Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange and the mundane.
Speaker: We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera.
Speaker: On this episode, we're continuing our discussion of mythology, our myths, allegories, insights into the human subconscious, and why do some stories seem to transcend time and culture?
Speaker: Welcome back to Philosophy on the Fringes.
Speaker: Today we are tackling part two of our two-part series.
Speaker: Is it a series if it's two parts?
Speaker: It's a mini-series.
Speaker: Our two-part mini-series on mythology, which we're very excited to get into.
Speaker: We are just under a month away from my...
Speaker: due date, but we're hoping after today to get at least one more episode recorded before we probably have to take at least a short break.
Speaker: Hopefully not that long, maybe a month or two.
Speaker: Temporary hiatus.
Speaker: Don't worry.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We'll be back.
Speaker: But anyway, so Frank, do you want to just go ahead and just launch us into part two today?
Speaker: Yeah, let's begin where we left off last time.
Speaker: So last time we ended with a definition of myth, right?
Speaker: We said a myth is something like a traditional story taking place in the distant past, when things were really different, that plays some significant function for society or culture or people group.
Speaker: And we kind of shied away from the question of whether the story is true.
Speaker: That's not really our main concern.
Speaker: when talking about myth because we want to talk about like the function of myth and what it does and it doesn't need to be true in order to do some of these functions that we'll talk about today yeah because i mean at the very least the question of whether it's true is kind of an unclear question and very difficult to answer in any case yeah we've
Speaker: talked about that last time.
Speaker: So yeah, so what sorts of questions are we going to talk about in this episode?
Speaker: Well, things like should myths be interpreted literally or symbolically?
Speaker: What are they about typically?
Speaker: And yeah, and what sorts of things do myths do?
Speaker: They're not just mere stories as various investigators of myth from different academic disciplines like anthropology and psychology have pointed out.
Speaker: So that's sort of what we're going to be talking about here.
Speaker: So one of the most popular ways of understanding myths or approaching myths is to read them as allegories for things in the natural world, things that we are more familiar with, and to understand these stories as allegories for these other things that someone's trying to help us understand better.
Speaker: So like natural forces, things in the natural world, something like that.
Speaker: Right, exactly.
Speaker: Yes, I think we talked about this a bit in our polytheism episode way back when, where a lot of philosophers who were critical of the traditional religion, a lot of Greek and Roman philosophers, they wanted to maintain the tradition by saying something like this.
Speaker: Well, yeah, Zeus isn't really a guy with a big beard in the sky.
Speaker: Zeus is just a way of talking about the sky or a way of talking about the natural force of lightning.
Speaker: You know, we can think of Aphrodite or Venus as just a way of talking about sexual desire, a way of talking about the passions, right?
Speaker: Something like that.
Speaker: So really the myths refer to things in the natural world and not actually talking about gods and whatnot.
Speaker: It makes sense to me that this is a really popular approach to myths because for most myths, we don't have like, we don't know the point of origin.
Speaker: It just sort of gets like, it becomes disseminated in a culture.
Speaker: And then that's kind of how people come to know it without knowing exactly where it came from.
Speaker: And because of that, I think myths uncontroversially get used allegorically, whether or not that's primarily how we should understand them.
Speaker: Like, we're all familiar with Aphrodite or Venus being an allegory for sexual desire.
Speaker: This has historically been a very popular theory of myth.
Speaker: It was popular in the time of the ancient Greeks, right?
Speaker: So some of these myths involving like the Trojan War and all of that, they were like a thousand years old by the time Socrates was around.
Speaker: So the Greeks themselves, who we call the ancient Greeks, they were themselves trying to make sense of these myths.
Speaker: And one way they did it was by just thinking, hey, these are just references to natural forces, even if that's not what the origin of the myth was, which is lost to time.
Speaker: So I think it's interesting you could see this approach in some of the Platonic dialogue.
Speaker: So I found one instance of this.
Speaker: So in the Phaedrus, Socrates, when talking about the myth of Boreas, who was a god of the North Wind,
Speaker: who allegedly stole an Athenian princess named Orithea.
Speaker: Socrates says, well, maybe what happened here was she was just blown off a cliff by a gust of wind.
Speaker: And that's just a way of talking, a colorful way of talking about that.
Speaker: So yeah, he mentions this approach.
Speaker: He doesn't think it's going to work for every, in the dialogue, he doesn't think it's going to work for every kind of myth.
Speaker: But it was curious to see this kind of approach to myth, physical allegory in action in one of Plato's dialogue.
Speaker: That's really it.
Speaker: This is like, how can we how can we romanticize this really stupid death?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So this this approach is ancient, but it remained popular into modern times.
Speaker: So one scholar of religion, perhaps someone who might regard as the founder of the scholarly study of religion and modern scholars study of religion.
Speaker: This guy, Max Mueller, who lived in Britain, he was of German extraction, he had this really kind of wacky idea that all myths, and he meant all myths, all myths were really just a way of referring to the battle between sunlight and darkness.
Speaker: So really, all myths, even the myths about the Trojan War and Oedipus and Odysseus, all these things really are just about darkness.
Speaker: sunlight and it's overcoming the darkness and all of that.
Speaker: So this is called the solar mythology theory.
Speaker: And so he thought that this is how all myths began.
Speaker: They're all referred to natural forces.
Speaker: And over time, this was kind of lost in translation.
Speaker: He called myths a disease of language.
Speaker: So this is kind of weird, kind of wacky, but it's noteworthy that this guy was not like a crank.
Speaker: He was a translator and editor of a lot of books of Eastern philosophy, Eastern religion.
Speaker: So he's well respected during his time.
Speaker: But he had this kind of wacky idea that like nobody thinks now that all myths were really about the sun.
Speaker: Frank got extremely into this theory last week.
Speaker: I didn't get into it, but I find it interesting that like it's so bizarre and so like obviously false.
Speaker: It's trying to pigeonhole every myth from every culture into one thing.
Speaker: So how could he possibly have thought this?
Speaker: I was just curious about this.
Speaker: Let me stand up for Mueller here.
Speaker: I don't know if this is right, but I mean, certainly in the 19th century, we had access to fewer ancient myths than we have now just because we couldn't read them.
Speaker: I mean, our ability to read ancient dead languages has increased quite a bit since then.
Speaker: So maybe, I don't know, maybe he's just working with a smaller set than we have now.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, he was a translator of like a Hindu text.
Speaker: So he wasn't, yeah, he wasn't unlearned when it came to stuff from other cultures.
Speaker: But yeah, maybe he had a small, he h ad a small subset of all the myths and that's why it seemed plausible to him.
Speaker: So I found a quote about him from a textbook on myth.
Speaker: So according to this textbook, this guy, Max Mueller, was, quote, the Joseph Campbell of his time, a man of immense learning, tremendous charisma at the lectern.
Speaker: and a single idea about myth that he vigorously promoted long after others had found it intellectually suspect to do so.
Speaker: So we'll talk about Joseph Campbell later on in this episode.
Speaker: But anyway, that's Max Mueller.
Speaker: All myths are about the sun.
Speaker: All right, so another pretty popular way of thinking about myths is that they are, this is different from the allegorical approach I talked about before, understand them as like historical allegory or like remnants of historical memories preserved in a culture or people group.
Speaker: This is sometimes called euhemerism.
Speaker: Yeah, named after the 4th century BC Macedonian mythographer Euhemaris.
Speaker: Of course.
Speaker: So we kind of talked about the fancy name, Euhemarism.
Speaker: We kind of talked about this one in the last episode.
Speaker: Herodotus was sort of into this.
Speaker: He wanted to reinterpret some myths as referring not to gods, but to just ordinary humans.
Speaker: So instead of Zeus kidnapping Europa, that really just refers to some Greek that kidnapped an Asiatic princess.
Speaker: Maybe a ruler or something.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And Euhemurus himself, he thought that Zeus was really just a king from the distant past that was really noble and revered.
Speaker: He claimed to have evidence of this.
Speaker: He said he found some tablet on some island that definitively showed that Zeus was really just a human being.
Speaker: Yes, so this one's, I think this one's kind of fun, I guess.
Speaker: I like the idea that, like, myths preserve a kernel of historical memory that's been distorted through time.
Speaker: Sometimes people regard this theory as kind of dismissive of myth.
Speaker: Oh, it's just mere bad history or something like that.
Speaker: But I think it's kind of cool to think about this.
Speaker: So one myth I really like is the myth of the Minotaur.
Speaker: So do you remember that one, Megan?
Speaker: What's the...
Speaker: The myth of the minotaur.
Speaker: So in this myth, Athens has to feed 17 youths to this half bull, half human creature in some kind of act of penance.
Speaker: They lost a bed or something.
Speaker: Yeah, so Athens, right, they're subjugated by the island of Crete, like the king of Crete, Minos.
Speaker: He has this, like, nasty creature in the labyrinth.
Speaker: Well, isn't it his kid?
Speaker: Yeah, it's, well, it's his, I guess it would be, well, no, it's the offspring of his wife and a bull.
Speaker: So not his kid.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: Yeah, he's hanging out, the minotaur is hanging out in the labyrinth, right?
Speaker: And Athens has to send tribute to Crete for some reason.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: 17 young men.
Speaker: I think it's seven.
Speaker: Oh, it's seven.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then they get eaten by the Minotaur.
Speaker: Yeah, they get eaten by the Minotaur.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So the prince of Athens, Theseus, volunteers to be tribute for the Minotaur.
Speaker: And his plan is to slay the Minotaur.
Speaker: And he gets the help of Ariadne, who's the princess of Crete.
