Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stop
Speaker 1: works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert lamp and I'm Christian Seger. Here
Speaker 1: on Stuff to Blow your Mind. We talk about myths
Speaker 1: from lottop on mythology either, you know, sometimes it's directly
Speaker 1: tied into a topic. Sometimes it's just kind of the
Speaker 1: icing on the cake, you know. Yeah, you'll hear us
Speaker 1: often refer to mythos a lot, like in the background,
Speaker 1: especially like if we bring up topics like I don't know,
Speaker 1: pop culture, uh HP, Lovecraft type stuff that we we
Speaker 1: talked about often. So we're applying both myth as like
Speaker 1: the large general sense of the term, and then mythos
Speaker 1: as like these sort of like fictional shared universes with
Speaker 1: histories to them. Right. Yeah, So it's it's something we're
Speaker 1: always talking about. So it seemed fitting to do an
Speaker 1: episode where we say, hey, let's talk just a little
Speaker 1: bit about mythology now, would Don't worry, We're not gonna
Speaker 1: attempt to do a like complete overall of world myth cycles.
Speaker 1: What we're hoping to do here is to, uh it,
Speaker 1: to provide you some of the basic tools to to
Speaker 1: roll through some of the different ways that we look
Speaker 1: at myth, the different ways that we dissect myth and
Speaker 1: understand what they mean to us and what the power
Speaker 1: of myth really is. Yeah, this is like very much
Speaker 1: like a bare bones intro. And I imagine that if
Speaker 1: there are people out there who have done any kind
Speaker 1: of cultural or anthropological studies of myth before, you're gonna say, oh,
Speaker 1: but what about this detailer, what about this thing that
Speaker 1: you missed? And you know, there was only so much
Speaker 1: that we could fit into a one hour episode, right,
Speaker 1: And likewise, when it comes to examples, we're gonna We're
Speaker 1: gonna not We're probably not gonna use a lot of
Speaker 1: examples in here, but we are going to end up
Speaker 1: using some of the basic Greek examples that most of
Speaker 1: our listeners are gonna be familiar with. This is not,
Speaker 1: in a by any means intended to slight any of
Speaker 1: the fascinating cultures out there, but we're probably going to
Speaker 1: draw cards from the deck that most people familiar with,
Speaker 1: and probably some cards from the decks that we've you know,
Speaker 1: built ourselves out of things that interest us. Yeah, in particular,
Speaker 1: like I should probably just state this upfront, like I
Speaker 1: if you listen to the show before, you know that
Speaker 1: I'm a comic book nerd. You know that I like
Speaker 1: superheroes and have done research on superheroes in the past.
Speaker 1: In particular, like the research I did when I was
Speaker 1: at a university was about mythology, rhetoric, and Captain America ironically,
Speaker 1: because that Captain American movie just came out. Um, And
Speaker 1: so yeah, I have a lot of like superhero type
Speaker 1: examples or pop culture examples that will probably come to
Speaker 1: mind as we're talking about this, but also I'm gonna
Speaker 1: try to stay on target. Yeah. Likewise, I've been reading
Speaker 1: a lot of Chinese mythology recently, and so some of
Speaker 1: my examples are going to draw from that, just because
Speaker 1: it's fresh on my mind. But all of it is
Speaker 1: going to be intended to to to provide you with
Speaker 1: the tools to to go through these different ways of
Speaker 1: looking at myth and uh and you know, provide something
Speaker 1: that that the listeners of the show can't take with
Speaker 1: them as we explore other mythologies, even as a tangent
Speaker 1: in the future. So I have a challenge for us
Speaker 1: and a challenge for you the listener as well as
Speaker 1: we proceed, Um. Let's also consider, right, this is a
Speaker 1: science podcast, and as we've been we've been, we've been
Speaker 1: sort of inching our way towards this over the last
Speaker 1: i don't know, two or three months with episodes like
Speaker 1: we Could Problems and cargo cult science and things like that.
Speaker 1: But let's consider is it possible that some form of
Speaker 1: science is used today as mythology for our present culture?
Speaker 1: Because I think that's something that there might be something there. Uh,
Speaker 1: and if so, how is it? And then just for funzies,
Speaker 1: who are our scientific deities? Uh? You know, Robert and
Speaker 1: I have joked many times before on the show about
Speaker 1: how like we're putting together was slowly putting together a
Speaker 1: psychedelic Avengers of all these psychedelic scientists that we talked
Speaker 1: about on the show. But in general, like I feel
Speaker 1: like there are some scientists when you refer to them,
Speaker 1: they're referred to with the reverence that people used to
Speaker 1: refer to Zeus or thor with. Right, It's like Carl
Speaker 1: Sagan can do no wrong or Einstein. You know, well,
Speaker 1: they these are legendary individuals and science. And we'll get
Speaker 1: into the connections between myth and legend here. As we
Speaker 1: roll all right, So we'll keep that in mind, but
Speaker 1: let's hit it all right. So let's start with the basics.
Speaker 1: Just the word mythology. What does it, What does it
Speaker 1: come from? Well, myth an ology, myth and logos myth
Speaker 1: being the proto Indo European root move is involved. Here
Speaker 1: is then to murmur and from this we get the
Speaker 1: Greek mythos, meaning word or story. So this is gonna
Speaker 1: be very important because as we go through this, you're
Speaker 1: going to see that you know, and and this sounds
Speaker 1: like a no type thing, but there's an inherent connection
Speaker 1: between myth, mythology and human language and how that defines
Speaker 1: both culture and how we understand the world. Right, So
Speaker 1: of course it would be named after murmuring and words.
Speaker 1: All right. So that's the word mythology. And certainly I
Speaker 1: think when most when when a lot of us here
Speaker 1: the word mythology, the first thing that enters your mind
Speaker 1: is maybe just a you know, a quick glance at
Speaker 1: the Greek pantheon. Yeah, I think I like a clash
Speaker 1: of the Titans. Yeah, like old old gods, stories that
Speaker 1: have a very human aspect to them. Um. And it's
Speaker 1: one of those things that it makes it difficult then
Speaker 1: to talk about myth in other areas such as like,
Speaker 1: for instance, been talking about Christianity to talk about myth.
Speaker 1: People here you say myth and they take it as
Speaker 1: an insult because they think, oh, myth is a thing
Speaker 1: that's not true and that is just mildly amusing in
Speaker 1: big budget sandals movies exactly exactly, And that's something I
Speaker 1: think we should try to dispel today too, is like
Speaker 1: that myth is is larger than just these ideas we
Speaker 1: think of them today as being fictionalized stories, right, But
Speaker 1: to the Greeks and the Romans that worshiped those gods,
Speaker 1: they were just as real to them as uh Einstein
Speaker 1: and Carl Sagan are to us. Yeah, and it in
Speaker 1: mythology as well. Discuss here is a powerful force. And
Speaker 1: even though you might you might think of Greek gods
Speaker 1: and whatever is just you know, mirror window dressing is
Speaker 1: just something that's just aesthetically pleasing. We are all living
Speaker 1: in the shadows of mythology. And yet at the same time,
Speaker 1: the human experience cast the shadow of mythology. So keep
Speaker 1: it very nice to keep that word shadow in mind
Speaker 1: for when we get the good old Carl Young, Oh, yes,
Speaker 1: all right, So under this heading, though, is there anything
Speaker 1: that we can agree upon this kind of universally considered. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what a myth is, generally speaking about. The only
Speaker 1: thing we can everyone agrees on is that mythologies are stories,
Speaker 1: their narratives. There's a lot of disagreement on whether those
Speaker 1: narratives are inherently sacred, you know, which is to say
Speaker 1: they involve gods in the supernatural. Can you have a
Speaker 1: myth that doesn't involve a god or god like being? Well,
Speaker 1: that's an issue of discussion and another thing to consider here.
Speaker 1: This is from just the basic definition in the Salem
Speaker 1: Press encyclopedia is that myths are stories, beliefs, fables, legends,
Speaker 1: whatever you wanna call them. We're gonna sort of slice
Speaker 1: that pie up a little bit later. But they reflect
Speaker 1: the culture of the people who write and listen to them,
Speaker 1: right So, and what they're often trying to do is
Speaker 1: provide explanations for how the world works. Ironic, because we
Speaker 1: are working for How Stuff Works this is How Stuff
Speaker 1: Works podcast. So, uh, you know, while we provide explanations
Speaker 1: for how stuff works, uh, the old way of doing
Speaker 1: so was to say, well, the reason why that lightning
Speaker 1: struck that tree over there was because Zeus was angry, right,
Speaker 1: something like along those lines. Uh. So, for example, it
Speaker 1: was natural phenomena that human beings didn't quite understand yet,
Speaker 1: and so they told stories of heroes that were up
Speaker 1: against good and evil steaks to explain those things. So
Speaker 1: they explain our place in the world, or at least
Speaker 1: they try to write to us. It's it's that old
Speaker 1: like sort of very meta thing of like the stories
Speaker 1: are us looking at ourselves Like fiction mythology is just
Speaker 1: like uh, us creating an eyeball that's looking right back
Speaker 1: at ourselves and then trying to explain ourselves to us,
Speaker 1: which is is a weird thing to think about. Um,
Speaker 1: but it's everything from creation myths like well, how the
Speaker 1: world start? How? How why am I here? Who rules
Speaker 1: the world? What's the afterlife? Like? Like? All of that
Speaker 1: stuff stems from mythology, and there's so many shared similar themes.
