Myth Differences: A Cultural Fingerprint

While the similarities in myths reveal the commonalities of human experience, the different ways in which each culture's myths develop reveal the character and concerns of that culture.

The Romantic Period during the late 18th and early 19th centuries was characterized by an interest in the comman man and the common life. The French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau had written of the "noble savage," and "primitive" people were believed to live a simpler, purer life. During this time Johann Gottfried Herder developed his volk theory, which focused on simple, honest folk (German volk) who lived close to the soil. According to Herder, humans had once lived in a "divinely sanctioned unity" after creation, but, following the Tower of Babel, had devolved into "various linguistically, geographically, and culturally separated Volk" (Leonard and McClure 9).

Herder's theory had a significant impact on the study of mythology during the 19th and 20th centuries. His ideas influenced the "romantic idealisms of the 19th century" with its emphasis on the folklore of individual cultures, "the racist ideologies of 20th century fascism" (Leonard and McClure 8), the "romantic folklore movement" (Leonard and McClure 9), and a desire among many people to return to a simpler life or to racial purity (Leonard and McClure 7-10).

Many comparative mythologists of the 19th century believed "that physical environment has a direct influence on people's collective disposition and body type, and indirectly, on their sociocultural values." "[T]he study of myths was primarily a matter of sorting out the races according to similarities and dissimilarities in their languages and sacred narratives." On the positive side, this led to the collection and preservation of many myths that might otherwise have disappeared as indigineous cultures were displaced by Western culture (Leonard and McClure 10). On the negative side, the desire to show that one culture's myths were superior to the myths of others sometimes led to racism, including the development of the Aryan hypothesis, which claimed that members of the Aryan race were the direct and "true" descendants of Adam and Eve. While the Brothers Grimm collected German fairy tales "to demonstrate that which was distinctive in the German character" (Leonard and McClure 11) and Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle based on the Nibelungenlied, suggested "an almost religious devotion to the values of the Aryan Volk" (Leonard and McClure 11), Wagner's theoretical works were more obviously racist, denigrating the Jews as a subnormal culture. Friedrich Nietsche went farther, coupling Aryan Volk ideas with Darwinian evolution, romanticizing the Aryan ancestors of the German people as "triumphant monsters," describing the ancestral Aryan as "the splendid blond beast prowling about avidly in search of spoil and victory" (qtd. in Leonard and McClure 11).

Anthropological approaches to myth during the 20th century viewed myth as "primarily a living, oral, culture preserving phenomenon" (Leonard and McClure 13). Branislaw Malinowsky offered a charter theory of myth, arguing that myths "validate existing communal institutions, beliefs, and practices." Such myths provide a rationale for cultural practices and a means of maintaining cultural identity through their repetition over time (Harris and Platzner 42).

These approaches to myth remind us of the unique character of every culture and the ways in which our common human experience is modified by time and place.