this myth does not result in the desired equalization of wealth, it speaks of a fully intelligible desire for such equality that is not incomprehensible to the outsider. In other words, the myth does not express a worldview that is totally alien to our own.38
Smith also discusses the Enuma Elish, the ancient Babylonian text that was understood by Eliade and others as a prime example of a cosmogony. According to the cosmogonic interpretation of this myth, it reenacts the creation and guarantees new life through a symbolic death and resurrection of the king. Smith, however, argues that the myth is not primarily about creation, death, or resurrection to new life but rather about the founding of Babylon and its divine kingship by the god Marduk. As such, it is a more political and historically conditioned text than is sometimes realized, as it acts to establish the legitimacy of the current rulers of Babylon. The associated ritual of the Akita festival involves a staged slapping and humiliation of the king, who is stripped of his royal garments and who engages in a negative confession (claiming he has done no wrong) before being restored. This is no symbolic death and resurrection that reenacts the cosmic cycle of life and death but an implied threat of what will happen to a poor ruler. Unless one rules wisely and protects Babylon, as the king claims he has in the ritual, he will be judged and destroyed. This ritual had particular relevance at the time when it was written, a period during which Babylon was occupied by the Seleucids, so it acts as “a ritual for the rectification of a foreign king.” In other words, Babylonians could accept a foreign ruler as long as he promised to comport himself as a native ruler would, and this ritual enacted both the threatened judgment (if he ruled poorly) and the promised acceptance (if he ruled well). The myth is used to deal with the tense situation of foreign occupation and provides a means to legitimize it.39
Smith then wants us to understand myths in their local sociopolitical context and not homologize them to a single idea or concept. To understand a myth, we must understand its cultural and historical situation and how it speaks to the people who tell it in that place and time. This does not mean that he reduces myths to simply political strategies, but he insists that we deal with the context in which they have meaning, and this point is well taken. Smith’s emphasis on the importance of understanding the particular details of religions and myths is perhaps his most significant legacy as a scholar of religion.
It may be, however, that Smith insists too much on incongruity, to the point that myths cannot possibly resolve the conflicts with which they deal. One may hear some echoes of Lévi-Strauss’s notion of myth as involving an attempt to resolve a fundamental conflict that is doomed to fail. For Lévi-Strauss, this functioned as part of his romanticized concept of the mythic and illogical “savage” whose worldview loses credibility as soon as it is exposed to analysis. Smith has made it very clear that he does not wish to turn the myth teller into an alien and illogical creature, but it is sometimes unclear how he can avoid viewing mythological cultures in this way, given his assumptions.
One can also ask if the incongruity is as all-encompassing as he believes and whether the myth actually goes further toward resolving the tension than he allows. The Enuma Elish, for example, may actually succeed in its effort to legitimize a foreign ruler. The Hainuwele myth, too, does not fail in its efforts to view foreign cargo as equivalent to native products; it simply did not convince the whites to share equally with the Ceram, which may not have been its purpose. Myth is a strategy for dealing with a situation, and the measure of its effectiveness may not be in the objective political changes it makes but in the attitudes it evokes in those who tell it. Such attitudes may bespeak more reconciliation and wholeness than incongruity and tension, as people generally tend to seek wholeness rather than conflict. Smith holds that by playing with incongruities, myths provide “an occasion for thought”—but it is not altogether clear what one is supposed to think in such a situation of incongruity.40
For example, he discusses how the Aranda of Australia are initiated into the mystery of the “bull-roarer,” which they have thought to be the voice of Tuanjiraka, a monster responsible for all pain and suffering, but is in fact a piece of wood whirled at the end of a string to produce a frightening sound. Initiates are told that they should not believe in this monster, as it does not really exist; Smith concludes that it is “the incongruity between the expectation and the actuality that serves as a vehicle of religious experience.”41 But it is hard to see how this in itself is very enlightening to the initiates. One could instead conclude that they are being taught that suffering does not come from any supernatural being but that it is simply the nature of life—a lesson we might all find intelligible, even helpful, in learning to view pain as a part of normal existence and not as a punishment. This message could help people deal with the conflicts created by suffering rather than simply observing or enshrining such conflicts and the incongruities related to them.
Wendy Doniger
Wendy Doniger is yet another contemporary scholar who has written a great deal about myth, especially from her viewpoint as a scholar of Hinduism. A myth, in her view, is a story with “religious meaning”—in other words, a story that deals with “the sorts of questions that religions ask” about “such things as life after death, divine intervention in human lives, transformations, the creation of the world and of human nature and culture—and basically, about meaning itself.” This is not meant as a terribly precise definition, as Doniger does not want to limit what might be considered “religious,” although she assumes we all have some idea of what is to be associated with that term. A myth also has no author, as by the time it becomes a myth, its origins are always placed in the distant past; it is a story that has always been and so cannot, properly speaking, ever be heard “for the first time.” But myths are not isolated in a distant past, as they are retold because they are perceived as remaining relevant to subsequent ages: “Myths encode meanings in forms that permit the present to be construed as the fulfillment of a past from which we would wish to have been descended.” A myth must also be part of a mythology, a set of myths with overlapping characters and events. In this way, the myth and its themes are reinforced in the memory of the group.42
Doniger has also insisted that there is no “monomyth.” It is not the case that there is one myth endlessly repeated with variations in the world’s cultures. She is well acquainted with the tendency of myth scholars to overgeneralize about the content of myths and to ignore the details of individual stories. At the same time, she does not wish to give up the task of cultural comparison, as there may be some similarities that can be found among myths from diverse cultures and religions. If myths deal with basic questions about the meaning of life, it may be because they deal with basic human experiences such as “sexual desire, procreation, pain, death,” which are universal, although understood in different ways in different cultures.43
Words like true and false do not apply very well to myths, Doniger notes, as the historical referent for such stories is perhaps the least important measure of their value for a culture. Even cultural stories that include “impossible” situations such as a reversal of gender roles or the absence of death serve to demonstrate the undesirability of such situations and thus the necessity and “truth” of the actual order of things: “They preserve for us the cultural ‘truth’ that women should not work in the fields and men should not keep house, or the philosophical truth that we must die.” We are “better off” with the way things are, according to such myths, as they show us how the world would be less perfect if it were different. Myths in general might be considered “true,” she allows, not in the historical veracity of the events described but in the fact that they represent a culture’s understanding of the central questions of life.44
The Western tendency to distrust the value or truth of myths, Doniger holds, is related to our tendency to discount alternate “realities,” such as those experienced in dreams. From Plato to Freud, dreams have been viewed in Western thought as expressing our “lower” desires but not an objective reality.45 In Hindu thought, in contrast, the line between waking and dreaming and between reality and illusion is blurred, as is shown in numerous myths; Doniger gives two examples from the text of the Yogavasistha. King Lavana dreams
