Myths That Stand the Test of Time
Myths recapitulate reality throughout the world in almost every form imaginable. Children are entertained by Disney fairytales in both the home and classroom setting. As they grow up, the myths are retold again in more mature settings such as The Odyssey and Star Wars. Even as adults, cultures throughout the world immerse themselves in imaginative worlds even if they are the same worlds of the childish fairytales. Many of these adults convince themselves that their reality has occurred first and that myths come second as a byproduct or reality. In Myth and Reality, Mircea Eliade argues that myth occurs first and reality follows suit. It is up to the storytellers to create the narrative of the world. Without myths, there is no reality for the world to make sense of. Along with Eliade’s examination of myths, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari define the concept of a rhizome which helps explain the longevity of myths.
In Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's essay A Thousand Plateaus, the authors describe a root system that weaves together a seemingly unitary structure that can unfold into multiplicity. Every text has a thesis or in the case of myths, a moral of the story. According to Deleuze and Guattari, a thesis can be unwound into a series of references and regimes of signs. The entire framework is compared to a botany framework. The "root" represents symbols found in various settings that imitate the world. A "radicle" represents the seedling or meaning from a root. Finally, the radicles and roots conglomerate into a system known as a "rhizome". In terms of a typical hero myth, the separation, initiation, and return elements can be seen as roots and the retellings or generational references can be seen as the radicles. Rhizomes act as both barriers and rewards for the reader to extract from the text. This cat and mouse game between the reader and the author serves as a larger analogy to real life settings. True rhizomes exist without footnotes because in real life symbols that are not yet defined to people remain meaningless until that person researches that symbol more. Each time a new discovery of a text meaning takes place, connections within the rhizome are unearthed, but new radicles can form to expand the rhizome. Hence, a well-designed rhizome should have roots that can form more than one radicle and radicles that make the rhizome bigger.
In terms of timeless literature, the author must essentially make up as much words and concepts possible in order to have a timeless rhizome. Samuel Colridge made his works stand out because he used words and phrases such as "desynonymize", "esemplastic", and "willful suspension of disbelief". Some of his terms have been understood and used in the 21st century while others are so obscure they remain out of the mainstream lexicon yet still studied with each new generation of English Majors. If an author like Coleridge can add new words to the reader's lexicon over multiple generations, than the rhizome that he created was a success. The root becomes the term "esemplastic", the radicle becomes the meaning that is given to a generation of students, and the rhizome becomes their interpretations and roots that they impose within their own rhizome. In that sense, an author's final contribution from their rhizome is that it becomes the root of a new rhizome to continue the cycle. The functions of rhizomes are essential to Eliade’s interpretation of myths.
Eliade places myth above reality in several different examples and states, “Myth is an extremely complex cultural reality, which can be approached and interpreted from various and complementary viewpoints” (Eliade, 5). In this instance, our cultural reality is the product of the homogenization of storytellers and their myths. But as Eliade points out, interpretation plays a role in fragmenting stories. People rely on language to communicate with each other on the most basic level. Metaphors, heroes, and other narrative techniques are then needed to convey concepts through language. One person’s myth expands to the reality of millions. Through the use of radicles, authors control the lens in which readers see the world.
Eliade expounds on the notion of authors as God-like figures by stating, “Through myth, the world can be apprehended as a perfectly articulated, intelligible and significant Cosmos” (Eliade, 145). Pretend for a moment that the world and readers lie in a room of intellectual darkness. The world cannot escape this darkness until it has experiences to draw from. The collective conscious of the world relies on authors to shed light within this dark room. Readers cannot reach enlightenment on experiences alone because they can only grope about in their surroundings. Without context, shapes and the environment that surrounds readers have been rendered meaningless. Myth creates this context and connects readers’ experiences with knowledge.
Even when the roots of a rhizome are fading, the radicles can form new rhizomes. Eliade addresses the different mediums in which myths surivive:
But even when the Supreme God has completely disappeared from cult and is “forgotten”, his memory survives, camouflaged and degraded, in the initiations and narrations of shamans and medicine men, in religious symbolism…and in certain types of cosmogonic myths (Eliade, 97).
The storyteller doesn’t need to be recognized as a God in order for a myth to survive. As long as the radicles of a mythical rhizome remain, the cycle can continue. Cultures lose track of the origins of myths and their respective rhizomes, but modern radicles pick up the core meanings of myth and repeat them across generations.
Works Cited
Eliade, Mircea. Myth and Reality. San Francisco: HarperColins, 1963. Print.
