Comments on: Homeless Cinderella, Murdered Toad Kids, and Other Non-Western Non-Archetypes

By: Judith Berman

Judith Berman — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 06:51:49 +0000

Gah, have been sick all week. Some thoughts:

1. Iroquois oratory is a topic I know little about, but I have been in the audience during Tlingit events where it can seem as if everyone in the room has to stand up and speak at length. One of the things going on there is, it’s about protocol and indicating respect. You do this in part by showing yourself, saying who your parents and grandparents were (and what clans they belonged to), thanking your host, expressing your appreciation to everyone else who has already spoken… It was traditionally a society with no formal political institutions above the clan, and you needed to make very sure you showed respect, because lack thereof could lead to conflict and war. (For societies that never had writing, the word ‘non-literate’ is preferred over ‘illiterate’–it has a somewhat different meaning.)

2. European mythology… wouldn’t there be something to say about Ovid’s own mythographic choices? I mean, he never struck me as much of a believer.

3. No universal myths, but myth-making is universal. Absolutely. Malinowski talked about myths as charters for social institutions, and the reverse seems to happen–whenever people start thinking about the origins of their society, or institution, or lineage, etc., they start making myths. You see this in historical writing, alas, where it is painfully difficult for many historians to separate themselves from such mythic thinking. I sometimes wish we had two words for history, one that meant, “symbolic narrative about the past that is told to justify something in the present,” and the other that was, “critical thinking about the past that puts observation and evidence before ideology.”

By: braak

braak — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 20:57:13 +0000

Yeah, I've never been a huge fan of Campbell. I tend to think that Joe, and many of his followers, kind of missed the important point of what his research shows: not that there are universal myths but that myths are universal. That is, it's not the story that's the same across cultures, it is the process of making historical, social, or otherwise pertinent data into mythologically significant story. That is true across cultures, and that tendency is something that can be usefully used to apprehend both story and storyteller; but, in fact, studying myth in this way relies on the fact that mythic structure is not necessarily universal--if it were, there'd be little point in immersing yourself in an unfamiliar tradition.

By: James Enge

James Enge — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:11:00 +0000

This is interesting stuff. I don’t find Campbell super-reliable on European mythology either. I remember gently slamming the book against the desk four or five times after he compared Thompson’s “The Hound of Heaven” to Ovid’s account of Apollo and Daphne. Any chance similarity that suits his argument is evidence; anything that appears to run contrary to his thesis is chaff.

I sometimes recommend Hero with a Thousand Faces to people interested in fantasy, as a way to think about one kind of story. But I never recommend it as mythography.

By: Jackson Kuhl

Jackson Kuhl — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 14:15:43 +0000

My favorite example of this is “Shakespeare in the Bush.” It’s all about the witches!

I once read somewhere (I think in a Francis Parkman book) a description by a white man of an Iroquois lodge meeting. Every man who was allowed to speak would stand and summarize, individual by individual, what each speaker before him had said. The speaker would then offer his own opinion, commenting on and critiquing the previous speakers’ opinions. This would go on for hours. It shows the necessity of having a good memory if you live in an illiterate culture, but from what you say it would also seem to speak to the binary, two-part structure of American Indian narrative (in the northeast, anyway).