Speaker 1: We're gonna see that throughout all the things we talked
Speaker 1: about today, from virgin births to great floods. Uh, they're
Speaker 1: constantly being reinvented and passed down. And I would argue
Speaker 1: even into today's you know, a huge popular culture epics
Speaker 1: of whether it's your superhero movies or your Lord of
Speaker 1: the Rings or Star Wars or whatever, we see these
Speaker 1: played out in similar ways. They're uh anthropolo just in
Speaker 1: cultural critics have been trying to trace these connections for centuries,
Speaker 1: and we're going to talk about some some like key
Speaker 1: points I would say in the last what like two
Speaker 1: hundred years of mythological study. But it's complicated, uh, and
Speaker 1: nobody has like a singular answer, so I kind of
Speaker 1: want to dispel that right away, Like there's no this
Speaker 1: is how it is right there. There are certainly interpretations
Speaker 1: that are more popular. For instance, the etiological explanation that
Speaker 1: you just mentioned, the idea that myths are about explaining
Speaker 1: what the world is and how the world works, like
Speaker 1: that is one that a lot of views say, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that that is one of the powers of myth, that's
Speaker 1: one of the reasons for myth. But there are a
Speaker 1: number of different ways to look at it, and a
Speaker 1: number of these different ways to look at them are
Speaker 1: tied to specific um uh, specific areas of study, specific
Speaker 1: academic approaches. Yeah, and like it's easy to trace that
Speaker 1: back to like very simple things that we feel like
Speaker 1: we have a grasp on now, like the changing of
Speaker 1: the seasons or something like that, right, but at the
Speaker 1: time it was explained through mythology. Al Right, Before we
Speaker 1: roll into some of the views on mythology, let's take
Speaker 1: a few minutes just to talk about the formal features
Speaker 1: of prose narrative as they relate to myth, legend, and folklore,
Speaker 1: because these are three terms that are often used interchangeably,
Speaker 1: but they really kind of refer to different things. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think to like, uh, we should point out
Speaker 1: that the distinctions that we're about to give come from
Speaker 1: a book on Chinese mythology by is it in Barrel?
Speaker 1: I believe so. Yes, Yeah, it's a book I've picked
Speaker 1: up recently, and in addition to being just a great
Speaker 1: exploration of Chinese mythology, it has a wonderful some wonderful
Speaker 1: introductory material that summarizes some some key stuff about mythology. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is great stuff, but it's also like, I
Speaker 1: think that we should also question some of the definitions
Speaker 1: too as we go. Yeah, I mean that's the that's
Speaker 1: the thing when you like something to keep in mind
Speaker 1: with any any of this one we're talking about mythology,
Speaker 1: like mythology is almost a It exists outside of our
Speaker 1: attempts to neatly categorize it. And so there's a and
Speaker 1: throwing too many classifications at it. But but I I
Speaker 1: tend to like this idea of just sort of breaking
Speaker 1: it up so it's nice myth, legend, and folk tale.
Speaker 1: There's there's a table in this book, um that that
Speaker 1: lays it out in terms of like, what's the conventional opening?
Speaker 1: Can you tell this story after dark? Is this scene
Speaker 1: as a factor of fiction? What's the setting, like the
Speaker 1: attitude the principal character. So I'm not gonna roll through
Speaker 1: the whole list, but for instance, in a myth, you're
Speaker 1: you're generally talking about a non human character. A legend
Speaker 1: is going to be more of a human character, and
Speaker 1: then a folk tale can be either one. Um, A
Speaker 1: myth definitely has a sacred feel to it, you know
Speaker 1: that the gods, superhumans, godlike entities. Legend can be either
Speaker 1: sacred or secular, and then a folk tale tends to
Speaker 1: be secular in terms of setting. Uh, myth and legend
Speaker 1: are just sometime in some place where folk tales are timeless. Uh,
Speaker 1: as far as belief goes, myth and legend are essentially facts,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of a that's a problematic term, but well, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's address that in a second. You go, Yeah, but
Speaker 1: the myth and the legend as it is told it
Speaker 1: is real in some way, shape or form, whereas the
Speaker 1: folk tale is just pure fiction, like nobody is actually believing,
Speaker 1: you know, in the Boogeyman, nobody thinks Johnny Appleseed I
Speaker 1: actually walked all across actually with apple seeds. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: so these are just some of the ideas to keep
Speaker 1: in mind to flesh this out a little bit. Let's
Speaker 1: roll through some examples. First of just straight up myths.
Speaker 1: So I think the the Greek examples that come to
Speaker 1: mind most easily, probably you know, stuff having to do
Speaker 1: with the origin of the universe though, the fall of
Speaker 1: the Titans, the rise of the gods, that sort of thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's like the go to I think most of us. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it's interesting, I wonder why that's the one like
Speaker 1: mythological pantheon that, especially in Western culture we still like
Speaker 1: really gravitate too. But I loved reading stories about that
Speaker 1: and Norris mythology to a certain extent when I was
Speaker 1: a kid. Well, those tales have been They've been told
Speaker 1: and retold so many times as part of Western literature
Speaker 1: that that they're that they've just been carried and held
Speaker 1: on a pedestal this whole time. One of the interesting
Speaker 1: things about looking at Chinese mythology is that you don't
Speaker 1: see that case. There's not there's not a homer that
Speaker 1: is that is retelling these things necessarily, So you have
Speaker 1: we have less of our tradition of the mythology being
Speaker 1: upheld by the scholars throughout the ages um. In the
Speaker 1: Christian world you have Adam and Eve, the whole you know,
Speaker 1: Garden of Eden, that the origins of Man, the Origins
Speaker 1: of sin Um certainly classifies as as mythology um elsewhere
Speaker 1: in the world Um. Chinese mythology, for instance, there's an
Speaker 1: archer by the name of Ye and shoots down the
Speaker 1: extra nine sons in the sky, so that the world's
Speaker 1: not we don't need so many sons. So this is
Speaker 1: a good segue into me talking about superheroes for a second,
Speaker 1: because you just wrote a fantastic piece on Chinese mythology
Speaker 1: connecting to the world of superheroes. Uh, and in particular
Speaker 1: you wrote about a recent d C comics uh team
Speaker 1: called the Great Ten that we're based on Chinese mythology.
Speaker 1: So listeners, I highly recommend, uh you go and find
Speaker 1: that piece. It's on now dot how Stuff Works dot com, right, yeah, uh,
Speaker 1: and and go take a read because Robert does a
Speaker 1: great job with that. But I will segue from that
Speaker 1: from Chinese myth into superheroes and into Western superheroes. I
Speaker 1: will make the argument throughout this episode that, especially like
Speaker 1: our big budget uh d C comics, Marvel comics, superheroes
Speaker 1: are archetypes for myth in the same way as like
Speaker 1: the Greek gods were, right, so real quick, like think
Speaker 1: of like pretty much every myth has like some kind
Speaker 1: of solar deity, right, well, that's Superman. They've always got
Speaker 1: an Earth Mother, it's wonder Woman. Wonder Woman was made
Speaker 1: of clay in one of her origin stories. You've got
Speaker 1: the death Slash Underworld deity, Batman, right yeah, and then
Speaker 1: there's always like the Trickster, the Joker. So like it's interesting,
Speaker 1: like and I'll keep coming back to this, uh, but
Speaker 1: there are like paar ups like you can apply these
Speaker 1: models of these archetypes across both you know, whether it's
Speaker 1: thousands of years old Greek Roman pantheons or modern day
Speaker 1: like comic books or even like I'm kind of wondering
Speaker 1: with this this example of science, like who's our science Zeus?
