Thread by @AfroMythHub

How To Read Myths and Folklore (Thread)

First, I am not claiming this is the only way to approach myths and folklore. Also, my intended audience are those of us Africans (and diaspora) who Wole Soyinka describes as alienated within our own societies.

I thought to write about this because I feel like many of us, especially those raised Christian, internalize the idea that Biblical myths are either the only valid myths worth paying attention to, or are taught to see them as literal history.

Matter of fact, the stories in the Bible are not even called myths in many Christian circles. They are the literal "Word of God" which makes them truer than what anything, even common sense, scientific or other proof says.

Other myths and folklore, especially traditional African ones, are cast as just stories or dangerous superstitions which can offer no guidance or inspiration. I think these views are limiting at best and dangerous at worst.

The flip side is that there can also be this tendency to get defensive about traditional myths and folklore and treat them just as dogmatically in how they apply to life. We see the results of that in some the horrible things that happen our communities.

Be that as it may, my goal here is to review the different scholarly approaches to myth and folklore that exist then I’ll share my own thoughts on how *I* look at things. Also, I am not a trained scholar so if I misconstrue anything, please forgive (and correct) me.

So, in scholarly circles, the methods by which myths and folklore have been examined initially fell under three main categories:

-Ethnological
-Cognitionist
-Taxonomist

In the ethnological approach, myths and folklore of different societies are studied, then data is drawn from them and compared, to draw conclusions about humans as cultural beings.

There are two main branches of the ethnological approach:

1. Evolutionists who believe that myths are holdovers of ideas and worldviews from earlier human times such that myths from cultures at identical though independent stages of development will be similar.

Evolutionist thought can be:

a. Euhemerist i.e. myths are based on the exploits of historical personalities.

b. Solarist i.e. myths ultimately point to stories about the Sun, Moon and other heavenly bodies which were perceived to control human affairs.

c. Naturalist i.e. myths are based on ancient rituals associated with agricultural deities.

2. Functionalists who see myths and folklore as part of the network of needs which ensure the contentment and survival of a social system.

In the Cognitionist approach, the focus is on the individual and collective mental states and thought processes out of which these stories arise. This includes the works of Freud, Jung etc.

Psychoanalysis and Symbolism are outcomes of the Cognitionist approach. I assume we are all somewhat familiar with Psychoanalysis.

Symbols are perceptible objects used to reflect or represent abstract ideas or less perceptible objects. Archetypes are a kind of symbol.

Speaking of, a psychoanalysis and symbols, this is a really good read.
aeon.co/essays/how-psy…

Quotable Quotes:

“To believe is to make a commitment to a set of symbols that assuage doubt.”

“Psychology as mythology grounds the materialist and historical origin story of mankind in neuroscience and empirical psychology.”

“Conceiving of psychology as a mythology enables us to perceive that psychology is an explicit portrayal of what we want to understand about reality and the ultimately pragmatic forms that such knowledge has taken.”

In the Taxonomist approach, the focus is on the components parts of the myth and how they relate to each other. It is out of this that ideas such as folktale types, motifs or functions, etc. come. There are two main branches of the Taxonomist approach:

1. Diffusionists who hold that cross cultural similarities in myths can only be as a result of historical contact or geographical contiguity. This approach got lost in the weeds of determining the “origin” of myths (<- A futile attempt by all accounts)

2. Formalists who take the motifs or functions in a story and examine how they relate to each other. This approach got lost in the weeds of determining and classifying different motifs.

All in all, these approaches offer much but also get lost in their contradictions within and against each other, so the Structuralist approach eventually emerged.

Structuralists try to unite the elements of the other different schools of thought into one coherent approach.

To Structuralists, myths are the language used by cultures to grapple with and resolve contradictions in their worldview and so like languages, their constituent units only really make sense relative to each other.

Structuralism is derivative of linguistic theory so structuralists have mythemes (similar to phonemes or morphemes) which are the fundamental generic unit of the narrative structure from which myths are thought to be constructed.

The "Father" of Structuralism, Claude Levi-Strauss proposed these rules for reading myths:

1. A myth must never be interpreted on one level only. No privileged explanation exists since myths consist of interrelations on several explanatory levels.

2. A myth must never be interpreted alone but in relation to other myths which taken together constitute a transformational group.

( I look at other myths in the mythology from which the myth comes, and other myths that are similar to it in the mythology of other cultures.)

3. A group of myths must never be interpreted alone but by reference to other groups of myths and the customs of the societies from which the originate.

If you read myths and folklore across cultures, it’s clear all these approaches have strengths and weaknesses. But they do not tell you what attitude to take towards myth and folklore. And they shouldn’t. That’s on you to determine, IMO.

Some questions I ask myself when reading myths and folklore from Africa and other parts of the world include:

What do they say about the universals of human nature and the world I live in that was true then as it is now?

What do they reveal about what humans have valued, held as sacred and relied on for personal growth and enlightenment (and which actually worked)?

What kind of societies/civilizations did the people from whom these myths, folklore and inspired sayings come to develop?

What do the stories reveal about what has changed or been shown to be harmful for personal growth and enlightenment?

What do they reveal about how we could relate to the planet on which and the cosmos in which we live?

How do they make me feel on a gut/instinctual/intuitive level, about myself, about other humans, about plants, animals, and the rest of the natural world?

There is truth, beauty, mystery and inspiration in myths, folklore, and inspired sayings of African peoples as there is in the Iliad, Odyssey, Mabinogion, Bible, Koran, Torah, Gita, Sutras etc. which are collections of similar content from their respective peoples.

If someone did the work of systematically collecting just the proverbs and other inspired sayings from the spiritual traditions of all African peoples into a book, I bet the wisdom therein contained would be on par with the Tao.

The question of it such wisdom will be granted the same reverence as the Tao (which I love) is one whose answer we probably all have opinions on.

I agree with the thinking that many of us Africans struggle psychologically because much of the modern civilization we are trying to be a part of rests on western conceptions of life and personhood.

Western conceptions of life and personhood are spectacularly hostile to the life and personhood of Africans and this resulted in what I read somewhere described as the “Cultural Humiliation” of the Slave Trade, Colonization etc.

This is why I believe that using myth and folklore to look back and remember our conceptions of life and personhood that were interrupted and looking at the conceptions of life and personhood from other peoples is valuable.

A helpful schema of the theories discussed in this thread (and source)