Speaker: She helps him get his way out of the labyrinth with her thread, with her ball of yarn, right?
Speaker: Thread.
Speaker: So yeah, so that's one example.
Speaker: Wacky myth, really, really weird.
Speaker: But maybe, you know, that recalls hostilities between Athens and Crete from way back when.
Speaker: So we do know that there was a civilization on the island of Crete.
Speaker: This was discovered in the 19th century, this palace of Knossos, palace at Knossos.
Speaker: It's a really, yeah, it's a really elaborate palace.
Speaker: You know, you might describe it as a labyrinth.
Speaker: And they did discover iconography with a minotaur on it.
Speaker: And they found some really, really cool fresco of a bull and like youths jumping over it.
Speaker: It's really unclear what's going on here.
Speaker: It's called the bull leaping fresco.
Speaker: There's yet the bull is charging.
Speaker: There's young, young, young people like jumping over it, maybe.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Really unclear what's going on.
Speaker: But yeah, it does seem like there's some kernel of truth here.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like I like this one.
Speaker: I really do think it's cool.
Speaker: Who among us as a youth hasn't tried to jump over, you know, a bull?
Speaker: Yeah, and I mean, this approach to understanding, I mean, this is something that you see in other places, too.
Speaker: So, for instance, scholars of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, they sometimes read the Jewish story of the Exodus in this kind of way.
Speaker: We don't have a lot of historical evidence that there was this kind of mass captivity thing.
Speaker: of the Hebrew people in Egypt.
Speaker: And one way of explaining this and why it's written as a kind of historical account is that there is a kind of historical repetition of smaller instances of captivity of the Hebrew people by various different foreign cultures.
Speaker: And that this kind of just turned into how this got preserved in memory over hundreds and hundreds and maybe thousands of years is as this one big instance of captivity and breaking free.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So maybe got exaggerated over time.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So maybe maybe Athens had to send tribute to Crete in the form of like grain or something.
Speaker: And over time, it's got exaggerated to be like, oh, and they were they were killing our people, feeding them to a monster in the labyrinth.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Or instead of having to go through, you know, hundreds of counts of smaller, different kinds of enslavements or oppressions, you know, you you symbolize the the big problem is one large instance or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah, that's an easy way to pass down historical knowledge, right?
Speaker: So we're working in this kind of, you know, largely preliterate societies here.
Speaker: How do you preserve your history?
Speaker: And you can't pass down the fine-grained details that's going to get lost.
Speaker: You have to have like a thing that's really easy to remember.
Speaker: And maybe that's a way of getting the point across more easily.
Speaker: A way of ensuring that it stays around.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay, so staying on the theme of allegorical understandings of myth, some people think the best way to go about approaching myths is as primarily moral or philosophical allegories.
Speaker: Yeah, we sort of talked about this one in the last episode too.
Speaker: Plato uses myth to convey philosophical truths.
Speaker: So, yeah, you might think of myth as a way to warn people about things they should not do or instruct them in the proper ways of behaving.
Speaker: So one good example of this might be this story where Apollo, from Greek mythology, Apollo pursues Daphne.
Speaker: I think she's a human or a minor god, I forget.
Speaker: And then so when she's tired of running, she calls for help for her father who turns her into a tree.
Speaker: So what's the point of this kind of weird story?
Speaker: Well, maybe it symbolizes like the virtue of chastity or something like that.
Speaker: In the Roman mythology, so Rome was allegedly founded by Romulus and Remus.
Speaker: And they fought each other, at least in one version of the story, and Romulus killed Remus.
Speaker: A lot of Romans, reflecting on this sort of legendary founding of their city, they saw it as a kind of allegory for the civil wars that Rome had often fought.
Speaker: And yeah, they saw this as kind of like a representation of that.
Speaker: And maybe we shouldn't be doing civil war, right?
Speaker: That sort of thing.
Speaker: So one interesting thing about this way of understanding myths is that at least it seems like to me it kind of brings myths closer to like fables or fairy tales.
Speaker: So like this is obviously something that's going on in something like Aesop's fables or Grimm's fairy tales where there's really obvious moral or philosophical like myths.
Speaker: message or thing you're supposed to take away from it.
Speaker: And so, yeah.
Speaker: So to me, it seems like this way of understanding myth is kind of saying, well, they're not that much different from these other kinds of stories that are doing this.
Speaker: Well, it raises a really interesting definitional question, right?
Speaker: So like, how do we distinguish them between myths and like maybe legends and fables or folk tales or fairy tales?
Speaker: That's another kind of thing that we might want to reflect upon.
Speaker: Yeah, like is Paul Bunyan a myth or we normally refer to him as like a folktale, right?
Speaker: An American folktale or the guy who plants the apple trees.
Speaker: Who?
Speaker: The guy who plants the apple trees.
Speaker: I don't know who you're talking about.
Speaker: Well, we have all these American folk tales.
Speaker: Do you mean like George Washington didn't tell a lie or when he cut down the cherry tree?
Speaker: No, I don't mean that.
Speaker: No, I think I'm just thinking of Johnny Appleseed.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: But anyway, no.
Speaker: So we normally call those like American folktales or tall tales.
Speaker: But do they differ like meaningfully from myths?
Speaker: Well, I think we talked about this in the last episode.
Speaker: Some people want to use the term myth to refer to only things where like the gods are playing a major role.
Speaker: So myth.
Speaker: That's R.G.
Speaker: Collingwood.
Speaker: So Collingwood, remember, he said that myth is theocratic history.
Speaker: So, yeah, if you have this kind of narrow definition of myth and myth has to be about the gods, then you want a different term for those sorts of things.
Speaker: Maybe you can call those things legends, right?
Speaker: Legends are what?
Speaker: They're exaggerated accounts of the things human beings did.
Speaker: And maybe like folk tales and fables could be anything that just doesn't involve like the gods, but it's just like a made up story.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Or like, well, then what about like urban legends?
Speaker: Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: I don't really have a I don't really have a strong view on how to distinguish these things.
Speaker: It seems to me that we use the term myth to refer to a lot of different things and not just stories about the gods.
Speaker: Definitely.
Speaker: So maybe there's like some distinctions between these categories, but they're not very clear cut.
Speaker: Yeah, definitely not.
Speaker: I found a funny example.
Speaker: You like Plotinus, right, Megan?
Speaker: I love Plotinus.
Speaker: You love Plotinus.
Speaker: So apparently Plotinus thought that the three different generations of gods in male gods in Hesiod's Theogony, Uranus gives birth to Kronos, gives birth to Zeus.
Speaker: He thought of those as representing like the three distinct realities in the Neoplatonic scheme.
Speaker: So you have the one, right?
Speaker: You have Plotinus.
Speaker: like the intellect or noose and you have soul suke like the world soul so platonius is like yeah those those those greeks from back in the day they were on to something uranus is the one chronos is noose and zeus is the soul right there you go okay so it's an allegory for this metaphysical distinction yeah oh i like that yeah sure i'm convinced
Speaker: Yeah, and he even saw in the story the key elements of Neoplatonism, right?
Speaker: So those different realities generate the ones further down in the hierarchy, right?
Speaker: Like the one generating... Everything proceeds from... Everything proceeds, just like Zeus proceeds from Kronos.
Speaker: Incredible.
Speaker: Incredible work by Plotinus, as usual.
Speaker: So maybe we should go through some different categories of or like more specific categories of different kinds of myths so we can, I guess, use these categories to see which account of myth we think is best.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So that sounds good.
Speaker: There's lots of different there's lots of other ways of interpreting myth besides the allegorical approach.
Speaker: But let's talk about different kinds of myths.
Speaker: What are myths?
Speaker: What are some myths about?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Obviously, there are these broad categories that lots of different cultural myths fall under.
Speaker: And I guess, you know, maybe the first one that we think of because it's, you know, myths about the first things are creation myths.
Speaker: Those are very popular in common.
Speaker: Yes, very popular in comment, possibly because human beings just really like to explain things.
Speaker: So I found this one citation of something Megan's a bit dubious of.
Speaker: I think this is ridiculous.
Speaker: So where I got this from was Peter Lipton's book on inference to the best explanation.
Speaker: He cites a study by, I think these are psychologists, Nisbet and Ross from 1980, according to which 15% of conversation is about causal explanation.
Speaker: sounds pretty good to me you know i think it might even be higher whenever someone tells a story people are trying to explain it they love explaining things i think it's absolutely absurd that people think you could put a number on that but that's beside the point humans love explaining things we do that's one function of myth explaining say the origin of the world which leads to a common category of myth the creation myth we crave explanation we need it unlike other creatures and that's probably why we're always discontent
Speaker: Yeah, I'm discontent right now.
Speaker: I'm sorry.
Speaker: So myths help us with this, right?
Speaker: Like maybe in the absence of an explanation of why is there stuff rather than no stuff, we, you know, maybe inadvertently or, you know, maybe on purpose, turn to myth.
Speaker: We create a myth to kind of help us out.
Speaker: I mean, this isn't always a bad move, right?
Speaker: I mean, like it's sometimes a good move to be like, well, what kind of story could we tell that would explain what we're seeing or experiencing?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, like Plato does this, remember in the Timaeus that we talked about last time, where he's giving a probable tale of the origin of the world.
Speaker: Right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: So in my research for this podcast, I found it interesting to see the different types of creation myth that scholars have come up with.
Speaker: So they've taxonomized them.
Speaker: Some of them I've heard of, I'm sure some of our listeners have heard of, but some of them are a little less common.
Speaker: So I think it'd be interesting to go through this taxonomy.
Speaker: So perhaps the most...
Speaker: popular kind of creation myth is a sort of creation from nothing, creatio ex nihilo.