Speaker 1: Is it Nicola Tesla mm or Ben Franklin. It's not.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's been Franklin. So but you know,
Speaker 1: things like that to consider anyways. So that's that's my
Speaker 1: spiel about comics to start off with. And I'll be
Speaker 1: I think bringing it into yeah, an important fact to
Speaker 1: night because much like the gods, what you walk around,
Speaker 1: say to deaths in an office space and you see
Speaker 1: the action figures on people's death totally in many cases
Speaker 1: they are superheroes. Are superhero characters? What are they but
Speaker 1: the the the avatars for little gods that are the amulets,
Speaker 1: the protective presence. Yeah, and I would you know, i'd
Speaker 1: also point out to that, like in our sort of
Speaker 1: breakdown of of how myth, legend and folk tales work out, right,
Speaker 1: like we said myth is considered to be fact, Well,
Speaker 1: nobody actually considers, you know, Superman to be fact, right,
Speaker 1: Nobody thinks that he's a real person, or at least
Speaker 1: most people don't. Uh. And but the caveat being there
Speaker 1: is that there is such an intense devotion to the
Speaker 1: cannon that's within these myth myth mythologies of whatever shared
Speaker 1: universe it is, whether it's Star Wars or Marvel or whatever. Right,
Speaker 1: but there's constant arguments about what is true and what
Speaker 1: is not within the canon. Uh. It doesn't necessarily explain
Speaker 1: how the world works to us, but it represents how
Speaker 1: we think it works and how we want it to work. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it represents our ideologies too. Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's Superman. Even though no one is gonna gets into
Speaker 1: the whole idea of hyper real religions that we've covered
Speaker 1: in a previous that absolutely and that this thing that
Speaker 1: is certainly fictional still takes on mythological even religious uh
Speaker 1: power to the individual two large groups of people. So
Speaker 1: if anyone out there is thinking, oh, you mentioned Superman
Speaker 1: and Adam and even the same breath that is insulting
Speaker 1: or whatever, um, I encourage you not to take it
Speaker 1: that way and to listen to the rest of the
Speaker 1: podcast as we explore the power of myth and I
Speaker 1: think I would also say watched the last two Superman
Speaker 1: movies very carefully because there's a lot of christ imagery
Speaker 1: in there. There's a lot of him in cross like poses,
Speaker 1: him being back lit by the sun in the same
Speaker 1: way that Jesus is back lit in certain painting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of that stuff going Alright. So onto legends,
Speaker 1: as we discussed, you know, might be sacred, might be secular,
Speaker 1: but you have more of a human character, there's more
Speaker 1: of a grounding and reality, um, though there are still
Speaker 1: mythic elements to it. So in the Greek world, the
Speaker 1: example that came to my mind is Alexander, the great
Speaker 1: legendary figure, but definitely a real guy that existed with
Speaker 1: some possible uh fiction, you know, springing off on the edge.
Speaker 1: It still allows for big budget movies to be made
Speaker 1: about him, right, And it's and it's more, um, it's
Speaker 1: not in like pure mythic time like it's it's it's
Speaker 1: more relatable to the present. Likewise, in the Christian and
Speaker 1: Christian traditions, you have various martyrs. You can maybe even
Speaker 1: make a h an argument for some of the apostles.
Speaker 1: These are definite historical figures, like st When we talked
Speaker 1: about Stigmata on the Shadow before. Some of those guys
Speaker 1: that is definitely an example of Christian legend. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then elsewhere in the in the world. One example from
Speaker 1: Chinese histor three is the Yellow Emperor who reigned from
Speaker 1: two thousand six to UC Definitely a real ruler, but
Speaker 1: there's a lot of additional information he's taken on extremely
Speaker 1: lifendary status. Yeah. My experience, um, living in Southeast Asia
Speaker 1: as a kid too, is that Chinese mythology and legend
Speaker 1: is popularized in pop culture and movies and television just
Speaker 1: as much as like our Alexander the Greats or superheroes
Speaker 1: or Greek gods are Um, are you familiar with the
Speaker 1: Ones upon a Time in China series? Um? Yeah, Well
Speaker 1: I've never seen it, but I'm familiar with it. It's
Speaker 1: this like martial arts Woushia series of movies starting Jetly,
Speaker 1: and it's ostensibly about the history of China at the time,
Speaker 1: although there's a lot of argument about whether or not
Speaker 1: it's been influenced by the state or not, and it's
Speaker 1: sort of like a revisionist history. But it reminds me
Speaker 1: of things like this, or like a lot of Jetly movies,
Speaker 1: like what's that other one hero? Is that? What it's
Speaker 1: called anyway, the Wuhia movies in general tend to play
Speaker 1: around with these legends. They're like historical figures that they
Speaker 1: make larger than life. And then finally we have folklore
Speaker 1: and uh, certainly like in the Greek tradition they have
Speaker 1: they have their boogeyman, just as anybody else has a boogeyman.
Speaker 1: Believe it's called the baboos. And then you could maybe
Speaker 1: make an argument that a sub's fables count as folk
Speaker 1: floor you know what I mean, nobody, I mean they're
Speaker 1: almost like extreme folklore, like nobody's believing one of these
Speaker 1: stories with these interactions between animals briar rabbit. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: they're but they still they carry weight, and that that's
Speaker 1: um Christian tradition. You have an inherited pagan folk tales.
Speaker 1: You have stuff about witches, there's a lot of Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's an interesting example where fable can become something else,
Speaker 1: starting to find the world for us in a way
Speaker 1: that isn't necessarily accurate. Yeah, and then elsewhere in the world,
Speaker 1: what you have vampire? Do you have fox, spirits, beast men,
Speaker 1: all in that manner of of supernatural entity that it's
Speaker 1: just a folk tale, you know, it's like it doesn't
Speaker 1: have legendary and mythic status. So let's talk about the
Speaker 1: like how sacred some of this stuff has to be? Right?
Speaker 1: Like again like sticking to Uh, that's that table of
Speaker 1: splitting up myth, legend and folklore. Well, it says right
Speaker 1: here myths are always sacred. So how sacred are they? Well?
Speaker 1: I think it's definitely hard to find examples of older
Speaker 1: myths that are that are secular. Like most mythology as
Speaker 1: as we experience, it is going to be sacred. But
Speaker 1: the comic book examples really bring to mind a possible
Speaker 1: example of of of secular mythology, you know, in a
Speaker 1: kind of hyper real fashion. So um. Interesting side note here.
Speaker 1: Often mentioned writer on the show, Grant Morrison. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you're you've ever read his run on The
Speaker 1: Justice League of America happened. Uh. He's given many interviews
Speaker 1: where he said, well, his version of writing The Justice
Speaker 1: League was he saw it as, oh, this is the
Speaker 1: mythological pantheon of our times, and he set it up
Speaker 1: so that his roster of who was on the team
Speaker 1: uh lined up are typically with all of the Greek
Speaker 1: and Roman gods uh. And he had like this infamous
Speaker 1: breakdown of how that all worked out, how he chose
Speaker 1: who would be on on the team. Like, you know,
Speaker 1: you have your usuals like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.
Speaker 1: Then when you add somebody like plastic Man, like why
Speaker 1: is he there? And Morrison says, well, everybody needs a Dionysius. Interesting, yea,
Speaker 1: And of course Morrison also responsible for Alright. So here's
Speaker 1: the thing with with myth is we're discussing it now
Speaker 1: and and again. This gets down to the problems of
Speaker 1: classifying it. Myth is like a narrative mold that grows
Speaker 1: over our lives, and it grows over everything from big
Speaker 1: cosmological questions to what's on the dinner table. So you
Speaker 1: can think of it as as mold growing over a
Speaker 1: statue of a man or a woman, and that body
Speaker 1: is kind of a physical symbology for our concerns. Or
Speaker 1: if you're so inclined, you can think of chakras on
Speaker 1: a figure. Okay, So myth grows over the heart and
Speaker 1: the mind that it goes over all the senses of
Speaker 1: the head. It grows over the sex, organs, the breasts,
Speaker 1: the gut, It covers the dreadful scars of battle and
Speaker 1: the ever humor as buttocks. Uh, and is the butt
Speaker 1: sacred or secular? Humans will always disagree on that one.
Speaker 1: But but myth is ultimately poly functional, so it grows everywhere.
Speaker 1: It takes on various meanings. And that's not just the
Speaker 1: nature of of myth as as a whole, from you know,
Speaker 1: as just in general. I mean we're talking about individual tales. Uh,
Speaker 1: that mean a host of different things. Uh. The human
Speaker 1: experience exists, again, is the shadow of myth, but it
Speaker 1: also casts the very shadow. So I think polly functional
Speaker 1: is a good um description to keep in mind as
Speaker 1: we talk about all of these, because the more you
Speaker 1: try and pin it down and say, oh, well, this
Speaker 1: this myth is about your obsession with your mother, that
Speaker 1: is to limit the power of mythology to this one
Speaker 1: specific thing, when it really is more amorphous than that.
