The Buddha told the story of the blind men and the elephant. The men, each assigned a different part of the elephant, could not agree on the nature of the beast. Yet we know that the elephant was a combination of all of the things that each man experienced. Because the term "myth" means so many things to different people, in discussions of it we need to establish some kind of common bond, but also to expect and accept that you will have points of disagreement with what I say tonight. What we try to do in the study of myth is to gain access to the whole elephant, to see that the elephant is not A, not B, and not C, but all of those things--and that is sometimes hard to realize, because we use culture-bound ways of seeing things.

Myth means many things to many people, but the meaning I will assign to it this evening is, "a narrative of importance to an entire culture." The terms myth and culture can generally be used interchangeably if we modify that definition a bit to read, "deeply held ideas of importance to an entire culture." Culture is (to use Edward T. Hall's phrase) out of awareness--it is so completely ingrained in us from our childhood that the particular patterns that we live by are not available to us for rational examination. We do not necessarily understand that we are operating under rules that we know deeply in our bones, but we often get upset, without knowing why, when these cultural rules are violated.

We can know things in only three ways: from direct experience, from vicarious experience (what others tell us and what we read), and from ideation. (Just for reference, we might say that the experiential part is Aristotelian and the ideational part is Platonic.) Everything we are capable of thinking about, from myth to logic, comes from the same well. The center of human experience--what differentiates us from other animals--is nothing practical; not any technique nor any knowledge about how to stay alive, but (I believe) our ability to be bowled over by realizing that we are but a small part of a world that is immeasurably bigger than we are. This idea is not my invention; Joseph Campbell reiterated it in all his writings, especially as he grew older.

The mystery of being is experienced in awe at our recognition of our personal tiny-ness in the vastness of the universe. Because such experience is humbling, it is spiritual, and our recognition of it is a form of worship--that is, of "worth-ship." Direct and vicarious experience teaches us that sooner or later, inevitably, we are going to feel pain and to suffer and to die. Myths are told as a way of placing our awareness of our individual suffering and mortality in that grand universal context. I believe that all human expression--material, customary and oral--is artistic and is ultimately grounded in this awe and is a form of worship. The most primitive designs on earth--the zigzag, the meander, the spiral--were created in worship, not to gain practical ends but to express a spiritual recognition. The same is true of later, more sophisticated, stylized and bilaterally symmetrical designs such as the bucranium (ox-head), labrys (double axe), rosette, cross, circle, and swastika. None of these is "practical," but rather a human statement about symmetry in the universe. Six crossed lines in a circle will sooner or later suggest spokes and a wheel, but the design itself is best understood as a revelation of our ancestors' awe at seeing heaven with its celestial bodies as meaningful and connected to us (the Zodiac) and to the sensory world (the seasons). It may seem odd to think of a calendar as a spiritual object, but the first calendars were circular and were created as a map of the divine plan in heaven.

Codification, rigidification, and religiosity inevitably, eventually, replace the kind of spiritual expression discussed above. The cross was turned into something that now means only one thing. In modern times the swastika, in the wrong hands, became the very symbol of evil. These designs were appropriated by a particular group to fulfill a particular agenda. Yet we respond to these ancient symbols at some deeper level than just the political or the religious. According to Carl Jung, who was Joseph Campbell's early inspiration, this response may have to do with ancient experience. Campbell offers the example of newly hatched chicks, which (with no direct experience) run for cover when they see a shadow of a chicken hawk fly over.

Experiments show that this happens even with a wooden model drawn across the chicken yard on a wire. If all actual chicken hawks were somehow to disappear, baby chicks would still respond to the model. Jung's theory of the Collective Unconscious may thus be analogized as the reason human beings respond to symbols. (I do not subscribe to Jung's theory in its entirety.)

Myths of the world may seem extremely strange and puzzling, but really a very small number of things are accomplished in their telling. All myths are metaphors, using language, itself a form of metaphor, for our awe at the mystery of being, which is unknowable. Myths cannot give voice to the unknowable, but they can make up a story, a metaphor, about the unknowable. Even "God" is a metaphor for the unknowable. A very small number of themes can be found time and again in creation myths of every culture (but not in every creation myth!), for example, order out of chaos, creation by speaking, sacrifice of a divine being to make the world, the androgynous parent, the paradox that once creation happens it is no longer perfect, and others.

For us who live in the Occident--the West--the logic of Western myth is seen everywhere even if we don't consciously live by the codified official belief system of our culture the Bible, say--even if we consciously defy it. We still have unexamined cultural assumptions that are grounded in those myths and we cannot manage without them, for they provide the pattern or model against which we measure and evaluate our experience and our thought. Even if the most we do is rebel against our culture, we are ineluctably part of a system whose values are systemic.

After the lecture, Dr. Stewart responded to questions about terms and phrases she had used in her talk--for example, "spirituality," "God," and "divine"--that many humanists tend to avoid. She stated that language is metaphorical, words are metaphors (that is, they stand in for something) and that the vocabulary of spirituality--being humbled by a sense awe before the "mystery of being"--is necessarily metaphorical because it addresses that which cannot be known directly. Anyone who finds a particular metaphor unsatisfying is free to reject it.

--Polly Stewart
Dr. Stewart is a chapter member