Sarah Iles Johnston
One could say that the comparative approach to myth began as soon as people started to discuss (rather than simply re‐narrate) myths. Herodotus discusses the differences between the figure whom the Greeks call Heracles, and a different figure (or so Herodotus claims) whom the Egyptians call Heracles. (Hdt. 2.42–45). How are these figures and the stories told about them to be understood in relation to one another, he wonders? Are they all really of Egyptian origin, simply borrowed and elaborated upon by the Greeks? Or perhaps they are really Phoenician in origin, borrowed by both Egyptians and Greeks? At heart, who was this guy Heracles, anyway? This sort of quandary – and the desire to resolve it by seeking some oldest layer of “original” myth and tracing its varied manifestations forward in time – would have a long history among later comparativists, even as their methodologies became more sophisticated.
But if we leave antiquity aside, we could begin the history of the comparative approach in the seventeenth century, when missionaries and other travelers, having encountered natives in the Americas, Africa, and the East, noticed that some of the stories they told were similar to those known from the “high cultures” of Europe, particularly ancient Greece and Rome. Instinctively, the visitors began to compare the two.1 By the late eighteenth century, the habit of comparing myths was well established enough to be used for other purposes. Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) theorized that the essential spirit of a people (Volkgeist) could be recovered by studying their mythology and language. Believing as well in the original unity of humankind, Herder promoted the idea that the comparative study of myths would enable scholars to reconstruct the earliest stage of the shared human Geist. He argued that the birthplace of the human race lay in central Asia; this set him in broad alignment with the Orientalist Sir William Jones, who at the same time was working to trace the origin not of all humans, but rather of only what would come to be called the Aryan races, to Central Asia. Franz Bopp (1791–1867) systematized the comparative study of what would be called the Indo‐European language family (first called Indo‐Aryan or Indo‐Germanic), building on the work of Herder and Jones. Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm (1785–1863, 1786–1859) further advanced the comparative study of that language family and began collecting legal antiquities (Rechtsalterthümer), ballads, and stories that reflected the Volkgeist (Herder 1869).2
At about the same time, Adalbert Kuhn (1812–1881) posited an “Aryan myth” that survived in various instantiations in many of its member cultures. The protagonists of all these stories stole things from the gods and delivered them to humanity in order to improve the mortal lot – Prometheus was the familiar Greek example (Kuhn 1859). Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker (1784–1868) contrasted this Aryan story of the culture‐hero with the myth of a Fall, which he proposed was endemic to Semitic races (Welcker 1857–1863). This contrast (implicitly anchored in comparison) inspired Friedrich Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy (first edition 1872), with its own exaltation of the Prometheus myth and denigration of the myth of a Fall. Nietzsche honed this idea until, in later works such as The Antichrist (1888), he had set ancient Greece and its myths (= high forms of art) against Christianity (= a developed form of Semiticism, and enemy of the artistic spirit).
Meanwhile, in England, Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), an avid admirer of India’s languages, culture, and religions, began to work on his own theory of myth. Poetry, for Max Müller, was the highest form of verbal expression; myth, in contrast, was a “disease of language” that had developed parasitically upon it. When the earliest Greeks spoke of selene (the moon) kissing to sleep endymion (a Greek word that represented “dusk” in Max Müller’s interpretation), it was their poetic way of saying that night was falling. It was only later in the evolution of Greek civilization, when the naturalness of poetic speech had been lost, that selene became Selene, the goddess of the moon, and endymion became Endymion, her young lover who was doomed to sleep forever for reasons that the myth handily provided. As prosaic corruption crept into language, in other words, terms denoting natural objects or phenomena took on personalities, and myth was born.