Speaker 1: And that's what we see in a lot of the
Speaker 1: attempts and conflicts over what myth means over the last
Speaker 1: you know, hundred two hundred years of academic inquirery. I
Speaker 1: guess is sort of like attempts to constrain it and
Speaker 1: then attempts to balloon it back outwards again. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: you end up with say a psychologist or an anthropologist,
Speaker 1: story or a historian. They're coming in. They're taking their
Speaker 1: discipline applying it to mythology, and it's going to be
Speaker 1: sort of the vision of mythology that fits to their
Speaker 1: discipline well. And the funny thing is, too, is like
Speaker 1: they're human beings and they're just a subject a myth
Speaker 1: as the rest of us, and they want their answer
Speaker 1: to be the one answer, right Like they all think
Speaker 1: like young thought like his answer was the answer, and
Speaker 1: so did I don't know, Roland Bard or uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the Claude leavestros whoever, Like all these people were going
Speaker 1: to talk about today, they wanted to be the ones
Speaker 1: with the answer in just the same way as the
Speaker 1: people who u uh talked about Zeus as being responsible
Speaker 1: for storms wanted that to be the one true answer.
Speaker 1: So we have a lot of different interpretations and one
Speaker 1: individual will come back around to him at the very end.
Speaker 1: But there is a religious study scholar and mythologist William G.
Speaker 1: Dotty nine. He's still around, but he's retired. To understand,
Speaker 1: he identified no fewer than fifty definitions of myth and
Speaker 1: this was in the nineteen eighties. And again this is
Speaker 1: due to just all the anthropologists, psychologists, religious studies, uh,
Speaker 1: individuals of theo theologians, etcetera, chiming in on mythology. All right,
Speaker 1: so we're gonna take a quick break and when we
Speaker 1: come back we will roll through some of these big
Speaker 1: ideas concerning the nature and power of myth. Okay, so
Speaker 1: here we go. Let's first talk about sort of this
Speaker 1: nineteenth century universalistic theory approach. One of the key individual
Speaker 1: visuals here Frederick Max mu There eighty three nine hundred,
Speaker 1: generally known just as Max Mueller, German born English philologist
Speaker 1: and orientalists. As the term of the was used at
Speaker 1: we probably wouldn't call him that, not not today, but it's, uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's a good description to keep in mind in
Speaker 1: terms of the attitudes towards uh uh, you know, other
Speaker 1: people's belief systems and mythological roots. He argued that overtime
Speaker 1: humans lost the original meanings of words such as sun, moon, thunderstorms,
Speaker 1: you know, the basic terms we used to describe the
Speaker 1: cycle of things in the world around as planets. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that we gradually misunderstood them as myth figures and
Speaker 1: incorporated them into superstitious and religious world views. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: no coincidence that we named all of our planets after
Speaker 1: God's right. Uh. In fact, like our solar system has
Speaker 1: its own sort of pantheon of characters and archetypes as well.
Speaker 1: That there you go again, science the application of science
Speaker 1: to myth. H. Yeah. So with Mueller's in particular zs
Speaker 1: of language thing, this is something we're going to see
Speaker 1: come up over and over again. That language is like
Speaker 1: the culprit of myth. It's where it all originates. Right,
Speaker 1: Like if we were uh without language speaking animals, feral
Speaker 1: children for instance, feral children would maybe not need mythology,
Speaker 1: right anymore than like a squirrel would. Uh. And it
Speaker 1: goes a long way towards understanding again human cultural communication,
Speaker 1: all our differences and our similarities, and especially how we
Speaker 1: other other people. So I'm talking about capital, oh other
Speaker 1: uh and how we understand the world in general. Right.
Speaker 1: So uh, Muller seems to think more about nature as
Speaker 1: being personified as supernatural characters, right, But he's also talking
Speaker 1: about language as being the step that leads us there. Right.
Speaker 1: And I think this is a great example to kick
Speaker 1: off with because certainly if you took this as the
Speaker 1: only explanation from myth. That would be a very limited
Speaker 1: understanding of mythology. But you consider, I can certainly see
Speaker 1: where this would be a part of the overall energy
Speaker 1: of myth as it exists in human history. Um up, next,
Speaker 1: let's talk about the evolutionist school. One of the key
Speaker 1: individuals here Edward B. Tyler, that's T. Y L. O. R.
Speaker 1: Through nineteen seventeen English anthropologist. So he was a cultural
Speaker 1: evolutionist and he saw myth as expression of primitive philosophy.
Speaker 1: So this is another example of myth as considered by
Speaker 1: individuals immerged in a specific discipline. In time, evolutionary theory
Speaker 1: was changing the way we think about the world. On
Speaker 1: the Origin of Species by Darwin came out in eighteen
Speaker 1: fifty nine. So there's there's another science, mythological and Darwin
Speaker 1: and origin. I'm not sure which superhero here, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know, but you know, so some went in this,
Speaker 1: Some individuals picked up on the evolution craze and they
Speaker 1: went and decidedly racist and xenophobic directions with this. But
Speaker 1: it's worth noting that the Tyler at least believed that
Speaker 1: human minds had the same global capability, regardless of their
Speaker 1: position on what he saw as the ladder of cultural ascension.
Speaker 1: So he saw myth is an attempt to explain the world. Again,
Speaker 1: getting back to the ideology that we're talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: he saw it as a proto science. He also saw
Speaker 1: ritual as an application of myth, just as technology is
Speaker 1: an application of science to exert control. So myth is
Speaker 1: our understanding of how the world works, and ritual is
Speaker 1: our attempt to exploit that understanding for control. Yeah, ritual
Speaker 1: is in his sense, the application of how we're trying
Speaker 1: to control outcomes in a totally chaotic world that we
Speaker 1: don't know what's going to happen next. Right, there's gonna
Speaker 1: be a storm that's gonna hit and kill my family,
Speaker 1: or maybe it won't rain and my crops won't grow.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna perform these rituals to try to make
Speaker 1: these particular things happen. I want to change the outcomes
Speaker 1: of reality. Okay, And you know it's it's interesting to
Speaker 1: try and like apply that to the previous theory. So
Speaker 1: you can imagine, like this this thing we see in
Speaker 1: the sky, we we give it a certain amount of
Speaker 1: personality and then as we reach out to it, as
Speaker 1: we you know, at a loss of anything else, you know,
Speaker 1: amid say that the ruins of our village, we might
Speaker 1: ask it for help and then therefore personify it more
Speaker 1: and create more narrative energy for it. And this brings
Speaker 1: us to the myth as ritual school and one of
Speaker 1: the key individuals here Jane Ellen Harrison eighteen fifty through
Speaker 1: who was a British classical scholar, linguist and feminist. Harrison
Speaker 1: expanded on this notion of ritual and myth as the
Speaker 1: spoken correlation of the acted right, the thing done and uh.
Speaker 1: And this reminds me of some of the views that
Speaker 1: will discuss from Mercelle Elliotti in the country here. And
Speaker 1: up next we have the ipeological interpretation of Andrew Lang.
Speaker 1: He was a Scottish poet and anthropologist lived eighteen forty
Speaker 1: four through nineteen twelve. Yeah, and so you know, as
Speaker 1: we we mentioned this earlier, but aedeological means assigning or
Speaker 1: seek to assign a cause to things. It's the study
Speaker 1: of causation in myth in particular, we're talking about origin stories, right,
Speaker 1: how how did this thing happen? Why is it happening? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Lane wrote, Uh, wrote a book Myth, Ritual and Religion,
Speaker 1: Volume one, And this is like a number of these
Speaker 1: older text is available and full online if you just
Speaker 1: poke around for him. Um, but I wanted to read
Speaker 1: one line from it to give you sort of a
Speaker 1: sense of some of the some of the attitudes that
Speaker 1: were thrown around and trying to figure out what myth
Speaker 1: is and what its power is. Uh. And he was
Speaker 1: talking about some Greek and um and Sanscrit writings about
Speaker 1: about myth. Here he says, quote, we conclude that in
Speaker 1: Greek and Sanscrit, the myths are relics, whether borrowed or
Speaker 1: inherited of the savage mental status. Yeah. So now we're
Speaker 1: getting into Uh, this is that period of time where
Speaker 1: I think like a lot of uh philosophical thought was
Speaker 1: struggling with what we now view as i'd say, quasi
Speaker 1: racist territory in terms of, like, you know, whether these
Speaker 1: theorists see themselves as being superior to quote unquote primitive
Speaker 1: people's but then not exactly applying the same lens to
Speaker 1: themselves in terms of like how we understand culture and
Speaker 1: how we use myth. Right, Yeah, it's kind of like,
Speaker 1: let me, I guess is there a term for this,
Speaker 1: like white splain you or the colonial splain you. I mean,
Speaker 1: what I keep thinking of is like, and you see
Speaker 1: this in a lot of these guys, is the idea
Speaker 1: of the quote noble savage, right, Like the the idea
Speaker 1: that um particular primitive peoples have these two aspects of
Speaker 1: themselves and once we crack the code, we can figure
Speaker 1: out what makes them tick. And it's it's um kind
Speaker 1: of grossly elitist. Yeah, it's it's like, there's this beautiful
Speaker 1: thing about your whole situation. You're blind to it, but
Speaker 1: I I am. I am far enough at the ladder
Speaker 1: that I can I can reach in there and figure
Speaker 1: it out for exactly. So, Yeah, there's sometimes you get
Speaker 1: into that that kind of itchy area with some of
Speaker 1: these especially some of the early writings on the subject um.
