Ancient and Modern – 2 April 2004

Philip Pullman, author of the apparently anti-Christian His Dark Materials, and the Archbishop of Canterbury debated the significance of religion, and both enthusiastically agreed that ‘myth’ was an important feature of it. But why?

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Ameer Kotecha

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The Greek word muthos originally meant ‘word, speech, message’. It gradually came to mean ‘significant story’. At the one extreme, these were stories that had strong traditional and communal significance because (for example) they ‘explained’ the nature of the human and divine worlds; at the other, they were straight inventions by philosophers to make a point (e.g. Plato’s muthos of Atlantis). At all times there was an uneasy balance between myth as history that preserved a past, myth as explanation of the world, and myth as key to how things should be. But given myth’s status as story, usually involving men and gods, it is not surprising that Greek intellectuals, with their passion for rational explanations of the world in humanly comprehensible terms, should have begun to ask what sort of authority and credibility they had. Plato, for example, could not believe in Homer’s immoral gods.

Intellectuals developed two ways of dealing with myths. One was to rationalise them and show that they were distortions of historical truth. Thus the underworld dog Cerberus was originally a terrifying serpent that lived in the region that Greeks associated with the entrance to the underworld. The other was to allegorise them and argue that (for example) when Homer described the gods fighting among themselves in the Iliad, he was actually describing the battle of the elements. In both cases, intellectuals were fighting to preserve an important aspect of their own tradition: there was a powerful cultural need to maintain the authority of their ‘classical’ way of looking at the world, and they would twist their myths into any shape in order to do so.