Unraveling the Mythic

icing on the cake, you know. Yeah, you'll hear us often refer to mythos a lot, like in the background, especially like if we bring up topics like I don't know, pop culture, uh HP, Lovecraft type stuff that we we talked about often. So we're applying both myth as like the large general sense of the term, and then mythos as like these sort of like fictional shared universes with histories to them. Right. Yeah, So it's it's something we're

always talking about. So it seemed fitting to do an episode where we say, hey, let's talk just a little bit about mythology now, would Don't worry, We're not gonna attempt to do a like complete overall of world myth cycles. What we're hoping to do here is to, uh it, to provide you some of the basic tools to to roll through some of the different ways that we look at myth, the different ways that we dissect myth and understand what they mean to us and what the power

of myth really is. Yeah, this is like very much like a bare bones intro. And I imagine that if there are people out there who have done any kind of cultural or anthropological studies of myth before, you're gonna say, oh, but what about this detailer, what about this thing that

you missed? And you know, there was only so much that we could fit into a one hour episode, right, And likewise, when it comes to examples, we're gonna We're gonna not We're probably not gonna use a lot of examples in here, but we are going to end up using some of the basic Greek examples that most of

our listeners are gonna be familiar with. This is not, in a by any means intended to slight any of the fascinating cultures out there, but we're probably going to draw cards from the deck that most people familiar with, and probably some cards from the decks that we've you know, built ourselves out of things that interest us. Yeah, in particular, like I should probably just state this upfront, like I if you listen to the show before, you know that

I'm a comic book nerd. You know that I like superheroes and have done research on superheroes in the past. In particular, like the research I did when I was at a university was about mythology, rhetoric, and Captain America ironically, because that Captain American movie just came out. Um, And so yeah, I have a lot of like superhero type examples or pop culture examples that will probably come to mind as we're talking about this, but also I'm gonna

try to stay on target. Yeah. Likewise, I've been reading a lot of Chinese mythology recently, and so some of my examples are going to draw from that, just because it's fresh on my mind. But all of it is going to be intended to to to provide you with the tools to to go through these different ways of looking at myth and uh and you know, provide something that that the listeners of the show can't take with them as we explore other mythologies, even as a tangent

in the future. So I have a challenge for us and a challenge for you the listener as well as we proceed, Um. Let's also consider, right, this is a science podcast, and as we've been we've been, we've been sort of inching our way towards this over the last i don't know, two or three months with episodes like we Could Problems and cargo cult science and things like that. But let's consider is it possible that some form of science is used today as mythology for our present culture?

Because I think that's something that there might be something there. Uh, and if so, how is it? And then just for funzies, who are our scientific deities? Uh? You know, Robert and I have joked many times before on the show about how like we're putting together was slowly putting together a psychedelic Avengers of all these psychedelic scientists that we talked

about on the show. But in general, like I feel like there are some scientists when you refer to them, they're referred to with the reverence that people used to refer to Zeus or thor with. Right, It's like Carl Sagan can do no wrong or Einstein. You know, well, they these are legendary individuals and science. And we'll get into the connections between myth and legend here. As we roll all right, So we'll keep that in mind, but let's hit it all right. So let's start with the basics.

Just the word mythology. What does it, What does it come from? Well, myth an ology, myth and logos myth being the proto Indo European root move is involved. Here is then to murmur and from this we get the Greek mythos, meaning word or story. So this is gonna be very important because as we go through this, you're going to see that you know, and and this sounds like a no type thing, but there's an inherent connection between myth, mythology and human language and how that defines

both culture and how we understand the world. Right, So of course it would be named after murmuring and words. All right. So that's the word mythology. And certainly I think when most when when a lot of us here the word mythology, the first thing that enters your mind is maybe just a you know, a quick glance at the Greek pantheon. Yeah, I think I like a clash of the Titans. Yeah, like old old gods, stories that

have a very human aspect to them. Um. And it's one of those things that it makes it difficult then to talk about myth in other areas such as like, for instance, been talking about Christianity to talk about myth.

People here you say myth and they take it as an insult because they think, oh, myth is a thing that's not true and that is just mildly amusing in big budget sandals movies exactly exactly, And that's something I think we should try to dispel today too, is like that myth is is larger than just these ideas we think of them today as being fictionalized stories, right, But to the Greeks and the Romans that worshiped those gods, they were just as real to them as uh Einstein

and Carl Sagan are to us. Yeah, and it in mythology as well. Discuss here is a powerful force. And even though you might you might think of Greek gods and whatever is just you know, mirror window dressing is just something that's just aesthetically pleasing. We are all living in the shadows of mythology. And yet at the same time,

the human experience cast the shadow of mythology. So keep it very nice to keep that word shadow in mind for when we get the good old Carl Young, Oh, yes, all right, So under this heading, though, is there anything that we can agree upon this kind of universally considered. Yeah, that's what a myth is, generally speaking about. The only thing we can everyone agrees on is that mythologies are stories,

their narratives. There's a lot of disagreement on whether those narratives are inherently sacred, you know, which is to say they involve gods in the supernatural. Can you have a myth that doesn't involve a god or god like being? Well, that's an issue of discussion and another thing to consider here. This is from just the basic definition in the Salem Press encyclopedia is that myths are stories, beliefs, fables, legends, whatever you wanna call them. We're gonna sort of slice

that pie up a little bit later. But they reflect the culture of the people who write and listen to them, right So, and what they're often trying to do is provide explanations for how the world works. Ironic, because we are working for How Stuff Works this is How Stuff Works podcast. So, uh, you know, while we provide explanations for how stuff works, uh, the old way of doing so was to say, well, the reason why that lightning struck that tree over there was because Zeus was angry, right,

something like along those lines. Uh. So, for example, it was natural phenomena that human beings didn't quite understand yet, and so they told stories of heroes that were up against good and evil steaks to explain those things. So they explain our place in the world, or at least

they try to write to us. It's it's that old like sort of very meta thing of like the stories are us looking at ourselves Like fiction mythology is just like uh, us creating an eyeball that's looking right back at ourselves and then trying to explain ourselves to us, which is is a weird thing to think about. Um, but it's everything from creation myths like well, how the world start? How? How why am I here? Who rules

