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Language is not religion and neither can there be religion without language. Religion only happens in community, which requires language. This is obvious. We think of religious language, like ‘atonement’, ‘propitiation’, ‘Holy Trinity’, ‘godhead’, etc. as the technical jargon of theologians. There is also a religious dimension to ordinary language.
For example, when I hear the term, ‘In the beginning’ I immediately think of the opening words of the Genesis creation story. ‘The walls come tumbling down’ is an allusion to the miracle of Joshua at Jericho. In modern terms, ‘may the Force be with you’ reminds us of the cosmic Star Wars — it has almost ubiquitous resonance in American culture, as does ‘the yellow brick road’, which makes me think of Dorothy skipping along her journey. Words and phrases like these have mythic connotations and are part of everyday language.
Many words and phrases are allusive; they refer to something beyond the literal meaning of any one word itself. The fact that a phrase makes you think of something else is core to humor and communication in general. How many times have you chuckled at inside jokes when someone makes a quote about The Office? If you’ve seen Seinfeld, just saying the phrase ‘soup Nazi’ makes the initiated smile in a way that can’t be explained by either of those words taken literally. In general any language, to be artistic and cogent, alludes to other contexts, and may be funny by way of contrast with the current context. Here, I’d like to focus on a very specific subset of those cases, i.e. when language that originated in a mythic framework gets used in daily language.
These cases cross a boundary between the mundane and the metaphysical. It is bringing a god-framework into daily conversations in a way that keeps the myth active in the mind and soul of a believer. In some people mythology is taken as real. It could be so presented by a preacher in church to be absorbed by those desperate to believe, or by a parent reliving Santa Claus with their wide-eyed children. It might be a teenager whose head is in Middle Earth while reading Tolkien, or even a politician who desperately needs a fabricated vision of society to be real. For these people, keeping that illusion alive is very important, and injecting everyday speech with allusive references to that mythic framework is crucial. For anyone to adopt the myth, they have to see and feel its truth in someone they trust.
The myth provides hope and resolution for questions that otherwise cannot be reconciled with normal language. That tension between what we know is true and what we make ourselves believe is true needs constant attention for the elevation to persist. This is where embedding mythic references in everyday language helps. There may even be a correlation between the high or low usage of mythic language in everyday speech and the percentage of the population that are believers. I’ll leave that study to the linguists.
What if we talked only in mythic language? There must be a subset of words and phrases that together cover 95% of what a mythic framework requires to function as such. In other words, there is a finite scope to the semantic ‘infestation’ of mythic connotations in everyday language for a specific myth. All the allusions to Christianity in Italian during the late Dark Ages, for example. That must be a large set because of the ubiquity of Christianity.
Going further back, was there a time where all written language was only religious in a given culture? In some ancient cultures, the biggest driver for writing or depicting things was documenting the perspective of the ruling and priestly cast. Early narrative language must have been centered almost exclusively around the sacred myths.
Of course accounting records were written for transactional and evidentiary purposes, as were the various laws, edicts and safe conduct passes. These were all written artifacts. I don’t suspect there was a market for tabloids and pulp fiction in the early civilizations when writing was expensive and only a few could actually write. Moreover, gossip, jokes, family stories, day to day conversations didn’t have to be written down. They were transacted orally only. In terms of important narratives that were written, it’s reasonable to assume that all that content was tied up with myths that had religious import.
There might have been a time when all written language was religious, and therefore when anyone sat down to read, the immersion in myth was total. Something like this must have immersed Egyptians who saw the state mythology presented to them everywhere in hieroglyphs. Such a complete saturation of mythic imagery in language can lead a population to do whatever is required by the gods because everyone is saturated with it. If all narrative language was religious content, there must be remnants of the worldviews embedded deep in languages today.
This brings me to a curious hypothetical experiment. Because myth-tainted terms are so crucial to the adoption and spread of a worldview, and because we want to shift world views to have content that drives sustainable behaviors, we can define a set of terms, images, phrases and metaphors that are the building blocks for new directed myths. These are not just taken at face value from a trusted prophet, but are rather purpose-driven myths based on the intent of a community.
Let’s face it. The prophets who came up with the myths that govern billions of religious people today didn’t have the foresight to incorporate behaviors that foster sustainable existence. Manifest Destiny is implicit in the cultural mandate in the Old Testament. Often the immorality of leaders (like polygamous and murderous King David) was on a different standard than that of the rest of the believers. With that example, believers today seem to have no problem tolerating a blatantly immoral autocratic President today. Blatant racism and genocide were advocated by God in the Old Testament. A culture of war is assumed to be the normal way of life for Roman and Greek gods. Today, arms races have become very popular the world over.
So often the legacy ‘Holy’ writ disappoints, even as we carefully cherry pick the ‘love your neighbor as yourself’ nuggets of piety out of the verbal morass that is Scripture. Let’s face it, the next generation of prophetic writers cannot be cut from the same cloth as those who gave us dominant world religions from the past. We can do better, and one way is to constrain them by providing normative context in a set of ‘toys in the sandbox’ language artifacts for them to build with.
We can put coexistence, empathy, tolerance, grace, patience, collaboration, diligence, egalitarianism, social justice, equity, and related terms, into the sandbox. Not included in the building blocks are: war, a priestly cast, diving right of leaders, capricious gods, eternal damnation, sin, victory by the solitary hero, and more. What story new-myth authors come up with is really up to their creative genius. We don’t want to hinder the creative expression, i.e. the aesthetic language, method and experience. We want to constrain the moral principles advocated. This is teleological authoring.
Now let’s take this experiment a little further, not only recruiting an author or two to write the backbone myth, but also recruiting a grammarian — language specialist — who can take some of the key features of the new narrative and construct a new Indo-European language based on it. It should be minimalistic and focused so we don’t get lost in the complexities of aesthetic embellishment. The new language should be close enough to common languages, like English and German, for us to ‘recognize’ the words in some strange way. We should be able to integrate it into our own language. This type of integration, by the way, is normal for language evolution. In sense, we are embedding worldview into language through the association of strong mythic connotations with new words. Like bees carrying pollen, the more these words are embedded in everyday parlance, the more endemic the myth becomes in our cultural sub-consciousness.
This provides existing concepts with a new face and a myth-centric interpretive context that provides cultural cohesion to believers. This is absolutely required for a new myth to take hold and become a new interpretative framework because the new terms will have myth-affinity so important for a worldview to take root in a community.
Our current culture is very diverse, and that is a good thing. When we think back to the time where myths took deep hold in society, the interpretive framework of the myth was everywhere in culture. In other words, the mythic bias was baked into the language, which made it ubiquitous. This is how worldviews won out over the competition. There is a sense where we need a sustainable world view that can win out over the unsustainable competition. The tools of language described here can be brought into the service of that mission.
A key challenge, of course, is not creating a new instance of oppressive monocultures of myth that fossilize arcane and oppressive beliefs over time. This is where the common foundation of ‘sacred’ terms, the ‘toys’ allowed in the proverbial ‘sandbox’, may prove to be a uniting instrument because it allows for a family of myths to flourish, each riffing off a set of common values that constitute a good humanity.
— Roy Zuniga
August 2020
Duvall, WA
Dynamics of Myth 