There is an extremely popular belief that the term “mythology” refers to any religion that is no longer practiced. This belief seems to be especially popular among atheists. I’ve often heard atheists use the expression “Today’s religions are tomorrow’s mythologies.” This belief, however, is wrong. The terms “religion” and “mythology” refer to two completely different things. A religion does not turn into a mythology when it stops being practiced.
What is mythology?
Mythology is the body of traditional stories associated with a particular culture that have been passed down from generation to generation and have profound cultural and/or religious significance to the members of that culture. Myths can sometimes be religious in nature, but they can also be important to other aspects of the culture.
The word myth comes from the Greek word μῦθος (mŷthos), which literally means “story” or “narrative.” In colloquial usage, this word often bears the connotation that the thing it is being applied to is false or erroneous. Under its strict, academic definition, however, the word myth bears no implication whatsoever on whether or not a story is true.
Instead, the word indicates the story’s traditional nature and its cultural importance. Thus, while Christianity is a religion, the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is a myth, not necessarily because it is false, but rather because of the immense importance it holds within Christianity.
ABOVE: The Fall of Man, painted between 1628 and 1629 by the Dutch Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens
In some cases, stories about historical events can be considered myths. For instance, the story of the Mayflower Pilgrims landing at Plymouth in 1620 is a myth to most Americans, because, even though it really happened, the event has taken on defining cultural significance far beyond its immediate historical significance and versions of the story have been passed down through folklore.
Traditionally, Americans have seen the story of the Mayflower as saying something important about who Americans are as a people; the story is seen as representing the idea that Europe in the Early Modern Period was a land of religious oppression and that the United States is a land of religious liberty. (This idea isn’t exactly true in all ways, but it is an integral part of the United States’ national mythology.)
Modern subcultures have their own myths that are important within those cultures. For instance, you could make an argument that nerd subculture is centered around science fiction films and television shows, like Star Wars and Star Trek, and that those stories have thereby become myths for nerds. Even though those stories were originally written by known individuals, they have, in a sense, come to belong more to their respective subcultures than to their original creators and have, in a sense, become part of the folklore of those subcultures.
ABOVE: The Embarkation of the Pilgrims, painted in 1857 by the American painter Robert Walter Weir, a member of the Hudson River School
All cultures have myths. Myths are simply an intrinsic part of the human identity. They are inescapable. We should not, however, assume that all myths are the same. In different cultures and different religions, myths can convey drastically different meanings and they can be interpreted in drastically different ways; they can be interpreted as literally, historically true, as allegories for spiritual truths, or as simply entertaining stories.
Even within a particular culture, there is often broad disagreement about the meaning and truthfulness of myths. For evidence of this, you just have to look at any modern religious group. Inevitably, you will find that people within the religion have very different opinions about what to make of the religion’s myths.
For instance, within twenty-first-century American Evangelical Protestantism, there are people like the founders of Answers in Genesis who believe that every story in the Bible is literally, historically true and that the findings of modern biology are false because they contradict the Bible. On the other hand, there are people like the founders of the BioLogos Foundation who argue that Christianity and biological evolution are compatible.
This disagreement has always been the case. As I discuss in this article from January 2020, there was widespread disagreement among the ancient Greeks about which myths were true and to what extent. For instance, the Greek philosopher Plato (lived c. 429 – c. 347 BCE) in his dialogue Phaidros describes the philosopher Socrates as walking along the banks of the river Ilissos outside the walls of Athens with the young aristocrat Phaidros. They come to a certain spot and Phaidros asks Socrates if it is the spot where Boreas, the god of the north wind, was said to have abducted the Athenian princess Oreithyia. Socrates replies that he thinks the exact spot is a little further downstream.
Then Phaidros asks Socrates if he believes the story of Oreithyia’s abduction by Boreas. Socrates essentially replies that, if he were a clever man, he could invent an alternative story that would seem more rational, but doing so would take far more time than he cares to spend and, since he does not even know himself, he does not want to speculate about things that are not his concern.
