“Religion” and “Myth” have both been important and consistent themes in much of my intellectual work over the years. Whether viewed as ‘sacred’, ‘profane’, or ‘apocryphal’ their content informs identity and culture and their structure illuminates the ways in which our species conceives of its reality. I believe that there is ‘religious truth’ and ‘mythological insight’ to be found not only in the primary texts that are often pointed to as examples of those genres or the secondary explorations of scholars in those fields but also (and perhaps most importantly) by applying all of the above as a lens through which to view the stories, structures, and behaviors of our everyday popcultural existence.
I have set aside the blogs “potentialRELIGION” and “potentialMYTHOLOGY” as venues in which to further explore these topics.
Way back as an undergrad at Drew University in the early 1990’s I became turned on to structural myth theory and begun devoting a lot of my mental energy to deconstructing popular culture (particularly TV and Film) in terms of ‘modern mythology’ for a ‘techno-secular society’. I was raised a Catholic but also had some sense of Judeo-Christian-centric comparative religion. Ever since early childhood (and especially during the ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ obsession that so defined my middle and high school years) I had enjoyed popular/common stories of world mythology such as the tales of the Greek or Norse gods. Finally, anyone who knows me knows that I’ve always been a compulsive consumer of TV, Movies, and other mass media popular culture. However, it was not until around then that I began devoting structured mental energy to mixing the three categories together in a search of personal and academic insight. Growing as a postmodernist and lapsing as a Catholic I was increasingly fascinated by how we individually and collectively ascribed deeper meaning and even structured our lives by the popular yet not overtly religious or mythological stories we were telling ourselves through mass media.
When writing my undergraduate thesis I hit upon a colloquial definition to encapsulate how I had come to conceive of religion and mythology.
“Mythology is Religion that people no longer believe to be true.”
To a certain extent I still think that this one line somewhat says it all. All traditional “mythology” was once “religion”. Historically there was a time when and place where the stories of mythology accurately explained the mysteries of a universe for the faithful of a given culture as effectively as the mytho-historic stories of any ‘belief system’ currently identified as a “religion” does for its present day followers. Once the faith in the redemptive and instructive value of a religion disappears it becomes relegated to category of myth. Simply put, every new iteration sees ‘the false god(s)’ replaced by ‘the true god(s)’ and presumably the cornerstone of faith is the belief that ‘the process stops now because this time we got “the truth” right’. It is perhaps also important to note that all of this says nothing about the parallel paths of ‘scientific truth’ and ‘religious truth’ except to the extent that for many “science” does similarly replace the false god(s) of ‘religion in general’ as “the truth” by which they understand and structure their existence.
Writing now, in the next millennium almost two decades later, I think it is necessary to revisit my original premise regarding a colloquial definition of the relationship between “mythology” and “religion”. The notion of “absolute Truth” is increasingly commonly accepted to be a conceptual casualty of existing in the postmodern condition and living in a globally networked pluralist society. To paraphrase Obi Wan Kenobi, what is “True” or “unTrue” ‘depends greatly on your point of view’. Whereas in the past crusades, purges, inquisitions, and proselytizing missionaries attempted to convert the known world to ‘the true god(s)’ in order to insure that everyone believed the right/same things that they did; now the de facto reality is that atheists, monotheists, and polytheists of all varieties mix and mingle side by side with equal standing, visibility, and vocalism. (In some ways this is strikingly similar to the multicultural polytheistic pluralist commercial world of the Mediterranean at the height of belief in what is now considered ‘classical’ western [Greek and Roman] mythology.) Characterizing the postmodern world in this way is not meant to ignore that every day people are senselessly slaughtered by individuals and institutions in an attempt to prove that “my god is better than your god”. I am simply suggesting that the cultural conventions of polite global social interaction increasingly recognize that regardless of what one might personally believe ‘getting along together’ requires acknowledging that the other person with whom you are dealing may very well believe something else or even something completely contradictory which is also equally true to them.
Transportation, telepresence, and interactive technology make it virtually impossible for the postmodern individual to exist in a reality of purely likeminded and/or similarly acculturated individuals in the same way that people often did in pre-modern times and perhaps even in some cases in the modern world of the last century. Even enclave communities of religious, cultural, or ethnic homogeny generally must consciously exist with a self knowledge that they exist in separation from a larger pluralist planetary population with infinite alternate recombinant possibilities for personal identity and shared conceptions of reality. One need only pass an Amish buggy while driving down the highway to realize that even the most self-isolated must constantly reconcile their own chosen worldview with the realization that right-or-wrong others see the world differently. At the opposite extreme, globalization often means that it is necessary for average individuals on all sides of the information and commerce equations to exist with different feet simultaneously in very different worlds.
