Detective novels also offer a modern version of the battle between good and evil so that the reader, “through an unconscious process of projection and identification . . . takes part in the mystery and drama and has the feeling that he is personally involved in a paradigmatic—that is, a dangerous, ‘heroic’—action.”28 Whether reading or going to the movies, modern people escape from ordinary profane time and enter a “sacred” space and time.29 But even though the modern person is unavoidably and perhaps unconsciously religious, Eliade laments the fact that modern people deny the sacred, believing that they “make themselves” without any reference to a transcendent reality (as existentialism puts it).30 He would say that their religiosity is a diluted and desacralized faith that seeks fulfillment in the world rather than beyond it, and therefore, in his view, popular culture cannot have a transcendent referent.
Eliade’s analysis of myth is possibly more comprehensive than any that preceded him, and it has much to commend it, but it has also been criticized for romanticizing the “primitive,” as other theories have, and for overemphasizing the contrast between Western “historical” religion and the more “mythical” religions that allegedly have the cyclical notion of time so crucial to Eliade’s analysis. Perhaps myth is not primarily or only about creation and its repetition.31 Must mythology be understood as effecting an “eternal return” to the time of origins, outside of history, or can it sometimes be understood as incorporating a historical dimension? Francisca Cho has pointed out that Chinese “mythology” does not fit Eliade’s criteria, as the dichotomy between historical and mythical time does not exist in Chinese thought. Rather than define myths as stories that narrate a creation story in order to help us escape history, she suggests that we understand myths as providing archetypes that are models for “creation in the present.” In this way, “the creation narrative can be traded in for a creation function.” The basic purpose of all types of myths is to “provide patterns for living a life,” and this can be done with or without a rejection of the historical.32
Discarding the dichotomy of myth and history might also help us see the mythic dimensions of Western religion, not only in its attempts to escape history but also within its historically presented stories. We have seen the tendency to separate myth from Western religion, which may serve either to protect Western religion from mythological analysis (where myth is viewed as bad or false) or to critique Western religion as less “true” than the more “mythological” religions (where myth is viewed as good). Such dichotomies have served the value judgments of those who made them, but they have not necessarily served the goal of better understanding religion. This is not to say that Eliade engages in the sort of simplistic judgments on Western religion that mark the less scholarly work of, for example, Joseph Campbell; in contrast to Campbell’s anti-Western bias, Eliade criticizes Western secular historicism (communism, fascism) but not religious historicism as it is found in Judaism or Christianity.33 Still, Eliade demonstrates a tendency to exalt those cultures that differ from the Western in their view of time—or at least exalts the nonhistorical (i.e., mythical) aspects of Western religion as more effective in relating the sacred to human life. He also tends to assume that all cultures use basically the same cosmogonic, cyclical notion of myth, which may be a generalization without basis.
One thing for which Eliade deserves credit is his effort to avoid reductionism, as he was just as concerned as Geertz to provide a method that does not reduce religion to an expression of psychological or sociological forces. In order to do this, Eliade relied on a concept of the sacred as the transcendent (as in Rudolf Otto’s studies) more than as an expression of society (as in Durkheim’s studies). In practice, this means that his method does not work as well with those religions that lack a radical concept of transcendence, as we have seen. Geertz, to a greater extent than Eliade, avoided reductionism without such a “theological” concept of the sacred as the radically transcendent, but both of them understood the dialectical relationship between the sacred and the profane as one in which neither term can be reduced to the other, and there is considerable interaction between the two in both of their theories. Just as Geertz held that there is slippage between the commonsense worldview and the religious worldview, so Eliade finds the profane can be a vehicle for the sacred even as there is a continual alteration between the profane worldview and the sacred worldview. Myth gains its relevance, for both thinkers, by providing a link between the ideal world of the sacred and the ordinary world of the profane—even as I have suggested that films make a similar connection between the ideal and the real.
Jonathan Z. Smith
Jonathan Z. Smith is one of those religion scholars who admits his debt to Eliade even as he provides some criticisms of him. Smith finds Eliade’s dichotomy of “archaic” and “modern” religion problematic, especially insofar as it may imply a periodization that is artificial. Smith believes that the two forms of religion Eliade characterizes as mythic-cyclical and historical might be better referred to as “locative” (place-centered) religion and “utopian” (future-centered) religion—although here too one must be wary of implying a development from one to the other, as both appear throughout the history of religions. More significantly, Smith calls attention to the “dark side” of religious myths, which do not always deal with a cosmogonic unity and harmony that is to be reproduced as a source of order and new life. Instead, many myths deal with unresolved conflicts and tensions in life between good and evil, order and chaos. It is not that chaos is repeatedly overcome by creation, as Eliade would have it, but that chaos itself is a continual source of power, just as sacred as its converse. Smith finds myths to be more dualistic, especially in those stories that deal with outsider figures (like tricksters) that challenge the normal way of seeing or doing things.34 In addition to calling attention to such dualism and conflict in myth and ritual, Smith has focused on the importance of the particular in his studies of religion and so is suspicious of the sort of generalizations about “the sacred” that characterize the work of Eliade and other scholars.35
Smith also criticizes those views that make it seem as if nonliterate peoples have a “primitive” and, to us, incomprehensible understanding of myth or that romanticize the “pristine” nature of this worldview as one that lacks skepticism, the ability to make distinctions, or critical thought. In such views, according to Smith, the “primitive” is viewed as incapable of “those perceptions of discrepancy and discord which give rise to the symbolic project that we identify as the very essence of being human.”36 In contrast, Smith believes that every culture, modern or not, reflects on the incongruities of its experiences and develops ways of dealing with those incongruities and tensions. For this reason, Smith insists that “there is no pristine myth; there is only application.” Myths exist as particular strategies for dealing with particular situations, and so there is no single form for all myths (e.g., Campbell’s “monomyth” or Eliade’s cosmogony) nor a pure myth that exists apart from the social context in which it is lived. As a strategy for dealing with incongruity in life, myth is “a self-conscious category mistake. That is to say, the incongruity of myth is not an error, it is the very source of its power.” Myths do not seek to overcome incongruity, but (like jokes or riddles) they delight in the incongruous fit of disparate elements.37
Smith gives some examples to illustrate his view of myth. The story of Hainuwele from the Wemale tribe of Ceram (near New Guinea) deals with a girl who is born in a supernatural manner and who has the ability to excrete valuable items, “cargo” from other lands such as porcelain dishes and golden earrings. Her tribesmen kill her out of jealousy, and her dismembered body is buried, out of which grows various new plant species. The classic interpretation of this myth, by Adolf Jensen, viewed this as an example of the “pristine” myth of the origin of vegetation, death, and sexuality, which has been “corrupted” in its application by reference to modern items. But Smith points out that the story is not about origins at all, as death, agriculture, and sex all exist at the beginning of the story. Instead, it is a story developed to deal with the arrival of outsiders who have “cargo” that the Wemale do not. As the white outsiders did not share these goods equally with the Wemale (as Wemale morality dictated they ought), the Wemale developed this story to explain that the cargo came from their own people, who made it their own
