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Mircea Eliade’s Definition of Myth

All myths participate in some sort in the cosmological type of myth — for every account of what came to pass in the holy era of the beginning (in illo tempore) is but another variant of the archetypal history: how the world came to be.

The creation of the World being the pre-eminent instance of creation, the cosmogony becomes the exemplary model for ‘creation’ of every kind…. Origin myths continue and complete the cosmogonic myth.

Eliade

Mircea Eliade understood all myths to be creation/cosmogonic myths. The purpose of myth was to return to the time before time, before the gods or tribal ancestors (supernatural beings) created the world. This pre-cosmic state is sacred time, and according to Eliade it is the aim of the religious person to go beyond the natural/profane world of space and time (through ritual or storytelling) and enter into the sacred space of eternal time, thereby experiencing the primal power in the form of a hierophany (Greek: hiero “sacred,” and phainein “to show”) that gives order to the laws of culture and cosmos.

I find Eliade’s definition of myth to be helpful and illuminating up to a certain point. I’m not sure if I would define all myth as cosmogonic or always relating to acts of creation, though.

I do see all forms of storytelling (both modern and traditional) as having the mythic power to transport us outside of ourselves, thereby temporarily suspending every day reality, regardless of the actual theme.

Our Place in the Cosmos

Another function of Eliade’s myth (through heiorphany) is to give humankind an ontological and existential place in the universe. According to Ivan Strenski’s evaluation, Eliade’s Understanding of myth can be broken down into three categories:

1. They are stories about origins, beginnings, creations.
2. They function to provide men with an existential, ontological orientation by narrating the sacred, external events of their own origins, beginnings, or creations.
3. They originate in a human experience of a yearing for such a fundamental orientation. To satisfy the yearning is to achieve a real appropriation of timelessness in the midst of history

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