The truth and the lies about myths
By Aradlika Sekhon

A myth is the 'dream thinking' of people just as the dream is the myth of the individual. Myths are those sacred tales with which men seek to invest their lives with cosmic grandeur. With this spirit, a myth frequently seeks to postulate a "time before time, a kind of sacred pre-history, a drowsy, surrealistic world in which the coordinates of time and space are suspended and shifting, and nothing is impossible" says I.M. Lewis, anthropologist. But myth don't end merely in the telling of a tale. On the contrary they have various, and serious sociological and psychological nuances and are even considered as the 'soul stuff' of social anthropology.

Myths and fairy tales — which are often but outdated myths — are easily identifiable when they tell of extraordinary events and encounters between gods, spirits and man, which defy man's place in the universe and his relations with his fellows. "Paradoxically", says Lewis, "it is precisely the palpable suspension of mundane reality which enables a myth to state eternal verities", and set the standards for an ideal state or individual within that state, towards which the following generations must strive. The Ram Rajya propagated by the Ramayana, with its perfect ruler, perfect governance, perfect justice, perfect society and priniciples of equality, fraternity, moral and righteous living, for example, is the state that the Indian governance is ostensibly continually striving for, even centuries later!

So, myths proclaim great verities by telling great lies! But, to be believable, a myth must follow a rational format, which does not evoke outright scepticism. The central figures of myths, be they mortals, demi-good or gods, even when capable of miraculous feats, must perform them at appointed times and places within a logical chronological framework. For example, the tale of the Trojan Horse has been made so eminently believable that it is difficult for the layman to identify whether it was a figment of Homer's imagination or a historical fact incorporated in his grat epic, Odessy.

Many myths are rooted in history and sometimes the opposite also holds true. The anthropological dilemma occurs when a myth assumes the guise of history but there are no means of discovering what actually happened. Then the contemporary meaning or significance of a myth may be established, but there could be a tantalising uncertainty as to the events behind it. One such paradox lies in tracing the genealogies of great families or 'king-lists' where, at one end they are tied to God and immortality, and at the other to actual living people! One modern example is Haile Sellassie, the Ethiopean Emperor, who traced his origins back to Menelik I, son of the Biblical King Soloman and the Queen of Sheba. Closer home, we have the Rajputs who trace their genesis to the sun god (Suryavanshi) or the moon god (Chandravanshi). The first part of the genealogy is based on a divinely instituted, and logically, mythical hypothesis and the last part is plain fact! So these myths achieve their credibility not by setting their plot in a timeless limbo but by endowing it with every appearance of circumstantial accuracy.

But if many myths lose their somnambulism which is their basic characteristic by pretending to be history, they do retain a quality which is usually associated with individual dreams — the airing and potential resolution of subconscious conflicts. Myths invite the analysis of a community by the same methods which psychoanalysts usually employ in the study of the dreams of the individual. Anthropological structuralists like Levi — Strauss assume the role of universal psychoanalysts whose patients are myths, thereby treating cultures as patients who expose their souls in their myths and resolving deep-stated conflicts of which the myth — makers may be unaware, but which are brought to light, analysed and resolved.

The most universal of these are myths of the incestuous relationships in families, which the interpreters of myths feel arise at least partly from man's attempts to explain his own first beginnings. Treating such myths as an "excessive manifestation of kinship", one finds a widespread occurence of myths involving this act on a cosmic scale, right from the Indian myth of Brahma who married his own daughter at a mahayagna to propogate mankind, to the legend of the Wawilak sisters of aboriginal Australia who gave birth to children by committing incest within their own clan, or the Biblical first man whose wife was his sister, or the tale of the Tukano Indian of Columbia who recounts how their creator deity, the Sun Father, committed incest with his daughter at the time of creation. There also exists the myth of the goddess Durga whose dalliance with her son was observed and interrupted by peacocks. In her anger Durga cursed them with impotence and ugly racous voice. Incidentally, in India "mother-love" is not to be found in drama and poetry but in oral legends and folk tales.

The most significant modern-day use of the myth has been made by Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, in the explanation and resolution of the famous Oedipus Electra Complex. For Freud the recognition of Oedipal incest marked the watershed between nature and culture and the transition from raw nature to human society. He called attention to the Oedipus myth as the universal human statement of the tension between parents and children in the elimentary family. The Oedipus — Electra Complex is a recognised psychological phenomenon today, the resolving of which is a psychiatric preoccupation!

