by Robert W. McDonald

Created on: February 19, 2010   Last Updated: February 20, 2010

H.L. Mencken, in his “A Treatise on the Gods", described a myth as ‘a religion that people no longer believe in.’ In this essay I will argue that, although he was writing cynically, he was actually correct in that every known religion can be traced backward in time to its origin in what is now called myth. I will begin by posing the question, “What is myth?”

I will accept the Merriam-Webster definition of a myth as being a “… traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon…”  Further, I will accept that ‘myth’ and ‘fable’ are distinct from each other in that a “myth” is invariably accepted as “true” (at least at one point in time) while a “fable” is obviously untrue at any time (e.g. Aesop's “fables” in which animals talk to one another). Furthermore, “myth” and “fable” serve different purposes in the same society.

Fables are used to convey a sense of social values such as honesty or the virtue of faithfulness. As such fables are stories that are told in a manner that amuses the listener by creating a “mind picture” or a “visual” that, although not true, is easy for the listener to imagine.  Fables do not, however, “explain” or “justify” natural events or observations such as the change of seasons or why the sun rises and sets.

On the other hand, myths do explain such natural phenomena and always do so by assigning responsibility for such phenomena to a variety of deities such as a sun god riding in his chariot across the sky or to a harvest goddess whose daughter must spend half of each year in the underworld. A natural extension of these “gods and goddesses” explanations is that man could win the favor of the deities by performing certain acts that would gain their favor. When this collection of actions, rituals, and other such activities became formalized and the responsibility for performing such activities devolved to a distinct cultural/social class we have the birth of “religion.”

Religion has always been, at least until recently, an extension of the authority of the state into the supernatural realm where the kings ruled by “divine right” as the appointed emissaries of the gods while the shamans evolved into priests who had been granted authority in both the physical and eternal realms. Even in modern societies, in which there is supposedly no “state” religion, the cult of the gods remains a political and social power. But what of the kings, and the nations, that were conquered by other nations or simply ceased to exist due to internal turmoil.

When a nation suffered some catastrophe, it would invariably be seen as punishment by its god or gods for some transgression and the resulting social order would invariably adopt some new family of supernatural powers to replace the others. There would always be “holdouts” that would cling to the older beliefs until the old beliefs and the new reached a point where they merged, with the old gods relegated to subservience in the heavenly courts of the new. Thus, the old gods were recast into new. All religion can thus be seen as an evolutionary sense where new gods brushed aside the old but never totally replaced them.

In conclusion, religion is nothing more than older beliefs being displaced by newer beliefs but never being totally extinguished until, like the phoenix rising from the ashes of its funeral pyre, something more popular evolved.

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