The Implied Spider Updated with a New Preface

By Wendy Doniger

Wendy Doniger's foundational study is both modern in its engagement with a diverse range of religions and refreshingly classic in its transhistorical, cross-cultural approach. By responsibly analyzing patterns and themes across context, Doniger reinvigorates the comparative reading of religion, tapping into a wealth of narrative traditions, from the instructive tales of Judaism and Christianity to the moral lessons of the Bhagavad Gita. She extracts political meaning from a variety of texts while respecting the original ideas of each. A new preface confronts the difficulty of contextualizing the comparison of religions as well as controversies over choosing subjects and positioning arguments, and the text itself is expanded and updated throughout.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jan 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9780231527118

Book preview

The Implied Spider

COLUMBIA CLASSICS IN RELIGION

COLUMBIA CLASSICS IN RELIGION

Columbia Classics in Religion celebrates the long-standing tradition of publishing novel and influential works in religion.

The Implied Spider

POLITICS AND THEOLOGY IN MYTH

Updated with a New Preface

WENDY DONIGER

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2011 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN: 978-0-231-52711-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Doniger, Wendy.

The implied spider : politics and theology in myth / Wendy Doniger. — [Updated ed.]

p. cm. — (Columbia classics in religion)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-15641-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-15642-4 (pbk.)

1. Myth—Study and teaching—Methodology. 2. Mythology—Study and teaching… Methodology. I. Title. II. Series.

BL304.D54 2011

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Bruce Lincoln and David Tracy

Contents

Preface to the Updated Edition: Context and History

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

Myth and Metaphor

CHAPTER ONE

Microscopes and Telescopes

Myths as Textual Lenses

Scholarly Lenses on Myths

Myths as Theological Lenses in Job and the Bhagavata Purana

Myths as Political Lenses

Myths as Human Lenses

CHAPTER TWO

Dark Cats, Barking Dogs, Chariots, and Knives

The Difference of Dark Cats

The Dog That Doesn’t Bark

The Same Old Story

The Context

The Whole and the Parts: Chariots and Knives

CHAPTER THREE

Implied Spiders and the Politics of Individualism

Universalist Problems

Cross-Cultural Solutions

The Implied Spider

The Postcolonial and Postmodern Critique of Comparison

The Art and Science of Mythology

CHAPTER FOUR

Micromyths, Macromyths, and Multivocality

The Myth with No Point of View

Many Voices

Micromyths and Macromyths

The Myth with Points of View

Inverted Political Versions

Inverted Political Readings of Contemporary Mythic Texts

CHAPTER FIVE

Mother Goose and the Voices of Women

Old Wives’ Tales

Women’s Points of View

Men’s Voices in Women’s Texts

Women’s Voices in Men’s Texts

Androgynous Language

Salvaging Women’s Voices

CHAPTER SIX

Textual Pluralism and Academic Pluralism

The Archetype

Diffusion and Survival

The Foul Rag and Bones Shop of the Heart

Jumping off the Bricolage Bus

The Greening of Claude Lévi-Strauss

Seventy Different Interpretations

The Multiversity

Walking the Tightrope

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface to the Updated Edition

Context and History

THE MYTH OF THE NEW EDITION

Back in the 1970s, Phil Lilienthal, Director of the University of California Press—fed up with pleading with me, in vain, to stop making changes in the proofs of my book in press ( The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology )—had a small sign made for me to put on my desk: SAVE IT FOR THE SECOND EDITION. Forthwith I started a file of errata and addenda. But, although the book is still in print over thirty years later, the second edition proved to be nothing but a myth, a story that was good for me to believe in but unverifiable in the real world. Here the double meaning of myth comes into play: the word often has, for me, the positive connotation of something culturally richer and psychologically more revealing than history alone, a portal into civilization’s inner self.¹ But when considering the historical functions of many myths, I would define the term as a story that a group of people believe for a long time despite massive evidence that it is not actually true. The spirit of myth is the spirit of Oz: pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

There are, however, other reasons for keeping notes on things you’d like to change in a book. Mircea Eliade used to scribble in the margins of the published books he’d written, correcting new thoughts that he had continued to have on those subjects, and expanding the bibliographies when other scholars continued to publish related works, often in response to his own. In doing this, he once told me, he felt he was keeping the books not merely up to date but alive,² changing, even though most of his notes never found their way into new editions. (Of course a book lives on in one sense as long as anyone reads it, but it doesn’t continue to grow like a living thing unless the author acknowledges the ways it could be improved.) I kept such a file on The Implied Spider , right from the point of no return in page proofs. But this time, to my delight, Columbia University Press has given me the chance actually to make the changes, to give the book a second incarnation a decade after its birth. Perhaps we could even call it The Revised Spider.

