An Interview with Wendy Doniger
by Ray Grasse
Originally published in The Quest Magazine, Winter 1990.
Wendy Doniger is widely regarded as one of the world's foremost writers on mythology. First trained as a dancer under George Balanchine and Martha Graham, she went on to complete a doctorate in Sanskrit and Indian studies at Harvard University and a second doctorate in Oriental Studies from Oxford University. Among her many books (published earlier under the name Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty), are Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts; Dreams, Illusions, and Other Realities; and Other Peoples' Myths: The Cave of Echoes. She was appointed the Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, where she has taught since 1978. She lectures frequently around the world, and spoke with us recently about the role of mythology in contemporary society.
Q: We live in a time of unprecedented access to the myths of other times and other cultures.What is it exactly we have to learn from studying these myths from cultures other than our own?
A: Well, I suppose there are two basic sets of things that you learn. You learn the things that are different about them; that is, you learn what happened in India and China in history, and in people's minds, that never, ever happened in Europe, or in Christianity or Judaism. There are really new things, different experiences and different ideas; so that there is an exotic world that is made accessible, and that's exciting in itself. And that's all that people originally thought there was — the exoticism, the orientalism. Everyone thought that when you went someplace you saw something that was completely different. That was the enlightenment discovery of "the primitive," the Samoan, the innocent, and what have you. I think that's true, and it's still there, and to some extent it reflects one's admiration of foreign cultures — you know, how much more wonderful they are than ours.
But politically and historically, it's also reflected a sense of European superiority — how weird these people are. So these are the two forms of "otherness" — the otherness of admiration and the otherness of despising.
But I also think you learn what Jung and Eliade and, in his own way, Joseph Campbell have pointed out: you learn what isn't different, and that's exciting also in a different kind of way. You learn things that are actually available in our culture, but which people don't notice in our culture.
Q: Can you give me an example of that?
A: Well, people are always shocked by myths of cannibalism and myths of animal sacrifice. There's a lot of sensationalism, for example, about the way Muslims kill their lambs and so forth. And, certainly, myths of cannibalism are truly shocking. But the myth of cannibalism and of human sacrifice is the basis of the Christian mass, and can be traced back into the Hebrew Bible as in the story of Abraham and Isaac. There, of course, it's rejected; but it's imagined. So I think that when we see other people really doing it, it causes us to have a second look at these elements in our own religions which are not taken seriously anymore. It's such a long way from the crucifixion, after all, to the wafer and the glass of wine, and beyond the crucifixion to the pascal lamb ...have you yourself, seen an animal sacrifice?
Q: No, I haven't.
A: It's really awful. It's really shocking. The first time I saw one, in Calcutta, I passed out cold. And I thought I was all prepared for it. I felt thrilled and privileged that they were letting me come along, you know. And I've never really felt quite the same about the religious imagery in the West after actually having seen it done. It really opened me to a deep level of the symbolism of the passover (Seder) as well. that's what I mean; it's something that really is there in Christianity and Judaism, but you don't see it until you've watched a Hindu sacrifice a goat to Kali.
Q: You pointed out, in Other Peoples' Myths, that we are now in the position of being able to choose our myths consciously, as individuals, rather than simply inheriting them unconsciously as participants in the culture. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?
A: Well, in the old days, if you were raised a certain type of Protestant, then you were given your stories. Your stories were the stories of the Hebrew Bible and Adam and Even, and then you had the passion of Christ, and those are the images you were supposed to think your religious thoughts in. Some people did very well, but some people didn't. People who didn't sometimes left the church and tried to convert and got into lots of trouble with their families, or they just decided that religion made no sense to them and they didn't want it. Then there were people for whom those myths had meaning, and did indeed work to clarify their lives, and they kept them. But I think a lot has happened since the Enlightenment to make it more and more difficult for many — although, again, never all — Christians and Jews to think important thoughts in their lives through the inherited mythologies. For those people especially, and even to some extent for devout Christians and Jews, other stories from other religions are known to them and respected by them. Not as something that weird pagans believe, but as something that very good and intelligent people believe — people whom they meet and perhaps work with at the office or go to school with, people who are not weirdly other and exotic, but who seem to them to be humans like themselves. Those people don't have the story of Adam and Even and the crucifixion. They have other stories. If you take those stories seriously, and if you're the sort of person who finds religious imagery moving and useful, you can find those images moving and useful as well as, or instead of, those that your group gave you. You can think through them, think with them, find meaning in them.