the world? What's the afterlife? Like? Like? All of that stuff stems from mythology, and there's so many shared similar themes. We're gonna see that throughout all the things we talked about today, from virgin births to great floods. Uh, they're constantly being reinvented and passed down. And I would argue even into today's you know, a huge popular culture epics of whether it's your superhero movies or your Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or whatever, we see these

played out in similar ways. They're uh anthropolo just in cultural critics have been trying to trace these connections for centuries, and we're going to talk about some some like key points I would say in the last what like two hundred years of mythological study. But it's complicated, uh, and nobody has like a singular answer, so I kind of want to dispel that right away, Like there's no this is how it is right there. There are certainly interpretations

that are more popular. For instance, the etiological explanation that you just mentioned, the idea that myths are about explaining what the world is and how the world works, like that is one that a lot of views say, Yeah, that that is one of the powers of myth, that's one of the reasons for myth. But there are a number of different ways to look at it, and a number of these different ways to look at them are tied to specific um uh, specific areas of study, specific

academic approaches. Yeah, and like it's easy to trace that back to like very simple things that we feel like we have a grasp on now, like the changing of the seasons or something like that, right, but at the

time it was explained through mythology. Al Right, Before we roll into some of the views on mythology, let's take a few minutes just to talk about the formal features of prose narrative as they relate to myth, legend, and folklore, because these are three terms that are often used interchangeably,

but they really kind of refer to different things. Um. Yeah, and I think to like, uh, we should point out that the distinctions that we're about to give come from a book on Chinese mythology by is it in Barrel? I believe so. Yes, Yeah, it's a book I've picked up recently, and in addition to being just a great exploration of Chinese mythology, it has a wonderful some wonderful

introductory material that summarizes some some key stuff about mythology. Yeah, and this is great stuff, but it's also like, I think that we should also question some of the definitions too as we go. Yeah, I mean that's the that's the thing when you like something to keep in mind with any any of this one we're talking about mythology, like mythology is almost a It exists outside of our attempts to neatly categorize it. And so there's a and

throwing too many classifications at it. But but I I tend to like this idea of just sort of breaking it up so it's nice myth, legend, and folk tale. There's there's a table in this book, um that that lays it out in terms of like, what's the conventional opening? Can you tell this story after dark? Is this scene as a factor of fiction? What's the setting, like the attitude the principal character. So I'm not gonna roll through the whole list, but for instance, in a myth, you're

you're generally talking about a non human character. A legend is going to be more of a human character, and then a folk tale can be either one. Um, A myth definitely has a sacred feel to it, you know that the gods, superhumans, godlike entities. Legend can be either sacred or secular, and then a folk tale tends to be secular in terms of setting. Uh, myth and legend

are just sometime in some place where folk tales are timeless. Uh, as far as belief goes, myth and legend are essentially facts, and that's kind of a that's a problematic term, but well, yeah, let's address that in a second. You go, Yeah, but the myth and the legend as it is told it is real in some way, shape or form, whereas the folk tale is just pure fiction, like nobody is actually believing, you know, in the Boogeyman, nobody thinks Johnny Appleseed I

actually walked all across actually with apple seeds. Yeah. So, so these are just some of the ideas to keep in mind to flesh this out a little bit. Let's roll through some examples. First of just straight up myths. So I think the the Greek examples that come to mind most easily, probably you know, stuff having to do with the origin of the universe though, the fall of the Titans, the rise of the gods, that sort of thing. Yeah,

that's like the go to I think most of us. Uh. And it's interesting, I wonder why that's the one like mythological pantheon that, especially in Western culture we still like really gravitate too. But I loved reading stories about that and Norris mythology to a certain extent when I was a kid. Well, those tales have been They've been told and retold so many times as part of Western literature that that they're that they've just been carried and held

on a pedestal this whole time. One of the interesting things about looking at Chinese mythology is that you don't see that case. There's not there's not a homer that is that is retelling these things necessarily, So you have we have less of our tradition of the mythology being

upheld by the scholars throughout the ages um. In the Christian world you have Adam and Eve, the whole you know, Garden of Eden, that the origins of Man, the Origins of sin Um certainly classifies as as mythology um elsewhere in the world Um. Chinese mythology, for instance, there's an archer by the name of Ye and shoots down the extra nine sons in the sky, so that the world's

not we don't need so many sons. So this is a good segue into me talking about superheroes for a second, because you just wrote a fantastic piece on Chinese mythology connecting to the world of superheroes. Uh, and in particular you wrote about a recent d C comics uh team called the Great Ten that we're based on Chinese mythology. So listeners, I highly recommend, uh you go and find that piece. It's on now dot how Stuff Works dot com, right, yeah, uh, and and go take a read because Robert does a

great job with that. But I will segue from that from Chinese myth into superheroes and into Western superheroes. I will make the argument throughout this episode that, especially like our big budget uh d C comics, Marvel comics, superheroes are archetypes for myth in the same way as like the Greek gods were, right, so real quick, like think of like pretty much every myth has like some kind of solar deity, right, well, that's Superman. They've always got

an Earth Mother, it's wonder Woman. Wonder Woman was made of clay in one of her origin stories. You've got the death Slash Underworld deity, Batman, right yeah, and then

there's always like the Trickster, the Joker. So like it's interesting, like and I'll keep coming back to this, uh, but there are like paar ups like you can apply these models of these archetypes across both you know, whether it's thousands of years old Greek Roman pantheons or modern day like comic books or even like I'm kind of wondering with this this example of science, like who's our science Zeus? Is it Nicola Tesla mm or Ben Franklin. It's not.

I don't think it's been Franklin. So but you know, things like that to consider anyways. So that's that's my spiel about comics to start off with. And I'll be I think bringing it into yeah, an important fact to night because much like the gods, what you walk around, say to deaths in an office space and you see the action figures on people's death totally in many cases they are superheroes. Are superhero characters? What are they but the the the avatars for little gods that are the amulets,

the protective presence. Yeah, and I would you know, i'd also point out to that, like in our sort of breakdown of of how myth, legend and folk tales work out, right, like we said myth is considered to be fact, Well, nobody actually considers, you know, Superman to be fact, right, Nobody thinks that he's a real person, or at least

most people don't. Uh. And but the caveat being there is that there is such an intense devotion to the cannon that's within these myth myth mythologies of whatever shared universe it is, whether it's Star Wars or Marvel or whatever. Right, but there's constant arguments about what is true and what is not within the canon. Uh. It doesn't necessarily explain how the world works to us, but it represents how we think it works and how we want it to work. Uh.