Speaker: This is the kind of creation myth you see in the story of Genesis.
Speaker: So that's not the only place you see it.
Speaker: You see it elsewhere as well.
Speaker: I think the Aztecs have a kind of creation from nothing myth where the god just sort of thinks or speaks the world into existence.
Speaker: That's similar to something that is sometimes called a creation from nothing myth, but which I would want to distinguish from it, a creation from chaos, right?
Speaker: Where there is a kind of pre-existing formless matter where the god or gods fashions the formless matter to create the world, create human beings and all of that.
Speaker: So I think we should distinguish between like creation from nothing and creation from like a pre-existing formless matter.
Speaker: Often those are conflated.
Speaker: of like a debate i mean i don't know the genesis myth sometimes seems like creation from chaos yeah i heard that i went back and looked at it and i don't know i don't you know the world was without form yeah maybe and and maybe and then there was nothing else there okay yeah good point it doesn't rule out yeah ex nihilo yeah anyway
Speaker: Yeah, so creation from nothing, creation from chaos, those are different things because there could be a thing that's just chaos and it needs tamed and wrangled into what we see now.
Speaker: Yeah, this brings to mind, I like this distinction because it brings to mind a question in philosophy.
Speaker: Why is there something rather than nothing?
Speaker: You might think of this as like the ultimate question.
Speaker: Where did everything come from?
Speaker: And not just form and the order of things, but like where did everything come from?
Speaker: Like why is there not nothing?
Speaker: So this is, for many metaphysicians, like an important question, a question that needs an answer.
Speaker: But I find it interesting that a lot of cultures didn't really seem to think this was a problem.
Speaker: They were fine.
Speaker: with having there be some pre-existing formless matter that the god or gods fashion, or they were fine with taking for granted the existence of a whole pantheon of god that maybe go on to create other things.
Speaker: The contemporary philosopher thinks, no, no, you got to explain why there's something rather than nothing.
Speaker: But it seems to me that a lot of cultures and the point of their myths is to explain why there's order rather than chaos.
Speaker: Like that is a more important thing.
Speaker: Why are these specific things?
Speaker: Yeah, these specific things.
Speaker: Why is there multiplicity rather than just some kind of undifferentiated unity?
Speaker: Because some creation myths just start with like this thing popped into being.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And there's there's nothing before that and no explanation given for why that should have happened.
Speaker: So maybe humans maybe humans don't crave explanation as much as as much as I think they do.
Speaker: Well, I guess some things they maybe they were just fine with taking for granted that there's something.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But what you really need to explain is why that something is interesting.
Speaker: Maybe there were some intuitions behind this.
Speaker: Like, well, obviously something is is, you know, good.
Speaker: The gods would want to make something rather than not making anything.
Speaker: It's cool to make stuff.
Speaker: Yeah, that could be it.
Speaker: Megan's pushing her own views here.
Speaker: But I think maybe they just find it not like so.
Speaker: So when the philosopher brings up this question, they say, well, nothing's the default state.
Speaker: So that's probably that to me.
Speaker: That's like the assumption that's being questioned.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, I think nothing is the default.
Speaker: Absolutely nothing.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Well, I think that's the default state.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So we have creation from nothing, creation from chaos.
Speaker: Sometimes we have a creation from the slain body of a deity.
Speaker: So this is an interesting one.
Speaker: You see this pop up in multiple cultures.
Speaker: So in the Norse mythology, the world is created from the body of a slain god.
Speaker: Odin and his buddies, they slay some monster, some god, creates the world.
Speaker: In the Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, second millennium creation myth,
Speaker: Marduk slays Tiamat, the kind of water mother dragon goddess, and creates the world from her slain body, like cuts her in half.
Speaker: Half the body is the earth, half the body is the sky.
Speaker: So that's another kind of one, the world is created from a slain god.
Speaker: Here's one.
Speaker: I think we talked about this a while ago, Megan.
Speaker: Creation from like a cosmic egg.
Speaker: And this is like cosmic egg that's taken for granted, right?
Speaker: It's floating in the water.
Speaker: And then the world like springs from that.
Speaker: Where'd the water come from?
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: There we go.
Speaker: Where'd the egg come from?
Speaker: So you see this in various cultures.
Speaker: Now you see it in the Rig Veda of Hinduism.
Speaker: You see in Finnish culture.
Speaker: So that's another one.
Speaker: Sometimes the world is created from the sexual union of two gods, right?
Speaker: Father Sky and Mother Earth.
Speaker: Interestingly, and we'll talk about this later when we get to Carl Jung, this is a very persistent theme among very different cultures.
Speaker: There's a Father Sky, a Mother Earth via some act of union or some separation between the two, the world and other gods are created.
Speaker: So that's another one.
Speaker: Here's an interesting overlap with the slain deity myth.
Speaker: So it, I don't know, maybe this is just me seeing things, but it seems like there is a kind of thematic overlap with the aspect of Kabbalistic Judaism, the doctrine of the Simpsum, where creation or, you know, what exists comes into being when the
Speaker: The deity, God, which is everything, withdraws or shrinks itself intentionally.
Speaker: And in that void of deity, other things spring up.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: So a lot of these separation myths like Father Sky and Mother Earth are in this kind of really tight embrace and nothing else can emerge.
Speaker: And they have to be separated in order for things to emerge.
Speaker: There has to be like a void inserted.
Speaker: That's what goes on in Hesiod's Theogony too, right?
Speaker: Gaia and Eurydice are in this like tight embrace.
Speaker: There's no room for the other gods to move and they have to be separated.
Speaker: That's really fascinating.
Speaker: So there's a lot of thematic overlap with different cultures and that.
Speaker: That's cool.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's two more that I thought were worth mentioning.
Speaker: These are a little less well-known.
Speaker: So in a lot of Native American mythologies, there's something called an earth diver myth where sort of sea creatures, things like toads or water beetles or something,
Speaker: They go down into the depths of the water, bring up something like mud, and that's what generates the earth.
Speaker: Where'd the toads come from?
Speaker: Who knows?
Speaker: Where'd the mud come from?
Speaker: And then there is something called an emergence myth, where human beings, they start out in a kind of pre-human state living in the center of the world, and they have to emerge upwards.
Speaker: And through their process of emerging, they change form and they become human beings.
Speaker: So this is a myth of, I think, the Hopi Indians of the Southwest in the United States.
Speaker: So that's another really interesting one I had never heard of, this emergence myth.
Speaker: Where again, right, we take something for granted.
Speaker: What we're more concerned about is how things became interesting, how things got the form that they have, how order was created, not necessarily why there's something rather than nothing.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: Okay, so on the opposite end of creation myths, we have uncreation myths or destruction myths.
Speaker: I think the youths call this unaliving.
Speaker: Unaliving myths, right.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Everything gets destroyed normally by a flood.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We have the, I mean, ones that are very well known.
Speaker: The flood myth of Genesis, Noah and the Ark.
Speaker: My kid loves that one.
Speaker: She thinks Noah is Santa.
Speaker: Ho, ho, ho.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The Epic of Gilgamesh.
Speaker: Those are probably the two most well-known.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: They're certainly not the only one.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: There's a flood myth in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Speaker: There's kind of like a side story where someone recounts the flood myth.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I guess it's supposed to precede the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But it's in the background.
Speaker: And then there are other there.
Speaker: There are so many flood myths, not as many well-known ones.
Speaker: And not just in like Near Eastern cultures.
Speaker: So you might think, well, it's no surprise that there's a flood myth in the Mesopotamian culture and a flood myth in like Hebrew culture.
Speaker: They probably interacted with each other.
Speaker: There's also flood myths in the so-called like New World.
Speaker: There's a flood myth in Mayan mythology, too.
Speaker: So this is like a really persistent theme in various mythologies.
Speaker: That's actually surprising to me because I would have guessed that they were mostly relegated to the east because of the river situation and the way that floods and all of those intersecting rivers were so destructive to the food supply.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm not quite sure about this, but I think in my studies on this question, I came across the claim that even places that weren't really around water have flood myths too.
Speaker: That's very interesting and surprising to me.
Speaker: I'm unsure of it, but I think I remember that.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, OK, so among these myths, there's a lot of similarities, large boats or arcs that bring a certain.
Speaker: In the genesis and epic of Gilgamesh flood myths.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: So what about other myths?
Speaker: Are people saved on boats in those?
Speaker: Not necessarily.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So some of them are are different.
Speaker: But, you know, you should talk about the similarities first.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So Genesis and Epic of Gilmash, we have an arc, lots of rain that floods the entire world.
Speaker: Is it the entire world?
Speaker: Yeah, I think so.
Speaker: Animals are saved and they wind up marooned, saved, I guess, on a mountain that is providing the first respite of dry land.
Speaker: Yeah, so very, very similar stories in Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Speaker: There are some differences, though.
Speaker: One difference is that the Noah figure in the Epic of Gilgamesh, who's called Utnapishtim, he brings craftspeople and also gold on the ark.
Speaker: What are you going to do with the gold?
Speaker: Good question.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Another difference is like the gods, they disagree amongst themselves about whether there should be a flood.
Speaker: So it's kind of orchestrated by one god in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Speaker: And some gods disagree.
Speaker: And also they think it went a little bit too far.
Speaker: And also their motive was different, too.
Speaker: The motive wasn't that humans were wicked, as in Genesis.
Speaker: The motive was overpopulation.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So, yeah.
Speaker: And also a big difference is Utnapishtim is rewarded with eternal life.
Speaker: And that's why Gilgamesh is visiting him in the epic of Gilgamesh, because Gilgamesh's friend Enkidu died.