Aside from the more trivial errata, most of the changes consist in additions to the cluster of examples that illuminate or substantiate particular points in the original text, adding more players to my team in defense against potential critics. For the old, mad, bad idea of making the study of religion a science rather than an art continues to corrupt the discipline, though to be honest, comparative mythology has always gotten bad press. I had originally noted Shakespeare’s Fluellen as the very model of a bad comparatist, but a sharper, more relevant satire on a comparatist is the villain in one of the great novels of the nineteenth century, George Eliot’s Middlemarch. The Reverend Edward Casaubon, a pompous, arrogant, selfish megalomaniac, is every comparatist’s nightmare. Here is how he is first introduced:

He told her how he had undertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted before, but not with that thoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed. Having once mastered the true position and taken a firm footing there, the vast field of mythical constructions became intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of correspondences.³

This is, alas, how many of us appear to critics.

So we need all the allies we can get. Some of the passages added to this edition further nuance my original rather broad-brush formulations, while others are more elegant or persuasive formulations (by other people) of points I had made. I have revised the text in this way on a number of points: the truth of lies (Introduction); going inside the mouth of god, the imagery of sand and the size of the universe (chapter 1); hedgehogs and foxes, the metaphor of the transformation of a ship (chapter 2); the communal aspect of myths, Shylock’s defense of the humanity of Jews, the nature of shared experience, god as a spider, the uniqueness of Shakespeare (chapter 3); double meanings, the garden of Eden, opera as myth, ambiguous visual icons (chapter 4); and a rather longer section on women’s voices in men’s texts (chapter 5).

But there are also two subjects, treated throughout the book as a whole, that I have changed my mind about and that are therefore best discussed here at the start: context⁴ and the relationship between myth and history.⁵

CONTEXT

My ideas about context shifted as a result of writing two books⁶ that made use of context in ways new to me and becoming aware of the new wave of good contextualized work now being done by other scholars. I also came to see that comparative approaches that subordinate context to morphology or shared meanings need a stronger defense in the face of the continuing move, in the field of religious studies, away from anything that smacks of a broader universalism. I haven’t changed my basic thinking about comparison; I haven’t gone over to the dark side of hard-core Marxist-Foucaultian historical studies. I still think that cross-cultural comparison is worth doing and can be done responsibly, rigorously. But I now realize more fully how much is lost if context is abandoned, and how many ways there are of contextualizing comparison to make it richer. In other words, I intend to hold my ground, but I now acknowledge that the arguments against my position are stronger than I had previously recognized and must be faced more boldly and honestly, if only to reculer pour mieux sauter.

An unexpected ally in defense of comparison, not only despite but also precisely because of the loss of context, is the team of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin. Arendt writes in her introduction to Benjamin’s Illuminations :

From the Goethe essay on, quotations are at the center of every work of Benjamin’s. This very fact distinguishes his writings from scholarly works of all kinds in which it is the function of quotation to verify and document opinions, wherefore they can safely be relegated to the Notes. This is out of the question for Benjamin. When he was working on his study of German tragedy, he boasted of over 600 quotations very systematically and clearly arranged (Briefe I, 339); like the later notebooks, this collection was not an accumulation of excerpts intended to facilitate the writing of the study but constituted the main work, with the writing as something secondary. The main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated one another, and were able to prove their raison d’être in a free-floating state, as it were.⁷

Tearing fragments out of their context strips them of one set of meanings but makes possible another set of free-floating meanings through which the fragments illustrate one another. This is parallel to Claude Lévi-Strauss’s method of allowing entire myths to explain one another, which assumes that one must have many variants of a myth in order to begin the analysis.

