departments of interest to the gods and goddesses. One deity presides over agriculture, another war, another over the sea, and so on. Beyond this, the term myth is also applied to religious and secular traditions, which exert a powerful influence on attitudes to life, but whose literal accuracy there is reason to doubt. An example is the idea of hell. The traditional Christian picture of hell as a real place, a concentration camp of fire and torment deep in the bowels of the earth, is now regarded by many Christians as a myth. The truth it contains is of a different sort: for instance, that a human being who finally rejects God must inevitably suffer the pain of that rejection.
It is in this sense that the idea of hell in Christianity and other religions is treated here as a myth.
A myth is a story or tradition, which claims to enshrine a fundamental truth about the world and human life, which is regarded in its own milieu as authoritative, but whose truth is not literal, historical or scientific. The account in the Bible of God creating the world in seven days is scientifically untenable, as are the Indian, Tibetan, Chinese and Greek traditions of the world coming into being from an egg, but the real point of the myth is not affected, nor is its credibility necessarily destroyed. In practice, however, because myths are woven into the fabric of a society in which they are generally accepted as literally true the impact of new discoveries, new attitudes and new ways of life on myths is usually to undermine them.
When old myths are lost, new ones are needed. Myths flourish fade and die, but new myths are born, old ones are resurrected, and hybrid forms combining new and old emerge when times change or cultures mingle. Myths are not characteristic only of non-literate or ‘primitive’ peoples, or of societies of the distant past. Complex modern societies have also thrown up myths. The myth of progress for instance, has had a profound effect on attitudes and political developments in the modern West.
Both left-wing and right-wing political movements have drawn strength from the conviction of being carried forward on an irresistible tide of progress, and both have transformed the old myth of the golden age in the past into a new myth of utopian future. No society seems ever to have functioned without a set of myths containing a vision of its past, its present and its purposes.
There are innumerable ways of interpreting myths, but the principal varieties of approach can be roughly classified as the functional, the symbolic and the structural.
Each provides a brilliant and fascinating analysis of particular myths or groups of myths, but whether any one of these systems by itself gives a satisfactory explanation of mythology in general is debatable. In practice, the categories are not clear-cut, and functional, symbolic and structural methods of interpretation often blend into each other.
The functional approach regards myths as justifying social facts. A particular people, for example, traditionally live by fishing. They have a myth, which tells how, long ago, a supernatural being taught their ancestors how to catch fish. This story explains how it comes about that they are fishermen, justifies their way of life, and validates their traditional fishing techniques and beliefs and customs connected with them. It also gives them a sense of sharing in the existence of their ancestors through their way of life.
Many myths provide a similar charter of authorization for groups, institutions, rituals, social distinctions, laws and customs, moral standards, values and ideas.
Myths from all over the world account for sanction kinship rules and marriage customs, techniques of hunting, husbandry, art, and war, methods of offering sacrifice, the authority of kings and chiefs, the subordination of women and numerous other facets of a societies structure. They have an important moral function in defining acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. Some of them are written in title deeds, justifying a peoples claim to its territory. Some serve political purposes of a regime, an aristocracy or priesthood, as in Egypt, Rome, and Japan, among the Aztecs in Mexico or the Incas in Peru.
The myths authorize the present state of affairs. There seems to be a deep need in human nature for authority of this kind – an authority that transcends rational argument – and examples are not confined to tribal societies. In England and France in the 17th century the supreme power of kings was justified by the belief that they were appointed to rule by God, a political theory rooted in mythological traditions. The opposite tendency, the rise of democracy, was justified by the myth of the social contract. In Nazi Germany programs of aggressive expansion and savage race-hatred were ‘justified’ in part by a revival of ancient Germanic mythology.
Japanese imperialism before 1945 had similar sanction, though the revival of myths, which promoted nationalism, militarism and belief in the divine authority of the state.
Myths are often closely linked with rituals, though the theory that all myths spring from ritual does not command widespread support. The story of Prometheus cheating Zeus out of the meat at the first sacrifice provided a warrant for the customary Greek ritual in which the meat of a sacrificed animal was not burned, and so given to the gods, but eaten by the worshipers. Generally, the ritual repeats and re-enacts the myth, to recreate it with all its beneficent consequences for human beings.
In Syria stories of the triumphs of the fertility-god Baal over his enemies were recited, and apparently acted out, in rituals intended to ensure the corresponding triumph of fertility over barrenness on earth. Myths are used in alliance with rituals in this way to tap sources of power and attain experiences otherwise unavailable, for the actors in the ritual participate in the recreated myth. They are taken out of this world and become one with the figures in the myth, the gods and the ancestors. Dramatic examples occur in ceremonies of Voodoo and the rituals of Australian Aborigines.
Some myths range beyond ritual and custom to confront questions and problems of human life everywhere. They explain how the world came into existence, the origin of mankind and the animals and plants, the origin of the two sexes, how human beings acquired fire, how society began, how work, old age, disease and the last enemy, death, came into the world. Here again, by explaining, the myths also justify the present state of things, the world as it is now. Their practical function may not be so much to satisfy curiosity as to alleviate unhappiness, pain, and hardship through an imaginative satisfying explanation of the world and the condition of man. Set in a comprehensible framework, the evils of life may become, if not welcome, at least less hard to bear.
Whether functional explanations adequately account for the hold, which myths have on the mind, and for some of their characteristics, is open to question.
Symbolic approaches regard mythology as a way of thinking and poetic method of communication, and look for meanings beneath the surface. In stories of the world born from an egg, for instance, the egg is not meant to be a real egg.
The cosmic egg is an effective symbol of life stored within a whole, as a real egg shelters and nourishes the life within it. Similarly, when an Egyptian myth says that the first human beings were made of clay, fashioned on a potters wheel by a god, the clay shaped on the wheel is a symbol of mans relationship with the divine and of his link with the earth, on which he lives and to which his body returns at the last.