Max Müller’s development of this theory was motivated in part by his desire to prove that the Aryan races he so admired (especially the Greeks and the Indians) had been proto‐monotheists, rather than polytheists, and in part by his desire to exonerate those Aryans from the apparent savagery of many of their myths, which sounded every bit as bad as myths that contemporary anthropologists and missionaries were collecting from tribal peoples – that is, from “real” savages. In 1856, Max Müller published the first version of “Comparative Mythology,” an essay that set out to free Zeus and his ilk from the “crudities and absurdities” of myth.3 Starting with the Vedas, which were written around 1450 BCE and thus earlier than Greek texts, he showed that Hindu gods had names that denoted natural phenomena, the prime example being the sky‐god “Dyaus” whose name comes from a root meaning to “beam” with brightness. Indo‐European linguistics further enabled him to show that the names of “Zeus,” “Jupiter,” and the Norse god “Tiw” all derive from this root as well; all are also sky‐gods and three of these names were often joined with words meaning “father” (Dyaus‐piter, Zeus‐pater and Ju‐piter). Once the identity of Zeus (for example) as the Sky could be established, all manner of metaphorical interpretations could be applied to myths in which he appeared, and the technique could be easily transferred to other mythological figures, too. (The analysis of Selene and Endymion, mentioned earlier, also comes from this essay.)
In 1868, Max Müller was appointed to the first chair in comparative philology at Oxford, which made his ideas more widely known. As time went on and he revised them, more and more mythological figures became identified with the sun – Heracles, Orpheus, and many other heroes, for example, as well as numerous gods. In 1870, the Rev. R.F. Littledale, an Anglican clergyman and essayist, argued that Max Müller himself was a solar‐deity, a mere myth. Littledale’s tongue was in his cheek, but not completely so: he wished to demonstrate that Max Müller’s comparative method was so flexible as to be useless, so all‐embracing as to prove nothing.
Most of the eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century attempts at comparative mythology were anchored in a desire to explore what was understood to be Europe’s Aryan heritage and to distinguish Europe from Semitic cultures, on the one hand, and from contemporary “savage,” or “primitive,” cultures, on the other hand. The next stage in comparative mythology grew out of different yearnings: to apply Darwin’s evolutionary principles to religion (for which myth was understood to be a handmaiden) and to show, contrary to Max Müller et al., that the earliest stages of the higher cultures, including those of ancient Greece and Rome, had a lot in common with the primitives. The two motivations worked together: if the primitives could be understood to represent cultures that were less evolved than those of the classical Greeks, for example, then one might hope to recapture the earliest stages of Greek (or Roman, or whatever) religious thought and behavior by studying those primitives.
The people who engaged in these approaches are best known to us for having pioneered the “ritualist” approach to myth.4 Its founding father was the Semiticist William Robertson Smith, who proposed in a series of lectures between 1888 and 1891 that, whereas the heart of any modern religion lay in its system of beliefs, primitive religions focused instead on rituals.5 Rather than beliefs, these religions had myths – and the myths were intended to explain not the nature of the universe and all it contained (as E.B. Tylor had proposed two decades earlier) but the existence of the rituals themselves, whose real origins had been forgotten long before. “Primitive,” a word that Smith used more‐or‐less interchangeably with “ancient,” included the religions of Greece, where:
certain things were done at a temple, and people were agreed that it would be impious not to do them. But if you had asked why they were done, you would probably have had several mutually exclusive explanations from different persons, and no one would have thought it a matter of the least religious importance which of these you chose to adopt.
(Smith 1889, 18)
Note the implicit comparativism: the Greeks were “like” primitives insofar as their myths were rather weak, circumstantial explanations for rituals. In other words, comparativism at this point (and for a long time after) still focused on finding similarities among myths rather than thinking about their differences.
It was Smith’s younger (and longer‐lived) friend James Frazer who took the next step, which carried the link between myth and ritual out into the wider world, and in the process ensured that the fame Max Müller had brought to comparativism would endure. The Golden Bough (1890) was Frazer’s magnum opus which, in its third edition, made up 12 volumes of myths and rituals that Frazer had patiently gathered from what he took to be primitive cultures throughout the world and across historical periods. Many of these myths and rituals, in Frazer’s analysis, centered on a figure who sometimes appeared as a king and sometimes as a god, but who always represented the vegetation, and thus the vitality of the world. Like the vegetation, this figure had to periodically die and be “reborn” in order to regenerate the world’s vitality; many rituals accomplished the death of this figure in reality or metaphor. Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Balder, and Dionysus were instantiations of this dying‐and‐reviving figure, but so were many other gods and heroes from a wide span of myths.
