Let’s kick off this sequel to last week’s trashing of the monomyth by shifting gears to its antithesis: mythological structuralism. While Joseph Campbell presented a top-down approach that bound mythical tropes to the narrative of the Hero’s Journey; in 1958, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss coined the term mythemes to refer to the distilled, almost monadic, story units that built mythologies from the ground-up. Previous efforts, such as the ATU Fable Index (started in 1910), had already laid the foundations for understanding mythology (specifically, folklore) as a collection of discrete but overlapping leitmotifs, a sort of Dewey Decimal System for storytelling:
400. Quest for the Lost Bride 401. Princess transformed into a Deer 402. Animal Bride etc.
Given our cultural embrace of memes qua language and their unprecedented capacity to splinter into variations –as well as to multiply and accrue meaning over time– we’ll piggyback on this structuralist approach to posit a new expression of mythological themes via memetic #hashtags.
#MadKing, for instance, could be linked to the story of Tantalus, who had his son Pelops killed and served in a banquet to the gods, as well as to the wife-murdering Sultan Shahryar from the Arabian Nights. One #hashtag suffices to evoke the same archetype of the irrational power-abuser, beyond the specificities of each iteration, be these cannibalism, filicide or uxoricide.
This approach invites us to explore an encyclopedic universe of mythological #hashtags that can range from very well-known themes (e.g. #VirginSacrifice, which applies to the classic stories of Andromeda, Iphigenia, Hesione, and even Jesus) to some rather obscure ones (e.g. #IncompleteCorpse, which applies to Osiris’ missing phallus after being reassembled by Isis, or Pelops’ missing shoulder following his brief stint as the gods’ all-you-can-eat buffet).
Now, for a challenge.
The following #hashtag sequence represents the storyline of a well-known myth. Can you guess which one it is?
#AvertDeath #Katabasis #ElixirVitae #Invulnerability
How about this variation?
#AvertDeath #PactWithNature #RoyalPower #Invulnerability
Well done if you figured out that we’re talking about Achilles and Baldr, respectively. Breaking down their myths:
The Nereid Thetis desires to keep her son Achilles from dying (#AvertDeath) and goes to the Underworld (#Katabasis) to dip him in the water of the river Styx (#ElixirVitae), thus rendering him immortal (#Invulnerability).
Likewise, the Norse goddess Frigg desires to keep her son Baldr from dying (#AvertDeath) and makes a covenant with all materials not to harm him (#PactWithNature) using her queenly hierarchy (#RoyalPower), thus rendering him immortal (#Invulnerability).
You’ll find this four-hashtag structure provides an intermediate level of narrative detail: one could dive deeper into specifics (Frigg’s longing to #AvertDeath is triggered by an #OminousDream, for instance), or gloss over themes that are subject to variations (Thetis’ #Katabasis in the Achilleid is replaced by #Incineration in the Argonautica). However, I believe this quartet provides just the right level of abstraction for the comparative analysis I’ll develop throughout Applied Mythology.
The four themes, you’ll notice, are far from random and follow a common pattern:
1. The first is the Desire, or the motivation that activates the chapter of a myth. 2. The second is the Plan, or the course of action taken to fulfill the Desire. 3. The third is the Means, or the resource –a tool, power, skill– that facilitates the success of the Plan. 4. The fourth is the Deed, or the successful achievement of the Desire, following the Plan and using the Means.
Revisiting Thetis’ myth, for the sake of clarity:
1. Her Desire is for her son to #AvertDeath. 2. Her Plan is to travel to the Underworld: #Katabasis... 3. ...to reach a Means capable of protecting her son: an #ElixirVitae. 4. Her Deed: bestowing Achilles with #Invulnerability.
My thesis is that, just as with the case studies of Thetis and Frigg, any myth can be described and compared adequately using this #hashtag quartet.
Yes, but.
Achilles is best known not for his immortality, but by how it was thwarted by an arrow to the heel, the only weak spot his mother Thetis failed to protect. Similarly, Baldr is known for getting killed by a mistletoe spear, the only material his mother Frigg failed to include in her pact. The initial achievement of invulnerability from these foundational myths is not irrelevant to their frustrated outcome: it is their inception.