The free-floating power of a myth that has broken away from its contextual anchor has, I think, less value for most scholars of myth than it had for Walter Benjamin. For myths are always context-sensitive.⁸ Acknowledging the importance of context has led me to take more seriously the possibility of comparing contexts, a subject that I broached in the first edition but did not develop as much as I might have. Such comparison still begins with the scholar’s formulation (however arbitrary) of the subject of study, the micromyth, and the selection of at least two cultures that have thought about that subject. But at that point, a second process intervenes, taking into account the historical context of each occurrence of the micromyth, showing how it was inspired or configured by the events of the times, how it responded to what was happening on the political and economic scene. The two contexts can then be compared, along with the two myths, as can the relationship between each story and its context. This contextualized synchronic approach avoids some of the worst pitfalls of the more purely morphological comparisons of the Eliadean school. It helps us to see not merely that stories change but why they change. I sketched out, in the first edition of this book, the way I was trying to do this in my comparison of the myths of the shadow Helen in Greece and the shadow Sita in India; the result is the book Splitting the Difference.

In the first edition I argued that the focus on context to some extent dulls our appreciation of individuality. The question of originality is always a puzzle, in part because we can never account for individual genius; of course ideas don’t arise in a vacuum, nor are they nothing but the sum total of ideas that came before them. Individuals have ideas, often quite different from the ideas of other people living at the same time and place. This is particularly important to keep in mind when we search for the voices of marginalized people, who often achieve as individuals what they cannot achieve as a group. But context is still very important in coming to understand a force that works in tandem with originality, namely, the ability to flourish, to prevail. Originality is important for scholars to acknowledge, though ultimately impossible to account for; but some degree of knowledge of the conditions under which original ideas survive is often within our grasp. The context of history can explain why some narratives take hold and spread, while others do not; stories take root only when they become important to people at a particular time, when they connect to something that those people care about.

We can also contextualize a myth diachronically, by showing how each narrative is a reaction to narratives that came before it within its own tradition (as any good old-fashioned philological approach would do). Taking into account the diachronic development allows us to see how certain ongoing ideas evolve, which we cannot do with a contextualized focus on a particular event or text at a particular moment. In this way the telescope, the viewfinder, of historical context supplements the microscope of the purely textual analysis.

MYTH AND HISTORY

This brings us to the relationship between myth and history. My ideas about this changed largely as a result of writing about the political uses of myth through the course of Indian history in The Hindus: An Alternative History. And at the same time as I was moving closer to history, history was moving closer to me, as the insights of postmodernist historians (Collingwood, Hayden White) exerted an increasingly pervasive influence on the study of myth. (Ideas generally reach historians of religion a decade or two after the anthropologists and historians have thrown them out.) Yet few scholars of myth, however postmodern, would argue that myth and history are the same thing; and we have to be careful how we use each to understand the other.

For example, when the Ramayana (one of the two great ancient Indian Sanskrit epics) speaks of ogres (Rakshasas), it may be simultaneously constructing an imaginary world in which evil forces take forms that can destroy us and using ogres as a metaphor for particular types of human beings. But it does not record an actual event, a moment when people from the city of Ayodhya overcame real people in India (tribals, or Dravidians, or anyone else); nor does the story of the building of a causeway to Lanka mean that Rama and a bunch of monkeys actually built a causeway from India to (Sri) Lanka.⁹ And to say (as I do) that the Ramayana tells us a great deal about attitudes toward various social groups (including women and the lower castes) between, say, 300 B.C.E. and 300 C.E. is a far cry from saying that someone named Rama actually lived in the city now known as Ayodhya and fought a battle on the island now known as Sri Lanka with an army of talking monkeys on his side and a ten-headed demon on the other—or with a company of tribal peoples (represented as monkeys) on his side and a proto-Muslim monster on the other, as some contemporary Hindus have asserted. Rama left no archeological or inscriptional record. There is no evidence that anyone named Rama did or did not live in Ayodhya; other places, in South India as well as North India, also claim him, for the Ramayana was retold many times, in many different Indian languages, with significant variations. There is no second Troy here for a Schliemann to come along and discover. Or, rather, there is a second, and a third, and a nineteenth Troy for anyone to discover.

To take another example, when we read a text that says that a Hindu king impaled eight thousand Jainas,¹⁰ we need to use history to understand myth—that is, we need to know a bit of history to understand why such a story was composed and retold many times. That means knowing the reasons for the tensions between Hindus and Jainas at that time (such as the competition for royal patronage). But we cannot use the myth to reconstruct the actual history behind the text; we cannot say that the text is evidence that a Hindu king actually did impale Jainas. Such myths reveal to us the history of sentiments rather than events, motivations rather than movements.

