Myths, Symbols, And Icons

[trekkie]

This is a followup thread to "What do you think about liberal Christians and how do you deal with them" in the Extimonies section of our forum.

 

It was stated there that liberal Christians, while not taking the bible and some facets of Christianity literally, find alot of meaning in the myths, symbols, and icons of Christianity.

 

So I was wondering: what is the purpose of myths, symbols, and icons in a rationalistic/secular worldview?

 

A small example: The popular image of Santa Claus is a myth, a symbol, an icon. The Santa Claus of our traditions never existed: red suit, an elf, living in the North Pole, making toys, slithering down chimneys, having reindeer, etc. Yet, there was a historical saint Nicholaus, a monk who lived about 200 AD who helped the poor.

 

Some very conservative Christians say that teaching our children to believe in Santa Claus (not St. Nicholaus) is lying to them, foisting deception upon them.

 

Others think the idea of Santa Claus is not harmful at all because it stimulates our imaginations and keeps the "spirit of Christmas" alive generation after generation.

 

In my experiences, God was viewed much like Santa Claus. If you were a good boy, doing what Christianity said to do, Santa God would someday give you heaven in your stocking. If you were a bad boy, Santa God would someday send you to hell, stocking and all.

 

What do you think? Is there a good purpose to myths, symbols, and icons in a secular soceity?

 

Are myths always open to personal interpretation and application?

 

Are these things helpful or harmful to humans who, in progressing, seek to understand reality as it really is instead of pretending in a Pollyanna world?

 

Are myths, symbols, and icons really lies?

 

How should we interpret them?

[Legion]

“The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.” –Joseph Campbell

 

So we perhaps we could also ask ourselves if dreams have a purpose Trekkie.

[Ouroboros]

I think symbols, myths, and icons are part of who we are. We can't get rid of them unless we get rid of every ounce of what being human is.

 

Math is a symbolic language, is it therefore useless? Language is symbolic. How you interpret what I'm currently saying is your way of interpreting the symbols.

 

We all have a myth about ourselves, how we are, how we think, and how we think other people see us. If we got rid of it, we wouldn't even consider thinking about ourselves or who we are. We can never fully know how other people see us, so we have to build an image (imaginary) of how we think people do see us. But it's a myth, and yet we have to have it, unless we remove retrospective thought.

 

We have icons, like actors, heroes, leaders, people we look up to. Should we consider ourselves to be better, and never have people to look up to?

 

Now, there are other myths like the ones you're mentioning, like Santa Claus, and they are basically the side effects of that we have this nature. If you manage to get rid of Santa, a new icon/myth will arise.

 

Think about it this way. Breathing in toxic air is dangerous. But does that mean breathing is a bad thing?

[Antlerman]

There's a lot to be said to this, so I'll just scratch open the surface and sees where it goes. Mythologies are not just Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny. They are an amalgam of symbols which get lumped together to communicate whole ideas and ideals, which when taken in seem natural to the observer. I'm going to quote from a reviewer's synopsis on Roland Barthes' book Mythologies for some examples:

 

Barthes often claimed that he wanted to challenge the `innocence' and `naturalness' of cultural texts and practices which were capable of producing all sorts of supplementary meanings, or connotations to use Barthes's preferred term. Although objects, gestures and practices have a certain utilitarian function, they are not resistant to the imposition of meaning. There is no such thing, to take but one example, as a car which is a purely functional object devoid of connotations and resistant to the imposition of meaning. A BMW and a Citroën 2CV share the same functional utility, they do essentially the same job but connote different things about their owners: thrusting, upwardly-mobile executive versus ecologically sound, right-on trendy. We can speak of cars then, as signs expressive of a number of connotations. It is these sorts of secondary meanings or connotations that Barthes is interested in uncovering in Mythologies. Barthes wants to stop taking things for granted, wants to bracket or suspend consideration of their function, and concentrate rather on what they mean and how they function as signs.

 

<snip>

 

Mythologies

- both the journalistic articles and the theoretical essay - is a study of the ways in which mass culture - a mass culture which Barthes sees as controlled by la petite bourgeoisie constructs this mythological reality and encourages conformity to its own values. This position informs the various texts that make up Mythologies.

 

We inhabit a world, then, of signs which support existing power structures and which purport to be natural. The role of the mythologist, as Barthes sees it, is to expose these signs as the artificial constructs that they are, to reveal their workings and show that what appears to be natural is, in fact, determined by history.

