Mythological Essentials

William Doty  Ph.D.

Every now and then I fantasize that some of my contemporaries might wonder what I consider the most relevant features of the passional focus of so many of my energies over the last several decades: myth, mythology, and mythography (the term I use in the sense of the broad study of myths and rituals—see Doty 2000 [Works Cited are at the end of this], and now increasingly many academics—although earlier it meant primarily just collections of certain types of myths).

Distinctions would have to be made, of course, between the sheer academic or scholarly analysis, mythography proper, and recitations and interpretations of mythologies by elementary and secondary school teachers who were fascinated by Norse—or Maya, or Roman—stories. Huge gobs of what is available in mass-market book emporia and Web-sites feed precisely these interests (one that is much richer is Kathleen Jenks’s marvelous and beautifully illustrated Mything*Links.

I am still convinced by Joseph Campbell’s intelligent distinction between the universal and the local (throughout his writings), as well as I am dedicated to perspectives that champion understanding the universal only seriatim, post hoc, as one delves deeply into specific socio-historical contexts according to which any “universal” is concretely situated within any “local” socio-historical setting. What is most interesting to me within our postmodernist atmosphere is precisely its attention to the non-universalistic, the culturally-specific dimensions plumbed within cultural studies, post-colonial studies, third-wave feminism: all sites wherein earlier generations’ fascination with the transcendental is now chastened by today’s insistence upon the particular and local, recognizing the originating society’s assignments of meanings.

A movement founded by Charles Mabee, “American Biblical Hermeneutics,” specifically challenges the long-entrenched conservatism