A SHORT HISTORY OF MYTH. Karen Armstrong. 159pp. - 1 84195 644 9.
THE PENELOPIAD. The myth of Penelope and Odysseus. Margaret Atwood. 199pp. - 1
84195 645 7.
WEIGHT. The myth of Atlas and Heracles. Jeanette Winterson. 151pp. - 184195 671 6.
Edinburgh: Canongate. Pounds 12 each.
The two writers who inaugurate Canongate's ambitious new project, to publish a series of modern retellings of international myths, are inspired choices.
Jeanette Winterson's work, as she admits in her introduction, is "full of Cover Versions", and Margaret Atwood's novels are often shaped by traditional stories. First in the series, though, is A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong. Short it truly is. Armstrong has a great deal to pack into 159 pages, and it is hardly surprising that some chapters are taken at a breathless pace. She begins with a well-judged discussion of Paleolithic myth, comparing the myths and rituals of modern hunter societies -Australians, Greenlandic Eskimos, shamanic practices -with early archaeological finds. An introduction to myth in the Ancient Near East follows, tracing the consequences of the discovery of agriculture, and the development of cities, for the myth corpus.
The first half of the book is largely uncontentious: Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell are most frequently cited, and Eliade's concept of mythic time is helpfully explained as "Everywhen". There are, inevitably, generalizations which hold good chiefly for Near Eastern and classical myth, that "mythology is usually inseparable from ritual", or that myth usually functions as a kind of ethical charter. These definitions do not necessarily hold up in wider mythological contexts; Georges Dumezil, Franz Boas and Claude Levi-Strauss are not cited, nor are recent scholars of area myth such as Jean-Pierre Vernant, or Margaret Clunies-Ross. Other dicta are sensible: that myth is not theology, but about human existence, and that myth is not an early attempt at history which humans grow out of, are corrective and valid observations. And Armstrong is rightly cautious in dealing with contentious issues, such as the claim made by some feminist scholars for evidence of matriarchal rule at the Catal Huyuk site in Turkey.
Halfway through, Armstrong's account takes an unexpected turn. The author reverts to her occupation as a popular historian of religion and shows how the world's great belief systems -first, Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism and Greek philosophy, thereafter Kabbalah, Christianity and Islam - spring from, then reject, the mythological element in the human imagination, preferring the abstract, the rational, the ethical: that which Armstrong defines as Logos.