But stories, and the ideas in stories, do influence history in the other direction, into the future. People who heard or read that story about the impaled Jainas may well have acted differently toward Jainas and/ or Hindus (better or worse) as a result. More often than not, we do not know precisely what happened in history, but we often know the stories that people tell about it. In some ways, the stories are not only all that we have access to but all that people at the time, and later, had access to, and hence all that drove the events that followed. Real events and sentiments produce symbols, symbols produce real events and sentiments, and real and symbolic levels may be simultaneously present in a single text. Myth has been called the smoke of history,¹¹ and we must constantly strive to separate the smoke of myth from the fire of historical events, as well as to demonstrate how myths too become fires when they do not merely respond to historical events (as smoke arises from fire) but drive them (as fire gives rise to smoke). Ideas are facts too; the belief, whether true or false, that the British were greasing cartridges with animal fat started a revolution in India in 1857.¹² For we are what we imagine, as much as what we do.

Context and history can contribute to the comparative study of myth an understanding of not merely where the myths came from, in each individual culture, but where they went. And that too is well worth knowing.

Acknowledgments

Some of the ideas in this book began to germinate in print in various places: Myths and Methods in the Dark, the 1995 Ryerson Lecture, published in The University Record (of the University of Chicago), October 12, 1995, and then in the Journal of Religion 76, no. 4 (October 1996): 531–47; The Theological Uses of Double Vision, Criterion 34, no. 3 (Autumn 1995); The Microscope and Telescope of a Liberal Education, Shenandoah: The Washington and Lee University Review 46, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 78–88; and Minimyths and Maximyths and Political Points of View, in Myth and Method, edited by Laurie Patton with Wendy Doniger (Charlottesville: University Presses of Virginia, 1996), 109–27. I also gave an early version of parts of these lectures at the Well-fleet Library in August 1996, where I benefited particularly from the input of Victor and Jacqueline Gourevitch; and I worked on them in Key West in December 1996, with great help from Annie Dillard and Bob Richardson. Throughout the process of revision and expansion, Katherine Ulrich proved a spectacular research assistant, who made the index and, without a murmur, always delivered the goods even in response to idiotic requests like Can you find this somewhere in Plato (or Peirce)?

But my primary debt of thanks is to the American Academy of Religion and the American Council of Learned Societies, who invited me to give the 1996–97 American Lectures on the History of Religions. At each lecture, I met with lively discussion and helpful contributions, only a fraction of which are actually accounted for in the endnotes of the book. I would like, therefore, to take this opportunity to thank, at Cornell University, Dominick LaCapra, Mieke Bal, Tim Brennan, Roald Hoffmann, Allison Lurie, Edward Hower, Michael Steinberg, Michael O’Flaherty, and Rachel Nussbaum; at Duke University, Miriam Cooke; at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Joanne Waghorne and Jack Sasson; at Emory University, Mara Miller, Vernon Robbins, Laurie Patton, Paul Courtright, and Joyce Burkhalter-Flueckger; at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Sarah Caldwell, Ralph Williams, Val Daniels, and Lee Schlesinger; at the University of Missouri at Columbia, Jill Raitt, Joel Bereton, and Paul Johnson; and at the University of Chicago, Lorraine Daston, Clark Gilpin, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Hugh Urban, Wayne Booth, Tim Child, Glenn Most, William Schweiker, Judith Kegan Gardiner, Frank Reynolds, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Jonathan Z. Smith, and Sonam Kacchru (who helped me with the revisions for the second edition), and, as always, David Tracy and Bruce Lincoln, to whom I wish to dedicate this book about the interaction between theology (Tracy), politics (Lincoln), and myth (me).

INTRODUCTION

Myth and Metaphor

This book is about why and how myths from different cultures should be compared. I will take up the how—the actual method, the step-by-step procedure that a comparatist may follow—in chapters 4 and 5. But in the first three chapters, and in the final one, I will take up the why of comparative mythology.

