We Don't Need Another Hero
Oct. 26th, 2008 07:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vovatFor the past few Sundays, I've been writing about stuff I came up with as a kid. While I know I haven't covered everything yet, I don't currently have any memories that I think I can stretch into a full post. That doesn't mean I won't have more posts of that sort in the future, though, so don't despair. Also, there won't be any Simpsons, Family Guy, or American Dad reviews, since those shows aren't on tonight. Yeah, we're going to get another Simpsons Halloween episode after Halloween. I'm not sure why, if they knew they weren't going to air a new show this week, they didn't just put the Halloween one on last week. It's not like they don't show Christmas episodes well in advance of the actual day.
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rockinlibrarian, I recently finished reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I'd never read it before, despite the fact that I've always been interested in mythology and that my dad owned a copy, but I finally checked out a copy from the library. I wasn't always that interested in the psychological parts, as it seemed to mostly reflect the ideas of Freud and Jung, which I always found rather far-fetched. I did, however, like the exploration of the similar themes in the mythologies throughout the world.
One passage I found particularly interesting was this one, from Part II, Chapter I: "The arranging of the world, the creation of man, and the decision about death are typical themes from the tales of the primitive creator. It is difficult to know how seriously or in what sense these stories were believed....Many of the tales that appear in the collections under the category of origin stories were generally regarded more as popular fairy tales than as a book of genesis." I do have to wonder how much people actually believed some of the more absurd myths. I'm sure there were people who did, just as today there are people who think the first human was literally made of dirt and fossils were the result of a worldwide flood. What immediately comes to mind are the Mystery Cults of Imperial Rome, like that of Mithra, where those who were initiated into the mystery were the ones privy to the truth behind the stories. As a non-religious person who's fascinated by mythology, it kind of seems to me like there are two different sorts, which are almost opposite in a way. One is making grand cosmic concepts into everyday symbols, and the other is finding mystical concepts behind more or less generic things. That's really oversimplifying it, but I'll try to explain what I mean. The former is when someone wonders about, say, the nature of the Sun, and says something like, "Hey, the sun looks kind of like an egg yolk. Maybe a giant bird lays the sun every day!" The Sun is outside this person's realm of knowledge, but they see eggs all the time. Does the person who comes up with this concept actually believe it, or just think it makes a good story? I don't know, but I would imagine it varies. The other kind can be exemplified by the story of Jesus. While we don't know for sure that he existed, his story (especially as told in the Gospel of Mark, which lacks the virgin birth and only hints at the resurrection) is pretty believable. We know that there was a time in Judea when there were people trying to reform Judaism, and being scorned by the establishment and sometimes even killed. The mystical notion here isn't simply that a religious leader was crucified, but the symbolism added to this, in which Jesus took on and paid for all the sin of the world, and came back to life after dying. To put it another way, my former sort of mythology is deciding that a tree holds the world together, while the latter is to come upon a naturally occurring tree and state that it IS a world tree. I think the latter variety is more commonly believed today, and perhaps has been throughout history.
To Campbell, and to some others I've seen address the topic, what's really important are the deeper truths behind the myths. I'd say those are easier to find in some stories than others, though. I mean, I can see the intended meaning in the Garden of Eden story, even if I don't necessarily agree with it. With Noah's Ark, though, it's a little more difficult to fathom. But then, some people think that story might be based on memories of an actual flood (perhaps of the Black Sea) that a few people survived by building boats. If this is true, it's not so much a tale meant to explain why things are the way they are (although there is some of that mixed in, like with the explanation of the rainbow), but more along the lines of the real (or at least possibly real) event being modified into a myth. That would make it fit more easily into my second category, but I'll admit that these categories aren't very rigidly defined.
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rockinlibrarian, I recently finished reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I'd never read it before, despite the fact that I've always been interested in mythology and that my dad owned a copy, but I finally checked out a copy from the library. I wasn't always that interested in the psychological parts, as it seemed to mostly reflect the ideas of Freud and Jung, which I always found rather far-fetched. I did, however, like the exploration of the similar themes in the mythologies throughout the world.One passage I found particularly interesting was this one, from Part II, Chapter I: "The arranging of the world, the creation of man, and the decision about death are typical themes from the tales of the primitive creator. It is difficult to know how seriously or in what sense these stories were believed....Many of the tales that appear in the collections under the category of origin stories were generally regarded more as popular fairy tales than as a book of genesis." I do have to wonder how much people actually believed some of the more absurd myths. I'm sure there were people who did, just as today there are people who think the first human was literally made of dirt and fossils were the result of a worldwide flood. What immediately comes to mind are the Mystery Cults of Imperial Rome, like that of Mithra, where those who were initiated into the mystery were the ones privy to the truth behind the stories. As a non-religious person who's fascinated by mythology, it kind of seems to me like there are two different sorts, which are almost opposite in a way. One is making grand cosmic concepts into everyday symbols, and the other is finding mystical concepts behind more or less generic things. That's really oversimplifying it, but I'll try to explain what I mean. The former is when someone wonders about, say, the nature of the Sun, and says something like, "Hey, the sun looks kind of like an egg yolk. Maybe a giant bird lays the sun every day!" The Sun is outside this person's realm of knowledge, but they see eggs all the time. Does the person who comes up with this concept actually believe it, or just think it makes a good story? I don't know, but I would imagine it varies. The other kind can be exemplified by the story of Jesus. While we don't know for sure that he existed, his story (especially as told in the Gospel of Mark, which lacks the virgin birth and only hints at the resurrection) is pretty believable. We know that there was a time in Judea when there were people trying to reform Judaism, and being scorned by the establishment and sometimes even killed. The mystical notion here isn't simply that a religious leader was crucified, but the symbolism added to this, in which Jesus took on and paid for all the sin of the world, and came back to life after dying. To put it another way, my former sort of mythology is deciding that a tree holds the world together, while the latter is to come upon a naturally occurring tree and state that it IS a world tree. I think the latter variety is more commonly believed today, and perhaps has been throughout history.
To Campbell, and to some others I've seen address the topic, what's really important are the deeper truths behind the myths. I'd say those are easier to find in some stories than others, though. I mean, I can see the intended meaning in the Garden of Eden story, even if I don't necessarily agree with it. With Noah's Ark, though, it's a little more difficult to fathom. But then, some people think that story might be based on memories of an actual flood (perhaps of the Black Sea) that a few people survived by building boats. If this is true, it's not so much a tale meant to explain why things are the way they are (although there is some of that mixed in, like with the explanation of the rainbow), but more along the lines of the real (or at least possibly real) event being modified into a myth. That would make it fit more easily into my second category, but I'll admit that these categories aren't very rigidly defined.
