Conclusion
The Functioning of Myth
I. The Local Images and the Universal Way
“What is important,” said a white-bearded Hindu pilgrim as the train pulled into Benares, “is not the object worshiped, but the depth and sincerity of the worship.” And yet he was getting off at Benares, after a long and arduous trip, to worship Śiva in his spiritual capital.
Two aspects of every ritual tradition are recognized in Indian thought, and they correspond to Adolph Bastian’s “elementary ideas” (Elementargedanke) and “ethnic ideas” (Völkergedanke), which we discussed in the opening pages of this book. It will be recalled that according to Bastian the elementary ideas are never experienced directly, in a pure state, abstracted from the locally conditioned ethnic ideas through which they are substantialized, but, like the image of man himself, are to be known only by way of the rich variety of their infections in the panorama of human life. We may therefore think of any myth or rite either as a clue to what may be permanent or universal in human nature (which case our emphasis will be psychological, or perhaps even metaphysical), or, on the other hand, as a function of the local scene, the landscape, the history, and the sociology of the folk concerned (in which case our approach will be ethnological or historical). The corresponding Indian terms designating these two aspects of mythology and rite are, respectively, mārga, meaning “path” or “way,” the path or way to the discovery of the universal, and deśī (pronounced “day-shee”), “of the region, local, of ethnic,” the peculiar, sectarian, or historical aspect of any cult, through which it constellates a folk, a nation, or a civilization.
I should like to join these two Indian terms to Bastian’s; for they not only corroborate his insight but also suggest better than the Western terms the psychological force, or way of service, of the two aspects of a mythological image. Functioning as a “way,” mythology and ritual conduce to a transformation of the individual, disengaging him from his local, historical conditions and leading him toward some kind of ineffable experience. Functioning as an “ethnic idea,” on the other hand, the image binds the individual to his family’s system of historically conditioned sentiments, activities, and beliefs, as a functioning member of a sociological organism. This antinomy is fundamental to our subject, and every failure to recognize it leads not only to unnecessary argument, but also to a misunderstanding — one way or the other — of the force of the mythological symbol itself, which is precisely, to render an experience of the ineffable through the local and concrete, and thus, paradoxically, to amplify the force and appeal of the local forms even while carrying the mind beyond them. The distinctive challenge of mythology lies in its power to effect this dual end; and not to recognize this fact is to miss the whole point and mystery of our science.
We have to recognize, therefore, that even where a single deity is worshiped, the varieties of religious experience represented by the worshipers may differ to such an extent that it is only from the most superficial sociological point of view that they can be said to share the same religion. They are held together sociologically by their god, or gods, yet psychologically are on different planes.
“Among the Dakota Indians,” we hear, for example, from Paul Radin, “what the ordinary man regards as eight distinct deities, the priest and thinker takes to be aspects of one and the same deity.” [Note 1]
Comparably, in the contemporary world of cross-cultural communication, where the minds of men, leaping the local fences, can recognize common fields of experience and realization under alien forms, what many priests and sociologists regard as eight distinct deities, the comparative mythologist and psychologist can take to be aspects of one and the same. The nineteenth century saint and sage Ramakrishna stressed this psychological — as opposed to ethnological — orientation when he spoke of the ultimate unity of all religions.
“A mother prepares dishes to suit the stomachs of her children,” he said. “Suppose she has five children and a fish is brought for the family. She doesn’t cook pilau or kalia for all of them. All have not the same power of digestion. She prepares for some a simple stew; but she loves all of her children equally….Do you know what the truth is?” he asked. And he answered his own question:
God has made different religions to suit different aspirants, times and countries. All doctrines are only so many paths; but a path is by no means God himself. Indeed, one can reach God if one follows any of the paths with wholehearted devotion. You have no doubt heard the story of the chameleon. A man entered the wood and saw a chameleon on a tree. He reported to his friends. “I have seen a red lizard.” He was firmly convinced that it was nothing but red. Another person, after visiting the tree said, “I have seen a green lizard.” He was firmly convinced that it was nothing but green. But the man who lived under the tree said, “What both of you have said is true. But the fact is that the creature is sometimes red, sometimes green, sometimes yellow, and sometimes has no color at all.” [Note 2]
Every student of comparative mythology knows that when the orthodox mind talks and writes of God the nations go asunder; the deśī, the local, historical, ethical aspect of the cult symbol is taken with absolute seriousness and the chameleon is green, not red. Whereas, when the mystics talk, no matter what their deśī, their words in a profound sense meet — and the nations too. The names of Śiva, Allah, Buddha, and Christ lose their historical force and come together as adequate pointers of a way (marga) that all must go who would transcend their time-bound, earth-bound faculties and limitations.