Speaker: And he's like, oh, man, mortality is bad.
Speaker: I want eternal life.
Speaker: So he seeks out this Utnapishtim guy.
Speaker: So in the epic, the gods are like eco-terrorists.
Speaker: Yeah, so...
Speaker: Um, is there like, does, does the epic have the same thing as, as Genesis where like it ends with the gods being like, all right, we're not going to do this anymore.
Speaker: They say, oh, well, we'll never do something so bad.
Speaker: Next time we'll, in order to curb overpopulation, we'll send like disease or something.
Speaker: Well, well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But you mentioned, you asked earlier, like, what are other flood myths from other cultures?
Speaker: So off the top of my head, one that I remember, there's like flood myths in Hindu mythology.
Speaker: And there, it's not really like a bad thing.
Speaker: It's sort of just sort of like, this is the way things are.
Speaker: This is the cycle of rebirth and rebirth.
Speaker: No one's punished.
Speaker: No one really laments it.
Speaker: There was a flood, but then there were new creatures and it's all just part of the cosmic cycle.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: So, yeah, there are differences across cultures.
Speaker: Like these two are very similar.
Speaker: The one from the Epic of Gilgamesh and Genesis.
Speaker: But other ones seem to be quite different to me.
Speaker: So why?
Speaker: So maybe it might make sense to have some myths about destruction because people are worried about the world or their community being destroyed.
Speaker: But why water?
Speaker: Well, yeah, maybe it has to do with the fact that if you go back to the taxonomy of creation myths from before, a lot of them involve water.
Speaker: A cosmic egg floating on the water, creating the world from formless water.
Speaker: Amniotic fluid.
Speaker: Yeah, that's water.
Speaker: Remember the earth diver ones where the sea creatures go down into the water and bring up the mud?
Speaker: Water seems to be this sort of vessel of creation.
Speaker: So if it begins in water, maybe it'll end in water too.
Speaker: And that's kind of the anxiety people have.
Speaker: If it began, maybe it could end.
Speaker: Water is so powerful to create life.
Speaker: It could take it as well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Scary.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, the sea is scary.
Speaker: They will look out at the ocean.
Speaker: It's pretty scary.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Actually, Frank and I have this room that has a bunch of prints of really, really like old maps, like maps from like the 14th and 15th centuries.
Speaker: And the maps like mark out where the sea monsters are.
Speaker: Here be monsters.
Speaker: Here be dragons.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So another kind of function that myth plays.
Speaker: So we talked about one function, explaining the origin of the world.
Speaker: And also another function along those lines is just explaining the causes of things.
Speaker: Why are things the way they are?
Speaker: So you can think of like the Tower of Babel story in the Bible.
Speaker: Why can't humans communicate with each other?
Speaker: Why are there all these different languages?
Speaker: Why do people disagree?
Speaker: Well, in the story of the Tower of Babel, they...
Speaker: all spoke the same language.
Speaker: They're building this tower to heaven.
Speaker: And this is the way God punishes them for their hubris.
Speaker: At least one common interpretation of that myth.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: So why can't we communicate?
Speaker: Why are there all these different cultures that have conflicts?
Speaker: Well, you know, because of human hubris and that gets us into trouble.
Speaker: In the Greek mythology, why are there bad things in the world?
Speaker: Pandora opens her box due to her curiosity.
Speaker: That's why all the ills are in the world.
Speaker: A lot of times myths have an explanation for why there's death in the world.
Speaker: So in Native American, a lot of Native American mythologies, the trickster god, who we'll talk more about soon, who is usually the raven or coyote, they often bring death into the world due to their trickery.
Speaker: So that's an explanation for death.
Speaker: And then I guess you might want to just explain why your community or city or country came to be like with founding myths.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's another kind of myth.
Speaker: Rome has their founding myth.
Speaker: That's their favorite myth.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: One thing that a lot of anthropologists like to emphasize is that myths are crucial.
Speaker: They serve a crucial function in that at least a lot of them serve to justify and uphold a particular social order in a society.
Speaker: Yeah, so this is an important theory of myth because it points out that myth is kind of an active thing.
Speaker: It's not just a mere tale we tell each other.
Speaker: It's not just merely of intellectual interest.
Speaker: It's supposed to do something really practical and justify the social order.
Speaker: So this is sometimes called the charter theory of myth.
Speaker: It's often attributed to this one, I think he was an anthropologist, this guy Bronislaw Malinowski.
Speaker: He said the following, So we're supposed to do something really important.
Speaker: Society is the way it is now.
Speaker: We want some explanation or some justification for this.
Speaker: Maybe someone might question it.
Speaker: So we need a justification.
Speaker: Yeah, this is another one of those features that at least some myths have that in my mind bring it at least close to how we understand like urban legends or tall tales or fables, things like that.
Speaker: Like it's clearly doing some kind of, at least in the eyes of some people, pro-social work.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So if you're familiar with Plato, you might be familiar with one of these kinds of charter myths that Plato invents himself.
Speaker: You can think of the noble lie from the Republic as a kind of charter myth.
Speaker: So remember, in Plato's Republic, there's three different classes of people.
Speaker: There's the philosopher kings, the soldiers in the middle, and then the workers.
Speaker: So Plato says, well, here's what we'll do.
Speaker: We'll tell these three different classes that the ones at the top, they were born with gold mixed in them.
Speaker: The ones in the middle were born with silver and the ones at the bottom were born with bronze mixed in them.
Speaker: A clear kind of way of justifying the social order.
Speaker: Sorry, man, you're bronze.
Speaker: I can't do anything about it.
Speaker: One of my favorite examples of this kind of thing comes from Chinese folk religion, Chinese mythology.
Speaker: So the mother goddess of Chinese folk religion, she first creates the first people by hand.
Speaker: They're from yellow clay.
Speaker: They're artisanally created.
Speaker: This is taking a really long time.
Speaker: She gets kind of bored.
Speaker: So she decides to create the rest of the people by dragging a rope through the mud.
Speaker: And the rest of the people in the world are mass produced.
Speaker: So the ones that were created by hand, it's kind of artisanal fashion.
Speaker: They're the aristocrats and the ones created by dragging the rope through the mud.
Speaker: They're the rest of us.
Speaker: That's terrible.
Speaker: But it's a very creative one.
Speaker: I like it.
Speaker: I wonder if like our ideas or like the common, you know, picture of like the American founding fathers would fall under this kind of myth.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I mean, like these were real people, obviously.
Speaker: So it's a little bit different, but they're romanticized and even portrayed inaccurately, like portrayed as like old virtuous men.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Rather than like the 18 year old like.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We better not question anything they did or said because they were so virtuous.
Speaker: Yeah, when like most of them were like 18 to 20 years old and like in open rebellion against their country.
Speaker: And right.
Speaker: So as a way of kind of saying, oh, no, look, there's these these obvious like virtues that this country was founded on.
Speaker: And so this is something that is is worth, you know, dying for and preserving and and and et cetera.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: One other thing that we haven't mentioned yet, we sort of flirted with this, is the idea that myth has something to do with a ritual.
Speaker: This is also a very common theory of myth in the 19th century.
Speaker: The idea is that myth is the kind of narrative component or the narrative accompaniment of ritual.
Speaker: All ritual has some kind of myth that goes along with it.
Speaker: And here you can see examples illustrating this idea.
Speaker: Take the idea of resting on the Sabbath.
Speaker: That is clearly a reference to the fact that God rested on the seventh day when he created the world.
Speaker: So, yeah, this is something that's emphasized a lot by this one Romanian scholar of religion and philosopher, Mircea Eliade.
Speaker: I think you pronounce his name.
Speaker: You read this guy, right?
Speaker: I always said Eliade, but I could be mistaken about that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You read this guy, though, right?
Speaker: Didn't you say an anthropology major?
Speaker: I was an anthropology major for one misguided semester.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But no, I actually really love Eliotti.
Speaker: He's he's fantastic.
Speaker: I read his book, The Sacred and the Profane, when I was like 19 and many times since then.
Speaker: And it's it's really wonderful work.
Speaker: He was a very strange person, but his work is great.
Speaker: I read I've read a little bit of it.
Speaker: I've really enjoyed what I've read.
Speaker: I found out that he did his dissertation on in a philosophy department on yoga.
Speaker: I wonder what that's like.
Speaker: So someone who we talked about in the last episode, R.G.
Speaker: Collingwood, a philosopher of history, historian, he had this theory that all myths are about the gods.
Speaker: We brought this up a few times, which makes sense.
Speaker: I guess if you're, especially if you're trying to keep a particular social order intact, then you want people to think that the gods are in favor of that social order or made it that way because obviously that would have a lot of coercive power.
Speaker: But there are a lot of,
Speaker: seeming counter examples to this.
Speaker: It just doesn't seem like all myths are about gods, especially one we've already talked about.
Speaker: The Epic of Gilgamesh is at least not the main characters themselves are not gods.
Speaker: Yeah, so it's there.
Speaker: You might be described as like heroes, I guess.
Speaker: In the Epic of Gilgamesh, he's described as two thirds divine, which is kind of weird.
Speaker: But yeah, he was like a historical king.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So there is like archaeological evidence that there was a guy in ancient Sumeria named Gilgamesh.
Speaker: So it's ostensibly about a historical figure.
Speaker: So is he a demigod or are there layers of... He's mortal.
Speaker: I mean, he's mortal.
Speaker: He's trying to find immortality.
Speaker: He's human.
Speaker: I mean, he's a hero.
Speaker: He's a special person.
Speaker: But it's not really about the gods.
