Myth Manners
[I wrote this several weeks ago and forgot about it.]
Reading Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth. [She also wrote A Brief History of God, which I have not read.] There are three important components to this book: her conception of history, her conception of myth, and the relationship between history and myth. This is an uncritical book. Her treatment of both myth and history is unsophisticated.
The footnotes and perspective of the book reveal a very strong reliance upon the mythological ideas of Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, and Walter Burkert, in particular. In general, she conceives of myth in terms of religious belief, ritual practice, and psychology (as outlined by John Arnold in his Myth: a Very Short Introduction, vol. 111 in Oxford University Press's Very Short Introductions series. I didn't like that book when I read it, but I'm finding my reading of it to be useful), to the virtual exclusion of other perspectives on mythology. Myth is "only comprehensible in a liturgical context"; it "must lead to imitation or participation" [I forgot where I was going with this.]
Armstrong's view of history is distinctly progressivist. The first line of Chapter 2 refers to humans as having "completed their biological evolution" (which will come as a surprise to evolutionary and population biologists). It took urbanization to give rise to art and literature. The hope of the Modern era was that "humanity had entered a more positive era"; at any rate, it was "the last of the great revolutions of human experience."
She also exhibits a strongly universalist perspective on human behavior: all myth functions similarly for all peoples in similar cultural conditions. The details of various local mythologies may vary (e.g., China and the Near East), but they share broad themes that are determined, even prescribed, by cultural condition. The various major regional cultural changes throughout history are ascribed to tensions in national psyches arising from new material and behavioral conditions, with no consideration of systemic adaptation or reorganization. For a given cultural stage, the psychic tensions are similar between all nations, and their resolutions are the same (otherwise subsequent tensions and resolutions wouldn't be the same, but her argument needs them to be).
Combine progressivism and universalism and you get her characterization of historically new social and cultural conditions in terms of emerging cultural novelties rather than the overall character of "old + new": that is, change is substitutional rather than additive. There is little, if any, acknowledgement of cultural continuity; for Armstrong, cultural change seems to result in essential qualitative difference. Thus her discussion of the historical changes in the function of myth are based upon stereotypes so oversimplified that they're practically straw men. This is most clearly evident in her tacit sympathy for holding (para-)scientific thought responsible for the decline of myth in modern societies. It's quite clear, though, that even in Modern societies, myth retains a powerful hold on subpopulations (e.g., Christian fundamentalism ever since the Reformation). Yet for Armstrong, people change in their responses to myth; myth itself does not change. Myth itself remains historically stable because it is an eternal category, a mode of thought that is more or less commonly employed, rather than a cultural construction by which present circumstances are put in metaphysical perspective.
The second and third chapters, about the mythology of the Paleolithic and Neolithic, are abysmal. Her information about material culture of those periods seems to be lacking significantly. Her principal cited sources are the above three mythologists, whose prehistoric information is now dated, and who weren't archaeologists in any case. Next to nothing is known of the beliefs of the people of those times, but you wouldn't realize that from this book. She gets dates wrong; she lumps cultural variation from across thousands of miles and tens of thousands of years into what are really more uninformed stereotypes than anything else (she seems actually to think Paleolithic people were "cavemen"); she accepts long-disproven vernacular beliefs about hunting & gathering ways of life, including dependence upon hunting (instead of gathering) as the primary means of food acquisition, the ostensible precariousness of hunting & gathering as a way of life, the necessity of agriculture before people could settle down and invent material complexity. She treats the appearance of agriculture as an event rather than the millenia-long process it was, and ignores the risks to health and social stability that accompanied it (lifespans of early agriculturalists were actually shorter than the lifespans of their hunting & gathering predecessors, because early agriculture was carb-rich and everything-else–poor). Most of her discussions of prehistoric myth are inferences premised upon the idea that prehistoric mythology survives recognizably in Classical (especially Greek) mythology, despite the fact that agriculture had been well-established in Europe and the Near East as long before high-classical Greece as high-classical Greece was before us today (and that's just the established agriculture, not emerging agriculture or even Paleolithic hunting & gathering). (On the other hand, she doesn't seem to buy in to that New Age-ified Paleolithic Mother Goddess nonsense.)
The fourth and fifth chapters are more interesting. I'm not competent to evaluate her explications of myth in particular historical circumstances, but she at least considers them within regional (rather than global) cultural contexts, has actual primary source material to draw upon, and makes some interesting and plausible arguments. In some cases, though, when I looked up the mythological references she cited, they didn't seem to offer all that much support to her argument.
The final chapter is basically a brief survey of modernity and its discontents, with several Modernist works of literature examined as latter-day mythology (Eliot's The Waste Land, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Joyce's Ulysses, Orwell's 1984 and several others). This has been done by others in greater detail and with more authority. There is nothing new in the chapter. Sadly, her notes are sparse and lack references that one might use to investigate the argument further.
Curiously enough, she decries the modern linear mode of history for its inability to incorporate the always-alreadyness of myth as a moral or ethical force; but her book is a very good example of linear, unsubtle cause-and-effect history. In many ways, the book is perhaps best perceived as a meditation on the role of myth in history rather than an actual history of myth. I can't imagine that it would be interesting to anyone with more than a shallow interest in the history of myth, except for practicing literary criticism (e.g., this review).
