Why Myths Matter

Jenny and Tommy, sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in a baby carriage! That’s not all, that’s not all, then ….
Someone does something rhyming with –all.

I bet you predicted that. If you grew up in public schools in the United States (can’t speak for other places), and no one ever sang this annoying jingle at you or a close personal friend, then you’re extraordinarily lucky.

This post is about the importance of myth or story in the construction of our cultural episteme. This matters because the episteme isn’t just a body of available knowledge, it’s the apparatus by which we judge what ideas are and are not acceptable “Truths” within our particular cultural context. The jingle above is annoying and extremely catchy (two values young children seem to treat as gospel), but it also represents accepted ideas within our cultural episteme in a way that young children can internalize and repeat without even knowing they’re doing it.

Any child exposed to this jingle and others like it will undoubtedly concurrently be forming expectations about the typical format of opposite gender interaction (and unless playgrounds are becoming more friendly places to be, opposite-gender relationships are being reinforced as normative). There’s a reason why sexual education in schools simply cannot keep up with the norms already repeated and enforced on the playground, and I think that reason has everything to do with the method by which those norms are conveyed. A jingle someone heard on the playground in third grade, or better yet, a circulating rumor, has a stronger and longer impact on a child’s mind than some pedantic lecture about their bodies, given in dry, scientific language.

Why is this? I have no true cognitive science background, aside from some investigation into the relationship between cognition and religion, but I think it’s safe to say that images and narratives are easier to process than abstract, subject-specific language. For example, I think one of the reasons so many people find it hard to let go of the Genesis narrative, as the defining “picture” of the origins of the planet, is because the evolutionary model is just that, a scientific model. It isn’t a story. I think it has started to take on some narrative elements in popular discourse, but the danger is that the intentionality that is often ascribed to actors in a story causes misunderstandings about the theory itself, which puts scientists’ teeth on edge (for good reason).

I read a fantastic chapter today by Richard Valantasis on spiritual guides of the 3rd century (in various contexts), in which he proposed that semiotic analyses were required to truly understand the “underlying structures (the mutually understood context) which makes communication possible” in the ancient texts which describe a spiritual teacher from the perspective of the student.(1) He explored ancient semiotic theory, which was a way to search for underlying meanings within a text, utilizing theories of language and interpretation. (2) Aristotle’s poetics “explored ‘the nature of meaning and metaphor and the relation between literal and non-literal discourse.’”(3) For Valantasis’ purposes, a semiotic study “[discovers] … cultural systems that lie behind communication.”(4) These cultural systems are the “keys” which allow us to decode the underlying systems which allow the multilayered literal and non-literal images and “signs” within texts to signify meaning; that is, a particular meaning understood by both writer and reader, because of their shared access to an underlying meaning-system.

What was striking and alluring about Valantasis’ chapters was the fact that the communication of a student about his spiritual teacher was so “encoded,” that cultural and religious (or esoteric, as in the case of Hermeticism) fluency were absolutely necessary for “decoding” the deeper meaning of the text or oration. Those that shared this fluency were “insiders,” who were able to perceive the deeper “truths” the speaker wanted to convey about the signified, the guide, by correctly interpreting the signifiers which constituted that characterization within text, because of their concurrent fluency and engagement with a larger, shared episteme of meaning.

All of this complex jargon helps, in my opinion to explain why stories and myths are extraordinarily effective, efficient, and “capacious” teaching tools. I say “capacious” because stories/myths are able to “hold” an enormous amount of meaning because of the relationships between language and culture which allow for a multiplicity of meanings contained within the “vessel” of a single story. (For a great example of this, The Prologue to Origin’s Commentary on the Song of Songs is helpful)

This evening at our weekly symposium, my fellow graduate students and I discussed the problems of post-modern deconstruction, especially as regards the devaluation and elimination of meaning, value, and truth. My friend So (whose blog you can find listed on the right sidebar, “That Green Stuff”) and I arrived at the notion that post-modernism is a tool like any other, and what can be deconstructed to its most basic elements can also represent or “signify” a plethora of other meanings within a number of contexts. What post-modernism deconstructs, ecological theories of emergence, complexity, and novelty can help to flourish and expand according to its own internal logic, pressing on in a non-linear growth pattern that cannot be predicted by its original conditions.

Myths and stories matter because they can function as cultural “short hands” for accepted notions of morality, social cohesion, virtue and self-development, the purpose of knowledge, cosmogony and anthropology. But because these myths can also help reinforce particular “norms,” great care must be taken when it is recognized that they no longer adequately function as descriptors of the human experience and self-understanding in a given context, or if they are exposed as promoting an unhealthy vision of self and society. If these occur, the myths must change.

What myths do we assume as “normative” for our Western, hetero-normative, primarily Christian context? What myths have fallen from their meta-regulatory status because they no longer suit the self-understanding of people in a post-Christian world? These are questions to ponder.

I was going to cite more examples of how stories engage in the kind of signifying described by Valantasis above (Spencer’s Faerie Queene came to mind), but any story that has achieved the status of “national literature” would work just as well. Milton, Shakespeare, and Dickens do more to explain what it means to be English than any cultural study on English norms and customs, but only to “insiders” who share the cultural “reference-text” that allows them to recognize the signifiers of meaning in the texts and decode them. This is why I think academics really need to start writing more stories. So much of academic research is lost on those who would truly benefit from the findings because the information is caught up within language that does not signify to casual readers because they do not share the experience of academic “training” which gives them access to the vocabulary limited to those who have experienced the same paraskeuhv (practice, preparation, arrangement, training, etc.). I’m not talking about boiling down Foucault into a children’s book (readers age 17 and older only, please), but rather about recognizing that (important point!) the multiplicity of meanings that can be “carried” within the vessel of a story or myth allow for an implicit portrayal of the problem of multiple meanings explored by post-modern theory. In a text read in light of its possible underlying, symbolic associations, multiple meanings are free to coexist alongside one another, regardless of their compatibility. The form of the myth (or poem, for that matter) contains all of the essences that can be possibly signified by the particular signifiers within the text.

This is an extraordinarily difficult thing to accomplish once you’re thinking about it and concerned about all of the processes and details. Since semiotics is descriptive rather than prescriptive, I’m hoping much of this comes naturally to us, as we are myth-making creatures. I will be keeping this in mind as I attempt to start crafting my own myths, in order to signify truths of my own experience in a way that is truly multivalent and “makes room.” If we apply emergence and complexity theories to literature and the processes of conveying meaning, then construct myths that are accessible to a wide and imaginative audience, how much more competent (and comfortable) will we become in our navigation of a world in which multiple meanings coexist side by side?

(1) Richard Valantasis, Spiritual Guides of the Third Century: A semiotic study of the Guide-Disciple Relationship in Christianity, Neoplatonism, Hermetism, and Gnosticism (Harvard College, 1991) 6.
(2) Ibid. 7
(3) Ibid.
(4) Ibid., 9