CLARIFICATION

In this essay I've now defined what I call "literary myths" are "open" in terms of how they can be modified by their tellers and audiences, while by comparison religious myths are meant to seem "closed" by virtue of how much stuff people can make up about them, even though in point of fact new stuff does continually attach itself from every religious myth-figure from Adam Kadmon to Zeus.

(Side-note: closely related to "religious myths" would be "cultural myths" such as the legend of King Arthur, which does not promulgate any religion as such but which serves a more exemplary purpose to its audiences than does, say, Sherlock Holmes.)

I further defined the "form" of myth as being one which is not "dominantly SUPPOSED to change as humans do" over time, while the form of art/literature is expected to shift with the tastes of the audiences.

Now, in this earlier essay I did state:

Though I reject the simplistic notion that myth, as myth, was unchanging, or even universally intended by its makers to be unchanging, obviously art (at whatever point it became definitively separated from myth) could change to meet the needs of the community much more quickly.

In this essay I was taking issue with writers that I've critiqued elsewhere, like Roland Barthes, who chose to view myth as a mental/moral calcification of accreted superstitions. (He's not cited in the essay but he would fit my critique of writers who accept "chimarae like 'commoditiy fetishes.'") I believe that wherever tribal storytellers tried to put forth certain narratives as having a permanent authority as to the origins of the universe, they did want those narratives to be perceived as DOMINANTLY unchanging.

But not, as the reductive anthropologists would have it, UNIVERSALLY unchanging. Again, we don't know precisely how prehistoric myth-makers dealt with catastrophic changes in climate or society or any other of the thousand natural shocks that flesh-- and religion-- was heir to. We ASSUME-- because it's a practice we can observe today-- that they would have handled it the same way modern priests handle change. If Haiti is rocked by a horrible earthquake, it's because God is punishing its people for past misdeeds.

Possibly this sort of weasely rationalizing was the only way that ancient myth-tellers got out of difficulties, too. But it's important to remember that those mythmakers probably didn't have to put down attacks by rationalistic advocates of atheism or Marxism or whatever, because human society hadn't advanced to the point that such critiques of religion could even be formulated.

I surmise that when ancient mythmakers were faced with massive changes in life, they probably knew they would have to adjust their theoretically-unchanging mythoi to account for those changes. Perhaps they did so with as much of an eye to manipulation of the flock as we see today in Pat Robertson's Haiti remarks. Or perhaps they did so with a Job-like knowledge that the creator could change up the apparent rules any time he felt like it, and that all they could do was try to hold things together for the laity.

We don't know. But I do know that this are the problems one has to deal with whenever we speculate about the motivations of our long-gone ancestors, and even our best solutions to those problems may tell us things that are dominantly-- but probably not universally-- true.