LIT 229 Module Three 1 The Function of Form Because it resides at the deepest level of culture and our psyches, myth takes many forms as it works its way into public and private consciousness. It is instructive to mark these many forms and distinguish them from one another, but it is even more important to understand their history and cultural context. This context provides an account of their use, the unique forms they take, and the meanings we have attached to them. The Birth of Myth We touched on the orality and literacy dynamic very briefly in Module One, and it is a subject worth revisiting here as we explore the history of mythological forms. It is tempting to understand our world in terms of present technology, and most of us fall prey to this deception for reasons that will become clear. Once, a teenager asked if the world was black and white before the 1960s. She asked because everything she saw on television from that period was in black and white. We tend to use the same logic when we think about writing; that is, we project its influence backwards into history and assume that the past functioned as literate cultures do now. Scholars who work in orality and literacy studies have shown us that actually the opposite is the case. Human beings have existed in oral cultures long before and much longer than in literate cultures, and oral forms and thinking continue to influence literate cultures, even 500 years after the invention of the printing press. Myth was born in oral cultures and retains those features even now. A Book About the Absence of Books Walter J. Ong’s 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word provides a succinct and compelling account of the nature of oral cultures and the “secondary orality” afforded by new technology. In a chapter titled “Some Psychodynamics of Orality,” Ong details the profound differences of living in an oral culture, and they are worth reviewing in our study of myth’s forms. To begin, we must reflect on the nature of sound itself; specifically, it is evanescent. By the time one hears the syllable “scent,” the syllable “evan” is gone. In other words, sound has a relationship to time that writing does not. Writing can freeze time by placing words on a page, but words in an oral culture are always fleeting. As 2 LIT 229 Module Three Ong notes: There is no way to stop sound and have sound. I can stop a moving picture camera and hold one frame fixed on the screen. If I stop the movement of sound, I have nothing—only silence, no sound at all. All sensation takes place in time, but no other sensory field totally resists a holding action, stabilization, in quite this way. Vision can register motion, but it can also register immobility. Indeed, it favors immobility, for to examine something closely by vision, we prefer to have it quiet. We often reduce motion to a series of still shots the better to see what motion is. Th ...

1. LIT 229 Module Three 1
The Function of Form
Because it resides at the deepest level of culture and our
psyches, myth takes many forms
as it works its way into public and private consciousness. It is
instructive to mark these many
forms and distinguish them from one another, but it is even
more important to understand
their history and cultural context. This context provides an
account of their use, the unique
forms they take, and the meanings we have attached to them.
The Birth of Myth
We touched on the orality and literacy dynamic very briefly in
Module One, and it is a subject
worth revisiting here as we explore the history of mythological
forms. It is tempting to
understand our world in terms of present technology, and most
of us fall prey to this
deception for reasons that will become clear. Once, a teenager
asked if the world was black
and white before the 1960s. She asked because everything she
saw on television from that
period was in black and white. We tend to use the same logic

2. when we think about writing;
that is, we project its influence backwards into history and
assume that the past functioned
as literate cultures do now. Scholars who work in orality and
literacy studies have shown us
that actually the opposite is the case. Human beings have
existed in oral cultures long
before and much longer than in literate cultures, and oral forms
and thinking continue to
influence literate cultures, even 500 years after the invention of
the printing press. Myth was
born in oral cultures and retains those features even now.
A Book About the Absence of Books
Walter J. Ong’s 1982 book Orality and Literacy: The
Technologizing of the Word provides a
succinct and compelling account of the nature of oral cultures
and the “secondary orality”
afforded by new technology. In a chapter titled “Some
Psychodynamics of Orality,” Ong
details the profound differences of living in an oral culture, and
they are worth reviewing in
our study of myth’s forms. To begin, we must reflect on the
nature of sound itself;
specifically, it is evanescent. By the time one hears the syllable
“scent,” the syllable “evan” is
gone. In other words, sound has a relationship to time that
writing does not. Writing can
freeze time by placing words on a page, but words in an oral
culture are always fleeting. As

3. 2 LIT 229 Module Three
Ong notes:
There is no way to stop sound and have sound. I can stop a
moving picture camera
and hold one frame fixed on the screen. If I stop the movement
of sound, I have
nothing—only silence, no sound at all. All sensation takes place
in time, but no other
sensory field totally resists a holding action, stabilization, in
quite this way. Vision can
register motion, but it can also register immobility. Indeed, it
favors immobility, for to
examine something closely by vision, we prefer to have it quiet.
We often reduce
motion to a series of still shots the better to see what motion is.
There is no equivalent
of a still shot for sound. An oscillogram is silent. It lies outside
the sound world. (32)
But what does this mean for storytelling? For one thing it means
that in oral cultures, words
are wedded to time; therefore, words are events. To speak is to
act, and many mythologies
depict this reality directly; for example, “And God said, “’Let
there be light,’ and there was
light” (Genesis 1:3). Because spoken words are events, they can
and do affect the world.
Another side of the evanescence of words in oral cultures is that
because speech is fleeting,
the information it carries is easily lost. People living in oral
cultures must have a highly

