The Story of Myth

by Sarah Iles Johnston

Greek myths have long been admired as beautiful, thrilling stories but dismissed as serious objects of belief. For centuries scholars have held that Greek epics, tragedies, and the other compelling works handed down to us obscure the “real” myths that supposedly inspired them. Instead of joining in this pursuit of hidden meanings, Sarah Iles Johnston argues that the very nature of myths as stories—as gripping tales starring vivid characters—enabled them to do their most important to create and sustain belief in the gods and heroes who formed the basis of Greek religion.By drawing on work in narratology, sociology, and folklore studies, and by comparing Greek myths not only to the myths of other cultures but also to fairy tales, ghost stories, fantasy works, modern novels, and television series, The Story of Myth reveals the subtle yet powerful ways in which these ancient Greek tales forged enduring bonds between their characters and their audiences, created coherent story-worlds, and made it possible to believe in extraordinary gods. Johnston captures what makes Greek myths distinctively Greek, but simultaneously brings these myths into a broader conversation about how the stories told by all cultures affect our shared view of the cosmos and the creatures who inhabit it.

Genres: Mythology, Nonfiction, History

378 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 3, 2018

About the author

Sarah Iles Johnston is the College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Religion and Professor of Classics and Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University.

Reviews

[Alina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Johnston argues for an account of the nature of mythology. Her account reveals that most other accounts presuppose a certain approach to defining myth, and shows how this approach might be limited, or at least doesn't capture essential aspects of myth. Johnston's account is that myth is defined by a certain practical function it served in the communities who believed in it; this is the function of enabling community members to sense or experience their gods with more vividness or forcefulness. For example, if we just hear about a god as hearsay from a friend, this god's presence will not be as vivid to us as if we learned of this god's presence through all of the various media that we consume on a daily basis, and if we practiced rituals that presuppose the existence of and potential of interacting with this god. Johnston argues that the narrative form is especially effective at this end: stories let us vicariously experience various situations without risk and communicate information in a quicker and more engaging manner, among other functions which serve this end.

So Johnston takes it that myth is expressed in many communicative and cultural forms, as long as it is narrative in character--not just in the classic form of a bard's singing tales. Mothers telling their children to not do something or else face the potential threat of a god's punishment is an expression of myth, and so is leaving a sacrifice at a temple, as long as these are done with the involvement of narrative. This goes against the classic way of conceiving of myth as a particular literary genre; once we take up this approach, we become prone to looking for particular literary features of myth that might distinguish it from other, nearby genres, like the fairytale or fable.

My favorite chapters were 1 and 2; these were the only chapters with substantial content. All the other chapters are applications of Johnston's framework to particular myths; these do not present any further ideas, not yet contained in these first two chapters. In chapter 1, Johnston reviews the history of the term "myth" and the history of scholarly approaches to it. It derives from the ancient Greek term mythos which refers to something that was said, a statement of any kind regardless of whether it is fact or fiction. Then Plato took this term and redefined it as a fiction that contains some grain of truth, which could have severe impact on children (hence we get Plato's view that myths need to be heavily censored). In the 18th century, myth comes to refer to a particular kind of story, particularly if it originated from ancient Greece. Romanticism, particularly Herder, held that a myth expressed the essential spirit of a certain people, and that originally, all of humanity was united as a single people. This led scholars to believe that the apparently diverse myths across cultures in fact shared the same underlying essence, and so they read and analyzed myths in accordance to this assumption; they reduced myths to certain underlying narrative structures.

Only in the 20th century did scholars consider that we could categorize cultural forms not in terms of literary genre or medium, but rather in terms of how we engage with them--what are the kinds of circumstances that are in place when we engage with this cultural form, and what sort of attention do we give to the form? A cultural form could be in the foreground or in the background (e.g., watching a movie in the theater v. as background noise as we clean the house), we could engage with them in a more focused or flexible manner (e.g., prayer v. daydreaming), and our engagement with them could be deliberate or spontaneous.

Johnston examines which features of myths enable them to be so effective in letting their audience members come to take the gods and events of those myths as part of reality. (She goes more into this in chapter 3 as well; I don't like this fractured organization of the book). First, mythology involves an internally consistent and elaborate system of stories. When the same character re-appears across stories, and claims about them are consistent with one another and build upon one another across these stories, this amounts to the rhetorical effect of the character's being real (Johnston doesn't analyze why this is the case; we may presume it's because beings of reality may be encountered from various different perspectives and times, yielding different representations of them, all of which would be consistent with one another; so systematicity and consistency may be the product of either something's actually being part of reality, or of being designed in fiction as to mimic this effect). Second, myth may be represented across many different media (e.g., song, story, gossip, ritual). (Johnston also doesn't analyze why this fact lets the contents so represented show up ever more forcefully as part of reality).

