How "Myth" Came to Mean "Falsehood"

Nowadays people use the word "myth" to refer to things which people believe to be true but which are actually false. Pick up a newspaper or magazine and see titles like "The Myths of Growing Old," "The Myth of the Melting Pot," "The Myth of Cyberterrorism," or "The Myth of Grade Inflation." What all of these articles have in common is the thesis that these stories about the topic under discussion--these myths--are false.

As a consequence of this definition of myth, people will refer to the beliefs of other peoples as "myths": the myths of the American Indians, the Greek myths, the Norse myths, but their own stories--which are, of course, true--are not myths. They are facts.

So why are our stories true when everyone else's stories are false. You might be thinking, "Well, that's obvious. Because the stories I believe in are true." But there are good odds that there are people in this class who believe in different stories and would argue vehemently against someone else's stories.

Ruins of Delphi, Photo by De'Lara Stephens Maybe the place to begin is with the origin of the word "myth." "Myth" comes from the Greek word mythos which means "word" or "story." The Greeks also used the word logos to mean "word" or "story." Originally, mythos was used by poets like Hesiod to refer to the stories of the gods as "divinely inspired poetic utterances" (Leonard and McClure 2), just as modern conservative Christians argue "All scripture is given by inspiration of God" (KJV, II Timothy 3.16). Logos was used to refer to the language of commerce and everyday life, often carrying the meaning of "crafty legalese" (Leonard and McClure 2), what people mean today when they talk about lawyers or politicians twisting language to suit their own purposes.

Later Greeks thought earlier Greeks gullible for believing these stories, the myths, about the gods. For them mythos referred to fanciful tales and fables. And they used the term logos to refer to the way words can be used to create effective arguments. For them logos wasn't about truth or falsehood but was about the way language could be used to win arguments (Leonard and McClure 3).

Plato went a step farther, equating other people's mythos with falsehood, "contrasting the fabricated myth with the true history" (Doniger 2-3). But in works like the Phaedo and the Republic, Plato created his own mythos. "The myths that Plato didn't like (that were created by other people, nurses, and poets) were lies, and the myths that he liked (that he created himself) were truths" (Doniger 3). On the other hand, Plato used the term logos to refer to the truths of philosophy, to self-evident truths, to the absolute principles which Plato believed ordered the universe (Leonard and McClure 3-4).

After Plato, the Greek writer Euhemeros argued that myths were based on the lives of real people (Doniger 51-52). He claimed to have seen an inscription that identified some of the Greek gods as real kings. In time, people embellished stories about these kings, even attributing magical powers to them in order to explain natural phenomena like earthquakes and lightning (Leonard and McClure 4-5). A similar example of this kind of embellishment might be the popular story about George Washington chopping down the cherry tree.

In the Gospel of John, John equates logos with Christ and the voice of God creating the world in Genesis 1 (KJV, John 1.1-17). By doing so, he combines Plato's definition of logos as the word that orders the cosmos with Hesiod's earlier meaning of mythos as divinely inspired words. The word mythos, its original meaning usurped by John's use of logos, became synonymous with fable and falsehood.

Works Cited

Doniger, Wendy. The Implied Spider: Politics & Theology in Myth. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. Print.

Leonard, Scott and Michael McClure. Myth & Knowing: An Introduction to World Mythology. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2004. Print.

HUM 2130 World Mythology