Dreaming the Future Closer

I have had this bouncing around in my head for a little bit, thinking about how we compare mythologies and parsing out the different methods employed to establish comparisons.  Comparisons, even fairly easy ones, are fairly complicated things, and it seems worthwhile to consider what sort of elements compose the process.

Comparative mythology doesn’t really sit in any one field of study and, moreover, has a very robust life outside of the academy and its fields of study.  When I talk about comparative work, I don’t just mean folks like Dumezil and Levi-Strauss, Jung and Campbell.  I mean to include the sort of thing that happens when a Wiccan meets a Yogi, when a Catholic meets a practitioner of Lucumi.

In fact, I’m more interested in comparative mythology as a way to facilitate the social encounter between different traditions than I am in comparison in the abstract.

That’s a pretty big domain, so you should expect some equally broad categories from me, things that just begin to differentiate the domain, untidy and overlapping.

At the most basic level, you have instance-to-instance comparisons.  These occur when some myth or a description of a spirit ‘looks like’ some other myth or spirit.  This is as simple as “oh, well, you know this Shango fellow sounds a bit like Thor.  They both have strong ties to thunder, lightning, fertility, the color red, weapons tied to the thunder-lightning, thunder stones.”

These kinds of comparisons get dismissed frequently because they seem superficial.  And, well, they are superficial.  But it’s important not to dismiss them outright because they often lay the groundwork for more serious comparisons.  They serve the role of something like a hypothesis, something that can be tested by other ‘deeper’ comparative methods.

Many times, too, when we are deliberately looking for a comparative frame to approach another tradition, we begin by establishing some instance within our ‘home’ tradition and look for where it falls in another tradition.  So, for example, you begin with Thor and his relationship with lightning and thunder, then go looking for the being associated with thunder and lightning in the ‘new’ tradition.

I do not generally find the deliberate instance-to-instance comparisons helpful.  It puts too much weight on an element and not on the relationship between elements in a tradition.  It provides a point of entry for comparison.  Like an entryway, though, it only serves its purpose if you pass beyond it, into a consideration of how the instance is developed in the ‘new’ tradition.

The instance-to-instance comparisons, especially the spontaneous ones,  have an important social function.  The superficial comparisons give two people in different traditions a sense that there is a commonality between them, suggests the possibility of shared discourse.  Even where that commonality is superficial, easily waved away, the social connection engendered shouldn’t be disregarded.

I want to distinguish this instance-to-instance comparison with the more immediate sort of comparison that happens with recognition, when you ’see’ all at once an identity between two figures (e.g., Shango is Thor, Thor is Shango–not an identity I endorse, btw, just used here for exemplary purposes).  Much like visual recognition, this is more immediate and no less prone to error, so I want to bracket recognition off and leave it for a further discussion.  Recognition is powerful, but brings in a lot more issues than I want to deal with in this post.

Conceptual comparisons proceed from instances to develop an appreciation for how the instances (thunder, lightning, red, etc) are related to other instances within the traditions being compared.  Here each tradition is examined with the idea of describing the tradition ‘in its own terms,’ though understanding that this is a relative use of the phrase.

Conceptual comparisons can become incredibly complicated and detailed.  Each tradition has a systematic character and as such, each element tends to relate to every other element (though often times the relation is circuitous and distant).  Starting with one instance, you find a great network of instances.

The two traditions tend to get differentiated, since even where many instances are shared, the network of instances relates them quite differently.  For example, with Shango, we find a complicated set of issues relating to kingship in Africa, whereas Thor’s instances are developed more in relation to the common man.

I chose the examples of Shango and Thor deliberately, because the two traditions in which they are worshiped have relatively little to do with each other historically.  They developed in relative isolation from one another.  However, much comparative mythology is historical, focusing on genealogical relations rather than on relations of appearance.

Dumezil has a linguistic approach to this.  In discussing Tyr, relates his name to Indo-European language more generally.  In doing so, he looks to other Indo-European languages for gods who share a similar connection to Indo-European roots.  He then proceeds to posit a common mythological complex from which these gods derived, using this posited complex to justify comparisons between the different gods.

Dumezil, moreover, goes still further and uses that comparative framework to suggest how we might fill in what seem like gaps in one tradition by reference to another that shares the common roots.  This rests on a couple of implications.

First, there is the implication is that each tradition might have retained one element of the original, common tradition, so reference to allows you to rebuild a more complete picture of things.

You don’t have to settle for that implication, though.  Also implied is that their common roots gives them a certain conceptual compatibility that makes comparisons between them more straightforward.  In this case, you are basically suggesting that they share an underlying notion of how to relate instances in broader conceptual patterns.  The rationale for this rests on some classical notions about how language structures experience.  Common linguistic roots are here assumed to indicate a common way of conceiving.

Such an approach has its limits.  As an academic exercise, it can be used pretty much as-is.  However, if you are trying to establish some connection between your spiritual tradition and that of another in this line, it becomes more complicated.

In emphasizing the common tradition, the comparison tends to elide the complicated elaborations each tradition develops as it diverges from the common one.  If you just want some common ground to point toward, then this method provides you with the outlines of that.

If you want something else, if you want to deepen that social tie to bind together the two traditions, establish a place for common ritual or myth, you need to be comfortably situated within one of the descendant traditions and use the comparative method to establish how that might be constructed.

If you come to the comparison with a reconstructionist bent, supplementing gaps in one tradition by way of the shared tradition, you need to think carefully.  There are lots of ways to think about that supplementation.  One is to think of the comparison as providing a guide as to what can be compatibly grafted onto the home tradition.  This approach doesn’t presume that the graft existed in the home tradition in the past, only that it fits into it now.

Another way is to think of the method as a way of filling in what was once in the home tradition but was lost.  There is no way to be entirely sure, of course, that this is the case.  Historical research may bear out the assumption or reveal it to be in error.  Of course, this is the challenge facing reconstruction in general.

Without being situated in a tradition, you end up with a constellation of associations, but no context in which to develop them.

[Though, perhaps, with enough inspiration and work, you could patch together a new tradition, drawing upon elements of existent traditions using the posited ur-tradition as a conceptual structure.  Ths seems...well, difficult and problematic to say the very least.]

It’s worth making clear this point: the comparative method does not equate the myths it compares.  It functions by distinguishing what it compares, identifying each myth as something independent and individual, using the difference between them as the basis for establishing comparisons.

Positing ur-myths is useful, but it needs to be kept in mind that such ur-myths are useful primarily for facilitating relationships between existent myths that share in the history evoked by the ur-myth.  They don’t replace the myths used to outline them.  Ur-myths are schematic, second-order affairs, though they may become the basis for new myths. Hey, no one said it wasn’t complicated!

All this, and there remains a lot unsaid, especially when you consider it from the perspective of an insider to a religion and its myths.  There are questions about how linguistic and historical material relate to the spiritual world from which they are derived.  That relationship is rarely straightforward.