Lightning Bugs and Fireflies

The appalling ignorance among anthropologists and others concerning such standard folk narrative genre distinctions as myth and folktale might account for why ... no one seems to have noticed that Lévi-Strauss was analyzing folktales more often than myths. (46) Said a lightning bug to a firefly, “Look at the lightning bugs fly by!” “Silly dunce!” said the fly. “What bug ever flew? Those are fireflies. And so are you.” Maxine Kumin, “The Quarrel” Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm's Metamodernism is a welcome attempt to short-circuit the vicious cycle of auto-critique that has long been endemic to the study of religion and not a moment too soon. Though Storm warns against indulging in jeremiads, I will say that we are already out on a limb, and maybe it's time to put down the handsaw. But to be done with problematizing is not to be done with problems. As the first epigraph to this essay demonstrates, treating disciplinary concepts such as “myths” and “folk tales” like definable objects (as the great folklorist Alan Dundes seems to be doing in the above quote without irony) can be just as injurious to the health of the academic enterprise as are endless self-critiques. We can criticize the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss for valid reasons, but his not having recognized a folklorist's definition of myth is not one of them. “You three noisy things, you are all related,” She said to the worm, and promptly ate it. With a snap of her bill she finished the fly, And the lightning bug was the last to die. As the predatory early birds of state legislatures and trustees descend on us in droves, Metamodernism offers a kind of shelter. Storm's project with this book is to establish a new model for the humanities and, even more optimistically, to get scholars on board with the “future of theory,” as the subtitle has it. To that end, he has given us a general plan of action that should find broad agreement: We should go on studying “socially constructed” things like religions, aiming toward the production of humble, “zetetic” knowledge (although I admit to being a little uncomfortable with this word since it instantly calls to mind Samuel Rowbotham's 1865 flat-earth bible, Zetetic Astronomy: Earth Not a Globe), and rejecting the harmful illusion of value-neutrality by explicitly stating our overarching goal of multi-species flourishing. But if readers are expecting examples of what the metamodern study of religion would look like—such as a description of how a metamodern work of scholarship would differ from Robert Orsi's Between Heaven and Earth or Katherine T. McClymond's Ritual Gone Wrong—they will not find any. So, I want to take this opportunity to present one possibility, focusing on what I find most compelling about Storm's book, namely, his notion of “social kinds.” To paraphrase and condense the arguments Storm lays out in Part II, social kinds are “temporary zones of stability” (283) that are temporally and spatially contingent, being subject to rapid changes over time as well as a variety of interpretations at any given “now.” Their properties emerge via their relationships to other social kinds, with which they often partially overlap. Like nor'easters—violent storms which are in reality nothing but cold air and warm water temporarily held together by physical forces deriving from the properties of air and water—they have real effects in the world and can be studied scientifically, despite having no intrinsic existence independent of their conditions. The social kind that most interests me is “myth,” a second-order scholarly category (i.e., created for the purposes of comparison) that overlaps not only with its Greek cognate mythos but also with “epic,” “legend,” “folk tale,” and, closer to my area of interest, the Sanskrit words purāṇa, itihāsa, and jātaka. To use Storm's language, it “cross-cuts.” Its meaning varies over time, having meant something different to Plato than it did to Carl Jung. Likewise, it means something different today to my classicist colleagues than it does to people who watch old videos of A&E's Mythbusters on YouTube (although each group would recognize the context-dependent meaning deployed by the other). Storm is surely right that social kinds such as myth “exceed their reference, and research in the human sciences often proceeds by discovering [their] hitherto unknown properties” (111). Lévi-Strauss helped us understand the structural, formal properties shared by many myths; Bruce Lincoln has shown us mythology's powers to reify or challenge unequal social power dynamics, and Wendy Doniger has written of myths' properties as social and theological lenses. The property of myth that Storm inspired me to consider for the first time was the homological relationship between the nominal category (myth) and its individual members (myths), which Hans Blumenberg has described as having “a high degree of constancy in their ... core” and “an equally pronounced capacity for marginal variation” (1985, 34). Just as myth's meaning has changed over time and currently means different things in different contexts, so too