All of this radically transforms the notion of ‘self’ and ‘other’. The notion of ‘us and them’ (those who are ‘like me’ vs. ‘those who are not’) becomes at best an awareness of ‘us’ (those who are like me) and many other alternate us’s (those who are like each other and together are not like me and in the process are also not like many other alternate us’s that are also out there in the world). More realistically/holistically one can come to see the distinctions between self and other as ‘me’ in a sea of other me’s who are more or less like me according to a variety of criteria for comparison. Superficially those criteria can be accidents of birth like gender, geography, or ethnicity. Functionally the criteria take the shape of behaviors and attributes like ability/disability, profession, education, or spending power. Trends toward ‘political correctness’ frown upon the superficial criteria and the desire to bond over deeper philosophical similarities sometimes require one to transcend the functional criteria. Therein, I believe, emerges the evolving role of mythology and religion in defining one’s own identity and establishing commonalities with others.
Often it is considered best to leave religion, which is theoretically the most ultimately defining but potentially divisive aspect of an individual’s identity, completely out of conversation in favor of more universally agreed upon or at least dispersonally debated topics. Similar to how adults rarely exploit the opportunity to tell someone else’s child that “Santa Clause and The Easter Bunny aren’t real” regardless of their assumption of that statement’s literal truth; it’s generally frowned upon to tell one’s coworkers that their faith in “virgin birth” or “resurrection” is misplaced because it is different from what one personally believes to be ‘true’. I would suggest that a new incarnation of mythology now rises to fill the gap left when one is less socially ably to discuss, debate, or even just reference the [religious] narratives with which one identifies and/or around which one chooses to structure his or her life. Those new mythologies are the epics and pantheon of comic books, movies, television shows, sports, and other similar public heroes and/or morality tales with which postmodern individuals identify and around whose examples and teachings they choose to structure their lives.
Consequently, I see a new secondary/supplemental colloquial definition of the relationship between “mythology” and “religion”.
“Today people have faith in Religion but believe in the truths of their Mythologies.”
This second sentence inverts the focus of the original definition thereby modifying but not invalidating it. What one considers “Religion” may be true for the individual relative to the mytho-historical alternatives offered by any/all other religions past and present. Social convention dictates that one should practice religion in isolation or in communion with other like minded individuals while generally respecting the rights of others to do the same (or not) however they see fit. Your religion is one of many but it is rude to say that yours is ‘right’ and others are ‘wrong’ even though your faith reassures you that this is in fact the case (at best the acceptable convention is to defend one’s own philosophy without overtly attacking someone else’s or simply to acquiesce that the truth of these beliefs are simply ‘a matter of faith’). Classical “mythology” (or simply using the term to distance/differentiate one’s own perspective from the form and/or content of an active ‘religion’) becomes a device whereby to discuss the human impulses of religion making and observation. Pretty much anyone would agree that “mythology” is “untrue” (unless of course some pretentious academic is calling the religion that you have faith in a “mythology”). After all, isn’t ‘being untrue’ one of the dictionary definitions of “myth”? However, there are many philosophical and interpersonal truths that we find and internalize from techno-secular stories which preceding cultures would have received through mythological or religious narratives. These are what I consider to be the ‘new mythology’. Although the average person likely rarely thinks of or refers to “Lost” or “The Justice League” or many other examples that I could just as easily cite as a “mythology” let alone a “religion”, the structure of these stories and more importantly living culture’s relationships to them follows many of the same patterns as what are more traditionally identified as myto-religious cultural/narrative relationships. Therein diverse postmodern selves can find unifying identifications and answers upon which to build philosophical and spiritual community without the unpleasantries of the ‘my god can beat up your god’ argument. Then again one need only ask the question “Star Wars or Star Trek” in the right context to find how easy it is to spark a technosecular holy war.
Moving forward I foresee much overlap between my potentialRELIGION and potentialMYTHOLOGY blogs. Even at these earliest of stages I have chosen to write a single introductory article and parallel post it to both venues.
In general, at this point, I see the identity/role of the two blogs as follows…
potentialRELIGION is a venue in which to publish about my own personal pop culture-inspired belief systems (most notably, Disney, superheroes, and ‘the mass media oracle’ in general).
potentialMYTHOLOGY is a venue for a more detached academic discussion of modern pop cultural mythology and the postmodern mytho-religious impulse in general.
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