Myth and Misunderstandings

I especially want to draw your attention to the problem that the gods are intracosmic. There is no such thing as a world-transcendent God in any cosmological civilization; and for a very long time even in revelation and philosophy there is no world-transcendent God. That’s a very peculiar problem, how that problem arises at all. But in the cosmological civilizations, the gods are intracosmic, part of the cosmos.

With that in mind, let me say a word about the expressive forms, the symbolizations, in which such an idea, such an experience, is expressed. It is usually called the myth. And here practical science is still in a considerable methodological quandary. The comparative religionists and mythologists and archeologists usually subscribe to the older conceptions of myth, which are rooted in the general phenomenology of religion. That is to say that they are fundamentalists: One takes the phenomenon of a symbol and does not go back to the experience that produced it. Therefore, if you take the myth as the phenomenon of a symbol, you arrive at such a definition of the myth as you find in Eliade’s Myth and Reality. Let me read that to you, because then you will most easily see what the new problem is. Eliade defines myth:

Myth narrates a sacred history; it relates an event that took place in primordial Time, the fabled time of the “beginnings.” In other words, myth tells how, through the deeds of Supernatural Beings, a reality came into existence, be it the whole of reality, the Cosmos, or only a fragment of reality—an island, a species of plant, a particular kind of human behavior, an institution. Myth, then, is always an account of a “creation”; it relates how something was produced, began to be. [Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality (London: Alien & Unwin, 1964), 5-6.]

Against this very much accepted definition of myth, I would like to make the following exceptions: In the first place, when you go strictly empirically to the materials, the Babylonian literary documents of a cosmological civilization, the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Assyrian, or even the Hindu, only a very small percentage of all the materials are stories of anything.

When you have to deal, for instance, with the tension between a Ruler and the Gods, or a Ruler and the People, or with the invasion, say, of the Hyksos, that complex example in Egypt, no stories of the gods will tell you anything. They are quite different forms of expression than stories. So the formulation “Myth is always an account of a creation” is wrong in the face of the empirical facts. There are quite a number of other types of myth.

The second point is that the gods are designated as “supernatural Beings.” That, of course, is impermissible. The term supernatural, as opposed to natural, is Scholastic terminology very commonly used by Thomas Aquinas. From Scholasticism, as part of dogma, it entered into the dogmatism of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Eliade is rather an Enlightenment ideologue in this respect to the Scholastics.

In that connection we speak of supernatural as opposed to natural. As I have indicated, no man living in a cosmological civilization ever knew that the gods were a super nature against a nature; there were heaven and earth, the gods and men and the king, and all was part of this partnership. Nothing in it was more natural than anything else. So the terms natural and supernatural just make no sense when used anachronistically with regard to cosmological civilization. That makes sense in the thirteenth century of Scholasticism, that makes sense in the Enlightenment under the influence of the natural sciences, but it makes no sense when you deal with an ancient civilization.

For that reason one cannot accept these nominalist definitions. You have to take a realistic definition, which is very much simpler. You can simply say: Myth is that body of symbols that had in fact been found adequate by the members of such civilizations for expressing their experiences of the cosmos in which they lived. Nobody can object to that—you simply go back to empirical facts.

Now let me make good what I have said, that in the myth you have a lot of things that are not stories. For instance, I have listed nine different types. Let me just enumerate them; I shall deal with two of them as examples.

1. These are symbolizations of the established order of empire. The empire is an analogy of the cosmos; you might call it a small cosmos—a cosmion. Such formulations of the analogy between empire structure and cosmic structure are, for instance, found in the famous preamble to the Code of Hammurabi—no story at all; rather, parallel structures between the heavens and the earth. The empire, the small cosmion, is parallel to the heavens.

2. Then a case in which you have history, but a history of a very peculiar kind, a foundation myth of empire. In the case of establishment, the myth is symbolized by the parallel, the analogy, while the foundation myth must be symbolized by an action among the gods. The form is not strictly a history but a drama, such as the Theology of Memphis, of probably 3000 B.C., a drama that tells the story of the foundation of Egypt as a drama enacted among the gods.

3. Then in the crisis periods, for instance, in the First Intermediate Period—about 2200 to 2000 B.C. was the height of the crisis in Egypt—you find highly intricate discussions of the contemporary skeptical arguments, with the existential analysis of the two existences leading out of this mess. We’ll come back to that.

4. Or you have literary lyrics expressing skepticism of the gods, not a story of the gods at all, but expressing skepticism of man with regard to the stories told about the gods; for instance the “song of the Harper”—songs of skepticism.

5. Then a vast body is roughly equivalent to what you would find on the ordinary level of common sense, in the eighteenth century meaning of that word, the Wisdom literature; nothing about the gods, only about man, but in this context of a cosmological civilization.

6. Then the great expressions of defeat, victory, and restoration of empire; no story at all, but the relation between the ruler and gods. That is the problem.

7. Then the ritual renewals of order in the New Year Festivals, what Eliade usually brings under the “éternel retour,” the “eternal return.” There is no “eternal return” in any ancient civilization; there is only a rhythmical renewal, and the rhythm is not an eternal renewal. Let me briefly explain that, because there is still a lot of misunderstanding about it. When you have a rhythmical renewal you have something like a sine wave, like the annual spring, summer, fall, and winter, time going on and on.

But then there is something like a return, an eternal return of the same, and that would be really a circle of events. [Aristotle touches upon this] problem, when he asks the question, “If I am living at this point here, that being my present, and then I have a historical event, like the war against Troy, I can ask myself the question, Which way am I nearer to the war against Troy, going backward, or going forward?” That would be eternal return. But such an eternal return in a historical conception is nowhere to be found before the seventh century B.C., in Hinduism and in Hellas. No ancient civilization had any conception of an eternal return, but only of rhythmic renewal. That was not a story either, but the question of ritual renewal.

8. Then something else, which does not properly come under the term myth in the sense of a story of the gods, is the construction of unilinear history, from the beginning of the creation of the world, down to the imperial present, to the empire. We have—that is also very easy to ascertain —unilinear history in ancient civilizations, but we have no cyclical history. There is no concept of cyclical history in the ancient civilizations of the cosmological empires, but there is unilinear history. I shall come back to that in the second lecture.

9. And here we have all sorts of symptoms of a breakthrough beyond cosmic experience in the direction of either a beginning in time, extrapolation into the past to the point of origin, or to the origin in the transcendent. We have speculations or extrapolations of a long past history, extrapolating one part of it back to the beginning—that is one way of putting it—or prayers directed, without benefit of other parts of reality, to an unknown God, beyond all the known gods. Thus, the problem of the unknown God is already a problem in Egyptian civilization. The main god of the later period is Amon, and the Egyptian word Amon means “the hidden one.” So the hidden god, which becomes very relevant in gnosticism, is already present in the Amon Hymns, at the latest in the eighth century B.C.

Here we have all sorts of literature and symbolic expressions, which are always lumped together as myth and of which only a small part has the character of a story. As we have seen already from the enumeration, all human problems and situations with which we are familiar are also myths. The question of the loss of existence, questions of alienation, of crisis, of empire, of personal crisis, and so on, all are subject matter for expression in a peculiar medium, so there is not only one blocklike, peculiar conception of this or that.

This excerpt is from The Drama of Humanity and Other Miscellaneous Papers: 1939-1985 (Collected Works of Eric Voegelin 33) (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004)

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