Other People's Myths:

...To see O'Flaherty's proposal at work, we have only to read chapter five, "Other People's Rituals: Daksha, Pentheus, and Jesus...

...They secretly believe that God is dead and that myths are fraudulent...

...Myths raise basic questions of human meaning...

...But what kind of "hearing" is possible...

...But where Bloom would simply reinstate them, O'Flaherty proposes that we reap-proach the classics as "other...

...Against the first pretension, O'Flaherty argues that classics have been valued for different reasons, read with diametrically opposed interpretations, and are constantly undergoing a process of demotion and reinstatement...

...Although it is impossible for us to know precisely at what level of consciousness we exist, the myth helps us to understand generally that, as hunters, we have to experience things physically in order to understand them...

...Where Bloom and others would repeat the elite classical canon, O'Flaherty proposes studying it simultaneously with the classics and myths of other traditions, thereby assisting the def amiliarization process and making possible a new hearing-new in the sense of "anew" and also of new texts...

...O 'Flaherty believes they are the group most capable of hearing anew what myths have to say...

...This book is about myths (Hindu, Buddhist, Greek, Catholic Christian, and Jewish), particularly as they tell stories about stories (metamyths...

...With respect to scholars oi religion, O'Flaherty thinks, "good hunters do have sages in them, sages that bring some degree of self-awareness to the hunting...

...But good sages...alwayshavegoodhuntersinthem.': O 'Flaherty sees myth as viewed in foui different ways in modern Western culture: (1) those who are uninterested in myth, who never have or never will take religion seriously...

...and sometimes their authors were far removed from their subjects-Homer and Shakespeare both wrote about generations remote to them...

...Chapter three, "Other People's Classics: Retelling the Mahabharata," is also a comparative study-here, of the transmission of myths and classics, past and present, in our culture and in that of India...

...O'Flaherty uses her scholarly expertise to dismantle false assumptions: first, that classics form a tradition of which there is a "fixed core" of written texts...

...O'Flaherty, the first Mircea Eliade Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago, describes myths as potential vehicles of meaning...

...This is a sprightly book, replete with references to popular culture...

...Classics, in other words, do not, in fact, form a cohesive community of texts or readers...

...It affords many pleasures, not the least of which is its opening of several vexed issues to new questions and new views...

...3) the demy thologized, who have substituted secular humanism for their "first naivete...

...Much of the delight in reading Other People's Myths comes from its double focus on the kinds of people who attend to myths (who the "we" are who interpret myths), and on traditional myths as they are revised within themselves and as they are related to myths in other traditions...

...As such, they are stories which, while they are not literally true, are "as close as we can ever get to the truth about certain subjects...

...On this point she agrees with Allan Bloom and other recent authors who lament the decline of the classics...

...2) the undemytholo-gized (or still mythologized) who, however critical they may be of flaws in traditional religions, have never lost their "first naivete...

...Her brilliant reading of Daksha and Shiva, Pentheus and Dionysius, and Jesus demonstrates the fecundity of her approach...

...and (4) the remythologized, those who have lost their "first naivete" but have subsequently found secular humanism wanting...

...O'Flaherty argues that a growing number of our population is increasingly unfamiliar with and disaffected by not only the myths but also the classics of our own tradition...

...and second, that classics are shared by all members of the educated community...

...O'Flaherty uses the myth of the hunter and the sage from the Yogavasishtha, for example, to make explicit the different ways of "getting inside someone else's head...

...O'Flaherty points out that very few in our culture read the Greek and English classics in the original, whereas millions follow "Dallas" or some cartoon or television serial...

...They are, however, usually interested only in their own traditions...

...Writing, moreover, is not the only means of transmission-in some cultures, it is not even the major means...

...She offers insights that are both effective and accessible...

...They are, after all, inherited from generations far removed from our own...

...Mary Gerharl endy Doniger O'Flaherty's Other People's Myths addresses the problem of how we grasp religious meanings in terms of traditional myths and rituals...

...bad hunters do not...

...Against those linguists and philosophers who have "hopelessly defamed the character of language as a possible vehicle for mutual understanding," she writes that myth is possibly "our last hope for a nonlanguage that can free us from these cognitive snares, a means of flying so low that we can scuttle underneath the devastating radar of the physical and social the human heart...

...as sages, we might be tempted to think we understand things simply by learning about them, rather than by experiencing them...