Myth and Individualism

Abstract

Although terms such as mythology and mythical have been part of the English language since the seventeenth century, both myth and individualism are post-Romantic terms. The word “myth” apparently first appeared in English in 1830. Its sense is given by the Oxford English Dictionary as “a purely fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural persons, actions, or events, and embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical phenomena.” The word comes from the Latin mythus via the French mythe . Its exact meaning, as the OED definition suggests, is elusive: Claude Levi-Strauss, in his classic essay “The Structural Study of Myth,” complains that even today thinking about myth means thinking about “a picture of chaos.” I shall merely characterize very briefly the main modern ways of thinking about myth in an attempt to clarify how the term can properly be used in the sense we have been employing in this study. I shall lean heavily on the fine empirical summary given by Percy S. Cohen in his 1969 Malinowski Memorial Lecture, “Theories of Myth,” which distinguishes seven main types of myth interpretation. The first and earliest type assumes that myths try to answer more or less factual or rational questions. Edward Burnett-Tylor and Sir James Frazer, author of the highly influential book The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (1890), both assumed that early man had “characteristics of intellectual curiosity not unlike those of nineteenth-century anthropologists”; thus Frazer used the story of the Tower of Babel as an attempt to explain the variety of human languages.