This story reveals a sort of complicated attitude towards the truthfulness of traditional myths. On the one hand, Plato portrays Socrates as finding the story incredible, but, on the other hand, he portrays him as willing to leave the story alone.
ABOVE: Detail of an Apulian red-figure oinochoe by the Salting Painter depicting the wind-god Boreas abducting the Athenian princess Oreithyia, dating to c. 360 BCE
What is religion?
I think it is probably clear at this point that mythology is complicated and difficult to define. Religion, however, is even more complicated. The term “religion” generally encompasses some kind of worldview, which usually includes some sort of mythology, but also the attitudes, ritual practices, communal identity, and moral teachings associated with the worldview.
If you have ever been religious, then you probably already know that there is more to a religion than just a bunch of stories; a religion also involves an array of actions, practices, and attitudes. Simply telling or believing stories about Adam and Eve, Moses, or Jesus does not automatically make somebody a Christian. Being a Christian usually involves adhering to Christian teachings, being part of a larger Christian community of some sort, and engaging in Christian ritual practices.
Generally speaking, religious rituals tend to be a much more important part of a religion than the mythology. Examples of religious rituals in different religious traditions include things like ritually sacrificing a pig to the goddess Demeter (for practitioners of traditional ancient Greek religion), undergoing baptism and taking communion (for Christians), reciting the Shema Yishra’el (for practicing Jews), and making the hajj to Mecca (for Muslims).
ABOVE: Tondo from an Attic red-figure kylix dating to c. 510 – c. 500 BCE, depicting two men sacrificing a pig to Demeter. This ritual sacrifice is a religious act.
Often times, religious rituals are explained by religious myths. One example of this comes from the poem Theogonia, which was composed in around the eighth century BCE by the Greek poet Hesiodos of Askre. Hesiodos says that, long ago, in very ancient times, mortal men and deities met together at a place known as Mekone, where they sacrificed an ox. The Titan Prometheus divided up the ox into two portions. One portion was full of good meat, but had bones and gristle on top so that it looked like it was all bones and gristle. The other portion was full of bones and gristle, but had good meat on top so that it looked like it was all good meat.
Prometheus presented these two portions before Zeus and told him to pick one portion for the deities and the other portion for mortal men. Zeus fell for Prometheus’s trick and picked the portion that had the good meat on top, but the bones and gristle on the inside. Thus, whenever the Greeks performed a sacrifice, they burned the bones and gristle and the parts that were not good to eat for the deities, but ate the good meat for themselves.
Myths like this one, however, were clearly invented ex post facto. People didn’t start performing rituals a certain way because of the myth; instead, the myth was invented to explain an aspect of a ritual that already existed. The same thing is true for the seven-day creation story in the Book of Genesis, which I discuss in much greater depth in this article from September 2020.
Jewish people in antiquity did not hold a day of rest every seven days because God was said to have rested on the seventh day; instead, Jewish people invented the story of God resting on the seventh day in order to explain why they themselves had a day of rest every seven days. The ritual precedes the myth, not the other way around.
ABOVE: The Creation of the Sun, Moon, and Plants from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, painted c. 1511 by the Italian Renaissance painter Michelangelo
Polytheists are still around…
Another problem with this notion that the term “mythology” refers to any religion that is no longer practiced is that most of the religions that are cited to support this are, in fact, still practiced in some form or another somewhere in the world.
There are real people alive today in the twenty-first century who worship the ancient Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Norse deities, who perform various rituals that are based on the rituals performed in ancient times, and who regard the myths associated with these religious traditions as sacred.
Obviously, there isn’t a direct line of people continuously worshipping the Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Norse deities from antiquity to the present and the religions that modern polytheist revivalists are practicing today are, in many ways, different from the religions practiced in ancient times, but that does not mean these religions are illegitimate.