have individual myths changed their form over time and been subject to different interpretations. For instance, the story of Viṣṇu's incarnation as the Buddha is sometimes the story of the god taking the form of a false teacher to trick the demons into abandoning their ritual obligations. But sometimes, it is the story of a god taking human form to teach the virtue of compassion. To add a third level of homological reduplication, myths are the collected stories of mythical figures, some of whose various representations have diverged so far as to be distinct from one another, despite being originally anchored to the same story and name. An example of this is the once-popular saint Josaphat, whose story is none other than that of the historical Buddha put in a Christian context. Likewise, his name derives from the Sanskrit Bodhisattva (Future Buddha), which, as the story traveled west, became Budhāsāf in Arabic, Iodasaph in Georgian, Ioasaph in Greek, Iosapath in Latin, and finally Josaphat in French, by which time he had been transformed into an Indian Christian prince (see Lopez and McCracken 2014). Myths and the mythic figures they describe are high-entropic nominal categories loosely anchored by process social ontology, just like myth itself. Since I am more interested in doing some specific case studies of mythical figures than I am in establishing anything about myth as a conceptual category, I will now attempt to determine if and how Storm's book might help me do that. To take an example, I would argue that the “In-da-ra” named in the fourteenth century BCE Mittani treaty carved on a stele at Boğazkale, the “Indra” praised in the Ṛg Veda, the “Śakra” who serves the Buddha in Pali and Sanskrit texts, and the “Inder” worshipped as a rain god in Rajasthan all belong to the category we might call “the god Indra” despite the many properties that distinguish them from each other. This banal observation represents a kind of thinking Storm terms “pattern recognition,” the poisoned gift bestowed on us by generations of humanistic inquiry. Having someone describe your paper as “interesting” is a tell-tale sign that you have handed them an exercise in pattern recognition—something that may be admired for a time but cannot be generalized to apply to other cases, much less be tested. In order to make a better comparison, Storm encourages us to employ the logic of abduction, which he exemplifies with the hypothesis of the “Q” source, a supposed document from which the gospels of Matthew and Luke must have quoted the sayings of Jesus that are common to both but unknown to Mark. This undeniably useful hypothesis demonstrates the power of abduction because it (1) eliminates some less useful hypotheses, (2) is built on multiple pieces of observable evidence (like one particular saying of Jesus quoted in Luke and Matthew but not Mark) which are not strong on their own but gain strength when gathered together, and (3) is subject to revision if new evidence is found. But the problem solved by the Q hypothesis (which now sounds like some sinister conspiracy in light of the role played by a different “Q” in far-right rhetoric in the US in 2020) is not really a problem of religious studies. It is a problem of what was once called “lower” text criticism. There is no problem in my own research that could be answered with a provable hypothesis like the existence of the Q source. So instead of using abduction in this way, I will follow a recommendation Storm makes more than once in Metamodernism, and use it to account for the stability of and variations within some socially constructed thing (myth, in this case) over time. As I see it, there are three types of processes that account for the stability and variations of myths and mythic figures: anchoring, schismogenic, and mimetic. Storm uses some of these terms himself, so I will make clear how I am using them. First, anchoring processes are what hold a given cluster of elements together over time and create a continuity of identity. They most often take the form of names, iconographic conventions, associated sacred places, or an authoritative text. An anchor is not the same as an origin; some anchoring processes may not come into play until well into the development of a mythic figure. In his study of the transformations of the Germanic god Ullr, Lincoln points out that in the earliest record (which dates to 200 CE), he was worshipped throughout Norway and Sweden as something like “an ill-defined jack-of-all-(male)-trades [whose] position was constantly shifting within the implicit pantheon as people turned to him for one need or another” (2012, 25). Then, in the thirteenth-century Prose Edda of Snorri Sturluson, Ullr was explicitly identified as a great archer and skier. When Snorri's writings were rediscovered in the seventeenth century, this stable and recognizable image of Ullr as an archer on skis became the dominant one. Since then, Ullr has consistently been pictured like this in images produced by the disparate communities of Neopagans, ski enthusiasts, and fantasy artists, with the first group being the most constrained by Snorri's precedent and the last group being