There are No New Myths: Why We are Stuck with Homer and the Bible

 

The thought has occurred to me in pessimistic moments that there are only so many stories and only so many basic ideas. This would mean we have had all the ideas we are going to have and have set the basic patterns for every story we are going to tell. Consider time: we can think of time as a turning wheel or as an arrow in flight. Two inventions alone determine how we think of one of the most fundamental ideas we possess! I don’t say this happily. No one would be as thrilled as I if a new tale were told or if someone had a genuinely novel thought. Unfortunately I don’t see it happening. Consider the Biblically themed ‘Jericho March’ transpiring in Washington. This is a Hebrew story that embodies the eschatological hope of certain Christians. This hope is embodied in the release of a Norse Kraken. This image, though, is taken (I kid you not!) from the remake of Clash of the Titans! The hopes of Trumpists are now pinned on a mélange of the Christ myth and the story of Perseus and Andromeda! It was Hopkins, as far as I know, who Christianized this tale in a memorable sonnet. The Jericho marchers, alas, are very unlikely to know this. Clearly they are reaching back to a far more archaic stratum of European culture that embraces Hebraic and Classical myth as its primary source of images and tales. This raises the question of why, for these new times, they do not invent new myths. It could be that they lack imagination but listening to them speak this is clearly not so. 

My hunch though, and it is only a hunch, is that they lack the right kind of imagination. My second hunch is that they lack this sort of imagination because ALL of us lack it. There is primary imagination and secondary imagination and the historical conditions for the former are simply gone and are highly unlikely EVER to recur. We can endlessly reshuffle existing myths as generators of secondary culture but we cannot recapture the moment of primary creation. We feed off the primary creations of the Bronze age even in our supposedly scientific ideas which are actually just hyper-sophisticated metaphors encoding a primary myth. We think of Darwin and Genesis as opposed but what the mythic critic notices instantly is that they are all but the same. Indeed, Evolutionary theory is, from a mythic point of view, the great chain of being laid on a horizontal linear grid (a metaphorical horizon of course). This is EXACTLY what the creation in Genesis is. Indeed, all it took was the Genesis story and a few twists from Burke and Hume to frame nature in such a way that Darwin could see finches exactly as he did. AND PLEASE note that in saying this I am NOT saying evolution is ‘false’. By myths I mean narrative and imagistic frameworks that allow us to see things this way rather than that and suggest to us that things are a rather than b. Our truest perceptions are conveyed by myth exactly as our most false and meretricious ones. If one doubts this try to frame Darwin’s hypothesis in a world based (like the classical one) on cyclical rather than linear patterns and get back to me. 

It is interesting to me that when scientists get worried about this and try to purge ‘pure science’ of all traces of myth, ideology and image (like the ‘tree of life’ or the ‘ascent of man’) they produce empty mathematical formalisms like ‘population genetics’ that convey nothing about the world of experience but are simply calculation tools for predicting (in this case) the spread of certain traits in a given population. Science purged of its tropes and metaphors ceases to interface with the world! This is because such formalisms can be understood in an instrumental as opposed to realist sense as with navigational aids that work either in a Ptolemaic or Copernican framework. Of course Plato told us this ages ago when he placed the formal sciences or ‘dianoia’ on the third stage of the divided line: bordering on pure intellectual knowledge but still dependent on the projection of images. These images are, by and large, from the common stock of images that already exist. Indeed the last great mythic eruption, the European 'enlightenment', began with the physical elevation of the sun to the center of the cosmos. It took itself as new and revolutionary but of course it re-inscribed one of the oldest myths of all: the slaying of the dragon of darkness by the solar deity emerging as the sun disc over the primal hill.

This is because primary creation is only possible in the first, non-reflective, phases of human culture. If we could get past reflection we could create myths again.  At this late date though we cannot as all our culture, radical and conservative, begins in the standpoint of reflection and critique. Many great and heroic things can be done from this standpoint but creating primary myths is not one of them. This is because primary creation is not conscious or mechanical. This is what the primary creators tell us and we have no authority to dispute them having no experience in the matter. Homer speaks the mind of the Muse as Ezekiel speaks the Word of the Lord. In other words, all cultures rest on revelation for one cannot fabricate a primary myth piece by piece because, to be blunt, they have no pieces. Building stories from pre-existing blocks is secondary fabrication: the thing that WE do. This means there will be no new myths in the western word or in the Far East where all tales will unfold within the myth of re-incarnation or the Daoist motion of contraries. By the way, as some people are possessed of the silly idea that revelations have to be discursively consistent with each other they will claim that if Homer is inspired then Ezekiel cannot be and vice versa. Please note that I do not believe that in the least but we will have to argue it out some other time. 

In short, we have had our revelations and need to learn to work better with what we have been given.  This includes, if we live in the West, increasing our small stock of foundational myths and metaphors with those of non-western cultures. These are probably limited in number too but I’m not bothered by that at all since it is quality that counts here and too many myths and too many symbols would become unmanageable. Anyway, I suspect, though I can hardly prove this empirically, that the entire stock of human knowledge reduces to some pattern like ‘union-loss of union-reunion’ or, to quote a certain hobbit “there and back again”. If this reunion is at the cost of the empirical individual we have tragedy and if it involves the reintegration of the individual with moral and social order we have comedy. Is there in fact anything that is not tragedy or comedy or some mixture of the two? Well I suppose there is the banal march of daily existence but if we write about that at all we surely either impose some form on it or, like the serialist composer who builds an entire composition around avoiding major or minor tonality, so contrive things as to subvert the form. Of course the ‘happy ending’ like the key of C is always present in such works precisely in its absence. If everything is contrived to avoid saying a certain thing then this thing is emphatically said. I would like to think I am wrong about all this and something exciting and novel lies around the corner. In an article I recently read Jacques Derrida says that in the space of the khora the unforeseen will emerge. This however is a pious wish and I suspect he really thinks, in good Hebraic fashion, that the stance of waiting is structurally permanent. We are open to the emergence of the new always but this emergence is like Lacan’s phallus: a forever absence. The new, if it ACTUALLY emerged , would in that instance be reduced to the old. For that reason it is constituted in its nature as different by being forever withheld.