Q: But you've also addressed the potential dangers that can arise when we take on, not only the myths and metaphors of another culture, but the rituals of another culture.
A: Well, that's the tricky part. At a very deep level, anything you believe does affect what you do. In some ways it's obvious. You convert to another religion; you stop going to the Catholic mass and you start going to a Protestant church instead. Or you decide not to be a Communist and then you fight in a different army. There are decisions which obviously have their affect on our actions. But there are also other decisions which have much less obvious effect. And I think there are certain beliefs which don't really change your actions very much at all, but simply change your feelings about what you do. In other words, you go on doing the same thing you've always done, but your perception of its meaning is altered. At that end of the spectrum, I think it's possible to take on certain mythologies in the sense that you don't convert to Buddhism or Hinduism, but you hear a Buddhist or Hindu story, or read a Buddhist or Hindu text about how people should live their lives or what it's all about, and you say, that makes sense to me; that resonates with something in me.
The danger, I suppose, is that if you go far enough along in adopting other myths, you can find yourself in a situation where you're involved in an action system that you don't really subscribe to. For instance, let's say you like the Bhagavad Gita and you like all the Hindu stories, and all of a sudden you find yourself in a village where some widow is going to burn herself to death. Well, that's Hinduism too. Or you're with people who expect you to treat "untouchables" in a way which, as an American, you don't want to do. You may find that you've signed on for a thing with many more implications than one particular story or insightful idea. You may find that you are alienated in some ways from the community that gives your life a kind of structure that you took for granted. Even if you didn't worship in a Protestant church you may have very Protestant ideas about social factors — the way you treat women, the way you treat other people of other classes — ideas which will conflict with your participation in this religion whose stories made sense to you. In some ways you're buying into a bigger agenda than you may realize in buying into certain myths.
Q: The late Joseph Campbell was one of many writers who argued for the fact that beneath all the diverse mythologies of the world are certain core archetypes, or basic mythic themes. But you've pointed out that there are certain limitations to considering only this aspect of world mythology, to using what has, I believe, been called the "universalist" approach. Could you describe exactly what these limitations are?
A: First of all, Joseph Campbell didn't invent it. He got it from Eliade, and Eliade got it from Jung, and Jung got it from Adolph Bastian. And you could say, in a way, that they all got it from Plato. As Whitehead said, everything's really a footnote to Plato. So it's an old idea, but it certainly was developed most popularly by Joseph Campbell. I guess if you go back to what we began talking about — what you learn from other people's myths — I started out by saying you learn what's different and then you learn what's the same. Before learning what's different you have to assume a certain kind of sameness — that is to say, you assume at the very least that the people who tell these stories are intelligent human beings. And then once you've read some of Jung or Eliade or, indeed, Joseph Campbell, you're struck by the fact that you can compare certain stories in one culture with certain stories in another culture, that there are stories about a journey, stories about a search, images of snakes biting their tails, of world mountains in the center of the earth, and so forth, and that these images occur in several different cultures. That's a very interesting fact to know, and the people who have learned it from Joseph Campbell have learned something worth knowing. It's interesting for its own sake, namely, that there are these things which bind us in our symbolic worlds with people who speak very different languages and live apparently very different lives.
What it also does for a historian of religions, someone who is really interested in comparative religions, is that it allows you to compare the stories. In other words, say you have a French story about a hero who goes on a journey, and then you discover that in Africa there's a similar story. That knowledge is not only a fact in itself, namely, that these stories are similar, but it also makes possible a further inquiry, which is to say, let's look at these two stories and see how different they are, how the African story makes a different point from the French story. And it's only the initial realization that there is something in common between them that allows you to make the comparison at all. Once you've pointed that out, then the real fun begins, when you find out how different a Chinese journey is from a French journey — how the goals are different, how the entire point of the story is different.
And more often than not, Joseph Campbell never gets there, never gets to that second stage. He leaves you with the feeling that if you read the French story you don't really even have to read the Chinese story, that it's just interesting to know that the Chinese tell the same story. Whereas that's not the point at all; the point is that even when the Chinese tell the same story, they tell it differently. If you take the trouble to learn the Chinese language and read the Chinese story, you can learn things that are worth all that trouble, because the Chinese story has things which the French story does not have. I think that ultimately the Campbell agenda discourages the really interesting work of comparison, which requires learning languages, which he never did, and things of that sort.