Many myths have a dream-like quality. Strange distorted figures move through them, monsters and hybrid beings. Animals walk and talk like men, men and animals intermarry, change shape and possess magical powers. Women are impregnated and children born in physically impossible ways. There are sinister and disturbing motifs of parricide, fratricide, cannibalism, castration, incest, rape, and murder, which often are not condemned. The laws of time, nature and society to which we are accustomed do not apply, which is logical enough when the myths are dealing with a universe before the present order of things was established.
Myths of this kind provided ammunition for Freud and Jung, and for the belief that myths are the creation of the human unconscious mind and the dark, primitive wellspring of human nature. Freud thought that myths, and dreams, were projections of thwarted desires, which the conscious mind suppressed, so that they came to the surface in distorted imagery. Jung regarded them as products of the ‘collective unconscious’, shared by all human beings, formed by the experiences of prehistoric man, and the containing ‘archetypes’ or fundamental patterns of ideas which emerge in myths, dreams, symbolism, art and other forms of expression.
Freudian and Jungian interpretations have often been criticized for being unduly simplistic, for forcing complicated phenomena into simple, preconceived patterns.
They suffer from the more fundamental disadvantage that there is no conceivable way of showing them to be wrong. Since we have access only to our conscious mind, statements about the unconscious are assertions, which can neither be verified nor disproved. The prevailing tendency, consequently, is not to explain myths along these lines. They are more often seen as expressions of a philosophy, an outlook on the world, or as creations, which like art and literature in general are likely to combine conscious and unconscious elements, social and symbolic significance.
Especially when they are reactions to pressures and burdens, which weigh on all men everywhere, they may have a meaning, which transcends their immediate functional relevance in their own milieu.
Freudian theory, however, has influenced structural mythology, which is a comparatively recent development. The structural approach splits a myth into its component parts, its incidents and motifs, and considers the ways in which they are related to each other, to lay bare the underlying structure like a cross-section of geographical strata beneath a landscape. The significance of myth is not looked for in the narrative as a whole but in the arrangement of the strata beneath.
Structural interpretations are extremely complex and impossible to summarize in brief, but one structural pattern found in myths is interplay of opposites. For example, the present state of things is the opposite of the state of things ‘in the beginning’.
Men are dominant today, but women ruled long ago. Or, present-day kinship and marriage rules have developed from a time when incest between parents and children or brothers and sisters was the rule. Or, once upon a time, it was the animals that ate their meat cooked and men who ate it raw, instead of the other way round.
The leading exponent of structural mythology, the French anthropologist Claude L’evi-Strauss, regards myths as structures of opposites, such as nature and culture (the raw and the cooked), male and female, order and disorder.
On this view myths state, in veiled form, contradictions inherent in life, which the conscious mind is unwilling to confront.
Mythical thought moves from an awareness of contradiction towards their resolution, and stories of topsy-turvy state of things in the world of myth attempt to mediate between opposites and resolve them. The true function of myth is to provide ‘a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction’: which, L’evi-Strauss adds, is an impossible achievement when the contradiction is real.
Myths not only reflect man’s experience of life, but have also moulded it, for people naturally interpret what happens to them in the light of their prevailing attitude to reality, which includes their own mythology. One reason for taking mythology seriously is that a society cannot be understood in isolation from the myths. Another is the light, which myths cast not only on another people’s minds but on our own. If mythology is a way of thinking common to human beings in general, then a study of it is a study of ourselves.
Similarities and parallels between myths from different societies, not all of which are readily or completely explainable by the influence of one culture on another, suggest that they embody common patterns of thought. Along with the parallels there are numerous important differences, but the same patterns occur often enough to indicate that human minds tend to supply similar answers to basic questions.
One factor common to the myths of widely separated peoples is the feeling of living in a world dominated by mysterious, non-human agencies, gods and spirits and supernatural entities. Another common ingredient is the tendency to concentrate on the evils of the human condition, on the unfairness of life and its dangers.
Similar motifs and patterns occur in myths of origin: the dark and watery chaos that first existed, with no light, no sun, moon and stars; the cosmic egg; creation from the dismembered body of a god or a monster, the separation of earth and sky, which were originally joined together, the bringing of order from chaos; the making of man from the ground, clay or mud, or his emergence from the ground.
Again myths supply broadly similar answers to the question, why must we die. Death came into the world as the consequence of a mistake, sometimes made by a human being or sometimes by a god or messenger of the gods. Often connected with mortality and immortality is the moon, which appears to die and be reborn again in the sky, and the snake, which renews itself by sloughing its skin.
Other recurring themes include an immense catastrophe in the past, often a great flood, after which the world had to be restored to order or made anew. Another cataclysm may threaten the future, when the present world will be destroyed, as in Hindu, Zoroastrian, Christian, Scandinavian and Mexican myths for example.
The concept of Mother Earth is extremely widespread and so are the themes of the mutual dependence and mutual hostility between man and woman, between mankind and animals, and between the members of a family.
Or, again, the sense of an order, a balance of cosmic powers on which the world and man depend for life and security, is conveyed in the myths of many different societies.
Myths are of interest not only from a detached point of view, for what they reveal about human psychology and culture, but for their own sake, for the poetic truth which distinguishes great myths, like great works of literature, from trivial fiction.
The resurgence of enthusiasm for mythology in our time has drawn strength from the feeling that scientific and technological man has lost his way and that a path of truth lies through the territory of myth.
One thing that we may discover is that when myths come from cultures unlike ours, they may be strikingly relevant to our own lives and own situation in the world.
* Richard Cavendish *
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