4. developed memory, and since all information is carried in
spoken words, those words must
have mnemonic qualities. Thought must take the form of
rhythmic patterns that are easily
repeatable and set against other patterns to form a web of
memory, of information. Ong puts
it this way:
Formulas help implement rhythmic discourse and also act as
mnemonic aids in their
own right, as set expressions circulating through the mouths and
ears of all. “Red in
the morning, the sailor’s warning; red in the night, the sailor’s
delight.” “Divide and
conquer.” “To err is human, to forgive is divine.” “Sorrow is
better than laughter,
because when the face is sad the heart grows wiser”
(Ecclesiastes 7:3). “The clinging
vine.” “The sturdy oak.” “Chase off nature and she returns at a
gallop.” Fixed, often
rhythmically balanced, expressions of this sort and of other
sorts can be found
occasionally in print, indeed can be “looked up” in books of
sayings, but in oral
cultures they are not occasional. They are incessant. They form
the substance of
thought itself. Thought in any extended form is impossible
without them, for it consists
in them. (34–5)
This process describes how works such as the Bible, the Iliad,
and the Odyssey can be
passed down without a text—the interlocking patterns of plot,
characterization, rhythm,

5. alliteration, assonance, epithets, and other mnemonic forms
hold the story in place, and that
place is memory.
LIT 229 Module Three 3
Other features of oral cultures are that they are additive rather
than subordinative, which is
to say that there is frequent use of conjunctions to string
together the mnemonic elements
rather than nested clauses and phrases typical of the relatively
static grammar and syntax of
literacy. Redundancy is also a prominent feature of oral cultures
since the medium must be
oversaturated with the necessary information or it is lost. The
public speaking adage “Tell
them what you are going to say, say it, then tell them what you
said” is drawn directly from
oral dynamics. In oral cultures, words are concrete rather than
abstract. For example, the
language will not typically have a word like January for that
time of the year when it is cold in
the northern hemisphere; rather, it will be the “moon of the
popping trees” to depict a
particular lunar cycle when the trees are so cold that they make
an unusual sound. In oral
cultures, everything is grounded in lived experience. Similarly,
conceptual thinking as
understood in literate cultures is non-existent in oral cultures.
Instead, all thought is
grounded in experience. The classic syllogism in which a

6. conclusion is drawn from two
premises cannot be processed by thinkers in an oral culture, and
when presented with the
exercise, the following interchange might occur:
Anthropologist: “In the far north, all bears are white. Antarctica
is in the far north.
What color are the bears there?”
Subject: “I don’t know. I’ve never been to the far north, but
I’ve seen a black bear.”
One final observation from Ong for our purposes is that in oral
cultures, communication
cannot take place without direct human interaction.
Information-sharing is grounded in the
bodies of the speakers and listeners, and if those bodies are not
in the same communal
space, no communication can take place, and no information can
be shared.
Orality and the Meaning of Myth
The impacts of these observations upon myth are deep and
profound, and any discussion of
myth’s forms must begin here where myth was born. First of all,
we can note that the
strangeness and distance we experience in reading ancient
myths is related to the distance
we are from hearing them in oral cultures. Myth’s forms are
oral, but we are reading them as
literature. Secondly, if we understand the oral context of the
stories, we can apply it to our
reading and imaginatively enter the listener’s space. While this

7. effort will never be
completely effective, it is more productive than reading a myth
solely as a literate product,
which will produce dissonance in varying degrees. Finally and
most importantly, while the
myth we are reading is lying inert on the page, it was for the
most part of its life alive and
functioning as the primary medium for information in its
original context. People depended
upon these myths to survive and live together, and both the
people and the myths were in
dynamic relation. In reading a myth on a page, then, we are
functioning as something like a
4 LIT 229 Module Three
forensic anthropologist trying to determine the meaning of a
person’s life using only his
skeleton. That is not to say, however, that meaning cannot be
retained or restored in a
written version of a myth. We will explore how written
language can embody myth in our unit
on myth and literature, and Momaday's essay addresses the
issue as well.
Reducing Myth to Its Essential Form: Twin Theorists
Just as we can draw a line from Plato to the missionary in the
Eastman story—a line made
of logos, or truth—we can also draw a line between an ancient
Greek and a modern German
linguist when it comes to myth’s forms. Both of these theorists

8. view myth through the lens of
writing and find it to be a corruption of one kind or another.
Euhemerus lived in the century after Plato and may have been
the first mythographer
(theorist of myth) to explain how it becomes “fable and
falsehood.” In his lost book Sacred
History, Euhemerus explains how the stories of gods and their
power are exaggerations of
historical or folkloric accounts of actual human beings and their
unusual gifts and deeds. For
example, he argued that Zeus was simply an especially powerful
king. Through time and
storytelling, an apotheosis occurs as memories fade and legends
grow. Like Plato, but with
more detail, Euhemerus used logos to undo muthos by showing
that myth was excessive
language used in regard to natural occurrences.
Similarly, a German scholar named Friedrich Max Müller used
his training in linguistics to
demonstrate that myth was “a disease of language.” Müller uses
the myth of Phoebus Apollo
and Daphne to explain his theory. Daphne was a beautiful wood
nymph who was being
pursued by lustful Phoebus Apollo. Just as she was about to be
overtaken, Daphne called
out for help and was turned into a laurel tree, thereby
frustrating Apollo’s desires. Müller
claims that far from being a story about the gods and humans, it
is instead a simple
description of an everyday occurrence that has been infected by
myth. He points out that the
name of the god has etymological roots to the word “sun” and
the name of the nymph has
roots in the word “dawn,” so the “myth” is actually a

