Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Myths are stories drawn from a society's history, which have acquired through persistent usage the power of symbolizing that society's ideology, and explicating the meaning and direction of its history. A society's mythology is, in effect, its memory system. Myths usually develop around cultural crises or moments of collective shock or trauma, when events challenge the belief system on which the society has hitherto operated. The most durable myths develop around issues or problems that are fundamental to the society's organization and persistent in its history: for example, the problem of kingship and succession in premodern societies, and the tensions between individual rights and social authority in modern nation-states. As a society experiences the stress of events, its cultural leadership recalls and deploys mythologized “memories” of the past as precedents for understanding and responding to contemporary crises. Over time, through frequent retellings and deployments as a source of interpretive metaphors, the original mythic story is increasingly conventionalized and abstracted, until it is reduced to a deeply encoded and resonant set of symbols, “icons,” “keywords,” or historical clichés. In this form, myth becomes a basic constituent of linguistic meaning and of the processes of both personal and social “remembering.” Each of these mythic icons is in effect a poetic construction ... log in or subscribe to read full text