Speaker 1: Up next, we're going to briefly discuss friends bows. He
Speaker 1: had this um this interesting take that was that has
Speaker 1: been referred to but as autobiographical ethnography, all right, and
Speaker 1: that that was a description that was thrown out in
Speaker 1: that book I mentioned earlier by and Beryl about Chinese mythology.
Speaker 1: He was a German American anthropologist lived fifty eight through two,
Speaker 1: and the basic idea here was that the specifics of
Speaker 1: a primitive culture can be deduced from kind of a
Speaker 1: postmortem of its myths um, which you know, sounds like,
Speaker 1: in a sense, kind of an oversimplification and maybe and
Speaker 1: that's probably an oversimplification of his work, but you know,
Speaker 1: I can I can see the value in it. Like
Speaker 1: if you look at a person at a people's mythology,
Speaker 1: then you're going to learn certain things about who and
Speaker 1: what they are. Yeah. So Bois is an interesting contrast
Speaker 1: to Land because I think both of them are in
Speaker 1: this sort of weird period of time or like intellectuals
Speaker 1: saw themselves as like defining quote pre bit of people's right.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, if you look into Bois,
Speaker 1: like he was pretty staunchly against what he called white
Speaker 1: prejudice and racial superiority, uh, and that he didn't think
Speaker 1: that it was like the job of anthropology to sort
Speaker 1: of apply that mindset to other people's. But at the
Speaker 1: same time, like there's it's complex, Like I think it's
Speaker 1: too complex for us to get into in this episode,
Speaker 1: especially since we're trying to tackle such a big subject
Speaker 1: to begin with, it might be worth returning to Bois
Speaker 1: in a future episode. But just this contradiction between like
Speaker 1: not wanting to, as we're calling it, like white splain
Speaker 1: uh to these particular peoples, but then at the same
Speaker 1: time like saying like, oh, yeah, I get you figured out,
Speaker 1: like once once I look at your rituals and your myths,
Speaker 1: like I know what's going on here. Yeah. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: is difficult because on the other hand, you have individuals
Speaker 1: in a different culture with a different language trying to
Speaker 1: understand individuals in another culture in a different language, and
Speaker 1: speaking about it within their own culture, within in the
Speaker 1: own language, within their own discipline. And yeah, it gets
Speaker 1: it gets complicated pretty quickly. There's something going on here
Speaker 1: too about using myth to understand the world that also
Speaker 1: leads us to our fear of other people in like
Speaker 1: different ways of which we can try to apply that
Speaker 1: and make sense of it. Uh. And I think you
Speaker 1: see a little bit of that here, But Bois was
Speaker 1: obviously trying to push against it all. Right. Up next
Speaker 1: we have Polish anthropologist Brunus Law Malinowski lived eighty four
Speaker 1: through nineteen forty two, and Uh, his whole thing was
Speaker 1: that that myth is a sociological charter. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: if you want to know what's morally acceptable within a society,
Speaker 1: look to their myths, which end up reflecting and informing
Speaker 1: these standards. They spell out the important values, the rituals
Speaker 1: of behavior. Um claude. Levi Strauss, who we're gonna get
Speaker 1: to in a second, described this as myth is a
Speaker 1: charter for social action, and then Levi Strauss expanded on
Speaker 1: this view with a a structural analytical approach. The highlights
Speaker 1: the binary oppositions in myth that bring the reader, listener,
Speaker 1: or the individual to a place of deeper meaning. So
Speaker 1: you're kind of narratively juggling the notions of social action
Speaker 1: in a way that a mere you know, a mere
Speaker 1: set of rules, carbon and a piece of stone cannot. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Levi Strauss is one of sort of the you know,
Speaker 1: first major thinkers in the last century to do that
Speaker 1: uh language application thing here, and in particular he's considered
Speaker 1: a father of structuralism, which we've talked about recently on
Speaker 1: the show. Some people have asked us to please do
Speaker 1: an episode on structuralism or post structuralism. We might it's
Speaker 1: such an incredibly complex, uh theory that I don't know
Speaker 1: that we could do justice to it. Well, sometimes what
Speaker 1: you have to do is just to dip your toes,
Speaker 1: and maybe we'll do that. But in the case of Strauss,
Speaker 1: he wrote a four volume study called Mythologies. Uh And,
Speaker 1: and the the idea here was that he followed a
Speaker 1: single myth as it traversed from South America all the
Speaker 1: way up to the Arctic Circle, sort of like how
Speaker 1: we are tracing the origins of cannabis in that episode
Speaker 1: a couple of weeks ago, right, So he's tracing its
Speaker 1: cultural evolution. Uh And. In particular, he has an essay.
Speaker 1: He has multiple things he's written about this, but there's
Speaker 1: a widely read essay that is free on the internet
Speaker 1: if you just google it, the Structural Study of myth
Speaker 1: in which he says, and keep in mind this is
Speaker 1: sixty years ago. Myths are interpreted in conflicting ways, right,
Speaker 1: So he's looking at all the different ways that all
Speaker 1: these other theorists are trying to interpret them, whether it's
Speaker 1: through collective dreams or ritual or play or archetypes. All
Speaker 1: these things that we're we've either talked about already or
Speaker 1: we will talk about. None of them go beyond what
Speaker 1: he calls quote a crude kind of philosophic speculation. So
Speaker 1: he kind of looked down on them, right, But then,
Speaker 1: like any good academic, he was like, well, I have
Speaker 1: the one single answer and here um, he says, well,
Speaker 1: the paradox is that myth is both full of elements
Speaker 1: that contradict one another. Right, anything can happen in a myth,
Speaker 1: but the same time between different cultures in different regions
Speaker 1: that seemingly haven't interacted at all their similarities between their myths. Uh.
Speaker 1: And one of the examples he uses is the Native
Speaker 1: American trickster myth. As an example, he says, well, it's
Speaker 1: a it's a meditation on both life and death, right,
Speaker 1: and it's a it's symbolized by both like a raven,
Speaker 1: and I think it's either a coyote or a wolf.
Speaker 1: And those seem like they would be diametrically opposed, but
Speaker 1: they're not. And here's why. And I'm not going to
Speaker 1: dive down the whole Levi Strouss thing, but you can
Speaker 1: take a look. It's it's really interesting stuff. Um. He
Speaker 1: also used Oedipus as an example, and he said, since
Speaker 1: myth is made of language, uh, and it can't be
Speaker 1: told without human speech. This is why we need to
Speaker 1: apply linguistics and structuralism to it in order to understand it.
Speaker 1: He takes Oedipus and he breaks it apart, kind of
Speaker 1: like a musical arrangement, like an orchestral a score with
Speaker 1: assigned beats to it, and he breaks up those beats
Speaker 1: into four columns. Uh. And through this he tries to
Speaker 1: discern what a myth actually means, right, what that means, meaning,
Speaker 1: the etiological nature of that meaning, uh, by finding that
Speaker 1: the fourth column is the universal characteristic of man. Okay,
Speaker 1: so this is like his his prime answer to what's
Speaker 1: going on with myth? Uh? And in particular, he also said,
Speaker 1: there isn't one authentic version of a myth, but there's
Speaker 1: different manifestations, and we see this throughout all of them. Right.
Speaker 1: So even like in the examples of like that, I've
Speaker 1: been giving modern day superheroes as being sort of mythic, right,
Speaker 1: Like their continuity is constantly changing, and and it's you're
Speaker 1: talking about Superman the Sun God or Superman the Reagan
Speaker 1: as figure and what the Dark Knight returns? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly right, So like they're interpreted in different ways and
Speaker 1: applied in different ways. So he's like, he was trying
Speaker 1: to figure out what the fundamental units of myths were,
Speaker 1: and he called them my themes, which I like because
Speaker 1: if you split it, it's my theme. Um. And I
Speaker 1: believe this was before the conceptualization of memes too, but
Speaker 1: there's there's something connected there as well. Uh. He tried
Speaker 1: breaking them down in this very strict structuralist linguistic manner
Speaker 1: to find out what those fundamental units were, and he
Speaker 1: thought that there had to be some kind of universal
Speaker 1: law to all of them. All right, so we have
Speaker 1: some good material here. We have, we've were, We've already
Speaker 1: rolled through a number of different ways to take apart
Speaker 1: the myth and figure out what it means. So let's
Speaker 1: talk about Sigmund Freud. Just a little bit about your mother. Yes,
Speaker 1: so Freud is mostly known for for psychoanalysis, but of
Speaker 1: course myth was also hugely important to him. He would
Speaker 1: keep all these these different uh uh, you know, mythic
Speaker 1: depictions of God's just sitting around his office. And he
Speaker 1: saw myths as reflections of our unconscious fears and desires.