And it represents our ideologies too. Yeah, yeah, totally. I mean, it's Superman. Even though no one is gonna gets into the whole idea of hyper real religions that we've covered in a previous that absolutely and that this thing that is certainly fictional still takes on mythological even religious uh

power to the individual two large groups of people. So if anyone out there is thinking, oh, you mentioned Superman and Adam and even the same breath that is insulting or whatever, um, I encourage you not to take it that way and to listen to the rest of the podcast as we explore the power of myth and I think I would also say watched the last two Superman movies very carefully because there's a lot of christ imagery

in there. There's a lot of him in cross like poses, him being back lit by the sun in the same way that Jesus is back lit in certain painting. Yeah, there's a lot of that stuff going Alright. So onto legends, as we discussed, you know, might be sacred, might be secular, but you have more of a human character, there's more of a grounding and reality, um, though there are still

mythic elements to it. So in the Greek world, the example that came to my mind is Alexander, the great legendary figure, but definitely a real guy that existed with some possible uh fiction, you know, springing off on the edge. It still allows for big budget movies to be made about him, right, And it's and it's more, um, it's not in like pure mythic time like it's it's it's more relatable to the present. Likewise, in the Christian and

Christian traditions, you have various martyrs. You can maybe even make a h an argument for some of the apostles. These are definite historical figures, like st When we talked about Stigmata on the Shadow before. Some of those guys that is definitely an example of Christian legend. Yeah, and

then elsewhere in the in the world. One example from Chinese histor three is the Yellow Emperor who reigned from two thousand six to UC Definitely a real ruler, but there's a lot of additional information he's taken on extremely

lifendary status. Yeah. My experience, um, living in Southeast Asia as a kid too, is that Chinese mythology and legend is popularized in pop culture and movies and television just as much as like our Alexander the Greats or superheroes or Greek gods are Um, are you familiar with the Ones upon a Time in China series? Um? Yeah, Well

I've never seen it, but I'm familiar with it. It's this like martial arts Woushia series of movies starting Jetly, and it's ostensibly about the history of China at the time, although there's a lot of argument about whether or not it's been influenced by the state or not, and it's sort of like a revisionist history. But it reminds me of things like this, or like a lot of Jetly movies, like what's that other one hero? Is that? What it's called anyway, the Wuhia movies in general tend to play

around with these legends. They're like historical figures that they make larger than life. And then finally we have folklore and uh, certainly like in the Greek tradition they have they have their boogeyman, just as anybody else has a boogeyman. Believe it's called the baboos. And then you could maybe make an argument that a sub's fables count as folk floor you know what I mean, nobody, I mean they're almost like extreme folklore, like nobody's believing one of these

stories with these interactions between animals briar rabbit. Yeah, but they're but they still they carry weight, and that that's um Christian tradition. You have an inherited pagan folk tales. You have stuff about witches, there's a lot of Yeah, and that's an interesting example where fable can become something else, starting to find the world for us in a way that isn't necessarily accurate. Yeah, and then elsewhere in the world,

what you have vampire? Do you have fox, spirits, beast men, all in that manner of of supernatural entity that it's just a folk tale, you know, it's like it doesn't have legendary and mythic status. So let's talk about the like how sacred some of this stuff has to be? Right? Like again like sticking to Uh, that's that table of splitting up myth, legend and folklore. Well, it says right here myths are always sacred. So how sacred are they? Well?

I think it's definitely hard to find examples of older myths that are that are secular. Like most mythology as as we experience, it is going to be sacred. But the comic book examples really bring to mind a possible example of of of secular mythology, you know, in a kind of hyper real fashion. So um. Interesting side note here. Often mentioned writer on the show, Grant Morrison. I don't know if you're you've ever read his run on The

Justice League of America happened. Uh. He's given many interviews where he said, well, his version of writing The Justice League was he saw it as, oh, this is the mythological pantheon of our times, and he set it up so that his roster of who was on the team uh lined up are typically with all of the Greek and Roman gods uh. And he had like this infamous breakdown of how that all worked out, how he chose

who would be on on the team. Like, you know, you have your usuals like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. Then when you add somebody like plastic Man, like why is he there? And Morrison says, well, everybody needs a Dionysius. Interesting, yea, And of course Morrison also responsible for Alright. So here's the thing with with myth is we're discussing it now and and again. This gets down to the problems of

classifying it. Myth is like a narrative mold that grows over our lives, and it grows over everything from big cosmological questions to what's on the dinner table. So you can think of it as as mold growing over a statue of a man or a woman, and that body is kind of a physical symbology for our concerns. Or if you're so inclined, you can think of chakras on a figure. Okay, So myth grows over the heart and the mind that it goes over all the senses of

the head. It grows over the sex, organs, the breasts, the gut, It covers the dreadful scars of battle and the ever humor as buttocks. Uh, and is the butt sacred or secular? Humans will always disagree on that one. But but myth is ultimately poly functional, so it grows everywhere. It takes on various meanings. And that's not just the nature of of myth as as a whole, from you know, as just in general. I mean we're talking about individual tales. Uh,

that mean a host of different things. Uh. The human experience exists, again, is the shadow of myth, but it also casts the very shadow. So I think polly functional is a good um description to keep in mind as we talk about all of these, because the more you try and pin it down and say, oh, well, this this myth is about your obsession with your mother, that is to limit the power of mythology to this one specific thing, when it really is more amorphous than that.

