Myth, hero and ritual

Myth is a widely and variously used term referring to a culture’s way of understanding, expressing and communicating to itself concepts that are important to its self-identity as a culture. There are three main uses of the term – the ritual (or anthropological), the literary and the semiotic.

The ritual/ anthropological takes the form of an anonymously composed narrative that offers explanations of why the world is as it appears to be, and why people act as they do. It is specific to its own culture, though it presents its explanations as universal, or natural. It is a crucial means of turning nature into culture, and thus works also reciprocally as a naturalizingagency.

In literary theory, myth becomes a story about, or image of, what are seen as eternal, permanent human truths, usually of a spiritual, moral or aesthetic kind. It is closely associated with the notion of archetypalsymbols, that is symbols with a transcultural, if not universal, meaning, and belongs to a school that frequently asserts similarities between the social functions of religion and literature. Use of the term is usually the sign of an idealistic, vague and ultimately unsound approach to literature.

The semioticmeaning differs markedly from these two. It refers to an unarticulated chain of associated concepts by which members of a culture understand certain topics. It operates non- consciously and intersubjectively. It is associative, not narrative; it is culture-specific, not transcultural or universal; it changes over time, rather than being eternal; and it is unarticulated rather than being textually expressed. Its prime function is to make the cultural natural, and it thus shares with other usages the function of naturalization. The semiotic usage, as proposed by Barthes, is discussed more fully under signification.

A Russian philosopher A.F. Losev (1893-1988) was a creator of the philosophy of myth, understood as substantial reality and space. Myth is an energetic self-assertion of the individual, image of the personality, the representation of the personality, through the history of such personality, characteristic to any epoch and not just ancient. Losev regards myth as a necessary category of consciousness and defines it as “ unfolded magical name ” – a formula that highlights myth’s verbal (narrative) form, personalistic nature, and the presence of the miraculous in it. As a story about reality it is distinct from poetry and art in general; as a prereflexive story about a miraculous reality, myth is distinct from science and metaphysics. Myths form the foundations of people’s outlooks, Losev argues, and thus determine cultural and historical processes on the most fundamental level. He views the history of culture as a constant struggle among various mythologies, and one of his tasks is to uncover the inner logic of this process. “Whatever one’s view of myth, any critique of mythology is always merely a profession of another, new mythology” (Dialectics of Myth, M. 1927. p.771). According to Losev no historical epoch is free of mythology and, despite its hostility toward myth, modernity is emphatically mythological. Modern cosmology advances, he impugns, a vision of the world as an infinite dark void, ruled by a “blind, deaf, and dead”monster, that is, matter. Losev’s other targets among modern myths include titanic Prometheanism that he critiqued at length in The Problem of Symbol and Realistic Art. The key notion in Losev’s critique of modernity was what he called in Estetika Vozrozhdeniia (Renaissance aesthetics; 1978) “the absolutization of the human subject.” The reconciliation of myth and philosophy is Losev’s goal in his essay “Absoliutnaia mifologiia = absoliutnaia dialektika” (Absolute mythology = absolute dialectics; 1929–1930, published in 2000). Taken by themselves, both myth and dialectics are limited and an adequate outlook can be based, Losev insists, only on their synthesis. Dialectics inevitably comes up against the ultimate limit of rational cognition, and in the suprarational realm beyond this boundary it should be fused with mythology. In his early period Losev found the optimal candidates for such a synthesis in the mythology of Eastern (Orthodox) Christianity and Russian religious philosophical thought. Losev applied his theoretical ideas to numerous analyses of specific myths ranging from ancient Greco-Roman to modern mythology (for instance, in his Ocherki antichnogo simvolizma i mifologii, 1930 and Mifologiia grekov i rimlian, 1930s, published in 1996).

Hero (heroine) is an individual who is worshipped and idolized because of his or her morality, excellence and bravery. Heroes may be actual people, and may be culturally reproduced in textual forms. Whether real or imagined, such imagesappear in the face of adversity and with what is taken to be an essential goodness to reveal our own shortcomings. More often than not heroes are ideal types that have at least in part been exaggerated by media representations (in which case

they are closely related to star images), but which always go beyond individual identity through epitomizing a body of cultural values and moral beliefs. In so doing, heroes are integral to socialization and forms of identification. In addition we should also emphasize martyrdom, which refers to the cruel and unjust death of a hero. Heroic figures are often identified through binary oppositions, wherein they stand in contrast to morally corrupt villains. Indeed we can ask whether one always depends on the other for their continued existence, and whether so much narrative depends on this opposition – for instance, Sherlock Holmes versus the evil Moriarty. Going beyond fiction we have fact, and the construction of hero / villain stereotypes in real life. Much depends, of course, on which side you are on. The essential subjectivityof such images can be further applied to gender differences: compare, for example, the female ‘dumb blonde’ heroine with the male strong-silent type of hero.

A final point concerns the emergence of anti-heroes / heroines. Strictly speaking these should be villainous characters because of their weakness, corruption or even cruelty. Yet there now seems to be an in-between category which combines heroic / villainous elements together. You may want to debate the reasons for such an emergence – one explanation might be based on a saturated market for heroic images, wherein images of morality and excellence have become abundant, cliché d and even boring.

Ritual is organized symbolic practices and ceremonial activities

which serve to define and represent the social and cultural significance of particular occasions, events or changes. The study of ritual has been a prominent focus for anthropologists, whose analysis of religious and magical rituals in pre-industrial cultureshas been particularly influential.

Such studies have often distinguished between two main aspects of ritual. The first relates to what Van Gennep has termed rites de passage, those celebrations and ceremonies that mark socially defined

changes in the lives of individuals and groups. Birthdays, marriages and many other changes in status or kinship relations, legal or social position are examples of occasions sequenced and signified by this form of ritual activity. Such rituals, then, symbolize the cultural recognition of transition and represent changes from one social stage, or state, to another.

Mair suggests that they are often the meeting point for rituals of symbolic initiation, segregation and integration, whereby a ‘new’ social identity is gained or conferred. Berger suggests that they operate in both modern and pre-industrial societies to ‘transform the individual event into a typical case, just as they transform the individual biography into an episode in the history of the society’. In this way rites de passage mark and punctuate the passage of time and express the transitional rhythm of a group, community or society. This may be ritually expressed predominantly through representations of changes in nature, as in harvest festivals, celebrations for rain or growing seasons, or in ritual celebrations of particular historical events.

Such rituals, however, not only mark time (and hence serve to construct and confirm a sense of individual and collective identity, of cultural and historical location and transition), they also often operate to ensure success, security or a defined state of well-being for the individual or social group concerned. This second major aspect of rituals concerns the ways in which they function to procure symbolic (often supernatural) intervention and assistance in achieving certain desired objectives.

Worsley, for example, in his study of cargo cults in Melanesia, demonstrates how particular cult rituals (apparently irrational to the outsider) served to express and represent a form of symbolic response and expression to the experience of rapid social and cultural change through colonization. In this way much anthropological evidence points to the intensification of ritual activity in situations of social instability, or when the ‘normality’ of individuals or a community is perceived as threatened in some way.

The term has been rather unevenly developed from this anthropological base, although it has clearly entered the analysis of modern industrial cultures, their institutions and forms of social interaction. As a result it is often used in a more general and secular sense to refer to sets of recurrent rule-governed practices which are of symbolic significance for either individuals or particular social groups. In this sense the term may face the problem of over-inclusion, it becomes ‘stretched’ to the point where it is difficult to distinguish activities that are not in some way ritualized.