ABOVE: Photograph from this article from The New York Times of Baba Heru Semahj, an Egyptian polytheist priest in New York City
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Hellenic polytheist priest associated with the Greek organization YSEE performing a ritual
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a modern sacrifice to the ancient Roman goddess Concordia in Budapest, Hungary
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Icelandic Norse polytheist organization Ásatrúarfélagið performing a Sigurblót in Reykjavík, Iceland, in 2009
Sir,
when it comes India. we have a peculiar ratio when it comes to mythology and religion. I appease any religion it is secular. If I say anything saying something good about hinduism. It is communal and mythological.
Both scientists and historians have confirmed that aryan invasion theory doesn’t hold any good. But, for certain people this research holds no good. The same scientists have also confirmed that Adam’s bridge/ ram Sethu is manmade. But, people who need minority appeasement say, this research is communal/mythological.
Scientists say, the Kurukshetra battle did happen. But, the same cannot be considered and is communal and mythological.
You see, in India anything towards majority i.e. hindus is a myth. People of India have never considered hinduism as a religion. We consider it as a dharma(responsibility, faith) that is why we consider atheists as Hindus too. That is how people of Europe, Russia are accepting Hinduism.
ISKCON is a part of our community. The saint who started this, was given sanyasa by a very famous, highly regarded saint in India. As I enter into conversations with foreignors who have accepted hinduism. They say, how they were warned of the responsibilities under hinduism. And, they were actually happy to undertake the responsibilities. But it is all myth and communal for others.
Hello from the land of Greek mythology…
I have noticed in other articles of yours that you seem to forget real present day polytheists (rather than the… quaint/weird Greek etc.) such as Hindus, Chinese, Japanese et al. There is more in the world than the three abrahamic monotheistic religions.
Could/would you venture into the origins of religion long before the monotheistic ones? There must be a reason why ALL people that have inhabited this planet have some religion or other…
Challenge…!
I am well aware of Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Daoism, Shinto, etc. There are, however, two big reasons why I don’t talk about any of these religious traditions in this article. The first reason is because I have never heard anyone try to cite Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Daoism, or Shinto as an example of a supposed “former religion” that has become a “mythology.”
The second reason is because I wrote this particular article primarily as a response to western atheists who use the saying “Today’s religions are tomorrow’s mythologies” and those people generally can’t be expected to know much about religions that were originally practiced in the Far East. Thus, for the purposes of this particular article, I have tried to talk about religions that western atheists are likely to be familiar with.
Thank you for the clarifications.
Hi Daniel
I think you are doing something a bit sneaky here. The word ‘myth’ has a number of meanings in English and you slide between them a bit. In the third paragraph you talk about the “strict academic definition” of myth but the definition you give is too broad. Strictly speaking, a myth is not any “traditional stor[y] associated with a particular culture that [has] been passed down from generation to generation [that has] profound cultural and/or religious significance to the members of that culture”. A true myth also relates events and states of affairs surpassing the ordinary human world, but which are yet are basic to that world and take place in a time that altogether different from the ordinary historical time of human beings (and usually a very long time ago), as opposed to legends, sagas & epics which occur in historical time. So the Adam and Eve story is indeed a myth, as you state, but the Boston Tea Party is not a myth. Nor are the Star Trek stories. The most we can say is that such stories have assumed ‘mythic’ or myth-like significance for American patriots and George Lucas fans respectively, but ‘mythic’ is used here metaphorically, not as a precise description. Nor is the story of Jesus in the New Testament a myth, since it occurs in historical times. You are absolutely correct that many atheists, including Richard Dawkins, get this wrong. Just as you have got the Boston Tea Party wrong. There is an important distinction between a true myth and a story that has assumed mythic significance for a group, which you gloss over.
Secondly, I don’t think you can dismiss the implication that a myth is ipso facto false quite so easily. It is true that there is a modern usage in which “X is a myth” is pretty much synonymous with “X is false” but this usage didn’t come out of thin air. For the first academic researchers into myth, most, if not all, of the myths they studied were in fact not true. Some of them may have made an exception for their own (usually Christian) culture but no-one saw myths as being true in the sense that history is true. At best for them the myths may have embodied some psychological or theological truths.