Speaker: It's about Gilgamesh and his friendship with this other person, Enkidu, who dies and all that.
Speaker: It's about Gilgamesh's quest for immortality.
Speaker: You know, the conflict between nature and civilization, other themes like that, but it's not really about the gods.
Speaker: So I always found it strange that Collingwood says this because it doesn't seem like this is theocratic history, as he puts it.
Speaker: This is about Gilgamesh and other themes, right?
Speaker: It's not about the gods.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: So maybe so you use the word hero.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So maybe it might be at least some some people famously have thought, actually, we should think of myths as being about a hero, specifically a hero's journey into becoming the heroic person that they are destined to be.
Speaker: Yes, the hero myth, a very popular form of myth made famous by the professor of literature, Joseph Campbell.
Speaker: So he flourished in like the mid 20th century.
Speaker: Sarah Lawrence College.
Speaker: Sarah Lawrence College.
Speaker: And he wrote this book called Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Speaker: Another book called, I guess this was like an interview series, right?
Speaker: The Power of the...
Speaker: on PBS, The Power of Myth.
Speaker: So th is is a very, very popular approach to myth.
Speaker: It's very popular in high school and middle school English classes.
Speaker: In fact, I asked my sister, who teaches middle school English, have you guys ever learned or taught this sort of thing, like Campbell's approach to myth and the hero's journey?
Speaker: And she said, yeah, of course, this is super popular.
Speaker: So yeah, this is another way of approaching myth through this framework that Campbell came up with about the hero's journey.
Speaker: Yeah, so Campbell's theory, I guess, is that myths can be understood as being broken into.
Speaker: I guess there's two versions of this.
Speaker: One version, there's six stages of the monomyth, the journey of the hero.
Speaker: Another version, there is 17.
Speaker: I was previously only familiar with the six stages.
Speaker: That's what I'm going to really focus on.
Speaker: And then I'll talk a little bit about the details of the more detailed one.
Speaker: But in the six stage version, we have an ordinary person, an initiate, a person that the story's focused on.
Speaker: They start out pretty unremarkable, who begins their journey in some way.
Speaker: They set forth into the world.
Speaker: This is not always willingly.
Speaker: In fact, often it's involuntary.
Speaker: They kind of
Speaker: get pulled in or coerced in or have no other choice, that kind of thing.
Speaker: They resist the call.
Speaker: They do.
Speaker: Is what Campbell says.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Often.
Speaker: They arrive at some kind of, the next stage is that they arrive at some kind of boundary between what they're familiar with and what they're unfamiliar with.
Speaker: And they have to kind of push themselves out of their comfort zone into this dangerous new land of
Speaker: Danger, evil.
Speaker: There's trials along the way.
Speaker: Often they fight monsters.
Speaker: Yeah, fighting monsters, going through tribulations and tests.
Speaker: Then they come to like a final boss stage.
Speaker: That's that's step four, where they they have to either, you know, fight someone.
Speaker: big or they undergo some kind of really bad ordeal and are victorious and gain some kind of reward of some sort.
Speaker: Stage five is that the hero brings, as Kamlo calls it, his boon, the reward or whatever he gained from being successful in this big ordeal.
Speaker: He starts to return to his world to bring back the riches to where he came from.
Speaker: He's bringing this back for people.
Speaker: So he's coming back into the world that he's familiar with, back into his world.
Speaker: And then the final stage is that he reemerges from what Camel calls the Kingdom of Dread into his former world, the one he's familiar with, bringing this thing that is beneficial to his society or world in some way.
Speaker: So Campbell wants to say that like most, if not all myths involving heroes, maybe not all myths, like creation myths clearly don't fit this framework.
Speaker: But like most myths involving heroes basically fit this pattern.
Speaker: And there's a sense in which there's only one.
Speaker: hero's journey.
Speaker: Sometimes we call the hero King Arthur.
Speaker: Sometimes we call him Hercules.
Speaker: Sometimes we call him Gilgamesh.
Speaker: But really, they're all doing the same sorts of things at a very abstract level of description.
Speaker: And that's the way it should be analyzed.
Speaker: Are they all men for Campbell?
Speaker: Well, that is one thing that people have criticized when it comes to Campbell.
Speaker: So a lot of scholars, although Campbell is perhaps the most popular mythologist or mythographer, myth theorist, most scholars don't seem to like him very much.
Speaker: In my brief research into this, most people think that his source material is too limited or he has a kind of selection bias.
Speaker: Some of his...
Speaker: Some of his theories are a little, like, ethnocentric.
Speaker: And yeah, there's a kind of masculine bias.
Speaker: Most of the heroes are men.
Speaker: He doesn't say the hero has to be a man, but, you know, he doesn't really talk a lot about, to my knowledge, female heroes.
Speaker: And maybe their journeys differ from the journey of the male hero.
Speaker: Well, and notably in the more detailed 17 stage version of the monomyth, there is a character of a femme fatale that is in his theory of this monomyth is...
Speaker: And coercive in this, I guess, you know, evil, but heterosexual way with a male hero, reinforcing this idea that the heroes are typically, if not all the time.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And you can see this in some myths.
Speaker: In that book of Gilgamesh, there is a femme fatale.
Speaker: It's the goddess Ishtar.
Speaker: She wants to marry Gilgamesh.
Speaker: But every time she marries someone, she like kills her husband.
Speaker: So Gilgamesh is like, I don't want to marry you.
Speaker: You can see that.
Speaker: But, you know, it doesn't feature in every myth.
Speaker: That is a feature in the myth of Demeter, who's trying to get her daughter Persephone back from Hades.
Speaker: None of that stuff he's talking about happens in that.
Speaker: Would she be the hero in that one?
Speaker: It seems like she does journey.
Speaker: It's true.
Speaker: She does transform herself in various ways.
Speaker: She, in a sense, she gets what she wanted back.
Speaker: She gets Persephone back for half the year.
Speaker: And that's why sometimes it's spring and sometimes it's winter.
Speaker: And during winter, her daughter Persephone is in Hades.
Speaker: But yeah, she doesn't bring a boon back to her people.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: It doesn't seem like it fits a lot of myths to me.
Speaker: Maybe she brings warm weather back or something.
Speaker: Yeah, she restores agriculture, you know.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: It just seems like one of these frameworks where it's like if you try hard enough, you can shove most things into it.
Speaker: But it's unclear if this amount of work to get myths to fit is like worth it or the best way to understand these myths.
Speaker: Yeah, I agree, right?
Speaker: I mean, for instance, take the point about the threshold.
Speaker: So the hero has to cross some threshold before beginning their journey.
Speaker: You know, there's a sense in which that's true.
Speaker: I think of the Gilgamesh story, there's this kind of forest that has a monster in it, and Gilgamesh and Enkidu have to cross the threshold to go into the forest and defeat the monster.
Speaker: But like, you know, anything's a threshold.
Speaker: Like, what's a threshold?
Speaker: That's just something in between two spaces.
Speaker: It's just a line.
Speaker: It's a line.
Speaker: I know.
Speaker: It's easy to cross a threshold.
Speaker: Like who doesn't cross?
Speaker: I cross thresholds all the time.
Speaker: So I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah, this is kind of like danger of abstraction whereby you're just saying something really vacuous.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: One of the other details in the more detailed 17 stage version is that there's like a deep conflict and then ultimate atonement with a father figure.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: This is prominently seen in Star Wars.
Speaker: And in fact, George Lucas was very influenced by Campbell's theory of the monomyth.
Speaker: Yeah, so if you want a good illustration of Campbell's ideas, just look at Star Wars.
Speaker: A lot of the stages in Star Wars, they happen in the way Campbell describes because according to George Lucas, he sort of designed it that way.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: You know, there's Luke has to meet some supernatural figure that helps him, Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Speaker: He resists the call to adventure initially.
Speaker: He has to cross a threshold.
Speaker: Like, what's the threshold?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: The cantina, the spaceport where he leaves the planet.
Speaker: So yeah, you can see a lot of
Speaker: The Campbell's ideas represented in the Star Wars stories.
Speaker: And I mean, to Campbell's credit, it does.
Speaker: There is something obviously enduring about the Star Wars stories, something that does seem like timeless kind of giving, you know, it has happened a long time ago in a faraway place.
Speaker: Like, you know, true to the structure of mythology, Lucas doesn't give us any specifics about time and place.
Speaker: And there is something obviously that endures about this because we're still watching and thinking about and talking about Star Wars decades later, even in our culture where, you know, we forget about movies two weeks after they come out.
Speaker: Yeah, good.
Speaker: So I don't think Campbell's work is valueless.
Speaker: So maybe some of his more ambitious claims that all myths fit this sort of framework seem to me suspect.
Speaker: But yeah, it is useful to analyze these myths, point out things they have in common.
Speaker: And it does make for a good story.
Speaker: That's definitely true.
Speaker: But it does seem like a lot of canonical myths, hero's myths.
Speaker: You know, the Iliad.
Speaker: There are heroes in the Iliad.
Speaker: Achilles and Hector and all of that.
Speaker: They don't seem to really fit Campbell's framework.
Speaker: A lot of the heroes in Greek mythology are like bad people.
Speaker: Hercules, for instance, the Heracles.
Speaker: He does these 12 laborers where he's slaying monsters and stuff like that.
Speaker: Sort of seems like it would fit with Campbell's framework.
Speaker: But the reason why he's doing this is because he killed his children.
Speaker: I mean, to be fair, like Hera, Zeus's wife, tricked him into doing it.
Speaker: But yeah, I me an, a lot of the heroes are bad dudes.
