Defining Mythology While Ranting Against Merriam-Webster

I hate Merriam-Webster’s definitions of mythology. The first one is “an allegorical narrative.” That’s straight-out idiocy. Mythologies are virtually never allegories, which are stories in which characters, things and events stand for specific but abstract ideas. Orwell’s Animal Farm is pretty close to a modern day allegory, but more classic examples are The Faerie Queene or Pilgrim’s Progress.

Whomever wrote that definition may have mistaken myth for allegory because some mythic characters some to represent natural phenomena or ideas. For example, Helios is often viewed as the personification of the Sun. However, the sun god that gets most of the press in Greek and Roman tales is Apollo, who is a much more complex character. He may be associated with the sun but he’s also identified with music, poetry, art, oracles, archery, plague, medicine, light and knowledge. And, aside from those associations, here’s a three-dimensional character who doesn’t necessarily symbolize or stand-in for anything but himself.

Okay, so if allegory is such a terrible definition, what’s better? Merriam-Webster’s second definition includes this: “the myths dealing with the gods, demigods, and legendary heroes of a particular people.”

Meh. It’s certainly better than “allegorical narrative,” and it does point to what people commonly assume are myths, but it ignores and even obfuscates the fact that myths tend tend to start off as religions. That is, they are human narratives intended to explain the world to ourselves and help guide our thoughts and actions. Only after religions die, or at least lose the majority believers, do they become myths.

In a lot of cases, whether a story is a religion or a myth depends entirely on your belief system. For example, are the stories found in Vedic literature Hindu mythologies or aspects of Hinduism itself?

So, if Merriam-Webster has such crappy definitions of mythology, what’s a better one? The famed mythologist Joseph Campbell said myth was
“the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.” Yeah, well, that’s so highfalutin that it’s almost impossible to derive any meaning from it.

I think mythology is something much more basic: it’s the narratives that give, or have given, people their systems of belief. In other words, myths are the stories we tell ourselves about how the cosmos works, what it means, and our own places within it.

So, scientific narratives and interpretations are today’s myths. Many of us accept the “big bang” or “dark energy” as scientific facts, but they may turn out to be nonsense or, at least, deeply mistaken. They’re the best stories we have right now, given the evidence at hand. All the debate about climate change is an example is a narrative that is viewed as false by some and a scientific fact by others. Either way, though, it’s a narrative used to describe what’s happening in the world.

Some myths probably get close to the truth of what’s happening in the universe (or multiverse, depending on your narrative), but they’re all about explaining the world and our lives to ourselves.

Therefore, in a very real sense, myths are the cultural and cognitive waters in which we all, without exception, swim. We have family myths, personal myths, political myths, scientific myths, etc.

In certain contexts, we tend to use the word “myth” to be synonymous with “false,” but this belies a more important point: that mythologies are all we have. There are no direct lines to The Truth. The best we can do is tell ourselves stories (aka, narratives or myths) about how things works and hope those they get as close to some ultimate truth as they can.

Image: Le Rapt d'Europe ("The Abduction of Europa," 1750) by Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre

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