We have summarized in Parts Two to Four the history and distribution of the mythological forms according to the plane of interest of history and ethnology. It remains now to indicate very briefly the psychological levels in terms of which symbols are experienced and utilized. And here it will be useful to turn to India for a system of classification. For in India, where an essentially psychological orientation to the forms of myth has prevailed for millenniums in the disciplines of yoga, and a vast number of native and alien cults have existed side by side, a cross-cultural, non- sectarian, syncretic analysis of myth and ritual in psychological terms has yielded a number of very clear, well- defined orders of comparative interpretation — of which we may choose the simplest for our present introductory sketch of a unitary mythological science.
II. The Bondages of Love, Power, and Virtue
In classical Indian philosophy a distinction is made between the ends for which men strive in the world and the aim of absolute release from these ends. The ends for which men strive in the world are three — no more, no less; namely: love and pleasure (kāma), power and success (artha: pronounced “art-ha”), and lawful order and moral virtue (dharma).
The first, kāma, corresponds to the aim or interest conceived by Freud to be fundamental to all life and thought, and — as a vast literature of psychoanalytic research now lets us know — anyone motivated by this urge, whether he be the patient or the doctor, sees sex in everything and everything in sex. The symbolism of mythology, like the world itself, means sex and nothing else to such a psyche: food, shelter, sex, and parenthood. And all mythology and cult then (including the cult of psychoanalysis itself) is simply a means to the harmonious realization of this vegetal system of interests.
The second category of worldly aims, artha, “power and success,” corresponds to that conceived by the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and the later psychology of Alfred Adler [Note 3] to be the fundamental impulse and interest of all life and thought; and again, we have a considerable clinical literature to let us know that any psyche fully mastered by this drive, desiring to conquer, eat, consume, and turn all things into itself or into its own, discovers in the myths, gods, and rituals of religion, no more that supernatural means for self-and tribal aggrandizement.
These two systems of interest, then — the erotic and aggressive — may be taken to represent, together, the sum of man’s primary biological urges. They do not have to be infused; they are implicit at birth and supply the animal foundations of all experience and reaction.
We have already observed that in many animal species the innate releasing mechanisms (IRMs) respond immediately and appropriately to specific stimuli of which the individual animal in question has had no previous experience, the reacting, “knowing” subject in such cases being not the individual but the species; whereas in others an individual experience (an “imprint”) supplies the sign stimulus to which the affected IRM thereafter responds. And we have observed, further, that in the species man the majority of the responses are to sign stimuli established by imprint. But then we found that such imprints are in large measure constant to the species, so that a considerable series can be named of fundamental imprints or engrams to which the whole race responds. In other words, we found that there are certain fundamental biological urges ingrained from birth in the human central nervous system and that these are released by sign stimuli which, in the main, are also constant to the species, though not innate. And so we may say that a substantial trans-cultural system of constants has been found to exist, on the level of which no greatly significant historical or sociological differentiations can be discerned.
Furthermore, we now must note, in addition, that these two elementary systems of interest, kāma and artha, pleasure and power, do not necessarily support each other but often are in conflict. For example, even among the fish, the little fellow known as the stickleback has a highly effective concealing color pattern outside of the breeding season, but when he is ready for mating everything changes. As Professor Tinbergen describes the case: “The back is much darker than the ventral side, thus counterfeiting the effect of dorsal illumination (‘counter-shading’), and the sides show a pattern of vertical bars, thus breaking up the visual outline of the body (‘disruptive pattern’). [Note 4] During the short courtship period, however, the coloration of the little fish changes, “leaving the back a radiant bluish-white, while the ventral side becomes deep red. The result is a total reversal of the countershading while the disruptive coloration disappears. The fish is now very conspicuous indeed, which is an adaptation to attract females. At the same time such a male is extremely mobile and practically loses its escape reaction. There are indications that these adaptations serving cooperation between the sexes render him very vulnerable to predators like cormorants and herons.
“Such a conflict between various ‘interests,’ of which this is only a random example, is in fact a basic phenomenon of adaptiveness,” Tinbergen declares; and he concludes: “The conflict is resolved by all animals in such a way as to compromise between the different demands.” [Note 5]
And in man, too, there has to be a compromise. So that in the psyche itself, even before the factor of the social norms and mores — the aims of dharma — in introduced, an elementary problem of balance and harmonization exists, which has to be solved — and solved, and solved again, since man, unlike the stickleback, has no mating season, but is ever alert to the values and offerings of both worlds.