I was also fascinated by one concept Johnston examines in chapter 3. There, she distinguishes between ancient Greek myth and ancient Mediterranean historiola, as the cultural predecessor to myth. Historiolae include characters familiar to the community, each of whom are known for possessing certain powers, or as partaking in certain archetypal narratives. Individuals in the community would utter lines from stories involving those characters, and by doing so, believed that the powers of those characters would become immediately manifest in the present. For example, if a mother's infant is sick with fever, she might talk about Isis, which is an ancient Mediterranean character known for feeding her infant her magical milk, which can cure the infant of fever. So individuals must believe that words can carry direct causal power, tapping into the realm of the sacred and letting their powers penetrate into the mundane present. This involves a conception that the sacred realm is geographically distant from the mundane, but the two realms may interact.

I was very interested in how this sounds similar to certain Christian practices. Some Christians will look at Bible stories and understand their lives according to those. The difference lies in whether an individual believes that this act of interpretation and invocation of a divine text will actually and directly change their circumstances; vs. whether an individual believes that time is cyclical or microcosm/macrocosm structure is ontologically real, so we can know the future will unfold as it does in a Bible story, but uttering or reading the story wouldn't change the present moment to unfold analogously to that in the story, unless it inspires the agents to act anew. So it seems that historiolae would be effective may be understood as an endorsement of wishful thinking; the culture at the time held that what we take to be wishful thinking is causally efficacious.

Johnston argues that Greeks didn't believe that narrating a myth could directly cause changes; they rather believe that myths are figurative or metaphoric. One myth could stand in for many different kinds of situation, rather than serve as a straightforward analogy for one particular kind of situation. (Unfortunately Johnston does a terrible job in making explicit this difference. In my attempt to do so, it seems that if the Isis story were a myth in this sense, she could be evoked not only if one's infant had fever, but if anything of personal value were in a dire condition, like the failure of crops). Greeks understood that if the invocation of myth had causal effects upon one's present situation, these effects would be mediated by other causal forces. For example, listening to myth could stir up one's emotions, or get one to see a situation in a new light; this new emotion or understanding of the present could get one to perform new actions.

I got pretty frustrated with the author when she makes claims like narratives have the power to "change the way in which people decide what is real and unreal". That's not the case! Rather, narratives may inspire changes in what we already take as real. As soon as we know some telling is fictional, this makes it the case that we will rule out the possibility that its contents are part of reality, no matter how rhetorically convincing or vivid the telling is. But, it could circuitously inspires us to look at our real lives in new ways. When we understand this fact, Johnston must be more careful and revise her claims about the fictional v. factual status of myth to the ancient Greeks. If they believe that the gods are part of reality, although of a sacred realm that is distant from our mundane one, they cannot be taking myth to be plainly fictional. But if the author is right that they took the myths to be figurative, it is a curious thing to consider that a story could be seen as both factual and figurative. This might be difficult for us to wrap our minds around because we have a different metaphysics than the ancient Greeks, perhaps: we are less inclined to believe that transcendental universals or non-particular entities genuinely exist, in the manner by which particulars exist. It seems that for something to be factual and figurative it must be universal in character, or at least non-particular in some way, so that it could possibly represent various particulars. I wish Johnston spent more time analyzing the options for distinctions between fact and fiction.

I would recommend this book to readers interested in the make-believe v. reality distinction (e.g., Winnicott, Kenneth Walton). It serves as a nice case study for how thinks can so often be sloppy about this, or misunderstand it; or if readers are less biased than me, they might consider that Johnston's analyses show that there is something misleading about this distinction.

[Devin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I took a course on interpreting myth (from one of the reviewers of this book no less) and he recommended this book when I asked what the dominant theory of interpreting myth was today.

This was an excellent read. Johnston does an outstanding job of weaving together a tapestry of theories that have come before and the weaknesses that those approaches presented. She then skillfully presents a new "theory." Theory is in quotes because I feel like one of Johnston's great breakthroughs is moving away from the idea that there has to be one interpretive key to all myths. Rather, she presents an interpretive toolbox, and I can pull out certain tools based on specific myths. She pulls extensively from modern ideas in order to make her toolbox. The result is a cutting edge, interdisciplinary approach. I think her focus on the narrative is also important, and was arguably her greatest pushback against previous theories, which often completely ignored the narrative structure of myth.

There were some areas where I would have liked more expansion on some ideas, but I recognize that this is her first foray into establishing a new theory. She does an admirable job, and I look forward to seeing where other scholars are able to take this theory and how it contributes to our overall understanding of myth as a discourse.

[Veiltender · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was one of the most important books on myth that I have ever read. I admit to being biased (Sarah was my teacher in graduate school), but the way that Sarah deftly wove together various methodological approaches in order to argue for a return to considering the myth side of the old question of myths and rituals was exceptional.

This book has given me a lot to think about, and deserves to be revisited. It also deserves to be read even if one's interest is not specifically in Greek mythology or mythography.

Highly recommended.

[Tiffany · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like this book says a lot of things that are said about Greek myths in other places/books/analyses, but this book brings them all together into one book. Nothing groundbreaking, but a good overview of common themes in Greek myths.

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm writing a review for professional publication, so I am not going to put one here.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Middle-of-the-road analysis of myth...no bad but not great.

[Ananya]

useful