Myth Theorized - Robert A. Segal
Eliade on Myth and Science
Myth Theorized - Robert A. Segal
Robert A. Segal [+]
University of Aberdeen
Description
In chapter eight I consider Eliade on myth and science. In contrast to nineteenth-century theorists like Tylor and Frazer, Eliade, together with Malinowski, maintains that myth and science are compatible--not because their subject matter is other than the physical world, as for Bultmann, Jonas, Camus, Freud, and Jung, but even when their subject is the physical world, as it often is. For Malinowski, myth covers physical woes, such as flooding and illness, that science, at least for primitive peoples, is too rudimentary to cope with. Myth explains those woes by tracing them back to events from long ago, but it cannot remedy them. It espouses resigned acceptance. Eliade, by contrast, does not seek to reconcile myth with science. For him, the fact that, especially, moderns have both means that they must be compatible. But how so? He does not even try to explain. He is left with two, purportedly compatible, kinds of explanations of the origin of physical phenomena, one mythic and one scientific. He is similarly left with two, purportedly compatible, kinds of explanations of social phenomena, such as race. One is mythic, the other social scientific. At the same time Eliade proposes functions that go far beyond that of science. Most important, myth, when read or heard or acted out, magically returns one to the time of the myth and thereby enables one to experience the gods in the myth.