Speaker 1: So he viewed ancient religious characters as the manifestations of
Speaker 1: submerged human desires, and therefore all religions is kind of
Speaker 1: a mass delusion or maybe a paranoid for one of
Speaker 1: wish fulfillment. This is where we get our edipal complex
Speaker 1: and our electric complex room exactly. And so the idea
Speaker 1: here is that in these religious figures you could find
Speaker 1: the universal truth of the human condition. The edifice one,
Speaker 1: of course, is probably the big one, probably the most
Speaker 1: well known one, the classic example drawn from the the
Speaker 1: the actual myth here of edifice Rex mythical Greek king.
Speaker 1: He's a solver of riddles that have to do with
Speaker 1: the human condition. So, you know, Freud dug that. But also, uh,
Speaker 1: the myth underlies the edifice complex, the idea that on
Speaker 1: and I'm and I'm summarizing super paraphrases, super paraphrasing, but
Speaker 1: that this is like the dime store understanding of it,
Speaker 1: but that all children want to kill their father and
Speaker 1: marry their mother. Yeah, it's the Jim Morrison version, right,
Speaker 1: So that that's that's kind of Freud's contribution in a
Speaker 1: nutshell to our understanding of myth. Yeah. And then Freud's
Speaker 1: contemporary and you know, sometime rival Carl Young had a
Speaker 1: psychological explanation for everything. All these guys, man, everybody's just
Speaker 1: coming up with their universal laws. I've got it figured out. No,
Speaker 1: I've got it figured out. Here's my universal law. Uh.
Speaker 1: Willam Reich, who we talked about in a previous episodes,
Speaker 1: spun out of these two guys as well with his
Speaker 1: universal law of how everything worked out. So Young he's
Speaker 1: all about collective unconsciousness, in particular archetypal patterns of thoughts
Speaker 1: and symbolism. He thought that myths were projections of the
Speaker 1: collective unconsciousness that we all share. Uh. And again like
Speaker 1: super dime store version of this is that there's like
Speaker 1: this uh, shared imaginary space between all of us that
Speaker 1: we're all pulling our ideas from. And it's it's natural
Speaker 1: to humans, right Uh. And we can't quite define it,
Speaker 1: but we're all pulling from that same space no matter
Speaker 1: where we are in the world. And this seems to
Speaker 1: explain why all these myths from varied locations are so similar.
Speaker 1: So Young argues, well, like deities, for example, in mythology,
Speaker 1: those are expressions of these universal archetypes. Uh. And so
Speaker 1: it's been done with Young's work, is the psychological archetypes
Speaker 1: that he came up with are applied in a certain
Speaker 1: kind of literary criticism. Uh, and you can pretty much
Speaker 1: apply to any story, right. Uh, it's usually very basic.
Speaker 1: One of my former advisors in grad school would refer
Speaker 1: to it as the model fits kind of study, right
Speaker 1: where you're just you're taking his model and you apply
Speaker 1: it to a text and you go, Yep, that works,
Speaker 1: and that's you know, for for a lot of people,
Speaker 1: that's good enough. For some people they want more meat
Speaker 1: on the bone. But a lot of the young iun
Speaker 1: criticism is done as such. So right, we've got examples
Speaker 1: like the hero, the animal and the animals, the mother,
Speaker 1: the father, the child, the sage, the trickster, the fool.
Speaker 1: Right there, These are all archetypes that show up in
Speaker 1: in many of our texts, whether they're literary, mythological, or
Speaker 1: or superhero movies. Right. A really good example I think
Speaker 1: of how young and archetypes are applied in world building,
Speaker 1: and like a fictional setting is Game of Thrones, Like
Speaker 1: that's like reverse engineered uh mythology there right in that
Speaker 1: like George R. And Martin like clearly he had either
Speaker 1: looked at this or other archetypal versions of mythology and
Speaker 1: said Okay, Well, when I create my religion in this world, right,
Speaker 1: like we've got a God of Light and then the Seven,
Speaker 1: there's like what there's like Maiden, Mother and Crone, and
Speaker 1: then there's the Stranger Strange Ponification, and I would imagine
Speaker 1: the Stranger lignes up pretty well with the Young's version
Speaker 1: of the Shadow, and the Shadow is this immoral remnant
Speaker 1: of our instinctual animal past. So it's sort of like
Speaker 1: this weird, like dark side of ourselves that we don't
Speaker 1: want to admit to, but it's always with us. It's
Speaker 1: always following us, right, like our shadows to um. And
Speaker 1: so yeah, you can take this and you can PLoP
Speaker 1: it on top of like almost any story and map
Speaker 1: it out and it works. Uh. And in the same
Speaker 1: way you can do that with Joseph Campbell's Heroes Journey,
Speaker 1: which is another very popularized sort of explanation of mythology
Speaker 1: in the last what fifty years. Yeah, I mean it's
Speaker 1: it's becomes synonymous with Star Wars, right absolutely. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: Campbell is renowned today as a pop mythologist. Uh. And
Speaker 1: it's similar to, uh, there's way more to it than this.
Speaker 1: I we're really just diving in the shallow end here. Uh.
Speaker 1: If you're interested in this, I highly recommend you go
Speaker 1: out and read more about these these theorists and these thinkers.
Speaker 1: But yeah, we're providing you with the IKEA toolkit if
Speaker 1: you want to. If you want a real Alan wrench
Speaker 1: for for extended use. Uh, there's a there's a different
Speaker 1: tool kit out there for you. We're just giving you
Speaker 1: the you know, a good overview. Campbell basically argues that
Speaker 1: like almost every story follows this formula that he calls
Speaker 1: the hero's journey and it play is out and Star
Speaker 1: Wars is the one that everybody uses as an example
Speaker 1: for this, not only because it fits it perfectly, but
Speaker 1: also because George Lucas himself claimed, oh yeah, I was
Speaker 1: influenced by Joseph Campbell, and I intentionally did all that stuff. Uh.
Speaker 1: So he claims that he intentionally applied this three act
Speaker 1: structure that breaks down into seventeen sub acts. Uh. And
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna go through the whole thing here, but
Speaker 1: you know, if you're familiar with sort of just like
Speaker 1: generic uh film storytelling, it's going to be very familiar
Speaker 1: to you in the way that, like, you know, stories
Speaker 1: have rises and arcs. There's calls to adventures. Uh, there's
Speaker 1: particular challenges that they have to go through and then
Speaker 1: they have to return with something. And in this particular
Speaker 1: Joseph campbell formula. He always says that you have to
Speaker 1: the the hero has to refuse to return back to
Speaker 1: the real world, but then they eventually do on some
Speaker 1: kind of magical flight. Uh. It's it's interesting. And when
Speaker 1: you again the model fits. You lay this on top
Speaker 1: of Star Wars and it works out perfectly, even even
Speaker 1: more interesting, like you lay it on top of a
Speaker 1: New Hope and it works perfectly. And then if you
Speaker 1: lay it on on top of like all of the
Speaker 1: movies as well, the arc still works out. So okay,
Speaker 1: I tend to believe George Lucas that he looked to
Speaker 1: this quasi academic for you know, a narrative application. I
Speaker 1: don't know about you, but like when I've written fiction
Speaker 1: before in the past, I've actually tried to play around
Speaker 1: with Campbell's uh formula. Yeah I have. I have at
Speaker 1: times the dipped into it for sure, because then, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you have this ultimately, which is a great
Speaker 1: universal narrative arc too. I don't know which to follow
Speaker 1: a mythic characters. Yeah, it's it's hard not to be
Speaker 1: inspired by it, or at least to look at it
Speaker 1: and say, all right, was this idea that I was
Speaker 1: thinking of? How do how does that match up with
Speaker 1: the blueprint here? For me, it was like it was
Speaker 1: along the lines of like, okay, am I sticking to
Speaker 1: this blueprint? All right? Like how do I break that
Speaker 1: a little bit so that it's something that's the story
Speaker 1: isn't so expected? Exactly? Yeah? Alright, So next we're gonna
Speaker 1: discuss Mercella Eliade, who he mentioned earlier, um and he
Speaker 1: was influenced by myth as ritual school of thought as
Speaker 1: well as union archetype concepts. He recognized the etiological aspects
Speaker 1: of myth, but he saw it as a vital link
Speaker 1: between ancient sacred past in the modern profane present. So
Speaker 1: imagine this bridge or even though like a time portal
Speaker 1: between our modern linear experience and it's inherent terror of history,
Speaker 1: which is a big deal over him. The idea that
Speaker 1: you know, in brief that since we are experiencing time
Speaker 1: as this linear progression, it's all the more horrifying when
Speaker 1: we realize, oh well, we as as a as a
Speaker 1: species keep making the same mistakes over and over again,
Speaker 1: and we're never gonna get him fixed. Uh, that makes
Speaker 1: more sense in a cyclical mindset, which you would have
Speaker 1: had in the in the ancient past. So imagine this
Speaker 1: portal connects our modern world to an age in which
Speaker 1: sacred time is cyclical. This means that the meaning of
Speaker 1: life is in the circle of things, and in this
Speaker 1: ancient age, people are one with the cosmos and the
Speaker 1: cosmic rhythms, while modern humans, according to Deliade, they're connected
Speaker 1: only with history. So myth is the portal. Myth is
Speaker 1: that that bridge that brings these two worlds together. Plus
Speaker 1: he also gets into some of the other ideas we've
Speaker 1: discussed here. I just want to read a quick quote
Speaker 1: from his his excellent book Um the myth of the
Speaker 1: Eternal Return. Myth is a history that can be repeated indefinitely,
Speaker 1: in the sense that the myths serve as models for
Speaker 1: ceremonies and periodically reactualize the tremendous events that occurred at
Speaker 1: the beginning of time. The myths preserve and transmant the paradigms,
Speaker 1: the exemplary models for all the responsible activities in which
Speaker 1: men engage. By virtue of these paradynamic models revealed to
Speaker 1: men in mythical times. The cosmos and society are periodically regenerated.