the least constrained and therefore the most inventive. Second, schismogenic processes act to dis-integrate, creating difference and distinction as myth variants multiply. Schismogenesis is a term originated by Gregory Bateson to describe “a process of differentiation in the norms of individual behaviour resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals” (1958, 175). The concept was repurposed in 2021 in David Graeber and David Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything, where they argued that something similar to what Bateson observed within societies happens between societies as well, writing, “People come to define themselves against their neighbours. Urbanites thus become more urbane, as barbarians become more barbarous” (2021, 69). I would argue that something similar also happens in myths when two figures with similar powers and associations are brought together and both are transformed in relation to one another to make them more distinct. In other words, schismogenic processes deal with a redundancy by creating a distinction. Fritz Graf has remarked that Apollo and Athena were quite similar in their roles as protectors of the city and of adolescent bands and that the Homeric opposition that placed Athena and Apollo on opposite sides of the Trojan War “looks as if it is constructed on the background of this functional overlap...” (Graf 2009, 125). Sometimes schismogenesis happens between two variants of the same original. In popular culture, we see this with the case of Superman and Superboy. Superman appeared in Action Comics #1 in April 1938. Superboy was introduced in 1945 to tell stories of Superman's past adventures. But as both persisted and Superboy never “grew up” to become Superman, DC Comics editors had to make the conscious decision to distinguish the two of them as inhabitants of two alternate universes. Finally, mimetic processes introduce change as they act to integrate a myth into its new cultural context. An example is found in the Seven Mothers, who began to appear around the fifth century CE in Indian texts and temple art. Six of their names and iconic forms mirrored the six Hindu deities Brahmā, Śiva, Skanda, Viṣṇu, Varāha, and Indra. These female versions of the gods were subsequently transformed as they were absorbed into Tantric pantheons over the next few centuries and eventually ceased having anything to do with the gods from which their names and forms derived (see Hatley 2012). Let us take another example. Guanyin is the name of an East Asian and female form of Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. Guanyin's transition from a bodhisattva into a goddess around the tenth century was partially driven by the incorporation of the Chinese story of Princess Miao-San, who gave up her eyes and ears to cure the illness of her estranged father, who had previously tried to burn her alive. The influence of the Miao-san story was profound on the myth of Guanyin, both in making her popular in China and unrecognizable as a bodhisattva. Chün-fang Yü has noted that “many Chinese, if they are not familiar with Buddhism, are not even aware of her Buddhist origin” (2001, 223-4). Throughout his book, Storm's erudition is evident as he draws example after example from wide-ranging fields, but references to religious studies are rare. In chapter seven, he addresses Donald Wiebe's critique of the discipline for one paragraph only to rapidly move on to economics. For the most part, Storm is leaving the nuts and bolts of metamodern religious studies to us, the students and scholars who read his book. I have tried to do that here, but in some ways, the method I have described looks exactly like what I would have done before I picked up Metamodernism. This may be a failure on my part to incorporate new ideas in my methodology, or it may be because what Storm has described as social kinds are basically already aligned with our intuitive understanding of things like myths and rituals. But even if much of what Storm has given us is a redescription of how we already conceptualize our objects of study, it is a redescription that is intellectually sophisticated, clearly articulated, and most refreshing of all, cataphatically constructed. To my mind, this project is more useful than any attempt to further problematize the discipline. Like the lightning bug and the firefly glowing through the dusk for all the hungry birds to see, we have problems enough already. But, as Storm has tried to show us, we also have the resources and the responsibility to light the way when and where we can

Art · Epistemology · Folklore · Folkloristics · Idiot · Ignorance · Irony · Literature · Mythology · Narrative · Classics · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Philosophy

• The Dawn of Everything

  David Graeber, David Wengrow•The Dawn of Everything•2021

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• Naven

  Gregory Bateson•Naven•1958

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• Kuan-yin

  John Kieschnick, Chun‐fang Yü et al.•Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies•2002

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