Q: So you're saying that the differences are as enlightening, and sometimes even more enlightening, that the commonalities between the mythic stories from around the world.
A: Exactly. But I'm giving Campbell credit for making it possible to find out those differences, by understanding in the first place that there are commonalities.
Q: Does our culture have any myths today?
A: Well sure, first of all it has the same myths it always had. Adam and Eve is still a very operative myth, I think. I would say that the myth of Easter is still a very operative myth for many, many people. So you could say that some of the classical religious texts still exert a serious appeal on people.
In addition to that, you get the modern secular variations of the ancient myths. In Star Trek, for instance, the episodes are very classically mythological. And Star Wars also. A lot of the science fiction films have mythological themes, to say nothing of movies like Superman, or even Batman. The whole series of "body snatcher" films in the fifties was not only a political metaphor but had a lot of ancient mythology about being possessed and having demons take over the bodies of people. There's a lot of mythology in modern art forms, particularly in popular culture, in comic books. I was just watching The Black Stallion made by Carroll ballard and produced by Francis Coppola; it's full of ancient Indo-European horse mythology about the ocean and the fire and snakes and winged horses, and horses as fathers, and it's just straight out of a lot of medieval epic texts.
Q: But you've also made a distinction between what you call "kitsch" mythology and truer, deeper forms of mythology. What exactly is that distinction?
A: Well, it's a tricky one to make. On the one hand, it is true that mythological art survives pretty dreadful and inept representations. That is to say, you can re-tell the passion narrative or the story of Adam and Even in fairly unartistic ways and still have people moved by it, because the story itself survives. And that's not true of another kind of story. If you tell a love story very badly, and the characters aren't realistic or you don't care about them, people don't like it any more, and they say that it isn't any good.
So you can get away with a lot of kitsch in mythology, but I think that something is lost in a really kitsch representation, and that if you have a really beautiful representation of a myth, it does ultimately survive better, and carry forward more of the original meanings of the myth than a kitsch representation. They both work but, ultimately, kitsch is not as effective as really honest heartfelt mythology.
Q: Do you feel that the mythic variants in popular culture you were describing earlier are kitsch mythology, or can they qualify as true, heartfelt mythology?
A: I guess you'd have to judge each one on its own merits. I think The Black Stallion is certainly a beautiful mythological movie. Some of the body snatcher mythologies are just kitsch; that is, they don't really seem to have any true artistic motivation behind them, they're just sticking these things together and hoping that they'll work.
So I'd say that you'd have to judge them case by case. A good movie is a good movie. Comic books in general are kitsch, because it's difficult — although not impossible — to get real art and real literature into a comic book. But nowadays there are comic books that are quite original and quite striking.
Q: But you've also said that while we may have certain mythologies now, they no longer seem top perform the classical function of traditional myths. What do you mean by this?
A: That's an interesting point. The different between a myth and just any old narrative, I think, is that a myth is perceived as extending in time and space. That is, it is believed to come from the fairly distant past and to belong not to an individual but to a group of people. It's not regarded as an individual creation — although I suppose every story is originally told by some person — and it's not perceived as belonging to only one person. Now, in order for a story to have that function in our culture, it has to be perceived as in the possession of the group; but it's very hard to figure out what our groups are nowadays, really.
Also, the idea that something comes from the distant past is not an idea that most Americans respect. They don't want something old, they want something relevant and something new, and they don't understand that relevant is not the opposite of old. So there are ethnic groups which still have mythologies because they perceive themselves as having a group status. But Americans as a whole, I think, do not function as a religious or cultural unit anymore, and haven't for many decades. For that reason it is hard to think what an "American mythology" would be like. But you could have a Mexican-American mythology, or a Polish-American mythology — and I think you probably do. So there are minor mythologies within American culture, but we no longer have an over-arching cultural myth the way we used to when the whole of Europe was perceived as Christian.
Q: So a mythic theme doesn't necessarily have to evoke a sense of the divine or a sense of the transcendent to perform the function, socially, of a myth?
A: Myth has some relation to what Tillich used to call "ultimate meaning." That is to say, it ultimately touches down upon certain rather deep questions about the meaning of human life. It's not just a soap opera; soap operas aren't myths. And to that extent, Dallas was not a myth. It simply produced a pseudo-mythic community. Star Trek really did raise metaphysical questions.