Dharma, the sense of duty, the knowledge of one’s duty and the will to abide by it, is not innate, but the aim instilled in the young by education. Since the period of the Renaissance, we of the West have come to believe that the proper aim of education is the inculcation of information about the world in which we live. This, however, was not the aim in the past, nor is it the aim in the Orient (in which I include Russia) to this day. The aim of education in the primitive, archaic, and Oriental spheres has always been and will no doubt continue to be, for many centuries, not primarily to enlighten the mind concerning the nature of the universe, but to create communities of shared experience for the engagement of the sentiments of the growing individual in the matters of chief concern to the local group. The unsocialized thought and feeling of the very young child are egocentric but not socially dangerous. When the primary urges of the adolescent remain unsocialized, however, they become inevitably a threat to the harmony of the group. The paramount function of all myth and ritual, therefore, has always been, and surely must continue to be, to engage the individual, both emotionally and intellectually, in the local organization. And this aim is best effected — as we have seen — through a solemn conjuring up of intensely shared experiences by virtue of which the whole system of childhood fantasy and spontaneous belief is engaged and fused with the functioning system of the community. The infantile ego — uncommitted, unaware of itself as distinct from the universe and ranging without bounds, without regard for the conventions of the local scene (like those Greenland Eskimo puppies who could not learn until adolescence the political geography of the packs) — is dissolved for recombination in a ritual and actual experience of death and resurrection: death of the infantile ego and resurrection of the socially desirable adult. So that, thereafter, the man is neither physically nor spiritually a general model of the species Homo sapiens, but specifically an example of a certain local type, developed to function in a certain way in a certain field.
Kāma, artha, and dharma, then — pleasure, power, and the laws of virtue, the two primary systems of interest of the raw individual controlled by the mores of the local group — are the fields of force composed in every functioning system of mythology on its plane of address to the common man, the hard-headed, tough-minded, honest hunter, his wife, and his family. And so that the pedagogically furnished system of the law (dharma) should have the weight and authority to work upon the two others (kāma and artha), it is presented as the will and nature of some unimpeachable higher might — which, according to the level of development of the group in question, may be represented as the will and magic of the “ancestors,” the will of an omnipotent all-father, the mathematics of the universe, the natural order of an ideal humanity, or an abstract, immutable imperative seated in the moral nature of every man who is properly a man. The main point throughout, however, is that this third, socially presented principle should have sovereignty over nature’s two, and that the members of the group who represent it should have the whip hand. Attitudes of love, fear, servitude, pride in achievement, and identification with the law itself are variously fostered by the rites through which the local dharma is imprinted; and the individual, assaulted from every side — no less from inside than from out — is either beaten into form or rendered mad.
We should not judge the case of the past, however, by the present. Among the paleolithic nomads the groups were relatively small and the demands of dharma relatively simple. Furthermore, the roles to be played accorded with the natural with the natural capacities of the male and female organisms, which had evolved and been gradually shaped under conditions of the hunt during the course of a period of some six hundred thousand years. With the turn, however, to agriculture, c. 6000 b.c., and the rapid development then of sedentary, highly differentiated, and very much larger social units (up to, say, four or five hundred souls), the problem no only of enforcing but also of rationalizing a dharma in which inequality and yet coordination were of the essence became acute. It was then — by a stroke of intuitive genius — that the order of the universe, in which inequality and coordination are of the essence, was taken as a model, and mankind was put to school to the stars. In every one of the archaic systems the mythology of a natural harmony coordinating mankind and the universe poured its force into the various social orders, so that the sheer brutality of the interplay of the three mutually antagonistic interest systems of kama, artha, and dharma was softened, beautified, and significantly enriched by the operation of a fourth principle, that of the mind’s awe before the cognized mystery of the world.
And it is now to this fourth principle that we must turn our regard; for although it is true that the full extremes of dedication to this principle have been realized only in the Orient, it is also and equally true that its force, in what may be termed the minor, first stages of its mysteries, inhabits, and has always inhabited, mythology wherever it has lived, and will today, as its spirit is recaptured, make it evident that science itself is now the only field through which the dimension of mythology can be again revealed.
III. The Release from Bondage
In the period of the hieratic city states man’s awe before the discovered order of the universe moved him to match that order in a mime, based on what he conceived to be celestial laws, which should bring into play in his own field of kama, artha, and dharma the force of a superior principle. Comparably, in the earlier periods of the paleolithic and mesolithic gatherers, hunters, and primitive planters, a sense of awe before the closely watched wonders of the animal and plant domains had produced the mimes of the buffalo dance and the sacrificed seed. Through such half-mad games and plays ordered human societies were constellated in which the mutually contradictory interests of the elementary and social urges were resolved. And the higher principle according to which they were thus resolved was not in any sense a function or derivative either of any one of them or their combination, but an actually superior, superordinated principle sui generis, which we have already seen illustrated in the round dance of Köhler’s chimpanzees: that principle of disinterested delight and self-loss in a rhythm of beauty, which now is termed aesthetic and which used to be called, more loosely, spiritual, mystical, or religious. The biological urges to enjoy and to master (with their opposites, to loathe and to fear), as well as the social urge to evaluate (as good or evil, true or false), simply drop away, and a rapture in sheer experience supervenes, in which self-loss and elevation are the same. Such an impact is “beyond worlds”; for it is not such as can be explained by a reference to anything else. The mind is released — for a moment, for a day, or perhaps forever — from those anxieties to enjoy, to win, or to be correct, which spring from the net of nerves in which men are entangled. Ego dissolved, there is nothing in the net but life — which is everywhere, and forever. The Zen masters of China and Japan have called this state the state of “no-mind.” The classical Indian terms are moksa, “release,” bodhi, “enlightenment,” and nirvana, “transcendence of the winds of passion.” Joyce speaks of “the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, “when the clear radiance of the aesthetic image is apprehended by the mind, which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony. “The mind,” he says, “in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal.”