9. description of the sun chasing away the
dawn. After its mythological infection, however, it becomes the
story of lustful Apollo and the
shy wood nymph, complete with a concerned father and moral
implications. There are a
number of problems with Müller’s interpretation, but it is
interesting that he has to tell a good
story to debunk a good older story. His is a good story because
it confirms our deep belief in
the power of rationality over fantasy, of logos over muthos,
which is itself Western culture’s
story.
LIT 229 Module Three 5
Types of Myths
Cosmic Myths: The word cosmos is Greek for order and refers
to the order of the universe
or cosmos. Cosmic myths, then, are about the big issues: the
world and our place in it. More
specifically, they concern creation, destruction, heaven, and
hell. Obviously, here is where
the cosmological function comes into play most profoundly but
not exclusively.
Myths of the Gods: Most understandings of myth—both
scholarly and popular—center on
“stories of the gods.” God is a necessary and common subject

10. for myth since it reaches
beyond the experience of the quotidian and into the realm of the
unknown, which is often the
home of the divine.
Hero Myths: This is possibly our favorite type of myth because
it is about us instead of the
gods or the cosmos. Hero myths represent humans reaching their
full potential, usually by
overcoming the natural resistance of the universe, the social
resistance of other humans,
and the powerful resistance of the gods. Sometimes reaching
that full potential even means
apotheosis, or becoming divine.
Place and Object Myths: This is a more general category that
includes stories of the origin
of sacred spaces, particular objects, and even the body itself.
These myths often provide
rationales and scripts for ritual actions.
Related Forms
To continue our birth metaphor, myth has, like Zeus, given birth
to an entire family of forms
that have varying degrees of similarity and relation. Here are
brief explanations of these
related forms and their family resemblances and differences.
Fable: Unlike myth, a fable usually is didactic in nature and
thus has a moral to its story.
Fables also are generic in terms of details, while myths are
typically specific in terms of
contexts. Fables serve mainly the societal function, while myth
serves all four functions.

11. Folktales: The differences between folktales and myths are
subtle but not ultimately
important since they have to do mainly with arguments about
terminology. The most
significant difference has to do with who is telling the tale, the
“folk” or an elite person, but
again, this is an argument within European history more than an
issue in myth studies.
Sagas: The etymology is Old Norse and means simply “what is
said.” The term is most
precisely used to refer to Icelandic prose narratives regarding
those national heroes, though
6 LIT 229 Module Three
it is sometimes loosely used to refer to other historical
narratives.
Epics: The term usually calls to mind Homer’s Iliad and
Odyssey, and as such refers to long
stories in poetic form that integrate myth, history, and heroes to
form a compelling national
narrative. Many cultures have such poems that define their
national character through the
actions of their heroes and heroines in founding the city or
nation (e.g., The Aeneid).
Legends: Legends are typically more associated with historical
personalities, such as Arthur
or Gawain, but they also include mythical material. For most
practical purposes, this word is

12. a synonym for myth. One could argue that legends are more
historically based or at least
historically focused and not be wrong, but the distinctions
between them and myth quickly
disappear upon close analysis.
Parables: Shorter and more to the point than myths, parables are
closer to didactic riddles
designed to force the listener into a new awareness of a
particular truth or mode of conduct.
Etiologic Tales: The term refers to the assignment of causes or,
for our purposes, a story
about how things came to be the way they are. These stories are
a type of myth, but not the
only type. Their function is primarily explanatory.
What It All Means
It all means a lot, of course, but for our purposes you should be
aware that in reading an
ancient myth, you are entering another world, not just the world
of that culture and language,
but the world where stories are life and the forms they take and
use are experiential,
dynamic, and charged with meaning.
LIT 229 Module Three 7

13. Works Cited
Bolle, Kees W., and Richard G. A. Buxton. "Myths." Web. 19
Mar. 2013.
"Euhemerus.” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. N.p., n.d. Web.
20 Mar. 2013.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euhemerus>.
Leeming, David Adams. The World of Myth. New York: Oxford
UP, 1990. Print.
Momaday, N. Scott. “The Man Made of Words.” Nothing but
the Truth: An Anthology of Native American
Literature. Ed. John L. Purdy and James Ruppert. Upper Saddle
River: Prentice Hall, 2001. 82–95.
Print.
Müller, Freidrich M. "Full Text of "Comparative Mythology: An
Essay." Archive.org, n.d. Web. 19 Mar. 2013.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
Word. London: Methuen, 1982. Print.