And that's what we see in a lot of the attempts and conflicts over what myth means over the last you know, hundred two hundred years of academic inquirery. I guess is sort of like attempts to constrain it and then attempts to balloon it back outwards again. Yeah, because you end up with say a psychologist or an anthropologist, story or a historian. They're coming in. They're taking their discipline applying it to mythology, and it's going to be sort of the vision of mythology that fits to their

discipline well. And the funny thing is, too, is like they're human beings and they're just a subject a myth as the rest of us, and they want their answer to be the one answer, right Like they all think like young thought like his answer was the answer, and so did I don't know, Roland Bard or uh, you know, the Claude leavestros whoever, Like all these people were going to talk about today, they wanted to be the ones with the answer in just the same way as the

people who u uh talked about Zeus as being responsible for storms wanted that to be the one true answer. So we have a lot of different interpretations and one individual will come back around to him at the very end. But there is a religious study scholar and mythologist William G. Dotty nine. He's still around, but he's retired. To understand, he identified no fewer than fifty definitions of myth and

this was in the nineteen eighties. And again this is due to just all the anthropologists, psychologists, religious studies, uh, individuals of theo theologians, etcetera, chiming in on mythology. All right, so we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back we will roll through some of these big ideas concerning the nature and power of myth. Okay, so here we go. Let's first talk about sort of this

nineteenth century universalistic theory approach. One of the key individual visuals here Frederick Max mu There eighty three nine hundred, generally known just as Max Mueller, German born English philologist and orientalists. As the term of the was used at we probably wouldn't call him that, not not today, but it's, uh, it's it's a good description to keep in mind in terms of the attitudes towards uh uh, you know, other

people's belief systems and mythological roots. He argued that overtime humans lost the original meanings of words such as sun, moon, thunderstorms, you know, the basic terms we used to describe the cycle of things in the world around as planets. Yeah, and that we gradually misunderstood them as myth figures and incorporated them into superstitious and religious world views. Yeah, it's no coincidence that we named all of our planets after

God's right. Uh. In fact, like our solar system has its own sort of pantheon of characters and archetypes as well. That there you go again, science the application of science to myth. H. Yeah. So with Mueller's in particular zs of language thing, this is something we're going to see come up over and over again. That language is like

the culprit of myth. It's where it all originates. Right, Like if we were uh without language speaking animals, feral children for instance, feral children would maybe not need mythology, right anymore than like a squirrel would. Uh. And it goes a long way towards understanding again human cultural communication, all our differences and our similarities, and especially how we other other people. So I'm talking about capital, oh other uh and how we understand the world in general. Right.

So uh, Muller seems to think more about nature as being personified as supernatural characters, right, But he's also talking about language as being the step that leads us there. Right. And I think this is a great example to kick off with because certainly if you took this as the only explanation from myth. That would be a very limited understanding of mythology. But you consider, I can certainly see where this would be a part of the overall energy

of myth as it exists in human history. Um up, next, let's talk about the evolutionist school. One of the key individuals here Edward B. Tyler, that's T. Y L. O. R. Through nineteen seventeen English anthropologist. So he was a cultural evolutionist and he saw myth as expression of primitive philosophy. So this is another example of myth as considered by individuals immerged in a specific discipline. In time, evolutionary theory

was changing the way we think about the world. On the Origin of Species by Darwin came out in eighteen fifty nine. So there's there's another science, mythological and Darwin and origin. I'm not sure which superhero here, Yeah, I don't know, but you know, so some went in this, Some individuals picked up on the evolution craze and they

went and decidedly racist and xenophobic directions with this. But it's worth noting that the Tyler at least believed that human minds had the same global capability, regardless of their position on what he saw as the ladder of cultural ascension. So he saw myth is an attempt to explain the world. Again, getting back to the ideology that we're talking about earlier, he saw it as a proto science. He also saw ritual as an application of myth, just as technology is

an application of science to exert control. So myth is our understanding of how the world works, and ritual is our attempt to exploit that understanding for control. Yeah, ritual is in his sense, the application of how we're trying to control outcomes in a totally chaotic world that we don't know what's going to happen next. Right, there's gonna be a storm that's gonna hit and kill my family, or maybe it won't rain and my crops won't grow. So I'm gonna perform these rituals to try to make

these particular things happen. I want to change the outcomes of reality. Okay, And you know it's it's interesting to try and like apply that to the previous theory. So you can imagine, like this this thing we see in the sky, we we give it a certain amount of personality and then as we reach out to it, as we you know, at a loss of anything else, you know, amid say that the ruins of our village, we might ask it for help and then therefore personify it more

and create more narrative energy for it. And this brings us to the myth as ritual school and one of the key individuals here Jane Ellen Harrison eighteen fifty through who was a British classical scholar, linguist and feminist. Harrison expanded on this notion of ritual and myth as the spoken correlation of the acted right, the thing done and uh. And this reminds me of some of the views that

will discuss from Mercelle Elliotti in the country here. And up next we have the ipeological interpretation of Andrew Lang. He was a Scottish poet and anthropologist lived eighteen forty four through nineteen twelve. Yeah, and so you know, as we we mentioned this earlier, but aedeological means assigning or seek to assign a cause to things. It's the study of causation in myth in particular, we're talking about origin stories, right,

how how did this thing happen? Why is it happening? Yeah, Lane wrote, Uh, wrote a book Myth, Ritual and Religion, Volume one, And this is like a number of these older text is available and full online if you just poke around for him. Um, but I wanted to read one line from it to give you sort of a sense of some of the some of the attitudes that were thrown around and trying to figure out what myth is and what its power is. Uh. And he was talking about some Greek and um and Sanscrit writings about

about myth. Here he says, quote, we conclude that in Greek and Sanscrit, the myths are relics, whether borrowed or

inherited of the savage mental status. Yeah. So now we're getting into Uh, this is that period of time where I think like a lot of uh philosophical thought was struggling with what we now view as i'd say, quasi racist territory in terms of, like, you know, whether these theorists see themselves as being superior to quote unquote primitive people's but then not exactly applying the same lens to themselves in terms of like how we understand culture and

how we use myth. Right, Yeah, it's kind of like, let me, I guess is there a term for this, like white splain you or the colonial splain you. I mean, what I keep thinking of is like, and you see this in a lot of these guys, is the idea of the quote noble savage, right, Like the the idea that um particular primitive peoples have these two aspects of themselves and once we crack the code, we can figure out what makes them tick. And it's it's um kind

of grossly elitist. Yeah, it's it's like, there's this beautiful thing about your whole situation. You're blind to it, but I I am. I am far enough at the ladder that I can I can reach in there and figure it out for exactly. So, Yeah, there's sometimes you get into that that kind of itchy area with some of these especially some of the early writings on the subject um.