The impulse to art — the impulse to echo, through accord, an apprehended order of beauty — underlies the grandiose formation of the archaic orders of society; and, as we have seen, whole populations could be caught up in such a picture and given form, a new form, in which, paradoxically, all was surrendered and yet a heightened life was gained. We cannot suppose, however, that all who participated in the mime experienced its wonder in aesthetic terms. For the majority its value must have been only magical: a power to produce the fruits of their three elementary orders of desire. And yet, we cannot assume out of hand that there was none capable of disinterested wonder; for whence, then, would the rapture have sprung from which the social forms themselves derived? The words of our two Eskimo shamans, Igjugarjuk and Najagneq, have let us know that primitive man could bring his mind to rest in the mystery of the universe and therewith attain to a knowledge that can be justly called wisdom. His technical and scientific knowledge was limited to the horizon of his pitiful temporal community, but his wisdom, his enlightenment, his sense of experience of the mystery and power of the universe, was of eternal worth.
We have already pointed to the deep psychological cleavage separating the tough-minded “honest hunters” from their feared yet indispensable tender-minded shamans. We must now observe that for these two types, throughout the course of history, mythology and cult have had precisely opposite meanings, values, and effects. The benefits of religion for the majority have been primarily of the order of kama, artha, and dharma. The cult has served as a magical device to assure an abundance of food and youngsters, power over enemies, and the linkage of the individual to the order of his society. It has served, that is to say, as a means to engage him in the desi, the local, ethnic context, and has supplied, in compensation, assurance of a continuance of the goods of kama, artha, and dharma beyond the grave. One’s little offerings of finger-joints, pigs, sons and daughters, or even of oneself, seem to have meaning in a sort of mystical barter system; and one’s peccadillos, missed by the police, can be counted on to eat from within, like rats, doing the work of the law. But then, perhaps, on occasion, in the precincts of the temple, dancing ground, or some sacred site, the fleeting wisp of a sense of some mystery beyond, in the face of which all of this is trivial nonsense, may be experienced and therewith — even if only for a second — the interest of the fourth end for which men may live will have been attained.
The Way of Suffering of the shaman is the earliest example we know of a lifetime devoted to the fourth end: the serous use of myth hermetically, as marga, as a way to psychological metamorphosis. And the remarkable fact is that the evidence points irrefutably to an achievement — at least in many cases — of a perceptible amplification of the individual’s horizon of experience and depth of realization through his spiritual death and resurrection, even on the level of these first primitive explorations. The shaman is in a measure released form the local system of illusions and put in touch with mysteries of the psyche itself, which lead to wisdom concerning both the soul and its world; and he thereby performs the necessary function for society of moving it from stability and sterility in the old toward new reaches and new depths of realization.
The two types of mind, thus, are complementary : the tough-minded, representing the inert, reactionary; and the tender, the living progressive impulse — respectively, attachment to the local and timely and the impulse to the timeless universal. In human history the two have faced each other in dialogue since the beginning, and the effect has been that actual progress and process from lesser to greater horizons, simple to complex organizations, slight to rich patters of the art-work which is civilization in its flowering in time.
Once this point is made, I think, it speaks for itself. The dual service of myth as contributory to the ends of kāma, artha, and dharma, and, on the other hand, as a means of release from these ego-linked obsessions, is now perfectly obvious. And that in the latter service it is functioning as art can hardly be denied. Can mythology have sprung from any minds but the minds of artists? The temple-caves of the paleolithic give us our answer.
Mythology — and therefore civilization — is a poetic, supernormal image, conceived, like all poetry, in depth, but susceptible of interpretation on various levels. The shallowest minds see in it the local scenery; the deepest, the foreground of the void; and between are all the stages of the Way from the ethnic to the elementary idea, the local to the universal being, which is Everyman, as he both knows and is afraid to know. For the human mind in its polarity of the male and female modes of experience, in its passages from infancy to adulthood and old age, in its toughness and tenderness, and in its continuing dialogue with the world, is the ultimate mythogenetic zone — the creator and destroyer, the slave and yet the master, of all the gods.