Na’aman Hirschfeld Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
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Myth as a Temporal Concept: Antiquity and Primitiveness I will discuss today how, as part of the emergence of “modern mythology,” the concept ‘myth’ acquired a new temporalizing signification during the 18th century, which connected the ancient with the primitive – two hitherto separate categories. * For most of its history mythology was a marginal branch of scholarship, primarily concerned with the interpretation of Greek, Roman and occasionally Egyptian myths as Christian allegories or as a form of de-formed history; what is termed “euhemerism”, after the inventor of this interpretative approach - the ancient Greek 4 Century BCE mythographer Euhemerus. At the turn of the 18th century myth still referred to Greek and Roman narratives, which had a unique status in European-Western civilization. Yet within the next few decades its meaning began to expand. In 1724 the French Jesuit missionary and ethnologist père Joseph-François Lafitau, after spending six years living with the Iroquois Indians in the Canadian-French territories published his influential ethnological study Moeurs des Sauvages Amériquains, Comparées aux Moeurs des Premiers Temps. The following excerpt is from the introduction to this massive work: I confess that, if the ancient authors have given me information on which to base happy conjectures about the Indians, the customs of the Indians have given me information on the basis of which I can understand more easily and explain more readily many things in the ancient authors. 1
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[….] Not only do the people we call barbarians have a religion, but this religion has affinities of so great a conformity with that of the earliest time […] that one thinks at first that they are everywhere and share the same principles and the same bases. [….] One cannot deny this resemblance and this conformity. One finds, for example, vestiges of the mystery of the most holy Trinity in the mysteries of Isis, in the works of Plato, and in the religions of the Indies, of Japan, and of the Mexicans. One discovers many other similar traits in the pagan mythology […]. In his book Formations of the Secular, Talal Asad asserted that, and I’m quoting “new theorizations of the sacred were connected with European encounters with the non-European world, in the enlightened space and time that witnessed the construction of “religion” and “nature” as universal categories.” Lafitau opens his work with an astounding theoretical development – he is not only formulating conjectures about the Indians by using the ancient authors, but also formulating conjectures about the ancients using the Indians, that is, he is “reading” the ancients in light of the contemporary primitives – their customs, their religion, and their mythologies. He then turns to postulate a singular and natural universal Christianity that appeared in every known culture and in every known period and then “degenerated” with its true origin being obfuscated by false fables. Nonetheless, vestiges of the original monotheism are evident in myths and through the application of comparison, the validity of the theory is proven beyond any doubt 2
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through a plethora of evidence from the four corners of the world as well as the entire expanse of human history as it was known at the time. * In the same year that Lafitau’s book was published Fontenelle, one of the sharpest secular writers of the enlightenment published an essay on the origin of fables. Here it is important to consider the context. For Enlightenment thinkers, as Peter Gay asserted, there was a great imperative to create what David Hume called in his Treatise of Human-Nature “A Science of Man”, or in other words, Human or Moral-Sciences that will equal the seventeenth century achievements of physics and mathematics in establishing and elucidating the natural laws governing human-nature. As Gay explains, the “strategic” science for the enlightenment, was psychology from which a range of new, secularized sciences, could “radiate” outwards. The assumption of a natural and universal “human nature” as part of this psychology, thus made myth a highly important element. The following excerpt is from De l'origine des fables from 1724: The philosophy of the first ages worked on a principle so natural that even today our philosophy has no other; that is, we explain the unknown things in nature in terms of those we have before our eyes, and we carry over into natural philosophy ideas supplied us by experience. [I]n all the divinities that the pagans imagined, the idea of power was made dominant, and hardly any consideration was given to wisdom, justice, and all the other attributions that pertain to the divine nature [….] The first men were utterly unaware of any better quality than bodily strength. Wisdom and justice did not 3
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even have names in ancient languages, nor have they today among the barbarians of America. People ordinarily attribute the origin of fables to the lively imagination of the Eastern people; for myself, I attribute it to the ignorance of the first men [….] I could perhaps show, if it were necessary, an astonishing conformity between the fables of the Americans and those of the Greeks. The perspective promoted here by Fontenelle would have been read by his contemporaries in light of the so-called Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, of which he was one of the most renowned modern voices. As such the psychological argument itself can be understood as an argument for the superiority of the moderns, who progressively learned to demystify their beliefs through experiential knowledge and developed higher concepts which clearly separated them from savages, whereas the ancients retained these elements even when they knew – at least some of them – that these were false. As Jan Starobinski asserts in a beautiful treatment of Fontenelle in his book Blessings in Disguise; or The Morality of Evil, and I’m quoting: “When measured against the steady progress of reason over the centuries, myth attests to the first, faltering efforts of the human spirit in a time—when the soul had no resources other than metaphor to express its terrors and wonders. Moreover, this general theory of myth treats all beliefs equally: it makes no exception for the "true religion" except by precaution and with a flourish of style. The goal of education should be to free humans of all their prejudices, terrors, and cults. Such disillusionment will lead to poetry that uses myth without believing in it, coldly, wittily, mockingly: this might serve as a definition of the eighteenth century's antipoetic strain.” 4
Na’aman Hirschfeld Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