Up next, we're going to briefly discuss friends bows. He had this um this interesting take that was that has been referred to but as autobiographical ethnography, all right, and that that was a description that was thrown out in that book I mentioned earlier by and Beryl about Chinese mythology.

He was a German American anthropologist lived fifty eight through two, and the basic idea here was that the specifics of a primitive culture can be deduced from kind of a postmortem of its myths um, which you know, sounds like, in a sense, kind of an oversimplification and maybe and that's probably an oversimplification of his work, but you know, I can I can see the value in it. Like if you look at a person at a people's mythology, then you're going to learn certain things about who and

what they are. Yeah. So Bois is an interesting contrast to Land because I think both of them are in this sort of weird period of time or like intellectuals saw themselves as like defining quote pre bit of people's right. But at the same time, if you look into Bois, like he was pretty staunchly against what he called white prejudice and racial superiority, uh, and that he didn't think that it was like the job of anthropology to sort

of apply that mindset to other people's. But at the same time, like there's it's complex, Like I think it's too complex for us to get into in this episode, especially since we're trying to tackle such a big subject to begin with, it might be worth returning to Bois

in a future episode. But just this contradiction between like not wanting to, as we're calling it, like white splain uh to these particular peoples, but then at the same time like saying like, oh, yeah, I get you figured out, like once once I look at your rituals and your myths,

like I know what's going on here. Yeah. Yeah, it is difficult because on the other hand, you have individuals in a different culture with a different language trying to understand individuals in another culture in a different language, and speaking about it within their own culture, within in the own language, within their own discipline. And yeah, it gets

it gets complicated pretty quickly. There's something going on here too about using myth to understand the world that also leads us to our fear of other people in like different ways of which we can try to apply that and make sense of it. Uh. And I think you see a little bit of that here, But Bois was obviously trying to push against it all. Right. Up next we have Polish anthropologist Brunus Law Malinowski lived eighty four through nineteen forty two, and Uh, his whole thing was

that that myth is a sociological charter. So, in other words, if you want to know what's morally acceptable within a society, look to their myths, which end up reflecting and informing these standards. They spell out the important values, the rituals of behavior. Um claude. Levi Strauss, who we're gonna get to in a second, described this as myth is a charter for social action, and then Levi Strauss expanded on

this view with a a structural analytical approach. The highlights the binary oppositions in myth that bring the reader, listener, or the individual to a place of deeper meaning. So you're kind of narratively juggling the notions of social action in a way that a mere you know, a mere set of rules, carbon and a piece of stone cannot. Yeah.

Levi Strauss is one of sort of the you know, first major thinkers in the last century to do that uh language application thing here, and in particular he's considered a father of structuralism, which we've talked about recently on the show. Some people have asked us to please do an episode on structuralism or post structuralism. We might it's such an incredibly complex, uh theory that I don't know that we could do justice to it. Well, sometimes what you have to do is just to dip your toes,

and maybe we'll do that. But in the case of Strauss, he wrote a four volume study called Mythologies. Uh And, and the the idea here was that he followed a single myth as it traversed from South America all the way up to the Arctic Circle, sort of like how we are tracing the origins of cannabis in that episode a couple of weeks ago, right, So he's tracing its cultural evolution. Uh And. In particular, he has an essay.

He has multiple things he's written about this, but there's a widely read essay that is free on the internet if you just google it, the Structural Study of myth in which he says, and keep in mind this is sixty years ago. Myths are interpreted in conflicting ways, right, So he's looking at all the different ways that all these other theorists are trying to interpret them, whether it's

through collective dreams or ritual or play or archetypes. All these things that we're we've either talked about already or we will talk about. None of them go beyond what he calls quote a crude kind of philosophic speculation. So he kind of looked down on them, right, But then, like any good academic, he was like, well, I have the one single answer and here um, he says, well, the paradox is that myth is both full of elements

that contradict one another. Right, anything can happen in a myth, but the same time between different cultures in different regions that seemingly haven't interacted at all their similarities between their myths. Uh. And one of the examples he uses is the Native American trickster myth. As an example, he says, well, it's a it's a meditation on both life and death, right, and it's a it's symbolized by both like a raven, and I think it's either a coyote or a wolf.

And those seem like they would be diametrically opposed, but they're not. And here's why. And I'm not going to dive down the whole Levi Strouss thing, but you can take a look. It's it's really interesting stuff. Um. He also used Oedipus as an example, and he said, since myth is made of language, uh, and it can't be told without human speech. This is why we need to apply linguistics and structuralism to it in order to understand it.

He takes Oedipus and he breaks it apart, kind of like a musical arrangement, like an orchestral a score with assigned beats to it, and he breaks up those beats into four columns. Uh. And through this he tries to discern what a myth actually means, right, what that means, meaning, the etiological nature of that meaning, uh, by finding that the fourth column is the universal characteristic of man. Okay, so this is like his his prime answer to what's

going on with myth? Uh? And in particular, he also said, there isn't one authentic version of a myth, but there's different manifestations, and we see this throughout all of them. Right. So even like in the examples of like that, I've been giving modern day superheroes as being sort of mythic, right, Like their continuity is constantly changing, and and it's you're talking about Superman the Sun God or Superman the Reagan

as figure and what the Dark Knight returns? Yeah, yeah, exactly right, So like they're interpreted in different ways and applied in different ways. So he's like, he was trying to figure out what the fundamental units of myths were, and he called them my themes, which I like because if you split it, it's my theme. Um. And I believe this was before the conceptualization of memes too, but

there's there's something connected there as well. Uh. He tried breaking them down in this very strict structuralist linguistic manner to find out what those fundamental units were, and he thought that there had to be some kind of universal law to all of them. All right, so we have some good material here. We have, we've were, We've already rolled through a number of different ways to take apart the myth and figure out what it means. So let's

talk about Sigmund Freud. Just a little bit about your mother. Yes, so Freud is mostly known for for psychoanalysis, but of course myth was also hugely important to him. He would keep all these these different uh uh, you know, mythic depictions of God's just sitting around his office. And he saw myths as reflections of our unconscious fears and desires.