While dealing with myths, we cannot ignore their natural transition into rituals or, the practical enactment to myths. Rituals demarcate, emphasise, affirm, solemnise and also smooth over critical changes in social relationships. They perpetuate the sense of changelessness and continuity to which traditional societies attach great importance. Rituals are also employed to encapsulate and dramatise duty, obedience and obligation. The Indian ritual of sati, for instance, is performed by grief stricken Indian widows on their husbands' funeral pyres to commemorate an episode in Hindi mythology. The episode concerned Parvati, the wife of Shiva and daughter of sage Daksha. When her husband and father quarrelled, she killed herself in sorrow by walking into a fire. The custom of sati dates back to 4th century B.C. and the 6th century A.D. it was obligatory for devout Hindus. The women who immolated themselves this way were promised 35 million years of swarg. Though the practice of sati was outlawed in 1829, the practice of keeping vrats and wearing mangalsutras and kumkum as symbols of their husbands' longevity persists among Hindu women. Also, anthropologists like Malinoswski, regard myths as "charters legitimising and justifying contemporary events, the past continually re-interpreted to validate the present". The Indian caste system is the perfect example, issuing as it does, from the myth of Brahma from whose forehead sprang the Brahmins, arms the Kshatriyas, thighs the Vaishyas and feet the Shudras.

Although while interpreting the symbolism of a myth a universal formula cannot be applied, the same myth conveys different messages in different cultural contents but the myths of the creation of the male and female are surprisingly similiar to many cultures. Says Sudhir Kakkar, psychologist, "these myths are among the earliest attempts of the human imagination to formulate in poetic images and symbols, an explanation of heterosexual love". In the Indian myth of creations from the Upanishads, Purusha was alone at the beginning of the universe. Looking around he saw nothing other than himself. He longed for a second. Now he was the size of a man and woman..... He split this self in two and from this arose husband and wife...." Similarly, the Persian story of the twins Mashya and Mashyoi who grew up intertwined in the form of a tree. Later they were changed into human shape, received a soul and produced children. The Greeks too have such a story (in Plato's Symposium) of an androgynous being, longing for another. So, the Narcissistic self — sufficiency of an undifferentiated being who doesn't require another is condemned by all the myths. While Plato's globular monsters are in danger of annihilation, Purusha alone does not enjoy happiness while the tree of Mashya and Mashyoi joined at the trunk lacks soul.

No traditional culture is without the myths of romantic love, though in both western and eastern cultures, this has been considered a recent phenomenon, a province no more than 2000 years old in India and classical Greece, and younger in Europe. It was discovered when love between man and woman began to emancipate itself from its biological function alone and with this followed its romantic elaboration. It is a remarkable co-incidence that three of the world's best known works of romantic love, which occupy pivotal positions in their respective cultures — Berouls Tristan and Isolde in Europe, Nizami's Laila and Majnu in the Islamic world and Jaidev's Geetgovinda in India — were all produced approximately at the same time, he 12th century. This may have been a fallout of the socio-historical trends across the globe, but in poems and songs, tales and movies, these lovers live on and continue to enthral the imagination of their respective cultures. The essential elements of the legends recompose themselves again and again in the real lives of other lovers and in the works of artistic imagination. Without the examples of these great myths of love, we wouldn't quite appreciate why and how men and women of a particular culture love as they do nor fathom the individual depths of their passion. Born of dreams, not of doctrines, weilding power through expressions of individual fantasy rather than social codes, Laila-Majnu, Heer-Ranjha, Romeo-Juliet, Soni-Mahiwal have set standards for the course of "true love and the aspirations of lovers".

Mythology is also used to determine and justify the moral stand of a community. In India, however, there is a peculiar dichotomy in the two great epics. In the Ramayan we have the examples of Ahilya, the wife of a rishi who became the victim of Indra's lechery, and as a punishment was turned into stone for her unwitting lapse. Parshuram, who commanded by his father, killed his own mother who had caught sight of a handsome king sporting with his wives and was "unfaithful in her heart". And the supreme example of Sita who, to prove the truth of her love for Rama, willingly underlook to perform a public proof of purity. In the end she embraced death to her husband's dishonour. In the Mahabharata, on the other hand, is the myth of Kunti, whose five sons were sired by five different gods, and of Drupadi, the wife of five husbands, and the love between the married Radha and Krishna. But here the Indians make a selective decision regarding the moral code suitable for adoption, regarding some of the latter examples as myths per se, while sometimes even venerating the same mythological characters. But for emulation, they fall back upon the pure wifely love of Sita for her husband, Rama.

Then, for lessons on practical wisdom, myths in the form of stories from Panchatantra are told to children right from the beginning. Panchatantra is a traditional narrative which involves super-natural or imaginary persons and embodies popular ideas on natural or social phenomena. These stories of effective wisdom are incorporated in the minds of children at a tender age to become a part of their adult psyche. So, the turtle who talked too much crashed to the earth and died while being carried high above the ground by two birds, and the woman who hastily jumped to conclusions killed the loyal mongoose who saved her child's life; and the mouse-maid who was transformed back to a mouse because she desired what could'nt be hers.

The social, historical, sociological, anthropological and cultural connotations that emanate from significant myths which have lasted through the centuries are too vast and deep- rooted to dismiss lightly!