The paradigm of the dying‐and‐reviving god is important for our purposes not only because it brought the comparative method into greater prominence but also because it revived an older, more general vegetation paradigm – that is, the idea that, even in the absence of a central god/king figure, many myths and rituals were at heart about the growth, death, and regeneration of vegetation, however deeply hidden this might be behind superficial features. And this gave new life to an idea that had been around since comparative mythology first took off: namely that there were “Ur‐myths,” myths that were shared by all or most cultures, however varied the forms of expression they took. Searching for Ur‐myths inevitably leads to essentializing what myths are “about,” however, which in turn means disengaging them from their narratives, which typically are understood to be merely vehicles that serve to express them. Thus, for Frazer, what mattered in the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus was not how Homer told the story, but rather the fact that after escaping from Polyphemus’s cave, Odysseus taunted him so persistently as to enable Polyphemus to throw a well‐aimed rock at Odysseus’s ship. This echoes versions of what Frazer proposed was the Ur‐myth, in which the hero has a ring or other magical object stuck to his body that persists in crying out to his blinded adversary as the hero tries to escape (Frazer 1921, vol. 2, 404–455).6 Almost every version of the comparative approach to myth similarly essentialized the stories it treats.
The other important figure in this part of our narrative is Jane Ellen Harrison, who (like Frazer) was associated with Cambridge off and on throughout her career and who was at the center of a group of scholars that has retrospectively been labeled the Cambridge Ritualists. (The label is not entirely correct: they were never a formal group, as the capitalization of “Ritualists” implies, and “Cambridge” is too limited a descriptor, given that one of them, Gilbert Murray, taught at Oxford and that the theories of Friedrich Nietzsche and Émile Durkheim were at least as important to their version of the ritualist paradigm as were Frazer’s.)7
Harrison took up Frazer’s dying and reviving god and gave him a different name, the Year‐Spirit or Eniautos Daimon. Her introduction of this figure centered on an ancient hymn that had been recently discovered in a sanctuary of Zeus on Crete, which she proposed was the libretto of a ritual performed annually to welcome home a god who took the guise of a young man (kouros); the advent of this god reawakened the vitality not only of the fields and flocks but also of the social order itself. And with the involvement of the social order, things took a new turn: Harrison proposed that the ritual celebrating the return of the divine kouros simultaneously functioned as an “initiation” ritual analogous to those that anthropologists were discovering among primitive tribes, during which, she argued, the young men (kouroi) of Crete were introduced to their adult roles in society; the kouros of the hymn represented these initiates (Harrison 1912).8
To help support this interpretation, Harrison drew on myths in which Zeus, Dionysus, and an enigmatic god known as Zagreus appear as youths who are guarded by divinities known as Kouretes; in some of these myths, the young god is killed in spite of the Kouretes’ care, and must then be resurrected. She found the Year‐Spirit lurking behind other characters from myth as well: Heracles, Asclepius, and Achilles, for example. The fact that most of these figures were never resurrected didn’t pose a particular problem; myths, in her opinion, were notoriously unreliable, forever drifting away from a ritual’s real meaning until a scholar corralled them back. As she had famously pronounced earlier in her career, “ritual practice misunderstood explains the elaboration of myth” (Harrison and Verrall 1890, iii; cf. xxxiii).
Later in her life, Harrison left classics and turned to Russian literature. Following her departure, classicists’ interest in both the ritualist approach and the comparative approach to myth waned. Indeed, their faith in myth as a key to unlock religion more generally was over for the moment. Another important figure in the field, M.P. Nilsson, placed ritual so firmly at the center of ancient Greek religion as to perform what now seems like an impossible feat: he managed to write his two‐volume, 1573‐page Geschichte der griechischen Religion (1941, 1950) almost without mentioning myths at all. Among Semiticists, however, the ritualist approach was still gathering speed – and so, too, the comparative approach that always seems to accompany it, given that ritualists often “recreate” a “lost” ritual by using bits and pieces of what they judge to be similar rituals and myths. The main Semiticist proponent after William Robertson Smith, Samuel Henry Hooke, was a generation younger than Harrison. His first major publication on the topic, the edited volume Myth and Ritual, appeared in 1933.