So he viewed ancient religious characters as the manifestations of submerged human desires, and therefore all religions is kind of a mass delusion or maybe a paranoid for one of wish fulfillment. This is where we get our edipal complex and our electric complex room exactly. And so the idea here is that in these religious figures you could find

the universal truth of the human condition. The edifice one, of course, is probably the big one, probably the most well known one, the classic example drawn from the the the actual myth here of edifice Rex mythical Greek king. He's a solver of riddles that have to do with

the human condition. So, you know, Freud dug that. But also, uh, the myth underlies the edifice complex, the idea that on and I'm and I'm summarizing super paraphrases, super paraphrasing, but that this is like the dime store understanding of it, but that all children want to kill their father and marry their mother. Yeah, it's the Jim Morrison version, right, So that that's that's kind of Freud's contribution in a

nutshell to our understanding of myth. Yeah. And then Freud's contemporary and you know, sometime rival Carl Young had a psychological explanation for everything. All these guys, man, everybody's just coming up with their universal laws. I've got it figured out. No, I've got it figured out. Here's my universal law. Uh. Willam Reich, who we talked about in a previous episodes, spun out of these two guys as well with his

universal law of how everything worked out. So Young he's all about collective unconsciousness, in particular archetypal patterns of thoughts and symbolism. He thought that myths were projections of the collective unconsciousness that we all share. Uh. And again like super dime store version of this is that there's like this uh, shared imaginary space between all of us that we're all pulling our ideas from. And it's it's natural

to humans, right Uh. And we can't quite define it, but we're all pulling from that same space no matter where we are in the world. And this seems to explain why all these myths from varied locations are so similar. So Young argues, well, like deities, for example, in mythology, those are expressions of these universal archetypes. Uh. And so it's been done with Young's work, is the psychological archetypes that he came up with are applied in a certain

kind of literary criticism. Uh, and you can pretty much apply to any story, right. Uh, it's usually very basic. One of my former advisors in grad school would refer to it as the model fits kind of study, right where you're just you're taking his model and you apply it to a text and you go, Yep, that works, and that's you know, for for a lot of people, that's good enough. For some people they want more meat on the bone. But a lot of the young iun

criticism is done as such. So right, we've got examples like the hero, the animal and the animals, the mother, the father, the child, the sage, the trickster, the fool. Right there, These are all archetypes that show up in in many of our texts, whether they're literary, mythological, or

or superhero movies. Right. A really good example I think of how young and archetypes are applied in world building, and like a fictional setting is Game of Thrones, Like that's like reverse engineered uh mythology there right in that like George R. And Martin like clearly he had either looked at this or other archetypal versions of mythology and said Okay, Well, when I create my religion in this world, right, like we've got a God of Light and then the Seven,

there's like what there's like Maiden, Mother and Crone, and then there's the Stranger Strange Ponification, and I would imagine the Stranger lignes up pretty well with the Young's version of the Shadow, and the Shadow is this immoral remnant of our instinctual animal past. So it's sort of like this weird, like dark side of ourselves that we don't want to admit to, but it's always with us. It's

always following us, right, like our shadows to um. And so yeah, you can take this and you can PLoP it on top of like almost any story and map it out and it works. Uh. And in the same way you can do that with Joseph Campbell's Heroes Journey, which is another very popularized sort of explanation of mythology in the last what fifty years. Yeah, I mean it's it's becomes synonymous with Star Wars, right absolutely. Yeah, so

Campbell is renowned today as a pop mythologist. Uh. And it's similar to, uh, there's way more to it than this. I we're really just diving in the shallow end here. Uh. If you're interested in this, I highly recommend you go out and read more about these these theorists and these thinkers. But yeah, we're providing you with the IKEA toolkit if you want to. If you want a real Alan wrench for for extended use. Uh, there's a there's a different tool kit out there for you. We're just giving you

the you know, a good overview. Campbell basically argues that like almost every story follows this formula that he calls the hero's journey and it play is out and Star Wars is the one that everybody uses as an example for this, not only because it fits it perfectly, but also because George Lucas himself claimed, oh yeah, I was influenced by Joseph Campbell, and I intentionally did all that stuff. Uh. So he claims that he intentionally applied this three act

structure that breaks down into seventeen sub acts. Uh. And I'm not gonna go through the whole thing here, but you know, if you're familiar with sort of just like generic uh film storytelling, it's going to be very familiar to you in the way that, like, you know, stories have rises and arcs. There's calls to adventures. Uh, there's particular challenges that they have to go through and then they have to return with something. And in this particular

Joseph campbell formula. He always says that you have to the the hero has to refuse to return back to the real world, but then they eventually do on some kind of magical flight. Uh. It's it's interesting. And when you again the model fits. You lay this on top of Star Wars and it works out perfectly, even even more interesting, like you lay it on top of a New Hope and it works perfectly. And then if you lay it on on top of like all of the

movies as well, the arc still works out. So okay, I tend to believe George Lucas that he looked to this quasi academic for you know, a narrative application. I don't know about you, but like when I've written fiction before in the past, I've actually tried to play around with Campbell's uh formula. Yeah I have. I have at times the dipped into it for sure, because then, yeah, I mean you have this ultimately, which is a great universal narrative arc too. I don't know which to follow

a mythic characters. Yeah, it's it's hard not to be inspired by it, or at least to look at it and say, all right, was this idea that I was thinking of? How do how does that match up with the blueprint here? For me, it was like it was along the lines of like, okay, am I sticking to this blueprint? All right? Like how do I break that a little bit so that it's something that's the story

isn't so expected? Exactly? Yeah? Alright, So next we're gonna discuss Mercella Eliade, who he mentioned earlier, um and he was influenced by myth as ritual school of thought as well as union archetype concepts. He recognized the etiological aspects of myth, but he saw it as a vital link between ancient sacred past in the modern profane present. So imagine this bridge or even though like a time portal between our modern linear experience and it's inherent terror of history,

which is a big deal over him. The idea that you know, in brief that since we are experiencing time as this linear progression, it's all the more horrifying when we realize, oh well, we as as a as a species keep making the same mistakes over and over again, and we're never gonna get him fixed. Uh, that makes more sense in a cyclical mindset, which you would have had in the in the ancient past. So imagine this portal connects our modern world to an age in which

sacred time is cyclical. This means that the meaning of life is in the circle of things, and in this ancient age, people are one with the cosmos and the cosmic rhythms, while modern humans, according to Deliade, they're connected only with history. So myth is the portal. Myth is that that bridge that brings these two worlds together. Plus he also gets into some of the other ideas we've discussed here. I just want to read a quick quote from his his excellent book Um the myth of the

