Philosophy of Mythology
Myth appears as the result of an attempt to understand or perhaps explain the phenomena of nature; it consists of collective elaborations or perhaps sublimated projections of internal conflicts that beset the consciousness of humanity in antiquity. But this is only a partial aspect of the mythological.
For ‘primitive’ man or for one belonging to archaic civilizations, myth does not appear as a problematic reality; it is accepted, whether transcendently or immanently, as an absolutely natural fact.
Schelling observed that the mythological possesses a transhistorical meaning, revaluing the mythological and opening the path that would accept it as truth. The aim, then, is to ground a world that is at once similar to and different from the present one, a world in which events occurred that are incomprehensible to our limited capacity for reason. Setting aside the merely allegorical interpretation, the physical or naturalist one, and linear historicism, Schelling seeks to discover the rational within the ‘apparently irrational,’ finding meaning in what apparently has none, in such a way that not only what is judged rational appears as essential, but on the contrary, that what is accessory or supposedly formal also proves necessary and therefore rational. He thus discards the positivist conception of thought, within which myths would be creations of extraordinary poets, going so far as to consider them products created by an entire culture. Schelling thinks, in effect, that mythologies are neither invented nor programmed:
It seems impossible that an already constituted people should suddenly receive a mythology, whether through the invention of a single individual or through a collective production engendered by a kind of instinct. Such an eventuality also appears impossible because we cannot conceive of a people without mythology… Would the Greek still be a Greek and the Egyptian an Egyptian if their respective mythologies were taken from them?.. If a people were to receive its mythology in the course of its history, it would follow that it had a history before having a mythology. But the opposite is generally the case: it is not thanks to its history (nor in the course of it) that it receives its mythology; on the contrary, it is mythology that determines its history, or rather does not determine it but constitutes its destiny… the fate that belongs to it from its origins Schelling
Schelling’s conception observes that neither philosophy nor poetry is sufficient to explain analogies so close between the mythological universes of peoples who have had no contact with one another and who belong to regions scattered across the terrestrial geography.
While some consider myth to be a concretely historical fact, Schelling, setting aside its lack of historicity or prehistoricity, attributes to it a potential meaning, a non-metaphorical possibility arising from a concrete event. The poetry that has generated mythic forms is itself a philosophy, a knowledge-creating activity. Hence mythology ends up projecting a kind of ‘truth’ that is no longer accidental but ‘necessary’ in some sense.
Schelling considers polytheistic religions to be false, yet he regards them as a path toward truth. Schelling postulates that ‘divine revelation’ occurs at a given moment, causing a qualitative change in the mind of archaic societies and generating an acceptance of theogonic forces that not only justify the religious and historical truth of myth but simultaneously valorize the successive periods of polytheistic conceptions.
Despite the modern studies of Dumézil’s functionalist semantics, the phenomenological research of Mircea Eliade, and the anthropological structuralism of Lévi-Strauss—which attend to the cultural meaning of myths, to the religious symbolism they reiterate, and to the formal analysis of their internal structure—myths continue to be irreducible. No single discipline seems capable of explaining them in their full complexity.