Q: A lot of people have suggested that science can be thought of as one of the new mythologies. Do you feel that science really does qualify in terms of the ways you're describing myth here?
A: No. It produces a symbolic system which is shared by most of us, and it also ultimately addresses certain questions of basic meaning, and you can see that science is indeed perceived as a mythology by the creationists, who oppose it. They are certainly granting Darwin the status of a religious founder. There are ways in which science functions somewhat like a mythology; Thomas Kuhn has also written that when he talks about the nature of scientific revolutions.
But there are important differences. Science, by and large, does not work through narratives, it works more through models — that's an important difference, I think. Paleography is a narrative and Darwin presents a narrative; those are great exceptions and very important ones, too. It's not an accident that Darwin is, among all founders of scientific systems, the one is of most interest to thinkers in the world of religion, because he is the great scientific storyteller. But aside from Darwin I don't think that science, by and large, is a narrative genre, and that makes it, in my definition, no longer a mythology but simply a symbolic system.
Q: What about the "Big Bang" scenario? Wouldn't that qualify to some extent?
A: That's a narrative. A Cosmogony. A Science which tells us about the way the world began is certainly part of our religious narrative. It's also, of course, unprovable and unfalsifiable, like religious stories.
Q: So the element of "story" and of narrative are major factors in what does or doesn't constitute a myth?
A: Yes. Otherwise you have other religious forms, dogmas, and theories and catechisms and all sorts of things, but a myth is a narrative.
Q: Over the last few decades we've seen a re-emergence of interest in the Goddess. Do you see this wave of interest as a kind of "mythic" motif in modern culture?
A: No, I see it as political. I think it's an offshoot of feminism and of the political awareness of women. I see it as the reaction of women who have been silenced for many centuries and who are now finding a public voice and wish to use that voice in church and in synagogues where they are "not supposed" to. I think it's that more than anything that has motivated the search for the Goddess, and I don't really see it as a religious movement. That is to say, I don't see religious questions being asked. I political and social questions being asked by the women who are attempting to revive the cult of the Goddess.
Q: Well, as you know, many writers have suggested that the evidence indicates that the original world religions were essentially Goddess religions. But you've disagreed with that to some extent, haven't you?
A: Yes. I just don't think the evidence is very conclusive one way or another. There are logical ways to think it might be natural to perceive the creator as female, because women give birth to babies, and there is a womb-like quality to the way that plants are born out of the earth as well. That has to be granted; there is a kind of attraction to that basic way of thinking. There are also statuettes of women found in many primitive sites.
Against that, however, it has to be said that anyone who ever dealt with animals, let alone humans, knew that you also needed a male in order to produce babies in both humans and animals. I think that Frazer and others have shown that the awareness of the power of male generation is, in its own way, as mysterious and dangerous and exciting and as symbolically fruitful as the awareness of the ways that women have babies. So I think there's no reason to assume, without any evidence, that people excluded male sexuality from their models of primary creation. The statuettes of women may just have been women and not goddesses. And there are also a lot of phallic objects and drawings in very early art forms. I suppose ultimately that it's most logical to believe that both powers were acknowledged, and that God was either thought of as androgynous or as a male and a female. I just have never found overwhelming evidence that the female overbalanced the male in the religious perception of prehistoric peoples. And I would not expect it to be so.
Q: What did you mean in your book Other Peoples' Myths that mythic events seem to happen more often to people who believe in the mythic dimension?
A: Well, in a way that was a restatement of something that Jung said years ago. Jung said that myths happen to everybody, they don't just happen to Greek heroes. And I thought about that and I thought, yes, they do happen to everybody, but they happen to some people more than others. In other words, we make a lot of choices in our lives...there are elements of chance and good and bad luck in every life, of course, but there are a lot of choices too, and the sorts of things that happen in myths are things that you could prevent happening to you, to a certain extent, or encourage happening to you. And if you're the sort of person that is aware of myths, either through having read about them in literature or just from having experienced the sorts of things myths are about, and are open to them, then I think that you instinctively make the sorts of choices that allow those things to happen to you. You invest your time and your energy in those aspects of life which are concerned with matters of life and death, matters of hate and love, matters of sensuality, matters of paradox and of dreams. You pay attention to dreams, you pay attention to animals, you pay attention to religions. And in that sense you pay attention to death, you pay attention to "irrational" forms of healing.
