photo by Al Butler on unsplash.
The following thoughts on religious mythology come from a “deleted scene” left on the threshing floor of my upcoming book. Enjoy!
“Ok Terry, you’re telling me Adam and Eve weren’t real people—what about Cain and Abel? What about Noah? When do we start to deal with actual historical persons, and how do we determine where that threshold is?”
Adam and Eve very well may have been two real ancestors of the Hebrew people. Origin myths and legends often take (quite possibly) real ancestors and mythologize them beyond what or who they actually could have been. They do this in at least two ways.
One, they attribute actions to these persons that they could not have done and did not do. Myths do this because their thrust is not to give a historical account but rather to present cultural values and collective identity in a poetically compelling way (which legend and myth are famously very well-suited for).
Two, they play with those historical persons’ temporality; making them more original or primeval than they actually were. They’re often culturally the first people we can remember, or the first with direct relevance to who we are, so in our retellings we naturally make them into the first people that matter, which often morphs (rhetorically, at least) into simply the first people. It’s like Ron Swanson saying that history began in 1776 and everything before that was a mistake. We get a chuckle out of that, but this is kind of how origin myths work. The origin myths of my public school education weren’t too far off from this.
Origin myths do these two things in order to explain where a certain people come from and/or why things are the way they are. As mythology, it’s genius—it’s a helpful way to crystallize various cultural motifs, retell them in an easily transmissible and often beautifully poetic way, and hold them up for examination. Now, historiographically, we know that great origins and movements are rarely attributable to one or two larger-than-life charismatic leaders and most often to a large, diffuse group of mostly historically obscure people. But mythologically it’s sometimes helpful, and often inevitable, to oversimplify these origins and movements into simple, linear stories with one or two main characters.
For example, we know that the Black Liberation Movement of the last century was a vast struggle. It included the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the Black Panthers, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and various other organizations, as well as thousands of students, activists, and ordinary people. It was full of deep ideological and tactical differences between the above orgs, and took place in the form of teach-ins, actions, and campaigns that mostly did not make it into the main narrative. It certainly did not hinge on any one person or even one discrete group of recognizable persons. This is the historical truth.
And yet, of course, the mythological narrative is that there was one great leader and a few supporting cast members who by winning and directing followers accomplished certain identifiable “wins.” And while this narrative is deeply counterproductive in many ways, it’s not entirely worthless as as an entry-level myth that can serve as a launching pad for the uninitiated, such that they find the poetic inspiration to dig deeper and learn truer (though perhaps slightly less poetic) versions of the story (or stories, rather).
The particularities of how black holes are taught to second graders are likely inaccurate to the point of being counterproductive for, say, college astrophysics students, but they’re perhaps the only way for those seven-year-olds to be able to enter into the concepts. Those concepts are rightfully negotiated and deconstructed and reconstructed when kids revisit black holes in high school, and again in college.
It’s the same for cultural mythologies. Genesis 3 is in many ways a helpful entry point into the concepts of harm, self-supremacy, alienation, etc. because it presents them in a simple, poetic, narrative form that is easy to follow. But as a christian grows, they hopefully add a rational analysis to the poetic understanding provided by Genesis, and renegotiate and reconstruct the relevant concepts at a higher level of theological and anthropological complexity, even to the point where the original myth, through which they entered the conversation, comes to hold a very different place in their wisdom (just as the 2nd-grade black holes lesson comes to hold a different place in the wisdom of an astrophysicist). The original framing is not gone, and it’s not even necessarily looked down upon. Rather, it’s appreciated for what it is, and what it was, and how it framed the beginning of the conversation.
The danger is not in myths themselves or in their low level of nuance. Those are neutral in themselves, and can be good if understood and wielded appropriately.
The danger with mythology comes when rulers produce, coopt, standardize, control, and force-feed cultural narratives. Healthy engagement with myths requires freedom, variation, and metamorphosis. Yet centralized societies require mythological coercion, uniformity, and stasis. In order to maintain the status quo, rulers have to standardize, historicize, and control cultural narratives of identity and history.
The danger of the “MLK and co.” mythology is not so much that it’s a dangerous way to teach civil rights history to third graders, but rather that it is reified and absolutized by all levels of education, by the state, and sadly even frequently by the Black community itself. This then precludes and silences more holistic and liberative narratives which recognize more participants, expose the falsehood of centralized leadership, and reveal the impotence of reformism.
Myths can be helpful if they are recognized for what they are and allowed to function in the way they’re designed to. Even decentralized societies such as anarchist communities will inevitably tend toward, and in ways be truly helped by, mythological framings of origins and identity. But they will use these myths as poetry is meant to be used—as artistic appropriations and crystallizations of human experience which serve as scaffolding for more concrete reflection on everyday phenomena.
The Adam & Eve origin myth is helpful in that it provides a simple framework for reflecting on the realities of harm in the world. However, it becomes less helpful when rulers with centralized authority standardize (and historicize) one interpretation and prohibit others. For example, they standardize the idea that “sin” is something intrinsic to human nature and therefore something that needs to be managed and policed by rulers. And they prohibit the idea that harm often stems from an attitude of self-supremacy, an attitude which is intrinsic to statecraft and which can therefore be undermined by abolishing state institutions and ultimately the state itself.
So, Adam and Eve are quite possibly historical persons to whom the ancestry of the Hebrew people can be traced. They are not, historically, larger-than-life beings who are solely responsible for much of our reality. Mythologically, poetically, we can place them as allegorical representatives of basic human motifs, but only if that helps us to interpret and understand our actual history. Same for Cain, Abel, Seth, and Noah.
And even when we get to Abraham and the like, whom we have little reason to not see as real historical persons, the same principle applies. How do we healthfully engage with the narratives we have about these persons—identifying when legend is at play, learning the conceptual lessons which mythology is well-constructed to present, but remembering that ultimately actual history does not hinge so much on focal individuals (and simple narratives) so much as on large, complex movements of ordinary people?