Friedman, among others.17
By reducing myth to a product of the unconscious and a series of universally present archetypes, both Jung and Campbell risk losing the distinctiveness of individual myths as well as the meanings attributed to them by those who tell them. Myths seek to state something about the world, not just something about the psychology of those who tell them. Furthermore, such psychological interpretations are often largely fanciful, being based in speculations about the mind-set of peoples rather than any real empirical study, and they tend to impose one culturally specific set of psychological categories onto all cultures and religions.
Clifford Geertz on Myth and Sociological Reductionism
Many theorists of myth have avoided psychological reductionism but may fall prey to sociological reductionism instead. I have previously noted how Clifford Geertz sought a nonreductionistic anthropological method (which I am attempting to mimic), and he sometimes criticized his predecessors and their understandings of religion and myth—most notably Emile Durkheim, Bronislaw Malinowski, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. These sociologically oriented theorists tended to view religion and myth as expressions of social integration or social conflict and so effectively reduced myth to a by-product of social forces, not unlike Marx. Durkheim, the main founder of the sociological analysis of religion, essentially equated religion and society but in such a way that religion is reduced to a role of societal maintenance. This approach can admit that society shapes religion but not that religion can shape society as an independent cultural force, as Geertz claims it does.18 As for Malinowski and Lévy-Bruhl, Geertz finds them engaged in opposed forms of reductionism. Malinowski essentially reproduces Durkheim’s view that myth is a “common sense” pragmatic strategy for societal maintenance, hence ignoring any transcendental function for myth in its purported connection to a mystical, extramundane reality. On the other hand, Lévy-Bruhl reduces the myth to the mystical only, claiming it has no relevance to pragmatic everyday matters because it involves a way of thinking that is totally alien or incomprehensible to outsiders, and for this reason, myth is essentially impervious to logical analysis.19 In contrast, Geertz insists that myth must function both pragmatically and mystically and that, in so doing, it can be reduced neither to merely a strategy for societal maintenance nor to an irrational and inexplicable mystery. In his view, myth connects the everyday (empirically real) world of social matters and “common sense” with the mystical (ideal or ultimately real) world of religion, even as it connects a view of how the world is with a moral vision of how it ought to be. There is considerable slippage between the two, as the myth portrays a model of how the world is believed to be, but this also corresponds to a model for how people would like it to be. We should then neither reduce myth to its sociological function in the everyday world nor to being a fundamentally incomprehensible phenomenon that deals with an imaginary fairyland but not our real (societal) lives.20 If Geertz is right, religion and myth connect the real and the imagined, the everyday and the ideal.
Geertz’s efforts to utilize sociological analysis in a nonreductive way also contrast with the methods of Claude Lévi-Strauss, who expanded the sociological approach through the use of structuralism and linguistics. Geertz found Lévi-Strauss to be influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s idea of the “noble savage,” a romantic construct of “primitive” life as more moral and natural than life in our modern industrial society.21 This effort to romanticize and idealize pretechnological societies fails to understand individual cultures as it reduces them all to forms of the primitive archetype within ourselves, which Lévi-Strauss would like to see modern society recover.22 This reduction of all myth to a universal, “primitive” archetype has resonances with Campbell’s view and shares the same problems.
It is apparent that we need a better definition of myth than many of these views offer, one that avoids romanticizing or defaming it, that is neither sociologically nor psychologically reductionistic in viewing it merely as a by-product of social or psychological forces, and that views myth as neither irrational falsehood nor a basis for racist and fascist ideology. Geertz’s view points the way in his notion that myths unite the ideal and the real, a notion of how things could be with a pragmatic understanding of how they are. Myths can help people deal with life’s problems and also provide hope for a better day. Several other thinkers have offered significant ideas about myth that may help in developing a more positive and useful notion of the concept; four of them will now be considered, as well as the possible application of their views to popular film.
Mircea Eliade
It would not be an overstatement to suggest that Mircea Eliade (1907–86) has had a greater effect on the academic study of comparative religions than any other twentieth-century figure. He based much of his own understanding of mythology on a stark contrast between the Western “historical” view of time and the cyclical view of time found in other (especially archaic) religions. Mythology, to Eliade, is primarily cosmogony in that it gives an account of creation in a distant primordial time. This time of creation, however, can be accessed ritualistically through the retelling and reenacting of the myth of creation, in that such reenactment brings one outside of ordinary time and space to the sacred realm in which creation can once again occur.23 Eliade found that people whose lives are closely linked with nature (e.g., via agriculture) see the repetitious patterns of life and death in the seasons and believe that they can effect new life and so the new season by tapping into the power of creation. Through the myth of sacred origins, one can be returned to that time in order to bring its power to bear in the present of ordinary time. In such religions, time is viewed as cyclical rather than as linear. Even rites of passage have this cyclical character, in that each new generation must pass through the same stages of development in life as the previous generation and so make use of the same sacred power of new life.24
This cyclical view of time differs from that found in Western religions in that the latter find the sacred not in the constant repetition of creation outside of ordinary time but rather in ordinary historical time. God comes into history in biblical religion, making it possible to speak of a linear progression toward a fulfillment of history as God has planned it. History drives toward its completion, whether it is understood as the return of Israel to the Promised Land or the return of Jesus as the Messiah. There are elements of repetition in Western religion, of course: for example, the Jewish reenactment of the Exodus experience at the Passover Seder or the Christian reenactment of the death and resurrection of Jesus in Holy Communion. But these rituals always have an eschatological component in that they point forward to a final liberation in a distant future rather than backward to the creation in the distant past. It is not through returning to origins but through anticipating the end of history that meaning is found in biblical religion.25
This drive toward the fulfillment of life within rather than outside of history has now been secularized, according to Eliade, in political movements such as communism and fascism that seek to bring their own visions of societal perfection into the present. These movements are dangerous in that they have lost all connection with the sacred, so that while the historicism of Western religion is still linked to a transcendent reality, the secularized form of it believes that perfection is attainable here and now.26 In practice this means that historicism is now linked with political ideologies that seek to subordinate all culture and society to their own visions of the future, often through violent means. Eliade therefore seems to favor the mythic (cyclical-repetitious) view over the historical (linear-progressive), in spite of the link between historical thinking and Christianity. His preference is for a “cosmic Christianity” such as that practiced by the peasants of his youth in Romania, which viewed Jesus more as the lord of nature than of history and emphasized the cyclical nature of seasons continually renewed by the divine power of Christ more than a final transformation of history to his kingdom.27
Eliade has also applied his understanding of myth to Western popular culture, albeit in a limited way. He notes the mythological aspects of the Superman comic books, as the man of steel represents a modern hero in disguise (as mild-mannered Clark Kent) with whom readers can identify: “The myth of Superman satisfies the