Speaker 1: So uh at my encapsulation of that would be like
Speaker 1: the Battlestar Galactica version of all this has happened and
Speaker 1: it will happen again, right, that kind of thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you can summarize it as saying that this linear experience
Speaker 1: of reality, it works for us, but it's missing something,
Speaker 1: and when the terror of history begins to creep in,
Speaker 1: it's good to reconnect, to jump in that portal and
Speaker 1: reconnect with the sacred experience of reality. Well that's an
Speaker 1: interesting segue into um, two guys who I feel like
Speaker 1: we have to mention here there again uh connected to
Speaker 1: the sort of linguistic aspect, but they're also uh sort
Speaker 1: of along the lines of Mars Marxist philosophical thinking. Uh.
Speaker 1: Roland Bart is the first one, and he is infamous
Speaker 1: for having written a book called Mythologies. Uh and man,
Speaker 1: there's one chapter in there that I really think that
Speaker 1: you would love. Mythologies is actually more about messages and
Speaker 1: media than it is about myths per se. But he's
Speaker 1: using Levi stress the same linguistic analysis and structuralism to
Speaker 1: apply Marxist approach to myth and in particular media. So
Speaker 1: he's writing this in the fifties late fifties, as the
Speaker 1: rise of mass media is coming on. Uh. And he
Speaker 1: interprets media with linguistic terms, applying them to socio political analysis.
Speaker 1: So I think it'd be fair to say, like, without
Speaker 1: Bart there would be like no Noam Chomsky. Okay, Uh.
Speaker 1: And so he he does this, and it's interesting. He
Speaker 1: finds that most of our modern myths are created by
Speaker 1: a ruling class through media. Okay, now again again, like
Speaker 1: I'm not going to dive deep down that rabbit hole
Speaker 1: and make those arguments or or argue with them. But
Speaker 1: there's a section in there that's all about wrestling, uh.
Speaker 1: And it's uh one of the first sort of pro wrestling, right, well,
Speaker 1: they didn't really have pro wrestling, but they had that
Speaker 1: sort of narrative wrestling at the time that you could
Speaker 1: still go watch. It's one of the first sort of
Speaker 1: revelations of what we now call k fabe that I've
Speaker 1: ever heard or read on the sport. Uh. And he
Speaker 1: basically says, look, they're pantomim ing the archetypes of myth
Speaker 1: in every single fight, and these are direct quotes from
Speaker 1: the book. He says, the function of the wrestler is
Speaker 1: not to win, it is to go through the motions
Speaker 1: that are expected of him in the same way as iLiads,
Speaker 1: Like you know, history is repeating itself. We watched the
Speaker 1: wrestling match. We have expectations of what will or will
Speaker 1: not happen, and we experienced pleasure by seeing this enacted.
Speaker 1: And he says that it's enacted through three archetypical acts suffering, defeat,
Speaker 1: and justice. Uh. And it's fascinating. I actually in grad
Speaker 1: school went to school with the guy who took this
Speaker 1: and ran with it and wrote his dissertation all about
Speaker 1: modern day wrestling and mythology. Yeah, yeah, there's a there's
Speaker 1: a lot of myth inet. You see it less, I
Speaker 1: guess in the so the modern American models, But if
Speaker 1: you look too, especially if you look to the more
Speaker 1: traditional modes of Luca Libre in Mexico, you see like
Speaker 1: straight up like by the by the books, um mythological
Speaker 1: representations in many cases, to the to the point where
Speaker 1: sometimes American viewers look at it and they're like, well,
Speaker 1: I don't understand, Like I knew that this the good
Speaker 1: guy was gonna win. I knew that the the Technico
Speaker 1: was going to defeat the Rudeau, and it played out
Speaker 1: exactly like I expected. There was no surprise. That's the
Speaker 1: kind of the point. Yeah, that's the myth, that's this
Speaker 1: myth reenacted in the ring for you. Yeah. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so then there's also Frederick Jamison and again disservice like
Speaker 1: this is going to be a very like bare bones
Speaker 1: Jamison thing. But Jamison argues that myths actually attempt to
Speaker 1: disintegrate history rather than repeat history, by emptying history out
Speaker 1: of what their original meanings were and replaced them with
Speaker 1: a narrative that seems like it's always been that way.
Speaker 1: So my example, uh, from comic books would be, so
Speaker 1: comics had the comics code that tried to bottle realize
Speaker 1: and regulate and ignore entire aspects of American life for decades,
Speaker 1: right like ex and profanity, which is completely cut out
Speaker 1: of comic book stories. So you have these superhero mythologies
Speaker 1: without any of uh, like the real world that they're
Speaker 1: trying to explain within them, and these mythologies were pretending
Speaker 1: like that wasn't an aspect of the American community and
Speaker 1: acted like it had always been that way, right. Uh
Speaker 1: So it's an interesting sort of take on it that,
Speaker 1: like we're constantly revising history in the same way that
Speaker 1: we're constantly revising our mythologies. And again, like I come
Speaker 1: back to these the scientist examples, right, like we think
Speaker 1: of Einstein and our Einstein that we talk about, and
Speaker 1: Revere is kind of a fictional Einstein, right. Yeah. It
Speaker 1: just also brings to mind the earlier example of myth
Speaker 1: as a as a moral instructional tool. So, yeah, you're
Speaker 1: changing You're you're changing the comic book mythos and then
Speaker 1: using it as a way to or an attempt to say, hey,
Speaker 1: this is how you live, which is there's there's no
Speaker 1: well there is sex, but sure you're trying to make
Speaker 1: a moral stamount part of the mytholo morality of the readers. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the last one that I wanted to throw in there,
Speaker 1: and in particular because the thesis that I wrote when
Speaker 1: I was in grad school was all about Captain America
Speaker 1: and mythological applications to ideology and rhetoric. Uh. There's these
Speaker 1: guys Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, and they've written
Speaker 1: multiple books about something they called the American mono myth,
Speaker 1: and they've argued that Captain America as a character is
Speaker 1: indicative of this mono myth. Uh. They define it as
Speaker 1: an anti democratic fantasy where a superpowered everyman saves society
Speaker 1: by stepping outside of institutions to violently punish villains. There's
Speaker 1: more to it than that. I mean, these guys have
Speaker 1: written books and books and books on this, But look
Speaker 1: at the last three Captain American movies. That's pretty much
Speaker 1: what it is, right, Uh, Captain America, even though he's
Speaker 1: an embodiment of America, he's always stepping outside of whatever
Speaker 1: institution he's part of. Right. If he's part of the military,
Speaker 1: has to do something without them. He's part of Shield,
Speaker 1: he has to reveal that Shield has been co opted
Speaker 1: by Hyde or whatever. If he's a part of the Avengers,
Speaker 1: he has to step outside of the Avengers to set
Speaker 1: things right. It's kind of like this ideal for what
Speaker 1: the system should be, but he's not. Yeah, yeah, in
Speaker 1: a way. But it's also like incredibly violent and sort
Speaker 1: of fascistic as well. Uh. And so he's demonstrative this
Speaker 1: so much that they call it the Captain America complex.
