Clive wrote:In various discussions here, I am getting the impression participants are using different definitions and therefore talk past each other, things flare up or points get ignored.
I guess that a person's view about what "myth" is dependent on how much one has looked into the concept.
In the popular sense, myths are stories woven to "explain" why certain unavoidable things happen. Why does it thunder and lightening when it rains? Thunder and lightening become a cloud king's weapons, which he uses to bring rain etc., but also kick some ass once and awhile. Why does day always followed by night, and then the cycle repeats itself endlessly? "Well, that's because the sun circles around the earth. It rises in the east riding its chariot before setting to the west. Then it must take the subway back to the east." Elaborate oaths and such are invented to explain why the Sun doesn't just say "Hell with this, I'm taking a nap ..."
Now linguistically, the semiotic crowd (Ferdinand de Saussure et al) sees the symbols we attach to things are essentially arbitrary in themselves, but take on "meaning" by the associations we attach to their combined use. "Meaning," however, can be stacked. Myth is where secondary intentional meaning (not arbitrary as in the first level of semiotic understanding above) is attached to these "signs."
In 1957 Roland Barthes published a collection of his essays,
Mythologies, which uses a French magazine cover as an example. In it a boyish-looking black soldier, apparently from French North Africa, salutes a French flag. By itself, the picture simply shows a black soldier salute a flag.
The Flag, of course, carries the secondary notion of the French empire (yes, they had an extensive one before and for a short while after WW2), and the soldier, even though black and probably treated as second class by the white Frenchmen in Europe, symbolizes the notion that all French citizens are united when war calls. These secondary meanings are what HE calls myth, and this is generally what eddycated folks
mean by "myth" in modern use.
Folks can arguably quibble with my quick and dirty explanation above, but I described it to show HOW myth is intentionally created. Barthes also explained to the dense among us
how power structures in society use carefully created myths to maintain their control over it.
In
Weapons of the Weak: the everyday forms of peasant resistance (1985), James C Scott (not George C Scott) examines how this worked in a number of former colonial possessions of France and other European nations. He provides plenty of examples where the exploited classes, by participating in dialogue, turn these myths on their head, using them to pay lip service to the powers that be, as if they are admitting their acceptance of their "truth," but secretly the masses have changed the meanings these myths to reflect their POV as exploited subjects, as a means of resisting the power interests.
So, it seems that the "same" myth can have multiple meanings. Conversely, I do not see why multiple myths cannot
also develop to explain the same set of circumstances. This is where you will probably find some sort of meta explanation for the apparent contradictions in Christian myth.
Seinfeld used to always say "It doesn't mean anything!" when the "nothing" things he and his friends did, or did not do, meant wildly different things to other people. Ask Babu, now that he has been deported back to Pakistan, what the "junk mail" (a notice of an upcoming residency hearing) that Jerry casually forgot to deliver to Babu's restaurant, meant to him, as the Immigration folks revoked his Green Card when he didn't show.
Whatever ...
DCH