Hooke embraced the paradigm of the dying‐and‐reviving god and gave pride‐of‐place within it to the ancient Babylonian Akitu festival, a new‐year’s celebration during which the human king was first deprived of office and then reinstalled while a priest recited the Enuma Elish, a cosmogonic poem that culminates in the installation of Marduk as king of the gods. It was with this particular myth and ritual pairing, Hooke argued, that the paradigm of the dying‐and‐reviving‐god had originated and from which it had then travelled wide and far, expressing itself through many other myth‐and‐ritual pairings – it was the Ur‐myth par excellence (Hooke 1933).9 In contrast to Frazer and Harrison, then, who assumed that myths and rituals of similar natures could develop independently from one another in separate cultures, Hooke was a diffusionist. As Hooke’s work spread throughout his own field and others, it nurtured not only the myth‐and‐ritual approach, but also the drive towards essentialization. Scholars felt newly encouraged to purge away any inconvenient details that a narrative vehicle might have contributed to a given myth or ritual, in order to show that its structure was parallel to what Hooke had described.
And even if the classicists had temporarily left the field, others continued to read and develop their models, including the literary critic Stanley Hyman, who from the 1940s to 1960s pushed Harrison’s ideas so far as to argue that ritual underlay not only all myths but also all literature.10 The ritualist approach to myth (again accompanied by comparativism) was also developed by Lord Raglan, who in his 1936 The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth and Drama, extended the thesis of the dying‐and‐reviving god into hero tales (Oedipus, Heracles, Moses, and Robin Hood are among his examples). One of Raglan’s most enduring contributions is his observation that 22 traits frequently appear in hero stories throughout the world (although almost no story includes all of them). For instance, the circumstances of a hero’s conception are often unusual, he is often raised by foster parents, he meets a mysterious death. Again, we should take note of the fact that this sort of comparativism focuses on similarity – on collecting as many instantiations as possible of a given “type” but paying little attention to their differences. An approach very similar to Raglan’s had been offered by Vladimir Propp in 1928, although it did not gain the wide notice it deserved until it was translated into other European languages.
I need to treat briefly several figures who would ideally receive more attention than this short chapter allows: Carl Jung (1875–1961), Karl Kerényi (1897–1973), Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) and Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), all of whom shared a long association with the Eranos Institute, founded in 1933 in Ascona, Switzerland to further the comparative study of psychology, religion, philosophy, and spirituality. Jung (who was a co‐founder of Eranos) and Eliade were frequent participants in Eranos’s annual conferences from the start; Kerényi became active in the early 1940s and Campbell in the late 1950s. The themes of the conferences often included myths (e.g., Das hermetische Prinzip in Mythologie, Gnosis und Alchemie [1942]) (Wasserstrom 1999).
Through their contact at Eranos with one another and other sympathetic thinkers, each of these men enriched his own version of comparative myth. Jung argued for transhistorically and universally shared “archetypes” that were both embedded in the human psyche and encoded in myths; by carrying Jung’s work further and applying it to well‐known Greek myths, Kerényi contributed significantly to the broader awareness of Jung’s ideas. Eliade offered his own version of Jung’s archetypes: for him, they were universally and transhistorically meaningful mythic models (e.g., the “Cosmic Tree”) that manifest themselves in culturally particular forms called “hierophanies.”11 Although scholars disagree sharply in their evaluation of Eliade’s work (in particular, his methodology is often dismissed as being too loose to produce meaningful results), the numerous re‐issues of his books have ensured that his version of comparativism is widely known both inside and outside the academy. (Many works by all four men have been published, or republished, in Princeton University Press’s Bollingen Series, the name of which comes from the Swiss village where Jung had a country retreat.)
