Misusing Myth, I

“Stereotypes are devices for saving a biased person the trouble of learning” ~ Anonymous

" ... the Cold War was not some naturally occurring phenomenon but was created by U.S. policymakers in large part for the purpose of keeping a lid on social change ... " ~ Robert Jensen


"The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which (political pundits and tabloid journalists) have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that these men slew or captured any monster or finished any labor." ~ Henry David Thoreau


The image above is what Japanese people looked like during World war II - at least if you read American comic books. Comic books were one of the worst offenders for racial stereotyping back then. Japanese had bright yellow-orange skin, long fangs and claws... and were usually being killed by handsome American heroes like Airboy (pilot of Birdie, the only plane that flapped her wings). Chinese looked similar, only without the fangs and with huge buck teeth. It wasn't just pictures: one story had Japanese agents recruiting circus freaks to their cause because "the Japs are a race of freaks themselves." But it's one thing to use demons to symbolize the evils of Nazism or Japanese imperialism and quite another to depict a people as demons. Heroes like Captain America, The Patriot, USA, Captain Flag, V( for Victory)-Man and their like were wonderful morale boosters for Americans, but drawing "Japs" as monsters didn't promote peaceful understanding... any more than cartoons of "camel jockeys" help it now.

Like anything empowering, myths and stories can be misused, even abused. One of the worst examples is when stories go from archetypes to stereotypes. The lazy, cowardly Black, the inscutable Oriental, the greedy Jew, the helpless heroine and the effeminate gay man pop up in a lot of War-era fiction and beyond in a vicious circle: the stereotypes appear because people believed them and the stories reinforce the belief. Modern versions that sound more positive, like the streetwise Black, the kung-fu Asian, the sensitive gay and the man-hating feminist are just as bad because they're stereotypes. They feed the delusion that all members of a social group are the same, not individuals, and this can lead to real evils from profiling to genocide.

Stereotyping is only one way myth can be misused. I've talked about how believing in myths literally leads to the kind of hatred preached by fundamentalist religions from evangelical Christians to Islamic Jihadists.

People can use myths wrongheadedly to promote their own causes. Detractors of Barack Obama who call him "two-faced" like "the Roman god Janus" or warn of his Islamic leanings because his name means the winged horse (El Buraq) that Mohammed rode to Heaven have unknowingly given him pretty solid symbolic endorsements. Janus, as the Presidential Geek Survey at pinkraygun.com points out, represented not forgetting the past while looking ahead to the future. And El Buraq was a winged steed who brought people to paradise. It even represents a healing of religious wounds: on his arrival Mohammed was blessed by Abraham, Isaac, Joseph, Moses and Jesus, and welcomed as their equal. (1)

Bush supporters who tried to paint him as Frodo or the Lone Ranger miss the point so far that they're laughable. The Lone Ranger never answered an Indian raid by wiping out their tribe (or, as with Bush, the wrong tribe, because they had silver mines he wanted). IMHO Bush is more like Sauron than Frodo. There's a fascinating take on THE LORD OF THE RINGS and American politics at http://www.windweaver.com/politics/lordrings.htm making the point that Frodo's real battle was with his own dark side tempted by the Ring than with Mordor. Which is what myths are really all about anyway.

There are also people who will create a mythology and perpetrate it. These include groups from politicians to UFO believers to tabloid journalists to so-called prophets. I used to teach a Wichita Free University course in UFOlogy, and many of these diverse groups use a lot of techniques in common. UFOlogists will be discussed here in more detail later, because their mythology borrows from stories in popular fiction. What were Iraq's weapons of mass destruction but a created myth? Tabloids live by feeding us myths of the rich and famous

I'll get more into "creative myth," UFOs and such in Misusing Myth II.


(1) And the latest in their line of prophets: which reminds my geek side of “Into each generation a slayer is born ... a Chosen One. One born with the strength and skill to hunt the vampires, to stop the spread of evil.”

The Tree of Life and Death

I once said to an Air Force Christian Scientist chaplain that at that moment I felt so at peace that I didn't care if there was such a thing as eternal life or not. She replied, "There, you have found eternal life!"



“... one of what we all are: Less than a drop in the great blue motion of sunlit sea. But it seems that some of the drops sparkle. ... They do sparkle!” ~ King Arthur, Camelot by Lerner and Lowe



Two of the most potent icons that appear in different myths are intertwined. The image of the World Tree exists in most cultures --including pop culture-- and the story of the hero who dies and returns is always linked to it. Perhaps a tree's roots deep in the ground with branches reaching to the sky symbolizes our connection to the All. Its cycle of decay in Fall and Winter and rebirth in Spring and Summer represents the cycle death and resurrection. Religions tend to celebrate their heroes' or dieties' rebirth around the coming of Spring, when the world itself seems to be coming back to life.

Death and resurrection are a key theme in mythology. We want to know that we are eternal, or, at least, a part ofsomething that is. Most heroes of most myth-cycles are tasked to reaffirm this by dying and coming back. At the least, they experience a life change so profound that it is like being reborn. The Norse god Odin was nailed to the Tree Yggdrasil to gain knowledge, including the ability to enter the Land of the Dead and return. A gigantic tamarisk tree grew from the spot where the Egyptian god Osiris died; he was later resurrected by Isis after five days in the Underworld. Buddha found enlightenment sittiing under the bodhi tree. Christ died on a symbolic tree, the wooden cross, and was resurrected three days later. Arthur's mentor Merlin was associated symbolically with an oak tree. In modern myths Luke Skywalker faced his fears in the tree on Dagobah to become a Jedi Knight. It might even be said that Buffy's wooden stakes and Harry Potter's wands are shards of the great Tree. In fact, it is significant that Harry met his own death and returned amid the trees in the Forbidden Forest, and Buffy's death came on a tower that reached up like a tree.

Even without the symbol of the tree, most major popular culture heroes have an element of death and rebirth in their stories, keeping them firmly in the classic mythic tradition. Superman was sent out like a seed pod from a dying planet. The Lone Ranger was the last survivor of a band of Texas Rangers left for dead by the Cavendish gang; he even left a grave marker. Buck Rogers was overcome by an underground gas that left him in a deathlike state until he awoke in the 25th century. Denny Colt was doused with a chemical that left him in suspended animation; he was buried in a vault in Wildwood Cemetary that later became his hideout and base when he awoke and named himself The Spirit(1). Most of today's super heroes survive origins that would normally be lethal: struck by lightning, hit by a meteor, exposed to radioactive or toxic waste. It seems a hero just isn't a hero until he has met Death and lived to tell the tale.

Speaking of cycles, The Celtic celebration of the end of the harvest season and the coming of the season of death is tomorrow night. It was known in Gaelic as Oidhche Shamhna, or in modern terms Samhain, All Hallows Eve or Hallowe'en. It was the end of the year. Some traditions hold that on this night the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is thinnest. The ancients celebrated the aspect of Death because they knew that it is only part of an never-ending cycle, that while the old world died the darkness was germinating the seeds of the new. When you can see that, you've found eternal life.


(1) If you don't know the classic comic book hero, don't worry: the movie is out next year!)