Foreword

Greek Mythology and Poetics is the second book in the Myth and Poetics series. My goal, as series editor, is to encourage work that will help integrate literary criticism with the approaches of anthropology and that will pay special attention to problems concerning the nexus of ritual and myth.

For such an undertaking, we may look to the comparative testimony of relatively complex societies, such as the Ndembu of Zambia, and also of the very smallest, such as the Yukuna of the Colombian Amazon. [1] Just as important, we must pursue the varied testimonies of the most stratified societies, including those which go under the general heading “Western civilization.” It is precisely here that the meaning of myth is the most misleading—and challenging. In a small-scale society myth tends to be viewed as the encoding of that society's concept of truth; at the same time, from the viewpoint of Western civilization, myth has become the opposite of fact, the antithesis of truth. [2]

Since the ancient Greek concept of politeíā serves as the foundation for the very word “civilization” and for our concept of Western civilization, more than one of the books in this series will deal primarily with ancient Greece and the ancient Greek city-state, or pólis. The testimony of the Greeks is particularly instructive with regard to our central concern, the relationship between ritual and myth. The very word “myth,” {vii|viii} as derived from Greek mûthos, is a case in point: the meaning of this word brings to life, in microcosm, the relationship between myth and ritual in ancient Greek society.

In order to grasp the special meaning of Greek mûthos, let us consider the distinction between marked and unmarked speech (in the terminology of Prague School linguistics). We find that marked speech occurs as a rule in ritual contexts, as we can observe most clearly in the least complex or smallest-scale societies. It is in such societies also that we can observe most clearly the symbiosis of ritual and myth, and the ways in which the language of ritual and myth is marked, whereas “everyday” language is unmarked. The Greek language gives us an example of these semantics: múō means “I have my eyes closed” or “I have my mouth closed” in everyday situations, but “I see in a special way” or “I say in a special way” in ritual. Hence mústēs is “one who is initiated” and mustḗrion is “that into which one is initiated, mystery (Latin mysterium).” Hence also mûthos, “myth”: this word, it has been argued, is a derivative of múō and had at an earlier stage meant “special” as opposed to “everyday” speech.

A later Classical example of such early patterns of thought occurs in Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus 1641-1644: the visualization and the verbalization of what happened to Oedipus in the precinct of the Eumenides at Colonus are restricted, in that the precise location of his corpse is a sacred secret (1545-1546, 1761-1763). Only Theseus, by virtue of being the proto-priest for the Athenians of the here-and-now, is to witness what happened, which is called the drṓmena (1644). This word is what Jane Harrison used to designate “ritual” in her formulation: “myth is the plot of the drṓmenon.” Thus the visualization and the verbalization of the myth, what happened to Oedipus, are restricted to the sacred context of ritual, controlled by the heritage of priestly authority from Theseus, culture-hero of the Athenian democracy.

From an anthropological point of view, “myth” is indeed “special speech” in that it is a means by which society affirms its own reality. Such a thought pattern is pertinent to the theories of J. L. Austin and J. R. Searle concerning the performative aspects of language. A speech-act, according to Austin and Searle, entails a situation in which the word is the action; the antithesis of word and action is neutralized. Here we may invoke Barbara Johnson's application of Austin's notion of speech-act to poetry—an application that Austin himself resisted. We may go also one step further, with the help of Richard Martin's Language of Heroes, the first book in Myth and Poetics. [3] Martin applies the notion of speech-act {viii|ix} to the oral performance of oral poetry, the dynamics of which have been made well known through the pathfinding works of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. As Martin argues, the mûthos is not just any speech-act reported by poetry: it is also the speech-act of poetry itself.

Viewed in this light, myth implies ritual in the very performance of myth. And that performance is the essence of poetics.