What the “Mythicists” (and perhaps yourself) ignore is that there is an intermediate category between myth and history, and that is legend. Legends are stories of heroes and heroic events handed down from earlier times and popularly believed to be historical or quasi-historical fact. Unlike myths, they claim to have taken place in historical time, although they may contain fabulous events or supernatural elements. Well known examples include the story of Moses in the Old Testament, the Arthurian legends in Britain and the story of William Tell in Switzerland. There have been attempts to find historical evidence that these stories have some basis in historical fact, but, at least in the case of Moses and William Tell, it is pretty certain from modern scholarship that this is not the case and both stories are total fabrications. Neither Moses not William Tell ever existed. It seems to me that, as opposed to Dawkins on the one hand and to you on the other, it is as a legend that we must understand the story of Jesus. There may have someone on whom the stories are based but we can’t be certain of anything much about him, because all we have are contradictory accounts written some years later by people intent on perpetuating the legend.
That will do for now. I have argued this point in more detail elsewhere and this is already too long for a “comment”.
All the best with “Tales”. It’s a wonderful blog. In most cases I am in furious agreement with you.
Ian
I think that the distinction between “myth” and “legend” is not nearly so clear as you make it sound.
The ancient Greeks had no clear distinction between “mythic times” and “historic times”; for them, myths were a part of history. They generally believed that the labors of Herakles, the voyage of the Argonauts, and the Trojan War were historic events. They disagreed on exactly when these events supposedly happened, but they did generally believe that it was possible to date them. The ancient Romans, meanwhile, certainly believed that the founding of the city of Rome by Romulus and Remus was a historical event that could be dated with more-or-less exact certainty. Nevertheless, we generally refer to these stories as “myths.”
In my opinion, the categories of “myth” and “legend” overlap significantly. Just because something is a legend doesn’t mean that it can’t also be a myth, and vice versa.
Hi Spencer
First, let me apologise for calling you Daniel. I woke up at 3:00 am last night with the above thoughts about your post and they were written down between 3:00 am and 4:00 am and I admit I was too lazy to scroll back up to the top of the post to check your name and relied on my tired and clearly faulty memory. I’m sorry.
Second, you are right (as you in most things) about the fuzziness of the myth/legend distinction in Greek and Roman times. In many contexts “μυθος” meant little more than “story”. But I’m not sure this is material to to your argument or my response. This began as as a discussion of the way some contemporary atheists wrongly conflate religion and mythology, so I think we are stuck with the modern meaning of those words. How the ancient Greeks talked about it is neither here nor there. We are talking about contemporary views so we are stuck with the contemporary meaning of the terms. Modern academics do clearly distinguish between myth and legend along the lines I suggested above. There may be a grey area in terms of to which category a particular narrative is to be assigned, but the meaning of the the two terms today is clear and distinct. Religions are sets of mainly supernatural beliefs accompanied by rituals and codes of behaviour and narratives that support them. Most of those narratives are either myths, such as Adam and Eve, or legends, such as the story of Jesus. The narrative of Moses and the Exodus used to be seen as a legend, with historical roots, but is now revealed as closer to a myth, with no basis in fact at all.
But your general point is correct. Many atheists don’t understand myth and are mistaken in their attributions. You just need to be more exact in some minor aspects of your discussion.
Keep up the good work. And again sorry about the name.
Best wishes
Ian
hey Spencer, do you have any place where you leave book recommendations.
Unfortunately, no. I did create an account on Goodreads last year, but I’ve barely written anything on it at all. I haven’t had much time to write reviews because I’m too busy writing other things and, in all honesty, I keep forgetting that the account exists.
That was a very enlightening article about this topic. But I have noticed that what you describe as mythology is what I have come to think as folklore. Is there a specific distinciton between those terms or are they interchangable?
I’m also very pleased that you included the example of nerd culture. Many people think of myths as something from the past, but in reality they are still alive and always changing, especially in the age of the internet.