But no advocate of comparative myth is better known than Joseph Campbell. His work is in some ways similar to that of Raglan and Propp, although the influence of Jung is clear as well. For Campbell there is a heroic “monomyth” (he borrowed the term from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake (Campbell 1968, 30n.35), but we are essentially back to the idea of the Ur‐myth) that manifests itself continually throughout the world and across the centuries – indeed, it is the guiding myth of human culture. As he said in his immensely popular book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (first published in 1949):
A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
(Campbell 1968, 30)
The overarching theme of the monomyth, which shows Campbell’s appreciation of Arnold van Gennep’s The Rites of Passage, is that of “initiation.” It is this element in particular, perhaps, that has led to the work’s adoption by many of its readers as a sort of self‐help manual of personal exploration. A phrase from the Upanishads that Campbell later quoted, “Follow your Bliss” – by which he meant that each of us should follow our own particular version of the hero’s path – was emblazoned on millions of t‐shirts, bumper‐stickers, and other paraphernalia of popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s (nor are these items absent from the twenty‐first‐century marketplace).
But I have moved ahead of my story. Campbell’s work became widely known in part because of the great popular success of his books, but especially because of the significant influence that The Hero with a Thousand Faces had upon George Lucas’s “Star Wars” epic – a topic that was subsequently explored in the 1988 six‐episode PBS series The Power of Myth, during which Bill Moyers interviewed Campbell against the backdrop of Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch (and in the course of which “Follow Your Bliss” was uttered a number of times). The series spawned a book of the same name and a boxed videotape (later DVD) set, ensuring that Campbell’s ideas would continue to influence authors, artists, and the general public for many years after his death, which occurred during the months between the series’ filming and its broadcast. For those of us who teach in the United States, it is this PBS version of comparative myth that we most often find already established in our students’ minds.
In 1972, the German scholar Walter Burkert (b. 1931) published Homo Necans (English 1983) and then, in 1979, Structure and History in Greek Myth and Ritual. One of the most important ideas that Burkert explored in these two books, as well as in a series of articles, was the premise that, if both myths and rituals are symbolic expressions of biological programs, then myths and rituals can exist and function independently of one another, as well as in tandem. This should have laid the groundwork (as Burkert himself notes several times in his works) for better appreciating the contribution made by specific narrations of myths, and yet the greatest effect of Burkert’s work was to spur onwards again the search for myth and ritual pairings, and in its wake, new forms of comparativism and essentialization.12
There are two main reasons for this. First, Burkert offered a particularly captivating revival of Jane Harrison’s argument that the initiation paradigm underlay many Greek myths and rituals – which inevitably revived her ritualist approach to myth as well. By combining initiation with the very new idea of biological programs and with the (at the time) shocking idea that violence lay at the heart of many religions, Burkert galvanized the topic like no one else had. His timing was right, moreover; the younger classicists who took their cues from Burkert, such as Hendrik Versnel (b. 1936), Fritz Graf (b. 1944), Jan Bremmer (b. 1944) and Christiane Sourvinou‐Inwood (1945–2007), had come of age during the 1960s, a period when the western world developed a heightened awareness of society’s power to enforce normative expectations of behavior during adolescence. The (often brilliant) work on initiation by Burkert and these younger scholars tended once more to look for comparative material among tribal societies as well as within Greek and Roman cultures themselves, and to emphasize similarities among myths without always adequately appreciating their differences (Versnel being a notable exception in this last regard).13
Second, the idea of the biological program is in itself inevitably essentializing – indeed, more essentializing than any previous approach to myth had ever been. In developing his version of it, Burkert drew on the work of Vladimir Propp (1928), who had broken the folktale into 31 motifemes or functions, such as “departure” (the hero leaves home) and “receipt of a magical agent [by the hero]”; and on the work of folklorist Alan Dundes (1964) – particularly a pattern that Dundes argued underlay most stories called “Lack/Lack Liquidated” – that is, most tales are about the resolution of a deficit or failure of some kind. By applying these insights to his own materials, Burkert was able to demonstrate that most Greek myths fall into one of a few patterns: for example, a deity departs, famine or an epidemic befalls the people, the people persuade the deity to return in some fashion, and wellness is restored.