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Although it is impossible to speak here of progressive-time in the sense that develops in the postrevolutionary era, this modification of myth is, at least in part, the result of progressive thought in the particular vain of the Enlightenment: the construction of universal human-nature, the development of the concept of civilization, the scientific concept of experiential knowledge, and the ideology of moral progress, all contributed to a perspective that allowed one to see the other – be it a contemporary primitive people or an ancient pagan – as belonging to an earlier stage of civilization, and suddenly, both, as connected. This entailed the assumption of a fundamental psychological mechanism that underlies the production of myths – a mythopoeic mechanism, and it will become a core element of Enlightenment theories of myth and religion. * One of the most influential Enlightenment myth theories was David Hume’s fear theory of polytheistic religion. Hume added a twist to the idea of the creative imagination. He posited man, the primitive, as cowering in fear of the unknown future. And as a result inventing gods, who take the form of personified deities: often assuming the liking of ancestors or historical personas, but also that of the sun, the moon, water nymphs, and so forth. The function of the gods is to replace the deep terror of the unknown with the tangible fear of the power of the gods, for after all, the gods can be appeased, they can be negotiated with, they can be made friends and allies – for they are comprehendible. Another highly influential theory was the fetish theory of Charles de Brosses. De Brosses found a novel solution to the problem posed by Egyptian hieroglyphs – the depiction of animals in pictograms entailed in his opinion the worship of animals. This worship was modeled on a kind 5
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of practice that he identified with West African “fetishism” – a word he borrowed from Portuguese and applied to a wide-range of phenomena both ancient and contemporary, while explaining away all sorts of myth. Simply put, according to de Brosses, primitive people, both ancient and contemporary worshiped both animate and inanimate objects directly by assuming they are imbued with spirits. Not as conduits to a spirit world, but as objects of power directly. In both thinkers the origin of ancient pagan mythologies is comparable to the origin of contemporary primitive mythologies in that both stem from the same natural causes and produced through the same psychological mechanisms. These two thinkers also share a rather negative attitude towards myth. Let us turn now, towards the end of this lecture, to a positive perspective. One of the most tantalizing, rich and surprising conceptions of myth to emerge in the 18th century appeared in the work of Giambattista Vico, a Neapolitan professor of law who published in 1725 the Scienza Nuova, with a 2nd, highly revised edition appearing after his death in 1744. The following excerpt is from the 2nd edition of 1744: [P]oetic wisdom, the first wisdom of the gentile world, must have begun with a metaphysics not rational and abstract like that of learned men now, but felt and imagined as that of these first men must have been, who, without power of ratiocination, were all robust sense and vigorous imagination. This metaphysics was their poetry, a faculty born with them (for they were furnished by nature with these senses and imaginations); born of their ignorance of causes, for ignorance, the mother of wonder, made everything wonderful to men who were ignorant of everything. Their poetry was at first divine, because they imagined the causes of 6
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the things they felt and wondered at to be god. (This is now confirmed by the American Indians, who call gods all the things that surpass their small understanding. We may add the ancient Germans dwelling about the Arctic Ocean, of whom Tacitus tells that they spoke of hearing the sun pass at night from west to east through the sea, and affirmed that they saw the gods. These very rude and simple nations help us to a much better understanding of the founders of the gentile world with whom we are now concerned.) At the same time they gave the things they wondered at substantial being after their own ideas, just as children do, whom we see take inanimate things in their hands and play with them and talk to them as though they were living persons.
As we can see Vico not only connects the ancient to the primitive, he makes the connection with children as well, and this is a highly important fact: Vico’s historical account is developmental – it is built in stages, with one following the other, gradually evolving. One of his primary axioms is that, and I’m quoting “the order of ideas must follow the order of institutions. This was the order of human institutions: first the forests, then the villages, next the cities, and finally the academies.” The primary point of his new science is to explain the development of a gentile history, its telos, using human causes. This emphasis on human causes drives Vico towards myth, which Vico posits as a human fact in difference to natural facts – made by god and only understandable by him or only through an act of grace.
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This compelled Isaiah Berlin to see Vico as a representative of the counter-Enlightenment, and in turn Mark Lilla to label him as an Anti-Modern. Be these scholarly opinions as they may, using the principle that the truth and the made are convertible and that men can only truly understand that which they themselves have created, Vico posits philology as a new scientific practice capable of recovering and explicating an originary gentile historical telos, not as an alternative to but alongside sacred history. As Isaiah Berlin, Hayden White and many others discussed at length, Vico was a man ahead of his time. His work prefigured in many ways the Romantic and Historicist movements of the first half of the 19th century. But these movements resulted from a deep crisis – a series of intertwined schisms that made the hitherto unthinkable - thinkable. And this makes Vico’s achievement, working in Isolation in Naples, even more astounding. I cannot of course go into these schisms here at any depth, but I would like to finish this lecture with a few final words on the big change at the end of the 18th century. As Historians of Time, we are accustomed to think of the French revolution as the biggest single event in our field – literally shaping the experience of modernity. In living memory it can be akin perhaps to the twin towers event magnified ten-fold, or a hundred fold, a threshold event that divided history, having a before and after. But there was also another very important event that occurred at that time – at least for the topic of this lecture – the work of William Jones who discovered in 1783 the link between Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and the Celtic languages. Although this event was subsumed in the immediate impact of the revolution, it operated on a different register – historical, national, ideological and cultural. Its impact was long lasting, it continues in some respects to this day, but it’s impact was tremendous, even one may argue 8
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era defining, during the long 19th century and to a certain extent up to the mid-20th century. Furthermore, this shift is a crucial part of the great scientific revolution that the saw the emergence of the human sciences, on the one hand, and of the planetary sciences on the other. After all, it is during the late 18th and first half of the 19th centuries that the earth, life and man become fully historical. By suddenly introducing an ancient gentile origin for European peoples that connected them to the Orient, the cradle of spirituality, the entire historical meta-narrative was relativized and thus destabilized. This, no less than the French revolution, is a cause for the great movements of Romanticism and Historicism, and is a crucial element in the development of progressivist thought.
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