Parallel Myths Read Online Free Page B

of the population rejected the Soviet civic myth * and sought to replace it.
    The Jews and the early Christians were persecuted in ancient Rome as “atheists.” Now, they were hardly atheists in our modern sense of the word. Rather, they refused to worship the emperor as agod, a requirement of the Roman civic myth, part of what identified the Roman citizen. In Rome, religion and the state were entirely fused.
    The Bible contains an excellent illustration of the binding power of civic myth, as well as what happens when the myth breaks down. To be a Jew in ancient Israel meant to accept the king and the Torah as the moral, civic, and religious authorities. One had to identify with the sacred history of the Jewish people and accept that nationhood was defined by a covenant with God. The Old Testament sets forth that Israel prospered when the nation was faithful to the covenant; when that covenant was abandoned and the people worshiped the gods of neighboring peoples, society broke down and the Jews were sent into exile. This is the power of myth in action.

MORALITY AND MYTH
     
    For centuries morals and religion have been intimately linked and completely fused. Even today, one is bound to recognize this close association in the majority of minds. It is apparent that moral life has not been, and never will be, able to shed all the characteristics that it holds in common with religion. When the two orders of facts have been so closely linked, when there have been between them so close a relationship for so long a time, it is impossible for them to be dissociated and become distinct. For this to happen they would have to undergo complete transformation. There must, then, be morality in religion and religion in morality.
    —Émile Durkheim
    With their old taboos discredited, they immediately go to pieces, disintegrate and become resorts of vice and diseases…. Today [1961] the same thing is happening to us. With our old mythologically founded taboos unsettled by our own modern sciences, there is everywhere in the civilized world a rapidly rising incidence of vice and crime, mental disorders, suicides and dope addictions, shattered homes, impudent children, violence, murder and despair. These are facts, I am not inventing them. Theygive point to the cries of the preachers for repentance, conversion and a return to the old religion.
    —Joseph Campbell,
Myths to Live By
     
    Myth, especially as codified in religion, has always been the basis for the morality of a society. With a mythic basis—a revelation from God or the gods—the legitimacy of a system of ethics was absolute and unquestioned. There were no shades of gray, for to question the validity of the moral code was to question the validity of the myth and the legitimacy of the society itself.
    To return to the example of Old Testament Israel, the state was defined by the Torah, which in turn established an absolute standard of morality in the Ten Commandments. In this case, the civic myth and the absolute standard of morality were inseparable. In many premodern cultures, the price of violating a taboo is not death but something far worse from the standpoint of traditional culture: banishment from the group.
    The wholesale devaluation of life in our culture through violence, crime, and addictions, as well as the decline in public and private ethics, is an indication of the weakening of our respect for myth. The establishment and maintenance of a widely held moral code are the most important functions of myth.
    As we read the myths of numerous cultures, we will see a number of moral lessons presented. Of particular interest are “dualist” myths, such as the Persian and Chippewa stories of Creation. In these, there are two deities, one good and one evil, and good always prevails. Such tales were moral object lessons for the people, a means of conforming the behavior of the individual to that of the group.

THE SENSE OF THE SACRED
     
    From Rudolf Otto,
The Idea of the