Myths of Origin
How sad that our word ‘myth’ has accrued this most commonly heard, present-day meaning: ‘No, no,’ says Joe, ‘that’s just plain wrong; that’s a myth’. Every time I hear this I am saddened, not because I resent language change (you might as well resent the slow erosion of sea-rock, or the infinitesimal shifting of the stars), but because I can’t help but sense in this a sneering contempt for something else: stories and the art of storytelling. For myths are stories. I find etymology to be a useful guide, and here it tells us simply enough that the word ‘myth’ comes from the Greek μῦειν (myein) – to tell a story. Nowadays we tend to situate our stories within one of two main categories, ‘fiction’ or ‘non-fiction’. We judge the former on how closely it corresponds to the latter: that which we exclusively label reality. Strangely enough, neither myths nor stories have ever had anything much to do with the sphere of fact and non-fact. They exist entirely outside of it. To speak of a ‘myth’ as something ’false’, ‘untrue’ or ‘wrong’ is to invite the bespectacled nose of scientific rationalism into those realms of culture where it can offer nothing more than a fatal reductionism, and where it does not, perhaps, usefully belong at all.
A myth is a special kind of story. One might write pages trying to encapsulate what a myth is and still come no closer to explaining it; a case of the wily butterfly that slips the bug-catcher’s net. I find it much simpler to state the one thing that I’m sure that a myth is not. A myth is not a ‘primitive’ explanation for something people just haven’t quite figured out rationally yet. Whoever says that the Greeks invented Zeus to rationalise their fear of thunder is a cultural vandal. Myths simply do not take place in that same ‘everyday time’ which fact and non-fact inhabit, where such words as ‘prove’ and ‘disprove’ have weight and meaning. Indeed, as Karl Kerényi, that great student of myths, points out, all myths take place within another time, within ‘primordial time…a unity fusing in itself all the contradictions of [its] nature and life to be’. In one sense, this is the same ‘once upon a time in a land far, far away‘, with which we are all so familiar. And yet it is not ‘far away’; it is within, and at the root of, all that is.
Myths of origin speak of how certain phenomena have come (and continue to come) into being. Many of these centre on the world of plants. The best-known of this kind that I can think of is the story of Daphne, a nymph who in her flight from an amorous Apollo is transformed into the laurel-tree. Another Greek myth tells of how the youth Kyparissos, the lover of Apollo, kills his beloved stag by mistake, and is transformed by his grief into the cypress-tree. In an apocryphal Christian myth, the flowers of the rosemary-bush are stained blue by the folds of Mary’s mantle. The NSW Royal Botanical Gardens Trust narrates this myth about the Sydney flannel-flower, from the Bodkin/Andrews clan of the D’harawal People.
Myths do not recount; they do not describe finished acts, but an ongoing creation. Persephone returns to her mother from the underworld every Spring; every Easter brings the death, and rebirth, of the Christ-figure: Dionysus, Adonis, John Barleycorn. What is it about all such myths of origin that remains so perennially needful? For one thing, they speak of relationships, kinship, an ecosystem. They join humankind to an immanent, sacred reality; they remind us that we are no greater or lesser than the order of root and leaf; that we are, at core, a part. When I watch the leaves of the laurel-tree unfurl, I watch the transformation of Daphne. When I see the rosemary flowering, I see the flowers stained anew, now and again.