Reading Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth. [She also wrote A Brief History of God, which I have not read.] There are three important components to this book: her conception of history, her conception of myth, and the relationship between history and myth. This is an uncritical book. Her treatment of both myth and history is unsophisticated.
The footnotes and perspective of the book reveal a very strong reliance upon the mythological ideas of Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, and Walter Burkert, in particular. In general, she conceives of myth in terms of religious belief, ritual practice, and psychology (as outlined by John Arnold in his Myth: a Very Short Introduction, vol. 111 in Oxford University Press's Very Short Introductions series. I didn't like that book when I read it, but I'm finding my reading of it to be useful), to the virtual exclusion of other perspectives on mythology. Myth is "only comprehensible in a liturgical context"; it "must lead to imitation or participation" [I forgot where I was going with this.]
Armstrong's view of history is distinctly progressivist. The first line of Chapter 2 refers to humans as having "completed their biological evolution" (which will come as a surprise to evolutionary and population biologists). It took urbanization to give rise to art and literature. The hope of the Modern era was that "humanity had entered a more positive era"; at any rate, it was "the last of the great revolutions of human experience."
She also exhibits a strongly universalist perspective on human behavior: all myth functions similarly for all peoples in similar cultural conditions. The details of various local mythologies may vary (e.g., China and the Near East), but they share broad themes that are determined, even prescribed, by cultural condition. The various major regional cultural changes throughout history are ascribed to tensions in national psyches arising from new material and behavioral conditions, with no consideration of systemic adaptation or reorganization. For a given cultural stage, the psychic tensions are similar between all nations, and their resolutions are the same (otherwise subsequent tensions and resolutions wouldn't be the same, but her argument needs them to be).
Combine progressivism and universalism and you get her characterization of historically new social and cultural conditions in terms of emerging cultural novelties rather than the overall character of "old + new": that is, change is substitutional rather than additive. There is little, if any, acknowledgement of cultural continuity; for Armstrong, cultural change seems to result in essential qualitative difference. Thus her discussion of the historical changes in the function of myth are based upon stereotypes so oversimplified that they're practically straw men. This is most clearly evident in her tacit sympathy for holding (para-)scientific thought responsible for the decline of myth in modern societies. It's quite clear, though, that even in Modern societies, myth retains a powerful hold on subpopulations (e.g., Christian fundamentalism ever since the Reformation). Yet for Armstrong, people change in their responses to myth; myth itself does not change. Myth itself remains historically stable because it is an eternal category, a mode of thought that is more or less commonly employed, rather than a cultural construction by which present circumstances are put in metaphysical perspective.
The second and third chapters, about the mythology of the Paleolithic and Neolithic, are abysmal. Her information about material culture of those periods seems to be lacking significantly. Her principal cited sources are the above three mythologists, whose prehistoric information is now dated, and who weren't archaeologists in any case. Next to nothing is known of the beliefs of the people of those times, but you wouldn't realize that from this book. She gets dates wrong; she lumps cultural variation from across thousands of miles and tens of thousands of years into what are really more uninformed stereotypes than anything else (she seems actually to think Paleolithic people were "cavemen"); she accepts long-disproven vernacular beliefs about hunting & gathering ways of life, including dependence upon hunting (instead of gathering) as the primary means of food acquisition, the ostensible precariousness of hunting & gathering as a way of life, the necessity of agriculture before people could settle down and invent material complexity. She treats the appearance of agriculture as an event rather than the millenia-long process it was, and ignores the risks to health and social stability that accompanied it (lifespans of early agriculturalists were actually shorter than the lifespans of their hunting & gathering predecessors, because early agriculture was carb-rich and everything-else–poor). Most of her discussions of prehistoric myth are inferences premised upon the idea that prehistoric mythology survives recognizably in Classical (especially Greek) mythology, despite the fact that agriculture had been well-established in Europe and the Near East as long before high-classical Greece as high-classical Greece was before us today (and that's just the established agriculture, not emerging agriculture or even Paleolithic hunting & gathering). (On the other hand, she doesn't seem to buy in to that New Age-ified Paleolithic Mother Goddess nonsense.)
The fourth and fifth chapters are more interesting. I'm not competent to evaluate her explications of myth in particular historical circumstances, but she at least considers them within regional (rather than global) cultural contexts, has actual primary source material to draw upon, and makes some interesting and plausible arguments. In some cases, though, when I looked up the mythological references she cited, they didn't seem to offer all that much support to her argument.
The final chapter is basically a brief survey of modernity and its discontents, with several Modernist works of literature examined as latter-day mythology (Eliot's The Waste Land, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Joyce's Ulysses, Orwell's 1984 and several others). This has been done by others in greater detail and with more authority. There is nothing new in the chapter. Sadly, her notes are sparse and lack references that one might use to investigate the argument further.
Curiously enough, she decries the modern linear mode of history for its inability to incorporate the always-alreadyness of myth as a moral or ethical force; but her book is a very good example of linear, unsubtle cause-and-effect history. In many ways, the book is perhaps best perceived as a meditation on the role of myth in history rather than an actual history of myth. I can't imagine that it would be interesting to anyone with more than a shallow interest in the history of myth, except for practicing literary criticism (e.g., this review).
posted by Dr. Bubbles at 11:06
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