Why That Many Myths Are True

The term “myth” has become a synonym for “lie” but the fact is many myths are actually true. Or, as mythology expert Joseph Campbell would put it, a myth can be truer than fact. The reason for this is that myths convey beliefs, values and conceptual ideas through icons, emblems and symbols.

Myths are representative. They stand for something. And the things they stand for often cannot be communicated through simple statements of fact. An example here will help to clarify.

Let’s look at the myth of Rosa Parks. If we were to apply the contemporary usage of myth to mean lie, we might say that it’s a myth that Rosa Parks just happened to be sitting at the front of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama after a hard day’s work. It’s a myth that she refused to give up her seat to stand at the back of the bus because she was worn out from her daily labors.

This is a “myth” in the sense that these facts are not entirely accurate. They are a lie, but they are a lie that effectively conveys a larger truth.

First, Parks was not sitting at the front of the bus in a “Whites only section,” but at the front of a segregated section of the bus that she was legally allowed to sit in.

More importantly, Parks was a political activist before she was arrested on that bus. She didn’t just happen to stand up to injustice one day because she was tired.

An article in The Washington Post quotes Parks herself as saying, “People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I was at the end of a working day…. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”

Writing about Parks’ life before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Ryan Mattimore points out that “She joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1943, 12 years before that fateful commute.” Working for the NAACP to investigate a sexual assault case, Rosa Parks had established the Committee for Equal Justice for the Rights of Mrs. Recy Taylor in 1944.

So, to see Rosa Parks as a kindly, fatigue-laden, any-woman who was pushed to her limits one December afternoon in Montgomery is to misconstrue the facts. This is a myth.

But when we stop to think about the conventional, factually-inaccurate telling of this episode, we can see that it manages to convey a truth that is arguably more important than the facts.

If we depict Rosa Parks as a political agent, we remove the part of the story that emphasizes her basic humanity. She stops being a representative member of the labor class and inhabits a more complicated persona. We are less invited to empathize with her. And she’s no longer a pure symbol of an oppressed minority, reluctantly resisting segregationist policies. She’s a partisan.

The myth does a better job of communicating the central idea of the story than the facts can. And this is because of its fictionalized qualities, not despite them.

The myth tells us that the culture of Jim Crow was fundamentally inhumane. The myth pits an emblem of blameless humanity against a system of moral corruption.

This is the reality of the situation. This is the important idea that needs to be understood. And the facts don’t tell this story as well as the myth does.

Maybe this is why Joseph Campbell said, “Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.”

Rosa Parks’ story is just one example of how myth can be “truer than facts,” how the tales we casually lambaste as lies might actually reflect our beliefs, values and ideas in ways that are more profound than rigidly accurate facts.

Not all lies are myths, of course. Some lies are just lies, intended to deceive. But when you next come across a falsehood and think to call it a myth, you may also stop and think about what truth that lie is telling.

To learn more about the function of mythology in our culture, take a look at a new course I recently created at teachable. It explores oral literary traditions, in their form and their function.

Find more pop culture and literary analysis at Philo Culturo.