Eternal Return. Myth is a history that can be repeated indefinitely, in the sense that the myths serve as models for ceremonies and periodically reactualize the tremendous events that occurred at the beginning of time. The myths preserve and transmant the paradigms, the exemplary models for all the responsible activities in which men engage. By virtue of these paradynamic models revealed to men in mythical times. The cosmos and society are periodically regenerated.

So uh at my encapsulation of that would be like the Battlestar Galactica version of all this has happened and it will happen again, right, that kind of thing. Yeah, you can summarize it as saying that this linear experience of reality, it works for us, but it's missing something, and when the terror of history begins to creep in, it's good to reconnect, to jump in that portal and

reconnect with the sacred experience of reality. Well that's an interesting segue into um, two guys who I feel like we have to mention here there again uh connected to the sort of linguistic aspect, but they're also uh sort of along the lines of Mars Marxist philosophical thinking. Uh. Roland Bart is the first one, and he is infamous for having written a book called Mythologies. Uh and man, there's one chapter in there that I really think that

you would love. Mythologies is actually more about messages and media than it is about myths per se. But he's using Levi stress the same linguistic analysis and structuralism to apply Marxist approach to myth and in particular media. So he's writing this in the fifties late fifties, as the rise of mass media is coming on. Uh. And he interprets media with linguistic terms, applying them to socio political analysis. So I think it'd be fair to say, like, without

Bart there would be like no Noam Chomsky. Okay, Uh. And so he he does this, and it's interesting. He finds that most of our modern myths are created by a ruling class through media. Okay, now again again, like I'm not going to dive deep down that rabbit hole and make those arguments or or argue with them. But there's a section in there that's all about wrestling, uh.

And it's uh one of the first sort of pro wrestling, right, well, they didn't really have pro wrestling, but they had that sort of narrative wrestling at the time that you could still go watch. It's one of the first sort of revelations of what we now call k fabe that I've ever heard or read on the sport. Uh. And he basically says, look, they're pantomim ing the archetypes of myth in every single fight, and these are direct quotes from

the book. He says, the function of the wrestler is not to win, it is to go through the motions that are expected of him in the same way as iLiads, Like you know, history is repeating itself. We watched the wrestling match. We have expectations of what will or will not happen, and we experienced pleasure by seeing this enacted. And he says that it's enacted through three archetypical acts suffering, defeat,

and justice. Uh. And it's fascinating. I actually in grad school went to school with the guy who took this and ran with it and wrote his dissertation all about modern day wrestling and mythology. Yeah, yeah, there's a there's

a lot of myth inet. You see it less, I guess in the so the modern American models, But if you look too, especially if you look to the more traditional modes of Luca Libre in Mexico, you see like straight up like by the by the books, um mythological representations in many cases, to the to the point where sometimes American viewers look at it and they're like, well, I don't understand, Like I knew that this the good

guy was gonna win. I knew that the the Technico was going to defeat the Rudeau, and it played out exactly like I expected. There was no surprise. That's the kind of the point. Yeah, that's the myth, that's this myth reenacted in the ring for you. Yeah. Uh. And so then there's also Frederick Jamison and again disservice like this is going to be a very like bare bones

Jamison thing. But Jamison argues that myths actually attempt to disintegrate history rather than repeat history, by emptying history out of what their original meanings were and replaced them with a narrative that seems like it's always been that way. So my example, uh, from comic books would be, so comics had the comics code that tried to bottle realize and regulate and ignore entire aspects of American life for decades, right like ex and profanity, which is completely cut out

of comic book stories. So you have these superhero mythologies without any of uh, like the real world that they're trying to explain within them, and these mythologies were pretending like that wasn't an aspect of the American community and acted like it had always been that way, right. Uh So it's an interesting sort of take on it that, like we're constantly revising history in the same way that

we're constantly revising our mythologies. And again, like I come back to these the scientist examples, right, like we think of Einstein and our Einstein that we talk about, and Revere is kind of a fictional Einstein, right. Yeah. It just also brings to mind the earlier example of myth

as a as a moral instructional tool. So, yeah, you're changing You're you're changing the comic book mythos and then using it as a way to or an attempt to say, hey, this is how you live, which is there's there's no well there is sex, but sure you're trying to make a moral stamount part of the mytholo morality of the readers. Yeah. So the last one that I wanted to throw in there, and in particular because the thesis that I wrote when I was in grad school was all about Captain America

and mythological applications to ideology and rhetoric. Uh. There's these guys Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, and they've written multiple books about something they called the American mono myth, and they've argued that Captain America as a character is indicative of this mono myth. Uh. They define it as an anti democratic fantasy where a superpowered everyman saves society by stepping outside of institutions to violently punish villains. There's

more to it than that. I mean, these guys have written books and books and books on this, But look at the last three Captain American movies. That's pretty much what it is, right, Uh, Captain America, even though he's an embodiment of America, he's always stepping outside of whatever institution he's part of. Right. If he's part of the military, has to do something without them. He's part of Shield, he has to reveal that Shield has been co opted

by Hyde or whatever. If he's a part of the Avengers, he has to step outside of the Avengers to set things right. It's kind of like this ideal for what the system should be, but he's not. Yeah, yeah, in a way. But it's also like incredibly violent and sort of fascistic as well. Uh. And so he's demonstrative this so much that they call it the Captain America complex. And much like with Young and his archetypes, you can apply the Captain America complex to a lot of pop

culture examples and find that exact formula playing out. Especially I find in a lot of our like eighties action movies, the Captain America complex is pretty prevalent. Like lethal weapon or total recall, the stuff like that. Like it's always you know, some strong badass who has to step outside of authority to get things done, you know that kind of thing. Uh. And it's interesting they argue that it permeates not only our media, but our political language as well.