I will be talking about all sorts of stories; but the points that I wish to make are particularly relevant to myths, one discrete subdivision of the broader category of story. It is customary in scholarly approaches to myth to begin with a definition. I have always resisted this, for I am less interested in dictating what myth is (more precisely, what it is not, for definitions are usually exclusivist) than in exploring what myth does (and in trying to demonstrate as inclusive a range of functions as possible). Defining myth requires building up the sorts of boundaries and barriers that I have always avoided and that this present work is specifically designed to combat. I do not wish, for instance, to limit myths to stories involving supernatural beings (though many myths do), and though there are important differences among myths and epics, legends, history, and films, in many ways I think these texts function similarly and should be studied together. I certainly would not limit myths to written texts, let alone ancient written texts; they may be written or oral, ancient or contemporary.

On the other hand, I would also narrow the field of my concern in certain ways: all myths are stories, but not all stories are myths. In my definition, myths raise religious questions (which of course means that I should define religious questions, and I will in chapter 3). But my remarks are intended to apply only to the rather narrow field of comparative mythology within the broader field of the history of religions (which would include doctrines, rituals, ethics, and so forth), not the entire discipline of religious studies (which would include philosophy of religions, psychology of religions, and so forth). Other considerations would certainly have to be taken into account in an argument for comparison within these larger arenas. And it is worth keeping in mind at all times that myth is not an active force in itself but a tool in the hands of human beings—and different human beings will not only use it in different ways but also define it in different ways. The word may seem to be the same, but—like the narratives it represents—it will have different meanings in different contexts.

Let us begin with what a myth is not : a myth is not a lie or a false statement to be contrasted with truth or reality or fact or history, though this usage is, perhaps, the most common meaning in casual parlance today. But in the history of religions, the term myth has far more often been used to mean truth. What makes this ambiguity possible is that a myth is above all a story that is believed , believed to be true, and that people continue to believe despite sometimes massive evidence that it is, in fact, a lie.¹ For example, Sudanese storytellers often begin with this formula:

I’m going to tell a story.

[Audience] Right!

It’s a lie.

Right!

But not everything in it is false!

Right!²

Jacques Roubaud, in his postmodern fairy tale, The Princess Hoppy, or, The Tale of Labrador , plays with this idea: The tale always tells the truth. What the tale says is true because the tale tells it. Some say that the tale tells the truth because what the tale tells is true. Others that the tale doesn’t tell the truth because truth is not a tale. But in reality what the tale tells is true of what the tale tells that what the tale tells is true. That is why the tale tells the truth.³ He could have been paraphrasing Picasso: Art is a lie that tells the truth.

In its positive and enduring sense, a myth is a story that is sacred to and shared by a group of people who find their most important meanings in it; it is a story believed to have been composed in the past about an event in the past, or, more rarely, in the future, an event that continues to have meaning in the present because it is remembered; it is a story that is part of a larger group of stories.⁴ This definition of myth owes much to David Tracy’s definition of the classic,⁵ which (like a myth, in my view) is highly private in its expression but public in its effect and reception.⁶

Plato used the word in both senses, to mean lie and truth. On the one hand, Plato was the great demythologizer (if not the first), as Mircea Eliade noted long ago.⁷ Plato deconstructed the myths of Homer and Hesiod, contrasting the fabricated myth with the true history.⁸ But since people have to have myths, Plato was willing to construct new ones for them,⁹ so he invented the drama of the philosophical soul and made it a reasonable, logical myth¹⁰ to challenge the old myths of centaurs and so forth. He transformed ancient mythic themes to make the myth of Eros¹¹ and the myth of the creation of the universe,¹² and he actually applied the word myth (which he called muthos , since he spoke ancient Greek) to the story of the world that he created in the Phaedo¹³ and to the myth of Er that he created at the end of the Republic.¹⁴ The myths that Plato didn’t like (that were created by other people, nurses and poets) were lies, and the myths that he liked (that he created himself ) were truths. And this ambivalence in the definition of myth endures to the present day.

I will make further claims for myth in each chapter of this work, claims that could be taken as part of a cumulative working definition (the only sort of definition that I am comfortable with): in chapter 1, that myth combines distant and near views; in chapter 2, that it is greater than the sum of its parts; in chapter 3, that it expresses cross-cultural human experiences; and in chapter 4, that it expresses both an idea and its opposite, reveals—or sometimes conceals—certain basic cultural attitudes to important (usually insoluble) questions, and is transparent to a variety of constructions of meaning. Throughout this work, I will argue that a myth is not bounded by a single