Speaker: Achilles is a bad dude in the Iliad.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So maybe instead of this being a good way to like understand myths as such, it's more just like, oh, here's like an interesting narrative structure that for some reason is really impactful for people.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm fine with treating it that way.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: So one hero that Campbell talks about and is a particular kind of hero that I really like is called the trickster, the trickster god or the trickster hero.
Speaker: So here's Campbell on the trickster, this character that's recurring throughout a lot of different myths.
Speaker: Almost all non-literate mythology has a trickster hero of some kind.
Speaker: American Indians had the great rabbit and coyote, the ravens, and the blue jay.
Speaker: And there's a very special property in the trickster.
Speaker: He
Speaker: He always breaks in, just as the unconscious does, to trip up the rational situation.
Speaker: He's both a fool and someone who's beyond the system.
Speaker: And the trickster hero represents all those possibilities of life that your mind hasn't decided it wants to deal with.
Speaker: The mind structures a lifestyle, and the fool or trickster represents another whole range of possibilities.
Speaker: He doesn't respect the values that you set up for yourself and smashes them.
Speaker: I just want to say something about this quote before we start talking about the trickster, because this makes me think, and I guess given his timeline, it's pretty plausible that Campbell was like pretty influenced by, I guess he was influenced by Jung in the sense he was influenced by Freud, right?
Speaker: Yeah, he's-
Speaker: Freudian.
Speaker: Yes, he's very influenced by the psychoanalytic tradition.
Speaker: There's a sense in which the journey for the hero is always like an internal journey.
Speaker: And that sort of came out in your description at various points.
Speaker: The hero has to reconcile himself with his father.
Speaker: He has to go through some kind of spiritual transformation and all that.
Speaker: For Campbell, yeah, the journey really is internal.
Speaker: And he is very much influenced by psychoanalysis, Carl Jung and all of that.
Speaker: Yeah, so for him, the trickster represents this kind of unconscious, maybe what Freud might call like the id, something like that.
Speaker: You love the trickster.
Speaker: Love the trickster.
Speaker: Particularly the raven trickster.
Speaker: Yes, so in a lot of Native American folklore, particularly the Native American...
Speaker: of the Pacific Northwest.
Speaker: They have this character called the Raven.
Speaker: So the Raven's an interesting character because he's not just a trickster who's out to like gain for himself.
Speaker: So a lot of tricksters are driven by their appetites.
Speaker: They're engaged in cunning and trickery in order to satisfy their base desires.
Speaker: But interestingly, in Native American folklore, the Raven is also a creator god.
Speaker: So he likes to steal things for human beings, not necessarily because he cares about humans so much.
Speaker: He just wants to engage in trickery.
Speaker: So one story is the Raven tricks some man who is hoarding the light of the world in a box.
Speaker: He tricks the man, steals the sun, and that's why we have the sun and the stars and the moon.
Speaker: How does he trick him, Frank?
Speaker: I forget exactly.
Speaker: I think he tricks him because since there's no light in the world, the man can't see the raven.
Speaker: The raven tricks the man to thinking that the raven is the child of his daughter.
Speaker: So yeah, in another story, he tricks a man who's hoarding water, steals it from him, and then drops it over the world and it becomes the rivers.
Speaker: So the raven in Native American folklore is kind of a creator god, kind of like Prometheus who steals fire for human beings.
Speaker: Yeah, he's like a Robin Hood.
Speaker: He's stealing from people who shouldn't have things and giving it to the people who should.
Speaker: Yeah, and he does it because it's fun.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So the trickster is for Campbell, maybe represents this kind of unconscious impulses or something that come up out of our normally composed, I don't know, exterior behavior and show like something real about us underneath.
Speaker: And one of my favorite thinkers who I bring up on here all the time, Charles Taylor,
Speaker: political philosopher and moral philosopher.
Speaker: He writes about something kind of similar to this, this idea that there's this need that we see, well, a theme that we see throughout history of structure, especially like social structure being kept in place by moments of what he calls anti-structure.
Speaker: where the prominent social structure gets overturned in, I guess, like purposeful ways in order to reveal, I guess, the need for structure in order to keep people from being complacent.
Speaker: Well, I think the idea is that like, so we want myths to justify the social order.
Speaker: We need a structure.
Speaker: Society needs norms.
Speaker: But we don't want to be like rigidly adhering to those norms.
Speaker: Like we need to like blow off steam from time to time.
Speaker: And so we need these kinds of...
Speaker: you know, topsy-turvy days, carnival and stuff, rituals of reversal where, like, temporarily the norms of society are, like, suspended in order to just sort of keep alive the idea that society is constantly growing and needs to progress and change when the time is necessary.
Speaker: Otherwise, society would be stagnant.
Speaker: Yeah, I can read this short quote from his extremely huge book, A Secular Age.
Speaker: Taylor says, the general phenomenon here is a sense of the necessity of anti-structure.
Speaker: All codes need to be countervailed, sometimes even swamped in their negation on pain of rigidity, innervation, the atrophy of social cohesion, blindness, perhaps ultimately self-destruction,
Speaker: Both the tension between temporal and spiritual and the existence of carnival and other rites of reversal show that this sense used to be very alive, especially in Latin Christendom.
Speaker: So he's specifically pointing here to intentionally taking up rituals of anti-structure as a way, like you said, maybe a blowing off steam, also the maybe serving as a way of like
Speaker: recognizing that the structure isn't all there is.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, if you don't recognize something exists, it might be harder to fight it or something like that.
Speaker: So a way of recognizing things beyond the structure, letting people display frustration with the structure so that ultimately it has fewer cracks or weak points.
Speaker: Yeah, and you get the trickster of representing this kind of anti-structure.
Speaker: It's like a nice connection.
Speaker: So in that section of secular age that Megan just quoted, Taylor also quotes a medieval French priest, a cleric, who says, yeah, once a year we engage this kind of foolishness because the foolishness innate in us can then come out and evaporate.
Speaker: Maybe you can compare this to
Speaker: Aristotle's account of why we need tragedy, why we need to go to the tragic place for catharsis, right?
Speaker: Something like that.
Speaker: But also importantly, it represents the idea that the structure, like as you said, is not all there is.
Speaker: Society needs to evolve.
Speaker: And so these sorts of anti-structure rituals are important.
Speaker: So Taylor talks about carnival.
Speaker: He does suggest in the quote that Megan read that we don't really have these kinds of things anymore.
Speaker: But some people point out that we do.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like there is there are some instances of these kinds of rituals of reversal in our society.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, Halloween, trick or treat.
Speaker: I mean, I don't really think people trick that much anymore.
Speaker: People still do mischief night, I think.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Mischief night.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: April Fool's Day, which I used to do real tricks on April Fool's Day.
Speaker: Now people just lie on social media in ways that aren't funny.
Speaker: But April Fool's Day, you know, every four years we do the purge.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, I mean, we have some days, but I do kind of feel like the...
Speaker: The purpose of them that Taylor's getting at isn't really a big part of them anymore.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I don't know.
Speaker: Maybe that's something I think I do think there might be something significant to that.
Speaker: Maybe we're so...
Speaker: Uh, there, yeah, something has has died in our culture such that we don't see the need for moments of anti-structure anymore.
Speaker: I think Taylor connects it to this, not to talk about secularism again, but he connects it to the secular age, right?
Speaker: There's no kind of structure that everyone accepts that's guiding our experience in our lives.
Speaker: And you're not going to see a common anti-structure either.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So let's talk about psychoanalysis, Megan.
Speaker: We already hinted at this before.
Speaker: So this happens to be, I think, the most popular way of talking about myth in the 20th and 21st century.
Speaker: Oh, certainly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like myth is really about the human mind.
Speaker: It's not about gods.
Speaker: It's not an allegory for nature.
Speaker: It's an allegory about ourselves, our mind.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So Freud had this view, right?
Speaker: He thought the Oedipus story really did reflect the Oedipus complex.
Speaker: He thought, literally, that all male children wanted to kill their father and marry their mother, right?
Speaker: So he thought that the story's popularity, the Oedipus myth, the only way to explain its popularity was that this actually reflects a psychic drive that humans have.
Speaker: And he often interprets a lot of myths in his kind of framework where everything's about sex.
Speaker: So if you kill a dragon, you're killing your father.
Speaker: You're marrying a princess, you're marrying your mother.
Speaker: Swords are the phallus, cave is the vagina.
Speaker: So that's Freud.
Speaker: People that followed Freud in the psychoanalytrician, they have this kind of view.
Speaker: There's lots of Freudians.
Speaker: Perhaps the most famous Freudian, I suppose, psychoanalytrician,
Speaker: analyst of myth is Carl Jung, who we've mentioned before.
Speaker: He was a student of Freud.
Speaker: He departed from Freud in various ways.
Speaker: But he also had this view that myth is really about the human mind.
Speaker: And he had a particularly interesting, I think, kind of worked out account of myth.
Speaker: He wrote a lot about it.
Speaker: And for Jung, myth does play an important function, but it's not an explanatory function.
Speaker: It's not a justiquatory function.
Speaker: It's kind of like a tool.
Speaker: Myth is a tool to encounter the unconscious.
Speaker: Which for Jung is this real thing that exists out there, the collective unconscious.
Speaker: And if we want to access it, to tap into it, one of the tools we use is myth.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, Jung has this kind of really metaphysical notion of the unconscious because...
Speaker: On its surface, when I say, yeah, myth is a way to encounter the unconscious, you're probably thinking, oh, yeah, we all have our own individual unconsciouses, and myth is a way of tapping into those.
Speaker: No, no, no.
Speaker: Jung met this in like a way more metaphysical way, that there's this kind of collective, universal unconscious that we all share in some way.