And I would say, look at Donald Trump's campaign right now. That's why a lot of people are attracted to it is but because he steps outside of the institutions, right, or at least he claims to to save society by punishing the wicked. I do want to say, though, like, well, I think that there's something to this. Their evidence is only from like a few scattered, uh sources of at least in the Captain America case. Uh. And so that's

one of the reasons why I wrote the thesis. I did because I wanted to cover like the seventy years of American history that sort of goes on during the Captain America continuity. Uh. And one thing that's interesting with Captain America in particular, and I wonder if we're going to see this show up in these Marvel movies pretty soon, is he goes through these cycles where he's all of

a sudden apathetic about everything. Uh. And in particular, he gives up his role as a national symbol because he no longer believes in the myths that define the nation that he believes in. Right, so he like, there's the first big example of this is in the early seventies is this Captain America story that's crazy where like it turns out like the big villain behind everything is the

President of the United States. Captain America storms into the Oval Office, confronts him in the in the President United States shoots himself in the face. And so after that, Captain America is like, America, I don't believe in this fantasy anymore. I am no longer Captain America. And he discards his costume and his shield. If he moved to

Canada to so he joined Alpha Fi. He becomes a biker and he calls himself the Nomad and rides around on a bike and and is a vigilante that way, and then like eventually finds his faith in America again. Then it happens again in the eighties. It happened in the two thousands as well. Like this is like this recurring storyline with Captain America and kind of from a Christian perspective, like kind of like a harrowing of hell, maybe even the idea that even the Great Savior has

to fall and descend and then ride. Oh yeah, and it's in the hellish thing about it too, is right, Like he's never allowed to die or retire. Like every time, like you think Captain America is dead or he gets old or something, they replaced him with a new guy. He inevitably comes back. It just happened like to three weeks ago comics again, like he'd been replaced by someone and then and he had he had turned really old, he was like ninety years old. And then you know,

some science fiction anything happened and he's back. But yeah, he's gonna have to go through the whole cycle over again. All right, Well, um, you know, I just want to close out by mentioning William G. Dotty again. He's that religious study scholar, mythologist. Um, he summarized a lot of what we've talked we've talked about in this episode in what is, in my opinion, a highly effective kind of eightfold view. So he said that, and I'm just gonna roll him out here for you. Number one, myth as

is an esthetic device. It is narrative literature. Okay, myth is a tale of God's in other worlds, it's number two. Number three is myths explain our origins. Number four is that myth is essentially mistaken or primitive science. Number five is that myth is a text for a right or ritual that application again. Number six is that myth is a means to make universal ideas or truths concrete and intelligible for the average consumer. Number seven, myths are all

about explicating beliefs, collective experiences, or values. And number eight myths constitute spiritual or psychic expression, so that that would play out well with both like the sacred nature of myth, but then also Young's uh collective unconsciousness, which is sort of a psychic expression in a way. Yeah, And I think the big take com and one of the reasons I like like this approach is that that I feel like a lot of us can agree that myths are

poly functional. You know, they have they have various functions that they're carrying out at the same time, sometimes to the same consumer, to the same you know, the same person that's listening to, viewing, or hearing the myth or just thinking about it in the back of their mind. Again, it's this, it's this weird thing because that we're all living in the shadow of myth, and we're casting the

shadow of myth. Um. We may not think that that myths play a big role in our lives, but regardless, if we're talking about the Greek gods, uh, you know, the the Old Testament or just the pages of your favorite comic book, those uh, those that mythic energy is very much in play in our world. Yeah. I think if any lesson we can take from like this overview of all of these ideas about mythology, it's that there's no one universal law. Like a lot of these thinkers

tried to say, I've figured it out. This is the key to the universe, and the key to the universe is figuring out how these stories about what the key to the universe is work right and in a way,

they're creating their own mythologies. But there are applications that you can you can dip into from from many of these things and pull them out and think about uh, anything really in modern day settings, whether it's science, politics, pop culture, and you apply those and you can sort of pull out the strings and go, oh, wait a minute. This is like the sort of behind the scenes of how society works, right, or or at least how we're

trying to make sense of the world. Still, we're still looking up at the sun and the moon and the planets and nature and the seasons and going I don't really know how this whole thing works. But this answer, this is the answer I'm gonna go by, and if I'm gonna try to control it, I'm going to perform these rituals and everything will be fine. I'm gonna see what Batman has to say about it, and then I'm gonna touch back in with my my normal linear life.

Absolutely yeah. I trust Batman every day over. Carl Sagan all right, all right, well there you have it again. We're just hoping to provide you with some tools, with some different perspectives on myth in your life, in your world, in the things that you consume. We'd love to hear back from all of you on this topic. How does myth factor into your life? How do how do these different ways of looking at myth factor into your belief systems,

in your culture, etcetera. Yeah, and going forward to as we cover you know, we dive back into more science the topics as we continue with the show. You know, now we've got sort of a foundational framework for myth when it comes up again when we're talking about crazy space satellites or tiny bone worms that devour whales at the bottom the ocean. Right, So, uh, this is a nice way for us to have a framework, you know, as you're listening and myth pops up in your head

again for a future episode as well, please let us know. Uh, let's synthesize some of this information together and learn together from it. The ways to talk to us about those things are social media. Now. You can find us on Facebook, you can find us on Twitter, you can find us on tumbler, and you can find us on Instagram. Where below the mind on all of those Uh, and just to reiterate, I say this on every episode, I think, but we don't just like post the podcast there, and

that's it. Like we talk about what what we're working on outside of the podcast, whether it's writing or videos. We also share all this totally bizarre science and news information that we come across in our weekly endeavors. That's right, and be sure to check out stuff to bow your mind dot com. That's the mother ship. That's where we'll find all the podcast episodes, including the landing page for this this one, which one includes some links out to

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