Speaker 1: And much like with Young and his archetypes, you can
Speaker 1: apply the Captain America complex to a lot of pop
Speaker 1: culture examples and find that exact formula playing out. Especially
Speaker 1: I find in a lot of our like eighties action movies,
Speaker 1: the Captain America complex is pretty prevalent. Like lethal weapon
Speaker 1: or total recall, the stuff like that. Like it's always
Speaker 1: you know, some strong badass who has to step outside
Speaker 1: of authority to get things done, you know that kind
Speaker 1: of thing. Uh. And it's interesting they argue that it
Speaker 1: permeates not only our media, but our political language as well.
Speaker 1: And I would say, look at Donald Trump's campaign right now.
Speaker 1: That's why a lot of people are attracted to it
Speaker 1: is but because he steps outside of the institutions, right,
Speaker 1: or at least he claims to to save society by
Speaker 1: punishing the wicked. I do want to say, though, like, well,
Speaker 1: I think that there's something to this. Their evidence is
Speaker 1: only from like a few scattered, uh sources of at
Speaker 1: least in the Captain America case. Uh. And so that's
Speaker 1: one of the reasons why I wrote the thesis. I
Speaker 1: did because I wanted to cover like the seventy years
Speaker 1: of American history that sort of goes on during the
Speaker 1: Captain America continuity. Uh. And one thing that's interesting with
Speaker 1: Captain America in particular, and I wonder if we're going
Speaker 1: to see this show up in these Marvel movies pretty soon,
Speaker 1: is he goes through these cycles where he's all of
Speaker 1: a sudden apathetic about everything. Uh. And in particular, he
Speaker 1: gives up his role as a national symbol because he
Speaker 1: no longer believes in the myths that define the nation
Speaker 1: that he believes in. Right, so he like, there's the
Speaker 1: first big example of this is in the early seventies
Speaker 1: is this Captain America story that's crazy where like it
Speaker 1: turns out like the big villain behind everything is the
Speaker 1: President of the United States. Captain America storms into the
Speaker 1: Oval Office, confronts him in the in the President United
Speaker 1: States shoots himself in the face. And so after that,
Speaker 1: Captain America is like, America, I don't believe in this
Speaker 1: fantasy anymore. I am no longer Captain America. And he
Speaker 1: discards his costume and his shield. If he moved to
Speaker 1: Canada to so he joined Alpha Fi. He becomes a
Speaker 1: biker and he calls himself the Nomad and rides around
Speaker 1: on a bike and and is a vigilante that way,
Speaker 1: and then like eventually finds his faith in America again.
Speaker 1: Then it happens again in the eighties. It happened in
Speaker 1: the two thousands as well. Like this is like this
Speaker 1: recurring storyline with Captain America and kind of from a
Speaker 1: Christian perspective, like kind of like a harrowing of hell,
Speaker 1: maybe even the idea that even the Great Savior has
Speaker 1: to fall and descend and then ride. Oh yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's in the hellish thing about it too, is right,
Speaker 1: Like he's never allowed to die or retire. Like every time,
Speaker 1: like you think Captain America is dead or he gets
Speaker 1: old or something, they replaced him with a new guy.
Speaker 1: He inevitably comes back. It just happened like to three
Speaker 1: weeks ago comics again, like he'd been replaced by someone
Speaker 1: and then and he had he had turned really old,
Speaker 1: he was like ninety years old. And then you know,
Speaker 1: some science fiction anything happened and he's back. But yeah,
Speaker 1: he's gonna have to go through the whole cycle over again.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, um, you know, I just want to
Speaker 1: close out by mentioning William G. Dotty again. He's that
Speaker 1: religious study scholar, mythologist. Um, he summarized a lot of
Speaker 1: what we've talked we've talked about in this episode in
Speaker 1: what is, in my opinion, a highly effective kind of
Speaker 1: eightfold view. So he said that, and I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: roll him out here for you. Number one, myth as
Speaker 1: is an esthetic device. It is narrative literature. Okay, myth
Speaker 1: is a tale of God's in other worlds, it's number two.
Speaker 1: Number three is myths explain our origins. Number four is
Speaker 1: that myth is essentially mistaken or primitive science. Number five
Speaker 1: is that myth is a text for a right or
Speaker 1: ritual that application again. Number six is that myth is
Speaker 1: a means to make universal ideas or truths concrete and
Speaker 1: intelligible for the average consumer. Number seven, myths are all
Speaker 1: about explicating beliefs, collective experiences, or values. And number eight
Speaker 1: myths constitute spiritual or psychic expression, so that that would
Speaker 1: play out well with both like the sacred nature of myth,
Speaker 1: but then also Young's uh collective unconsciousness, which is sort
Speaker 1: of a psychic expression in a way. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: think the big take com and one of the reasons
Speaker 1: I like like this approach is that that I feel
Speaker 1: like a lot of us can agree that myths are
Speaker 1: poly functional. You know, they have they have various functions
Speaker 1: that they're carrying out at the same time, sometimes to
Speaker 1: the same consumer, to the same you know, the same
Speaker 1: person that's listening to, viewing, or hearing the myth or
Speaker 1: just thinking about it in the back of their mind. Again,
Speaker 1: it's this, it's this weird thing because that we're all
Speaker 1: living in the shadow of myth, and we're casting the
Speaker 1: shadow of myth. Um. We may not think that that
Speaker 1: myths play a big role in our lives, but regardless,
Speaker 1: if we're talking about the Greek gods, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the the Old Testament or just the pages of your
Speaker 1: favorite comic book, those uh, those that mythic energy is
Speaker 1: very much in play in our world. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: if any lesson we can take from like this overview
Speaker 1: of all of these ideas about mythology, it's that there's
Speaker 1: no one universal law. Like a lot of these thinkers
Speaker 1: tried to say, I've figured it out. This is the
Speaker 1: key to the universe, and the key to the universe
Speaker 1: is figuring out how these stories about what the key
Speaker 1: to the universe is work right and in a way,
Speaker 1: they're creating their own mythologies. But there are applications that
Speaker 1: you can you can dip into from from many of
Speaker 1: these things and pull them out and think about uh,
Speaker 1: anything really in modern day settings, whether it's science, politics,
Speaker 1: pop culture, and you apply those and you can sort
Speaker 1: of pull out the strings and go, oh, wait a minute.
Speaker 1: This is like the sort of behind the scenes of
Speaker 1: how society works, right, or or at least how we're
Speaker 1: trying to make sense of the world. Still, we're still
Speaker 1: looking up at the sun and the moon and the
Speaker 1: planets and nature and the seasons and going I don't
Speaker 1: really know how this whole thing works. But this answer,
Speaker 1: this is the answer I'm gonna go by, and if
Speaker 1: I'm gonna try to control it, I'm going to perform
Speaker 1: these rituals and everything will be fine. I'm gonna see
Speaker 1: what Batman has to say about it, and then I'm
Speaker 1: gonna touch back in with my my normal linear life.
Speaker 1: Absolutely yeah. I trust Batman every day over. Carl Sagan
Speaker 1: all right, all right, well there you have it again.
Speaker 1: We're just hoping to provide you with some tools, with
Speaker 1: some different perspectives on myth in your life, in your world,
Speaker 1: in the things that you consume. We'd love to hear
Speaker 1: back from all of you on this topic. How does
Speaker 1: myth factor into your life? How do how do these
Speaker 1: different ways of looking at myth factor into your belief systems,
Speaker 1: in your culture, etcetera. Yeah, and going forward to as
Speaker 1: we cover you know, we dive back into more science
Speaker 1: the topics as we continue with the show. You know,
Speaker 1: now we've got sort of a foundational framework for myth
Speaker 1: when it comes up again when we're talking about crazy
Speaker 1: space satellites or tiny bone worms that devour whales at
Speaker 1: the bottom the ocean. Right, So, uh, this is a
Speaker 1: nice way for us to have a framework, you know,
Speaker 1: as you're listening and myth pops up in your head
Speaker 1: again for a future episode as well, please let us know. Uh,
Speaker 1: let's synthesize some of this information together and learn together
Speaker 1: from it. The ways to talk to us about those
Speaker 1: things are social media. Now. You can find us on Facebook,
Speaker 1: you can find us on Twitter, you can find us
Speaker 1: on tumbler, and you can find us on Instagram. Where
Speaker 1: below the mind on all of those Uh, and just
Speaker 1: to reiterate, I say this on every episode, I think,
Speaker 1: but we don't just like post the podcast there, and
Speaker 1: that's it. Like we talk about what what we're working
Speaker 1: on outside of the podcast, whether it's writing or videos.
Speaker 1: We also share all this totally bizarre science and news
Speaker 1: information that we come across in our weekly endeavors. That's right,
Speaker 1: and be sure to check out stuff to bow your
Speaker 1: mind dot com. That's the mother ship. That's where we'll
Speaker 1: find all the podcast episodes, including the landing page for
Speaker 1: this this one, which one includes some links out to
Speaker 1: related content and perhaps some outside material as well. And hey,
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