Or rather I should say, he demonstrated that most ancient Mediterranean myths fall into one of several patterns, which brings us to the other important contribution to comparativism that Burkert has made: already in Structure and History in Greek Myth and Ritual (1979), to a lesser extent in many of his other works but most emphatically in The Orientalizing Revolution (1984; English 1992), Burkert brought new evidence and acumen to the old question of how ancient Near Eastern cultures had influenced Greek myths and rituals, providing methodologically more exacting comparisons of Mediterranean myths than the earlier ritualists had been able to offer.
And yet, the emphasis within comparative mythology was still on similarity. I will end by mentioning three scholars, all of whom currently teach in the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, who have been particularly eloquent in arguing for a shift in balance: Jonathan Z. Smith (b. 1938), Wendy Doniger (b. 1940), and Bruce Lincoln (b. 1948).
Smith has often returned to the issue of how one compares responsibly, but nowhere more explicitly than in his 1984 essay “In Comparison a Magic Dwells.” There, he categorizes the ways that comparison has been done by scholars and others (“ethnographic,” “encyclopedic,” “morphological,” “evolutionary”), and concludes that all have been “chiefly an affair of the recollection of similarity.” He proposes that this is in part born of the delight that humans take in noticing similarities and in part from the common desire to create totalizing systems.
But comparisons of this sort always include a suppressed tertium quid: X is [more] like Y [than either of them is to Z] – and implicitly there is often a normative message (whatever it is that X and Y share makes them better than Z – although you can play that other way around, of course: whatever Z lacks makes it superior to X and Y). Smith ends by urging us to remember that:
comparison is, at base, never identity. Comparison requires the postulation of difference as the grounds of its being interesting (rather than tautological) and a methodical manipulation of difference, a playing across the “gap” in the service of some useful end.
(Smith 1983, 35)
Doniger is perhaps the most engaging comparative scholar of myths of our times. Her method consists of juxtaposing similar myths from different cultures or venues (frequently from ancient Greece and India, as in many chapters of Doniger 1988) and through close readings and re‐narrations, revealing to her readers what those myths “are” (she insists that myths themselves are the objects that we must come to know – they are the messages rather than merely vehicles of the messages). This rejection of essentialism – this emphasis on the particularity of a given narration – leads to the further conclusion that “myths (like archetypes) do not, strictly speaking, have meanings; they provide contexts in which meaning occurs.” Thus:
The phallus may well be archetypical (for Jungians as well as Freudians, let alone the rank and file), producing a universal, instinctive response in real life as well as in myth; but it is always someone’s phallus, someone with manifestations (a tone of voice, a taste for a particular brand of Scotch) or (to switch from the Jungians to the structuralists) someone situated within a context (a past, a social role). These are the banal details that make the myth real and also our own.
(Doniger 1988, 35)
And in a 1996 essay that critiques Campbell’s “monomyth,” Doniger offers instead the metamyth: “a kind of nonoccurring [myth] that contains the basic elements from which all possible variants could be created.”
Lincoln began his career as an Indo‐Europeanist, which enabled him later to write a penetrating study of how the Aryan agenda has shaped the comparative approach to myth (Lincoln 1999). In his own work, he focuses on finding the differences among similar myths (he rejects the idea of universal patterns) and using them to reveal the narrators’ underlying ideologies. “In Praise of the Chaotic” (2009), for example, compares Hesiod’s Theogony, the Norse theogony narrated by Snorri Sturluson and a Zoroastrian theogony (i.e., three Indo‐European theogonies). All begin with a form of the chaotic (the Greek Chaos, the Norse Ginnunga‐gap, the Zoroastrian Void existing between Ohrmazd and Ahriman), but whereas Chaos is a space from which other, ordered elements of the cosmos emerge and Ginnunga‐gap a catalytic space of productive encounter among cosmic forces, the Void is a buffer between Ohrmazd and Ahriman that will eventually become Ahriman’s prison and grave. Lincoln ends this essay with comments on what each myth reveals about its culture’s expectations concerning power and its deployment of potentially useful materials. More recently (Lincoln 2012), in a collection of essays on comparison co‐edited with Claude Calame, Lincoln has published twelve “Theses on Comparison,” which again advocate attention to difference as well as similarity, and stress as well the importance of keeping one’s group of comparanda reasonably small, to facilitate close study.