 

<snip>

 

It is possible to argue that `myth', as Barthes uses it in Mythologies, functions as a synonym of `ideology' (for a more detailed discussion of this complex issue see Brown: 1994 pp.24-38). As a theoretical construct `ideology' is notoriously hard to define. However, one of the most pervasive definitions of the term holds that it refers to the body of beliefs and representations that sustain and legitimate current power relationships. Ideology promotes the values and interests of dominant groups within society. I like the explanation Terry Eagleton comes up with in his book Ideology: An Introduction:

 

A dominant power may legitimate itself by promoting beliefs and values congenial to it; naturalizing and universalizing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself. Such `mystification', as it is commonly known, frequently takes the form of masking or suppressing social conflicts, from which arises the conception of ideology as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions. (Eagleton: 1991 pp.5-6)

 

This particular definition of the workings of ideology is particularly relevant to Mythologies. Common to both Eagleton's definition of ideology and Barthes's understanding of myth is the notion of a socially constructed reality which is passed of as `natural'. The opinions and values of a historically and socially specific class are held up as `universal truths'. Attempts to challenge this naturalization and universalization of a socially constructed reality (what Barthes calls le cela-va-de-soi) are dismissed for lacking `bon sens', and therefore excluded from serious consideration. The real power relations in society (between classes, between coloniser and colonised, between men and women etc.) are obscured, reference to all tensions and difficulties blocked out, glossed over, their political threat defused.

 

Let me try to clarify these points with an example from Mythologies. In `Le vin et le lait' (Barthes: 1970 pp.74-77) Barthes explores the significance of wine to the French. Wine is clearly an important symbolic substance to the French expressive of conviviality, of virility and, more importantly, of national identity. Nothing could be more expressive of an `essential Frenchness' than a ballon de rouge. The uproar caused at the beginning of Monsieur Coty's presidential term of office by being photographed at home next to a bottle of beer, rather than the obligatory bottle of red, captures this perfectly. Barthes unsettles the mythological associations of wine by making explicit wine's real status as just another commodity produced for profit. He draws attention to wine-makers' exploitation of the Third World, citing Algeria as an example of a poor Muslim country forced to use its land for the cultivation of a product - `le produit d'une expropriation (Barthes: 1970 p.77) - which they are forbidden to drink on religious grounds and which could be better used for cultivating food crops. Barthes makes explicit the connections between wine and the socio-economics of its production. And this is an integral part of his aim as a mythologist: he must expose the artificiality of those signs which disguise their historical and social origins

 

Now here's where it get's murky, a little. I would contend to that everything we take in through language is a form of this. We communicate through implied meanings. We communicate through connotation. That's what myth is all about. It's using symbols to communicate whole levels of meaning in simple word signs. "Mother". That word alone conveys not merely "female parent", but nurturing, friend, trust, home, provision, love, strength, etc. This is why the media, the politicians, and every marketing guru alive finds such connotatively rich verbiage to appeal to the masses with. The "truth" behind the symbols - lays our desire to believe; our desire to find meaning. I would contend that it is impossible to strip myth out of language, on every level from commercial advertising, to religion, to daily personal communication. We frame our understandings of ourselves through symbols, and connotation-rich language is an powerful and effective means of communication, to ourselves in relating to the world, and in communicating with others; and tragically sometimes to mislead and destroy.

 

So what of the symbol of God? Is it different than the bottle of wine to a French person? Not really. It does operate on the same level, just with different messages. They both operate as myths (symbols layered with symbols to create a story of meanings). So when Jung speaks of mythical archetypes, and Joseph Campbell digs into the common themes from culture, I see a picture of man trying to relate himself to the world in symbol. "Facts", though relevant and important to technology and scientific investigation, does not produce symbol-rich language on this level: a humanistic level of an "irrational" desire for meaning in response to the terror that comes through our sense of meaninglessness.

 

Alright, enough for now.

 

P.S. I should clarify that I see a difference between pursuing ideals and being ideological.

[Vomit Comet]

Poststructuralist semiotics are useful for understanding communication, knowledge, understanding, epistemes, etc.

 

But we can still see the artifacts and stories of the church as being mere museum pieces. Whatever lingering effect (baggage!) they have on us culturally, psychologically, etc., despite our irreligiousness is one thing that could be looked at, I reckon. Otherwise, I don't think there are any underlying truths or structures that these things scratch at. I'm taking the basic poststructuralist stance on that one. It's just arbitrary fluff that can be discarded, and then the residual baggage can fade with time until it's impossible even for fanatical Althusserians to identify its continued lurking presence. Well, we can dream, can't we?

[Neon Genesis]

There's a lot to be said to this, so I'll just scratch open the surface and sees where it goes. Mythologies are not just Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny. They are an amalgam of symbols which get lumped together to communicate whole ideas and ideals, which when taken in seem natural to the observer.

And if we had no religious symbols, we wouldn't have kickass anime like Neon Genesis Evangelion that use religious symbols to convey its themes and message, so that's one example where religion is used to communicate ideas: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_Genesis_...ion_(TV_series)