In which Caroline reads the Gilgamesh flood myth

Campbell's idea of the "monomyth" really interested me. I was familiar with the idea that similar stories appear in many cultures mythologies, but something about the way Campbell presented his argument (that we all have "one mythology") gnawed at me. He says:

1. A myth is not a lie; it's a metaphor. It is what the myth is trying to tell you about the world that's important.

2. The same myth exists in many different cultures, tweaked only to represent their varying values.

These two statements contradict, to me. If its not the plot details of a myth that matter, but rather the values it espouses, then two stories from two cultures with differing values (and thus differing morals at the end) are different myths from each other, regardless of whether or not they share plot points. Campbell says himself, the important part of the myth is its message. Therefore, different message, different myth.

My questions about this prompted me to do a little more exploring in comparative mythology. I wanted to look at some common examples given (the only one I could think of was the big flood myth*) and determine for myself whether the messages were the same. What I found is that the field is split into two main groups: comparativists (like Campbell) who stress the similarities between myths, and particularists (like me) that stress the differences. At this point, my exploration became cyclical, because the wikipedia page describing these groups quotes heavily from Joseph Campbell. Apparently, comparativism was favored by academics in the 18th and 19th centuries, and today has largely fallen out of vogue, with the notable exception of the dissenting voice of Campbell.

I'm not going to try to convince any of you of a decisive answer on a topic people far smarter than me have been arguing about for three centuries, but I do think its an important question to consider. The hero's journey narratives Campbell describes are cross-culturally pervasive. As students of this archetype, we must ask why. What makes the same type of story so compelling to so many people with totally different values? Do we have more in common that I'm assuming? (Do you, as a 21st century American reader find The Odyssey compelling, on an emotional level?) Or, perhaps, are these similarities the result of something else? It's possible that hero's journey narratives did not develop independently in many cultures. The explanation could simply be that some types of stories are just very, very old. They start in one place, in one form. They migrate, and while the bones of the story stay the same, the meat, the essential bit, is replaced to reflect the story's new home. A traveling merchant hears the story, and repeats the process in his own country, creating a third story. A child hears this story growing up, and when she tells the story to her own children, the moral has changed to reflect her own experiences. After several generations of this, its a new story altogether.

Glancing at our semester's syllabus, I think we're going to find a lot of very different heros' journeys. While many of them may involve rejecting and then accepting a call, or a final showdown, I think if we compare any of them to The Odyssey, we'll find more about what makes ancient greek culture different from the native culture of the book than similar. Two distinct mythologies. Personally, I find that just as interesting, but you can decide for yourself.

*For what it's worth, although the flood myths are eerily similar, plot-wise, the minor differences really change what you take out of them. For example, in the Sumerian myth, this one god was trying to kill literally all of humanity with a flood and was pissed when he found out some mortals survived. The moral of that seems to be more "sometimes you gotta be sneaky to save humanity" than Noah's Ark's "rainbows are a reminder God will never try to kill us all again, because he loves us."