Speaker: So he says this.
Speaker: In addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche, there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals.
Speaker: This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited.
Speaker: It consists of preexistent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.
Speaker: So he's just kind of like, I don't know what you want to call it.
Speaker: It's kind of like idealist in a way.
Speaker: There's this kind of entity that we all share a part of.
Speaker: You can definitely see like strands of this in Plato a little bit.
Speaker: You know, we inherit these categories of the world by this through our collective pre-existence in the realm of the forms.
Speaker: And, you know, we come out of it.
Speaker: But the goal is to kind of get back to understand the true nature of things.
Speaker: Yeah, he really is putting together a lot of different philosophical strands.
Speaker: So there's definitely Plato, like these archetypes that we'll talk about in a minute.
Speaker: You can think of them as like Plato's forms.
Speaker: They're kind of, they're preexistent.
Speaker: So they're with us.
Speaker: They're not learned from experience.
Speaker: So that's one way he differs from Freud.
Speaker: Freud thinks we have certain experiences and then we develop these sorts of neuroses.
Speaker: For Jung, we're built with them already.
Speaker: So he's kind of like Kant in that regard.
Speaker: Kant thinks that
Speaker: the human mind comes prepackaged with various categories and ways of seeing the world and that structures our experience.
Speaker: So Jung has this view too, but then he also has this kind of like idealistic, monistic sort of thing, which I guess you can compare.
Speaker: This is a really obscure reference, but you can maybe compare this to
Speaker: Averroes, who was an interpreter, 12th century Islamic interpreter of Aristotle, who thought that we should best interpret Aristotle by saying something like this, that we all share a single intellect.
Speaker: And that's like literally speaking.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I don't think that's very popular among contemporary Aristotelians.
Speaker: No, no.
Speaker: But yeah, Jung thought this was for real.
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: His idea of synchronicity, like when you're thinking of someone and they call you, he thought that was real.
Speaker: These sorts of meaningful, non-causal, distant connections.
Speaker: Those are explained.
Speaker: Someone has like a feeling that something bad's happening to a loved one and then it turns out they are.
Speaker: Or something bad is happening to a loved one.
Speaker: And that's not just a coincidence.
Speaker: That's us being joined in this unconscious realm that maybe we're not aware of all the time, but is a part of us.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And the key elements of this unconscious are, as we've said already, the archetypes.
Speaker: So the archetypes, like we said, you can think of them kind of like Plato's forms.
Speaker: And they include an indefinite list of recurring patterns you see in lots and lots of myths.
Speaker: So things like the Great Mother, the Mother Goddess.
Speaker: The wise old man, the divine child, the trickster, right?
Speaker: The hero.
Speaker: Jung has this really interesting view where he thinks that we all have a kind of opposite gender self.
Speaker: So like I have a conception of the opposite gender, the part of myself.
Speaker: You have a conception of the opposite gender.
Speaker: It's a part of yourself.
Speaker: And that's a that's a thing about every person.
Speaker: And that's kind of platonic, too.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The cutting people in half.
Speaker: Yeah, from the symposium, Aristophanes' account of love.
Speaker: So true love is finding your other half.
Speaker: Right, literally.
Speaker: Yeah, Jung thought this too.
Speaker: You got to get in touch with your feminine and your masculine side.
Speaker: God, the great flood, things like that, the dark side of ourselves, these kinds of recurring images and themes.
Speaker: He thinks they're so widespread that they have to be built in.
Speaker: They can't be merely explained by cultural contact and stuff like that.
Speaker: All right, so I get that Jung kind of has this idea that, well, we can't explain the similarities in these cultural mythologies because of cultural context, because in a lot of cases, these cultures are totally distinct from one another, and blah, blah, blah, therefore collective unconscious.
Speaker: But, I mean, surely there could be some other explanation, right?
Speaker: I mean, like...
Speaker: Here's one.
Speaker: We don't know a lot about ancient human history, you know, but presumably at some point, all humans that existed were kind of all together.
Speaker: Maybe it's just really, really old preserved memories.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a good one.
Speaker: So yeah, prehistory is cool.
Speaker: Maybe we'll do an episode on that someday.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So maybe it's just like super ancient preserved memory that's like preserved in, you know, like, I don't know, like the epigenetics or something like really deep down.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Or, you know, maybe something a little more boring.
Speaker: We're all...
Speaker: the same species and so that means that we have similarities uh in the kinds of things that we fear and stuff because we have a similar evolutionary history we've you know evolved as a species to have at least under normal circumstances particular fears and aversions and desires and stuff like that um because it was selected for or whatever so we're all afraid of snakes and we're all afraid of great floods just yeah be a natural selection right exactly yeah
Speaker: Yes, these are just armchair other possible explanations, but they're ones that don't require you to get all weirdly metaphysical.
Speaker: We were all abducted by aliens at one point, and these things were put into our unconscious at an individual level.
Speaker: Yeah, so speaking of aliens, with respect to this topic, I think of the fact that different cultures that presumably didn't have a lot of cultural contact all landed on the pyramid kind of structure, right?
Speaker: You see pyramids in Mesoamerica, you see pyramids in Egypt.
Speaker: Now, the people on the History Channel want to say that aliens had something to do with this, but presumably the better explanation is just that pyramid is a good solution to a design problem when you don't have a lot of sophisticated engineering.
Speaker: It's a very stable shape.
Speaker: It's hard to knock over.
Speaker: How else are you going to build up really tall?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So yeah, those are good other possible explanations.
Speaker: I guess I sort of feel the way about Jung and the psychoanalytic approach as I felt about Campbell, which makes sense because Campbell's very influenced by this tradition.
Speaker: It just seems really vague at times.
Speaker: And it seems to, in many instances, to ignore the differences between different kinds of
Speaker: So take the case of the trickster again.
Speaker: So Raven in Native American cultures is a trickster, but Loki is also a trickster in Norse mythology.
Speaker: So these are both tricksters.
Speaker: They're supposed to be both instances of the trickster archetype.
Speaker: And so they do have some stuff in common.
Speaker: Tricksters are often shapeshifters.
Speaker: Loki's a shapeshifter.
Speaker: The Raven's a shapeshifter.
Speaker: But Loki's like a lot different from the Raven, right?
Speaker: Loki's a lot more sinister.
Speaker: He doesn't seem as fun-loving as the Raven.
Speaker: And he's also not a creator like the Raven is.
Speaker: And this is something that's even recognized in textbooks on mythologies.
Speaker: I'm not just making this up.
Speaker: Here's a quote from a contemporary textbook.
Speaker: Nevertheless, Loki isn't fun-loving or warm.
Speaker: His appetites proceed not from friendly bodily urges, but from more sinister psychic cravings.
Speaker: Moreover, Loki is neither culture hero nor creator.
Speaker: Those seem like really big differences to me.
Speaker: Raven's a creator god.
Speaker: Loki is not.
Speaker: So they're both tricksters.
Speaker: They have some similarities.
Speaker: But if we just subsume them under the archetype of trickster, we miss all these differences.
Speaker: I guess there's this lumper versus splitter thing.
Speaker: Some people are lumpers.
Speaker: They like to see the similarities and things.
Speaker: Some people are splitters.
Speaker: So I guess maybe my uncomfortability with the psychoanalytic approach is that it's too lumpy.
Speaker: It's too lumpy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: No, I was actually just thinking about, I mean, so there's this long tradition of thinking about like myth and the psychoanalytic tradition.
Speaker: And obviously the big name in our time is a certain Jordan B. Peterson.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Who obviously riffs off of kind of a simplified version of Jung and is probably a fan of Campbell as well.
Speaker: And, you know, cards on the table.
Speaker: I'm not a fan of Peterson's.
Speaker: I don't find them particularly insightful, kind of for the exact same reasons, just amplified that that I don't necessarily find these theories that insightful, which is kind of, I guess, one like philosophy term that we could use to describe why I don't like a lot of what they're saying here is that it seems unfalsifiable.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: The theories themselves don't lend themselves to any particularly good kind of counter evidence.
Speaker: There's nothing we could find that would easily disprove these theories because you can always kind of just, you know, finagle whatever myth you want into these frameworks if you try hard enough.
Speaker: Yeah, they're so vague they can really fit almost anything.
Speaker: And we sort of mentioned that with Campbell, right?
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: And, you know, on Twitter the other day, I was in a conversation with some other philosophers and one of them, a falsifiability came up as a theoretical desideratum.
Speaker: And one of them said, well, you know, this seems like something that that we should only really care about with like scientific theories.
Speaker: But I think that this is a good a good example of why maybe this seems like a theoretical desideratum for lots of different kinds of theories.
Speaker: Presumably, Jung thinks he's doing science of some sort.
Speaker: I'm not I'm a Jung scholar.
Speaker: Just just dabbled in it.
Speaker: But.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: I mean, he's at the beginning, you know, infant stages of psychology.
Speaker: And I mean, the aim there was to craft it as a kind of science.
Speaker: So presumably right.
Speaker: Yeah, I think the false viability thing probably gets at the core of why I'm kind of suspicious of the psychoanalytic approach to myth.
Speaker: So my background is in philosophy of science.
Speaker: So the great Karl Popper.
Speaker: talks about this.
Speaker: He talks about the defects of psychoanalysis in his explanation of the importance of falsifiability for scientific theories.
Speaker: I guess that's always at the forefront of my mind when I think of people like Jung and people like Freud.
Speaker: Yeah, but even if you don't want to include myth studies as like a kind of science or anything like that, it seems like, yeah, to me, this is just like a striking example of why falsifiability is good in lots of different domains.