People who have listened to stories like that, and who have become interested in those themes, allow more of that sort of event to happen to them than people who simply get up in the morning, go to the stock market and work all day, come home and read the newspaper, and go to sleep. Those people are not going to lead mythic lives. Mercenary soldiers and deep sea divers are going to lead more mythical lives than stockbrokers, by and large. Although, mind you, stockbrokers in their spare time can do very mythical things also!
Q: That reminds me of a great story you relate in the book about the archaeologist Dennis Puleston, which illustrates the extent to which people can become caught up in myths. Do you remember how that goes?
A: About the mountain?
Q: Yes. He was studying the Mayan ritualistic tradition of people being placed on the top of mountains to be struck by lightning...
A: — and he was struck by lightning. Well, there's an example of it, right? What the hell was he doing on the top of a mountain during a thunderstorm? He made that choice; he made it possible to be struck by lightning on the top of a mountain because he was fascinated by the theme and he ended up doing it. It's not inevitable that one will be struck by lightning on the top of a mountain, but if you spend more time up there than other people, it's more likely that it will happen to you than that it'll happen to them! [Laughs] He sought it out and he got it.
Q: It may not be possible to know what our future myths may be, but do you have a sense of what a future mythology will have to be in order to meet the needs of a global society?
A: Oh, well, you think we're going to have a global society? You think we're going to make it, huh? [Laughs] To some extent, it's almost impossible to imagine a global mythology, because mythology is so much tied to groups. And groups are usually small groups. It's hard to think of the human race ever — maybe I'm just pessimistic — it's hard for me sometimes to imagine the human race ever thinking of itself as a group, because one of the qualities that distinguishes a group is "us versus them." We are the people who do this in contrast with the people who do that. So a mythology almost always has an element of exclusivity about it; this is our myth, which is different from their myth. It needn't be aggressive or martial, but it's sort of who we are, and the sense of identity [in a group] has always been more than the identity of belonging to the human race.
A global mythology to me is almost incomprehensible. I should think that the best we could hope for is a group of interlocking, relatively localized mythologies which would not be aggressive toward one another, and which would define their identity and difference in a way which was satisfactory, but which did not require the destruction of the people that had other mythologies! And perhaps there could be an interlocking network in which each person is aware of other mythologies and respectful to them, and acknowledges their truth value while not necessarily converting to them. I think that's the most one could hope for, and that's a lot to hope for.
Q: A group of interlocking mythologies — that's an intriguing idea. As a mythologist, do you see any ways something like that could be facilitated on either a political or social level?
A: Well, you know, it happens all the time. If you look at the three so-called great religions of the book — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — those are three interlocking mythologies. Christianity bases itself consciously upon Jewish scripture, and Islam in turn bases itself consciously upon Jewish and Christian scripture. Now, each of these, of course, has supplementary scriptures that the others do not share, and the fact that they have the same book does not necessarily mean that they have the same reading of the book. But I would say that those are certainly three interlocking mythologies in a way that, for instance, Confucianism is not. Buddhism and Hinduism are interlocking mythologies.
In other words, one gets clusters wherever people live together and know one another. Hinduism and Indian Buddhism interlock. Japanese Buddhism interlocks with Shintoism. Chinese Buddhism interlocks with Confucianism and Taoism. In a way you can really construct a kind of chain, and since the work of the Christian missionaries, there are echoes and bits and pieces of Christian myths that have been worked into the mythologies of most other cultures as well. So, in a sense, there really already is a kind of interlocking mythologies in the world.
Q: It's interesting to speculate as to just how far this can be taken. Are you saying that we see this in pockets, or are you saying that this actually is the condition, in some sense, of the world with all of its diverse mythologies?
A: Both. I'm saying that to the extent that one gets back again to what we began talking about — Adolph Bastian, Jung, and Campbell — one is assuming that all mythologies will have some very basic things in common, because they are part of the basic ways in which human beings construct their symbolic meanings. So that people who have never met will share certain mythological ways of thinking. In addition to that original source — let's say the human mind and human experience and human biology, which is the source of a deep substratum of shared mythology — people meet and tell one another their stories. And so you have a second source of overlapping mythologies, in addition to that commonality of source, which is that Hindu's have met Christians, and Polynesians have met Jews, and so forth. And the mythology then rejoins...it's almost like those Banyan trees that come out of the single root and then put down other roots, then those rejoin one another and go back to the original root, and they meet up in the air as well as down in the ground. I think that's really how mythologies interact.
© 1990 Ray Grasse – all rights reserved