In Harmonium

Posted By Marc on August 27, 2008

One of the more fascinating things about the way humans seem to work is that we will frequently do pretty much the same thing while changing the labels and conveniently forgetting that we did it before. We seem to have “default” processes for a number of things including myth. For Anthropologists, “myth” doesn’t mean a nice, cute, “Disney-esque” story with animated characters dancing around. For us, “myths” are stories that order our perceptions of reality while, at the same time, “storing” knowledge for future generations.

Now, most of the time, “myth” tends to get melded in with “sacred story”, but they aren’t the same thing (sacred stories are a sub-set of myths). This frequently happens because myths deal with the realm of the “Sacred” (i.e. that which is not “Profane” or “normal”) and, also, because academics like to use the word “sacred” in a way that most non-academics don’t (cf Durkheim’s The Elementary Forms of Religious Life). Our understanding is much closer to that of the Greco-Roman world; the “sacred” is a place filled with awe, terror, beauty, wonder, (etc. ad nauseum) that is both larger than life and acts as a pattern for life. It is, to put it simple, one major “high risk” area!

I have always suspected that the “sacred” is so “high risk” because it deals with the underpinnings of cultural life and if you look behind the curtain, your perceptions of reality will change forever overthrowing the “natural” order of your culture.

But, you now, people want to know how and why things operate and when one explanatory device fails, they will go looking for another. Of course, there are always those rabble-rousing, intellectual terrorists who just don’t accept general answers and demand that they should be allowed to go off and find their own answers. Things have gotten so bad that, over the past 500 years pushed by changes in communications technology, isolated groups of intellectual terrorists have now banded together into a world-wide non-state actor that has launched rebellions, brought down governments and executed kings- we are called “scientists”.

Spearheaded by an ultra secret cabal rumoured to be located in Zürich (the Global New Order for Mental Existence, or GNOMEs), this non-state actor was so powerful that it managed to infiltrate its propaganda into the heart of North American public discourse back n 1966 with the following piece.

Alright, I’ll admit it – the last several bits were tongue in cheek .

The Time article is, however, important since it catalyzed a genral debate that is still raging in North America. Part of this debate surrounded separating out the religious content from the sacred content in what Anthropologists call “ritual practice”. Once the way was clear for us to do that, things started to get very interesting.

One of the things that we found was that even if you drop the religious content of a story, you can still have a myth that will act in a manner that is functionally indistinguishable from a religious myth. However, unlike religious myths, these secular myths were extremely mutable and adapted very quickly to changes in the environment.

A second thing we found was that secular myths emerge from lived experience (I actually tracked one from its initial, “real world” event to its spread across North America in under 4 months). Furthermore, the emergence of new myths was biased by the environmental conditions, and their relational form would match the current understanding of “what worked”.

What was truly fascinating, however, was a whole class of myths centered around rites of passage (birth, coming of age, marriage, death) and how these were appearing in a whole variety of media, including TV (e.g. the Wonder Years). These popular rites of passage myths were increasingly moving away from the sanitized myths of the 19th century and getting quite “down and dirty”; which is how myths originally appeared (see here for the Mother Goose series or try reading The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales).  This property of “down and dirty” or, as one blogger described them as

(horror stories) about ravenous wolves, brutal stepmothers, orphaned children, sadistic kings, blood-thirsty ghosts, kinky bondage and spanking sessions and even animals that talk but only tell lies and sometimes even dress up like women.

is central to how myths operate: myths are all about associating an emotional response to a pattern of action.  The morals behind the stories, at least in their original forms, are usually of the “do or die” (horror tales) and “do and succeed” (wonder tales) varieties.

Perhaps the most important thing we found was that if a set of myths didn’t match current, experienced reality, people would react in different ways in the same manner as to reality shocks.  In many cases, they would build one that did match current (or desired) reality (one of my favorites is the Paper Bag Princess).  In other cases, they would revive an older form of myth and imbue it with the same powerful emotional / experiential tonality (the Christian Halloween movement is an example of this). The key behind myths is in programming that emotional response, and the techniques used are positively Skinerrian in their form.

Interestingly enough, it also appears that a “practice” can, and does, take on a “mythic quality” (I just finished analyzing one for a client).  Consider, for example, the role taken on by football in the US, Hockey in Canada or Soccer in most of the world (“It will make you a MAN!!!!”).  Even as we started to examine how myths could be secular, we started to see a resurgence of them in their religious forms but with a renewed, “down and dirty” emotional tonality. And, lest anyone think that myths don’t really have anything to do with “reality”, let me just note that one of these newly revitalized myths is the Caliphate so beloved of the radical irhabis.

Category: Anthropology, Mythology & Narratives
Tags: Mythology & Narratives, secular myths