Notes on A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong.
What is Myth?
- Nearly always rooted in death
- Inseparable from ritual
- ritual required for fully understanding the myth
- About extremity and transcending everyday experience
- Shows how we should behave
- Speaks of a world alongside our own
- of gods
- of the dead
Paleolithic Period
- Everywhen
- example: Dreamtime
- a stable backdrop to reality in which myth takes place
- Lost Paradise/Golden Age myth
- Everything was sacred; nothing was profane
- Symbol
- from Greek, “to throw together”
- animism
- nature as symbolic
- Sky Father
- sky as…
- essence of transcendence and otherness
- numinous
- dynamic
- sky becomes personified as Sky Father
- examples: El, Anu, Ouranos
- first cause
- no images, cults, priests, or shrines
- the “gone away” or “disappeared” god
- inexpressible
- prehistoric monotheism
- sky as…
- Mistress of Animals
- examples: Artemis, Inuit Mistress of Animals, Catal Huyuk goddess
- aka the Great Goddess
- exacts bloody revenge for violation of hunting taboos
- hunting as sacred rite
- animal sacrifice
- animals as relatives, guides
- Religion as mystery
- fails if too impersonal
- Height as divine symbol
- mountains
- flight
- sky
- tree
- World Tree
- myths of ascent
- examples: Jesus, Mohammed, Elijah, shamans
- descend to ascend
- from depths of the earth to the heights of heaven
- from death to life
- Hero myth
- examples: Prometheus, Aeneas, Herakles
- Logos
- scientific, rational, pragmatic thought
- complement of mythos
Neolithic Period
- Agricultural revolution
- farming as sacrament
- Holistic reality
- ritual replenishing of earth
- first seeds thrown away
- first fruits left on crops
- sex as metaphor of earth’s fertility
- earth as womb
- ritual replenishing of earth
- Creation myth
- people emerging from earth as plants
- profound identification with place
- respect for natural rhythms
- creative force
- Mother Goddess
- examples: Ereshkigal, Asherah, Anat, Inanna, Isis, Hera, Demeter, Aphrodite
- fused with paleolithic Great Mother
- retained warrior and blood imagery
- farming as warfare against sterility, famine, and death
- seed dies, the earth is torn up, crops are ground, etc.
- retained warrior and blood imagery
- consorts all brutally killed and renewed
- examples: Adonis, Osiris, Baal
- female hero restoring harmony and balance
- mistress of life and death
- goddess of mysteries
Early Civilizations
- City builders
- mythos of city life
- writing
- Bible: civilization as disaster
- Mesopotamia: civilization as nearly paradise
- every city a holy city
- a new axis mundi
- gods live side-by-side with men
- Flood myths
- Withdrawn gods
- patron deities
- Theogony
- creation from void
- creation and evolution of gods
- elemental separation by couples/pairs
- sky, sea, earth
- slaying of chaos monster
- establishment of law
- alternate: creation as self-sacrifice
- Human legends
- celebrating human achievement
- example: Gilgamesh
- civilized man parting from gods
- unrealized quest for immortality
Axial Age
- Beginnings of modern religion
- prophets and sages
- four movements:
- Confucianism and Taoism
- Buddhism and Hinduism
- monotheism
- Greek rationalism
- Commonalities
- conscious of suffering inherent in human condition
- more spirituality, less ritual
- conscience and morality
- ethics
- karma
- compassion and justice
- questioning religion
- interior interpretation of myth
- gods as mental states
- Gulf between the human and the divine
- no longer shared the same nature
- the Infinite/the Good
- Ancestor worship
- Perfect Ancestor
- Culture heroes
- also: tragic heroes
- Creativity
- true creativity as selfless
- new Great Mother
- effortless creation by command
- true creativity as selfless
Post-Axial Period
- Move from myth to history in the West
- Mysticism
- cognate with “mystery”
- from Greek: “to close the eyes or the mouth”
- Word of God
- Shekhinah
- wisdom
- God on earth
- Shekhinah
- Hidden Imam
- hidden light and knowledge
- long-awaited sage
- No official versions of myths
Great Western Transformation
- Modernization
- technological
- entrepreneurial
- death of mythology
- useless, false, outmoded
- triumph of logos
- pragmatism
- science
- efficiency
- rationalism
- scientist/inventor as hero
- Effects of loss of myth
- despair
- depression
- loss of sense of significance
- impotence
- rage
- anxiety
- loss of trust in own perception
- alienation
- loss of control over irrationality
- loss of control over darker aspects of human nature
- “un-reason”
- fearful
- destructive
- nihilism
- spiritual regression
- Separation of the symbol and the symbolized
- Science’s infinite universe as Eternal Silence
- Rise of religious literalism
- We need myths that…
- help us identify with all our fellow humans
- recognize humans as sacred and numinous in their own right
- promote compassion
- promote spirituality and engender transcendence
- venerate earth as sacred
- help us identify with all our fellow humans
- Modern mythwork
- T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
- Picasso, “Guernica”
- Orwell, 1984