Speaker: We want to be able to say, at least in principle, that some theory is wrong, because otherwise it's meaningful or it's not meaningful to say that it, you know, seems kind of right.
Speaker: Yeah, sure.
Speaker: Because really what you're talking about when you're talking about falsifiability is being informative.
Speaker: Falsifiable things are informative.
Speaker: It's unfalsifiable because it doesn't really say much.
Speaker: Ironically for Popper, I guess maybe ironically for Freud and Jung and all that, Popper regards those theories, those psychoanalytic theories as kinds of myths.
Speaker: So he says this, he says, psychoanalytic theories have, in fact, more in common with primitive myths than with science.
Speaker: They contain most interesting psychological suggestions, but not in a testable form.
Speaker: So Jung is like, I'm given a theory of myth.
Speaker: Popper's like, you've given a myth.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I remember.
Speaker: Does he specifically attack like positive psychology and stuff like that?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: He attaches.
Speaker: He attacks.
Speaker: In the paper I'm thinking of, he attacks.
Speaker: This is conjectures and reputations.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: He attacks Marxism and Adlerian psychoanalysis.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: And Freud, too.
Speaker: Yeah, but this is something that we should mention, right?
Speaker: So a lot of people say, oh, yes, Popper showed or, you know, argued that psychoanalysis is bad.
Speaker: He does not think that that's necessarily a bad thing to be a myth.
Speaker: So he goes on to say, at the same time, such myths may be developed and become testable.
Speaker: That, historically speaking...
Speaker: All or very nearly all scientific theories originate from myths, and that a myth may contain important anticipations of scientific theories.
Speaker: I thus felt that if a theory is found to be non-scientific or metaphysical, it is not thereby found to be unimportant, insignificant, meaningless, or nonsensical.
Speaker: So he does think there's some value, even maybe you might even say scientific value, in being this kind of untestable, almost mythic psychological theory.
Speaker: Maybe it could become testable.
Speaker: It suggests something.
Speaker: It might still be interesting.
Speaker: It's not totally worthless.
Speaker: So there is a caveat here for Popper.
Speaker: Yeah, one example of something that could fit this bill that I'm thinking of is something we talked about in the last episode, the ancient Greek atomists.
Speaker: Oh, yeah, definitely.
Speaker: They're giving a kind of, I guess, what Popper would probably call a mythological story about the base level of everything that exists.
Speaker: But obviously, this did become testable.
Speaker: Yeah, certainly.
Speaker: Lucretius writes about atomism in a poem.
Speaker: It definitely was mythical.
Speaker: And Popper says this, science must begin with myth and the criticism of myth.
Speaker: And I think there is still something to this with respect to present-day scientific theories, or at least the way the public thinks and talks about them.
Speaker: So there's the big bang for physicists, where that's a
Speaker: highly mathematical theory where they really understand what it is.
Speaker: And then there's the Big Bang in like popular culture, which has a lot of mythical elements.
Speaker: The idea that it's like an explosion or something.
Speaker: That's not really what it was.
Speaker: It's like it's more of like an expansion of space and all of that.
Speaker: So, yeah, I think even present day scientific theories, at least in the minds of the populace, have these kinds of mythical elements.
Speaker: Yeah, actually, a philosopher who writes about this explicitly is she's not a super well-known philosopher, but I really appreciate her work.
Speaker: She passed recently named Mary Medjly, and she has a whole book kind of on myth in this more modern and, like you were saying, kind of scientific sense.
Speaker: Her book is called Myths We Live By.
Speaker: And what she's doing is she's kind of putting a lot of our pictures of the world or ways that we have of thinking about the natural world into the context of myth.
Speaker: And by myth, he or she means like an imaginative pattern, not something necessarily false or false.
Speaker: made up or misleading or whatever, but just like a way of framing how we think about some aspect of the natural world that may come in like degrees of truth.
Speaker: So one that she explicitly talks about is different theories of the mind.
Speaker: So like the mind is a machine or the mind is a computer.
Speaker: This is the way that our myth of the human mind has evolved according to
Speaker: different trends in culture, different development.
Speaker: Technology, I think.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like the mind is software and the brain is the hardware.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So during the Industrial Revolution, we see the rise of this thinking of the brain as a kind of machine.
Speaker: that you know each evolutionary iteration makes better and better and better and then of course right we get to the middle of the 20th century and now we have computation and now we start thinking of the mind as a computer because we can see kind of similarities between the way that we take ourselves to process information and the way that we see our computational devices process information but it has a mythological aspect for a couple reasons one because no picture
Speaker: or image of things like this is going to really capture all dimensions.
Speaker: It's going to capture an important one and maybe reveal something about the kinds of things we as a culture find important at the time.
Speaker: But it's not going to capture every aspect.
Speaker: And there's a feature...
Speaker: of these kinds of modern myths that are kind of self-insulating or self-creating in a way.
Speaker: So an example of this and this kind of effect is something that the philosopher Alex Rosenberg calls the reflexive effect of these kinds of theories of social phenomena.
Speaker: So, for example, we might, in kind of accepting this thing that culture or specific thinkers tell us that the brain is a computer or
Speaker: We may expect ourselves to do things like a computer to try to, you know, maximize some particular value that we know humans have.
Speaker: And so we expect ourselves to be value maximizers in some way.
Speaker: And this in turn is going to influence how we do, in fact, act, reinforcing our belief in the truth of that theory.
Speaker: Yeah, it's like an interesting idea that we've talked about before, like this sense in which like the theory is kind of cheating.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I learned I learned about the social science theory that says I am this way.
Speaker: And I'm like, oh, yeah, I guess I should behave this way.
Speaker: And then that confirms the theory.
Speaker: But it seems like something circular is going on.
Speaker: Right, right.
Speaker: Because we don't necessarily explicitly think, oh, the theory says this, so I should act this way.
Speaker: But it's more like we just accept this picture and that influences how we act in a way that becomes self-confirming in a way that, right, I think you're right, it is a kind of cheating.
Speaker: Yeah, so this is a real problem for that, like, people doing social sciences have to contend with.
Speaker: But there's a way of thinking of these as like a kind of myth as well, as a way of understanding aspects of the world under a certain frame that's helpful in some ways, but can also obscure certain other dimensions.
Speaker: Because the electron doesn't change its behavior based on our theories about it, but the human being might.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: The kinds of things we choose to observe about it could change based on our theories about it.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So you said earlier that myths can reveal to us things that we find important.
Speaker: I think that's a theme that we saw persistently in our discussion of myth, even before this kind of section on modern myths.
Speaker: Yeah, because if something's not important to a group of people, why bother talking about it over and over?
Speaker: I think, interestingly, we can see the same thing when it comes to myth interpretation.
Speaker: So theories of myth tell us something about what's important to the theorists.
Speaker: So it's no surprise, I think, and I'm not the first person to point this out, no surprise that the most popular approach to ancient myths in the 20th century is some kind of psycho and analytic approach.
Speaker: This is the century where people are obsessed with the self.
Speaker: obsessed with a psychologizing the self.
Speaker: So no surprise, right, that we have these grand theories, cross-cultural theories of myth where all the myths are something about the battle between the conscious and the unconscious or whatever.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: I guess I've been beating up on Jung and the psychoanalytic tradition quite a bit.
Speaker: But I guess in learning more about them, it may not seem this way, but I did become more sympathetic with Jung.
Speaker: So I'm never going to become a Jungian.
Speaker: I'm probably not going to read a lot of Jung, but I'm glad to have learned a little bit more about
Speaker: the guy and what he thought that I had known.
Speaker: And there was one quote of his I thought was really insightful from a paper written by a religious studies scholar on Jung.
Speaker: So Jung is addressing the question of whether moderns, like us, whether we have myths.
Speaker: Do we have any use for myths?
Speaker: And he thinks, at least in some cases, we do.
Speaker: And he gives one example of a kind of modern myth, and that's the UFO, he says.
Speaker: It is characteristic of our time that the archetype should now take the form of an object, a technological construction, in order to avoid the odiousness of mythological personification.
Speaker: Anything that looks technological goes down without difficulty with modern man.
Speaker: But that was pretty good insight.
Speaker: We do have our modern myths.
Speaker: Maybe the UFOs and abductions are some of them.
Speaker: They're not gods.
Speaker: We don't like mythological personifications, but we do have them.
Speaker: So, you know, going back to our aliens episode, maybe th is is another way of thinking about UFO phenomena and alien abductions.
Speaker: It's a kind of modern myth.
Speaker: It's a way of getting our myths about the gods without, you know, the embarrassment of talking about the supernatural or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We have aliens and advanced technology.
Speaker: Maybe the simulation hypothesis is another example of that sort of thing.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I can see that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And other people have called the technological singularity the rapture for nerds.
Speaker: So that's maybe another instance of this.
Speaker: We have these kinds of technological myths that the less wrong crowd's really into.
Speaker: Fantastic.
Speaker: I like that.
Speaker: That was Jung who said that?
Speaker: The quote I just read.
Speaker: Yeah, that was Jung.
Speaker: Yeah, that's really insightful, right?
Speaker: Really insightful.
Speaker: Really almost ahead of his time.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm more pro-Jung than I was before doing this episode.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, he's definitely a creature of his time, but an important creature.
Speaker: Yeah, and the basic outline of his ideas are interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: So that is definitely all the time we have for today.
Speaker: Thanks for indulging us.
Speaker: Yeah, this was a bit of an indulgence, but we wanted to get all of our material in here somehow.
Speaker: And so, you know, we just went for it.
Speaker: But if you're still, you know, awake and interested in hearing us talk sometime in the future, please join us next time where we will be talking about biohacking.
