The Misuse of the word “Myth”

I originally wrote this article for a theme on Medium: reasonable doubt. I had largely forgotten about this piece until the (Un)common knowledge competition was announced. Pretty much everyone knows what a myth is, so it might be odd to have an article on the topic published in FYI and submitted to a challenge about uncommon knowledge. But the reason I'm rewriting this article for the challenge is because the average person's understanding of the term is simply incorrect.

In common parlance, "myth" is used to mean something that is false or something that people believe without justification, like an urban legend. But for a mythicist and anthropologist, like myself, that's simply not the case. The use of the word, in this sense, is in many ways very similar to how certain people use the word "theory." It's not exactly that they're wrong, but the term loses a lot of its proper meaning and function when used in this way.

So what is a myth? Let's get a bit more basic. What is a narrative? Wikipedia's explanation is pretty easy to understand.

A narrative or story is a report of connected events, real or imaginary, presented in a sequence of written or spoken words, or still or moving images, or both. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to tell", which is derived from the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled".

On Myths

A myth is a type of narrative. But it's more than just any story. It's a story about ourselves. A myth is narrative, which is written with the intention of being truthful, which tries to establish our place in the world. Creation stories, including stories found in religious texts, are myths. They are attempts to explain our origins and how we got to where we are. Another myth would be the story of Columbus trying to prove that the Earth was round. The reality is that he knew the Earth was round, as did most people of the time. The argument was over the size of the Earth, and he was wrong.

While plenty of myths are inconsistent with our current scientific understanding of the world, a myth need not be. A myth isn't necessarily false or unpopular. Any narrative which attempts to explain our place in the world is a myth.

One can see now why history is a form of myth. It is written with the intention of being truthful, and its goal is to not only explain the past, but to connect the dots from the past to the present, explaining why things are the way that they are today.

History also has other components that other forms of myth don't have. For one thing, a proper history should have a rough outline explaining how the information was transmitted from the observer to the historian, something I refer to as the genealogy of knowledge [1]. That's one reason why the bible is myth, but not history.

I want to reiterate that a myth doesn't have to be true or false. That's not the point. History is overturned with new information all the time. What's important is that it is written with the intention of being truthful.

Religion as Myth

One of the most frequent topics in which I hear the abuse of the word "myth" is in discussions on religion. Often it's used to demean religion and religious people - "ah those people and their Bronze Age myths" - in a way which shows one's own ignorance of the topic.

Religion does indeed have myths, or at least, that's one of the cultural dimensions of religion described by Ninian Smart's seven dimensions of religion. But pretty much every culture has some form of myth, because we all like to have an idea of where we're from. It's all a part of trying to find order in nature.

Originally published at The Spiritual Anthropologist's Blog on February 20, 2019