The last post, which ended with a note how myth
and scripture are a foundation of literature (and, I
should add, art and music), got me thinking about the
preservation of these things. If you want to preserve
the cultural past in all its power, I believe we must
concede truth, beauty, meaning, value, and all that
good stuff to the old myths and scriptures. Lear is
powerful as an old King shouting about his ungrateful
children. Yet he assumes his full power—as
Shakespeare, for all his secular many-mindedness,
knew well—only in the shadow of the wroth God of
the Old Testament. With so many eloquent public
intellectuals undercutting myth and scripture, the
readers of the future stand to lose a lot. How can a
poor poet resist the literalists and fact-checkers?
First of all, let me point out that different religions
deal with the assault of literalists differently. I am one
of probably thousands of Hindus who doesn’t think
that a specific point in a specific ocean was
historically churned by Gods as real as this desk and
Demons as real as this chair, revealing a factual
Poison that a physically solid atoms-and-molecules
Lord Shiva had to protect the universe from by
pouring down his esophagus. You could send my
way a dozen tenured South Asian Studies professors
and Professors of Indian History, each with a different
point about how there is no archaeological evidence
whatsoever about ocean-churning, poisons, or a blue-
throated the Himalayan God from whose head the
Ganges flows, and it really wouldn’t bother me. The
myth stands. It has significance—about desecrating
nature (drilling in the ocean, no less!) and self-
sacrifice—that aren’t touched by this assault. The
nonfactual is neither devoid of truth nor devoid of
beauty (there is an exquisite stone relief of this scene
at Angkor Wat). I concede your point, gentlemen—
and declare it irrelevant. My “belief” in the myth is not
the attribution of factuality or historicity to it;
my “belief” consists in the attribution of value to it.
I think I do that so easily because Hinduism is
the (last living) mythological religion. Contrast this
with historical religions, which do insist on a literal
belief in the factuality of Jesus emerging from the
cave after being dead for three days, or of the
Prophet Mohammed being embraced by the
archangel Gabriel. How is a “virgin birth”
physiologically or anatomically possible? How can a
woman be “made” from a man’s rib? The relative
masses of one rib and a female of even average
height and weight simply do not match! Hah! Game,
set, match! Wherever these scriptural stories depart
from conventional factuality, they are vulnerable to
historicizing, literalist critiques.
…Or so the critiquers think. Ever notice how no
amount of “factualist” undermining seems to kill these
stories? You can stuff facts like glass shards down
the throat of praise, and praise swallows and keeps
singing. Why, exactly, is this? Is it pride, that can’t
bear to recant? A genuine inability to process new
information? The innate tendency to resist changing
one’s mind? Filial piety, as in the reluctance to break
with the faith of one’s forebears? Sheer intellectual
mulishness?
All of the above might play into it. But there’s
one other thing that makes people persist in the
old “delusions”: The ability to think mythologically.
(See above). This has something to do with negative
capability, which Keats famously defined as the ability
to hold contradictions in the same mind. Not everyone
possesses this. Political, polemical minds usually
don’t (Hitchens!). But more people have it, to varying
degrees, than get credit for it. It’s not just for poets.
There is a mental firewall that gets put up. This
wall divides the factual and the true. Reproductive
science tells us virgins don’t give birth. In Bethlehem
around two thousand years ago (which is the same
thing as saying: in the Bible), however, one specific
virgin did. I suspect this is much the same process
as goes on in my own, Hindu mind: Geographically,
the Ganges doesn’t have its source in the forehead of
Shiva. In the far reaches of Hindu prehistory (which is
the same thing as saying: in the Puranas), it did (and
does).
I suspect my monotheist brethren will be the last
to concede this point. Ours is an historical religion,
they will say. That stuff really happened, to the letter,
exactly as it’s written. Yours is a mythological religion.
You can ignore the facts and enjoy your stories.
Sound familiar? The mullahs and the Christopher
Hitchens crowd tend to choke on the same bone. The
atheist critique of historical monotheism is identical
to historical monotheism’s critique of mythological
religion. Can we all just be friends?
This brings me to my final point, and the purpose
of this post: The division of religions into those two
broad categories (historical and mythological) is
a false dichotomy. All religions are hybrids of the
historical and the mythic. The mythic element is what
keeps the story from becoming a dusty chronicle.
The historical element is what keeps the story from
slackening into a dream recounted by your stoned
friend. Yes, Prince Rama existed, and yes, monkeys
don’t talk. Yes, Christ was crucified, and yes, he is
suspiciously similar to a variety of pagan divinities that
have died and come back to life.
The glorious hybridity of these stories—the
mongrel hardiness of the offspring of factuality and
truth—is what makes myth and scripture powerful,
meaningful, beautiful, valuable: Not entirely factual,
but entirely full of truth.