Recalling last week’s presentation of the structure I call the Deed/Deed Undone, we find that every myth culminating in a Deed can potentially spawn a sequel themed around its undoing. Consequently, this new chapter can also be analyzed using the same, four-hashtag structure:
Thus, upon learning of Baldr’s invulnerability, the trickster god Loki has the Desire to kill him (#EnsureDeath), hatches a Plan to use Baldr’s blind brother Höðr to do so (#CrimeByProxy) by Means of a mistletoe, the only material capable of harming him (#OnlyWeakness), and succeeds in achieving the Deed Undone: killing the one who was meant never to be killed (#DeathOfTheImmortal).
Having said this, you may be asking yourselves: if a myth climaxing in a Deed spawns a sequel where that Deed is Undone, could there be a third sequel where the Deed is Redone? After all, Baldr is brought back to life after Ragnarök and Achilles finally achieves immortality in the Elysian Fields. (If so, should we kill them off again in Part 4?). What can we find at the inner and outer limits of mythology?
We’ll cover this and more in next week’s entry. Stay tuned.
Coming up next. The third and final entry of Applied Mythology’s structuralist approach: Where do myths begin? Where do they end? And what makes them good?
…and a Fun Fact. Let’s go back to Pelops and his missing shoulder (#IncompleteCorpse). After being murdered, cooked into a stew and served in Tantalus’ banquet like Tim Roth in Greenaway’s The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, the gods were so disgusted they decided to reassemble Pelops’ body and bring him back to life, only his shoulder had already been eaten. And who was the peckish deity who absentmindedly devoured a whole human shoulder while the rest of the gods were frowning and shaking their heads at their meal? It was the Demeter, who was afflicted by the captivity of her daughter Persephone in the Underworld… which would not have happened had Persephone, in turn, abstained from eating the food she was offered during her abduction. The irony.
I am listening to D. Eric Maikranz's "The Reincarnationist Papers" on Audible (Audible is my driving companion) and this bit of dialogue made me think of you and what you like to read and write about. I searched for it in my Kindle to cut and paste here. It is an interesting novel. I thought you would find the passage interesting.
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“Do you still feel that way?”
“What way?”
“That you must spurn them,” I said, pointing across the sea as though the rest of the world lay in wait beyond it.
He nodded slowly for several seconds. “Evan, ours is an inherently lonely existence, because of what we are.”
“And what’s that?” I asked quickly.
He turned toward me as though surprised at my question. “Why do you ask that question of me when you already possess the answer? We are the singers of goat songs. We are Zeus’s Dioscuri sons,” (34) he said, his voice rising with emotion.
I narrowed my eyes at him, confused.
He shook his head impatiently. “We are their victims, their hostages,” he said, pointing beyond the sea as I had done. He faced straight ahead and took a deep breath to collect himself. “It is all so different now, Evan. At times it is difficult to know where we stand in a remade world. Yes, quite difficult.
“The Greeks and Egyptians of my youth believed in the transmigration of the soul, they believed in us, or at least the possibility of us. But those days are gone, and now the true tragedy is that their beliefs, which served us so well, have failed them so miserably. That failure is because the standards of those beliefs were too low, too tangible. You see, if their godly goals are not high enough, then the common man can stand on tipped toes and touch the top of the portico, dwarfing all gods within. At that point, the system becomes valueless and without hope. In the end, those men who, through courage, had stood as tall as their gods, eventually showed cowardice and slunk away from the mirror, not in fear, but in loathing, for their once lofty gods now showed the same tangible flaws as their aspiring worshippers.
“Their problem with our limited divinity, if there is any divinity within us, is that they will see what we have as too modest a goal. Lately, I find myself wondering if they are not right.”
….
Footnote 34: When Clovis uses the term “the singers of goat songs” he is likely referring to the origins of tragedy, specifically the ancient Greek meaning which is tragōidiā contracted from trag(o)-aoidiā = “goat song” from tragos = “goat” and aeidein = “to sing.” “We are Zeus’s Dioscuri sons.” Here Clovis is likely referring to a little-known fact about the Greek gods and twin brothers Castor and Pollux (the Dioscuri), in that they spent alternate days as gods on Olympus and as deceased mortals in Hades.
D. Eric Maikranz. The Reincarnationist Papers (p. 305). Kindle Edition.
https://ericmaikranz.com/
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I still can't match the movie adaptation (Infinite, 2021) with the novel. Not sure what they did there...
Alonso, these are very good!