Mythology, or Mythography, is commonly considered to be the study of myth. The practice here is to use myth to study other things. This method (a mythodology) is to enter into the myth and then reinterpret our previous position. Thus as Joseph Campbell asserted the mythopoeic mode of consciousness discloses a relevant view of our mystical, cosmological, socio-historic, and psychological experience.
In this perspective, a Performative Mythology will be first and foremost a praxis--a mythopoeic praxis. In this sense "performance" is poiesis [Creative production, especially of a work of art[5]]. While "myth," among other things, is considered to be that essential modality of consciousness having the capacity to retain and convey the "inner depth and self-sufficiency," the unspeakable, the impossible, "hiddenness" of life and the universe.

"Myth," in conveying the unspeakable and hidden, provides the quintessential disclosure of locus and identity. A performative approach to myth should be highly concerned and involved with the performance of identity (more on this later).
Performance is poiesis. Myth, unlike dogma, always involves poiesis hence myth is ever shifting; as myth creates itself it must destroy or deform the fixed and rigid forms that precede it. As in David Miller's definitive phrase: "Myth is mythoclastic, when it is functioning truly as myth."[6]

"Performance," as in Richard Schechner's model, works across a spectrum from efficacy to entertainment. Myth, while usually entertaining, is decidedly on the side of efficacy--that is, like ritual, it intends to bring something about.
While elucidating and enacting the performative aspects of myth, and the mythic aspects of performance, a Performative Mythology will focus mainly on the actions and process of-and-in myth, on the one hand, and the actions and processes of-and-in the mythmaker on the other.

It is worth noting that the terms "myth" and "performance" both elicit highly ambivalent meanings. As many mythographers have pointed out, myth can mean an utter falsehood and, on the contrary, a sacred truth. Similarly the term "performance" often indicates falsehood, as in "they gave quite a performance," meaning they were faking or lying. On the other hand, when one needs an objective analysis of a person's efficiency we use "performance reports" and "performance ratings" to get the "truth." Far from wishing to alleviate or reconcile such contradictions, it can be stated that "ambivalence," or better "multivalence," is essential to this work.

Consciousness is essentially mythopoeic. The mythopoeic intelligence is synaesthetic. It is vastly inclusive, handling multivalences, contradictions, and paradox with apparent ease. Robert Bly says: "it's possible that what we call 'mythology' deals precisely with these abrupt juxtaposition. . . using what Joseph Campbell called 'mythological thinking,' it moves the energy along a spectrum--either up or down. [It] can awaken the 'lost music,' walk on the sea, cross the river from instinct to spirit."[7] Furthermore, we bring this multivalence, flexibility, and porosity to the performance of identity. That is to say in this movement there occurs a mythopoesis in which identity is not fixed or closed but continually loosed and disclosed. This identity, like David Bohm's ultimate totality of reality, cannot be explicitly known, it can only be apprehended by implication--it is not an explicate identity--it is an implicate identity.

At the heart of this approach is the Trickster's trick of "leaping" [peripeteia] from identity to identity, reality to reality. Not reconciling, or proving one over the other, but dwelling in the tension of incompatible and contrary ways of being, doing, and knowing. Thus the Performative Mythologist can leap from Archetypal Psychology [James Hillman] to Sociobiology [E. O. Wilson] to Performance Theory [Richard Schechner] with alacrity, respectfully stealing the "implications" that are needed in a mythopoeic bricolage without getting hooked on their "conclusions."

The modalities of mythic performance should include--even emphasize--the unspeakable, prelingual and postlingual arts of music, dance, phatic-sounding and gestic-motion.

Ritual is one mode of mythopoeic expression. That is to say ritual is a gestic [of or pertaining to bodily movement, especially dancing[8]], symbolic, imagistic expression of the mythopoeic intelligence. In this sense it is not the acting out of a prearranged narrative, it is an expression and communication that precedes indicative literalistic language--the performance is in-formed by its own enactment (poiesis).

Only the myth performed can truly "inform" us. As Black Elk said, one cannot use the power of their vision "until it is performed on earth for the people to see." That is, one is not fully informed by the mythic vision, or the vision is not complete, until enacted. The "informance of performance" occurs in an indivisible simultaneity of mythopoesis. 

 
Performance should be considered as sometimes communication, sometimes expression, and sometimes both--differentiating expression as not needing to be witnessed or comprehended by another.

A performative Mythology should be focused on apprehending and performing the unspeakable and implicate contents of mythic experience--as in Corbin's events of the soul: "taking place in the soul and for the soul. As such its reality is essentially individuated for and with each soul: what the soul really sees, it is in each case alone in seeing."[9] unlike the objective reports of science, the mythopoeic arts are indeed "designed to transmit experience on a personal level" (what the lone soul sees) and, as in Black Elk's performed vision, "to reconstitute the full richness of the experience."

A single performer cannot make, whole cloth, a "myth." As Bly says: "it takes roughly 10,000 years to invent a new myth, and none of us are likely to live that long."[10] The performative mythologist, or mythopoeic practitioner, can merely hope for "participation" in the mythic-reality--perhaps weaving a thread into the vast mythological tapestry.

Like its close relative "performance studies," a performative mythology will investigate and consider the literature and evidence regarding the psycho-neurological and psychological development and experience of the mytho-performative modalities.

We believe that all lasting myths gain their power through neurologically endorsed flashes of insight. . . . Any idea might trigger a myth if it can unify logic and intuition, and lead to a state of left-brain/right-brain agreement. In this state of whole-brain harmony, neurological uncertainties are powerfully alleviated as existential opposites are reconciled and the problem of cause is resolved. To the anxious mind, this resonant whole-brain agreement feels like a glimpse of ultimate truth. The mind seems to live this truth, not merely comprehend it, and it is this quality of visceral experience that turns ideas into myths.
                    --Newberg and d'Aquili[11]

While the understanding of myth as reconciling and resolving is naive, the premise that "myths gain their power through neurologically endorsed flashes of insight" is important. What is probably more profound in "this resonant whole-brain agreement" is the surrender to ambivalence which "feels like a glimpse of ultimate truth." A great deal should be said about this, however, for now the point is that what goes on in the performer should be a continuing theme in a performative mythology--as Schechner makes clear:

Performing artists are forever playing around -- not only with the codes, frames, and metaframes of communication -- but with their own internal brain-states. Although artistic and scientific creativity have long been thought to be similar, there is this decisive difference: scientists focus their work on external phenomena; even a neurobiologist works on somebody else’s brain. Performing artists--and, I would say, meditators, shamans, and trancers too --work on themselves, trying to induce deep psychophysical transformations either of a temporary or permanent kind. The external art work -- the performance the spectators see -- is the visible result of a trialogue among: (1) the conventions or givens of a genre, (2) the stretching, distorting, or invention of new conventions, and (3) brain-centered psychophysical transformations of self.
                               --Richard Schechner[12]

All myth is performative. All performance is mythopoeic--myth without poesis is dogma.


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[1] Robert Avens, Imaginal Body: Para-Jungian Reflections on Soul, Imagination and Death (Washington D.C.: UP of America, 1982) p. 125.

[2] William Irwin, Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality & the Origins of Culture (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981) p. 8.

[3] Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1978) p. 206.

[4] Black Elk as quoted in Joseph Campbell, The Flight of the Wild Gander (South Bend, IN: Regency / Gateway, Inc., 1979) p. 118.

[5] OED 2nd Edition on CDROM

[6] David L. Miller, Fire is in the Mind, Saga: Best New Writings on Mythology Jonathan Young ed. (Ashland, Oregon: White Cloud Press, 1996) p. 65.

[7] Robert Bly, American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity (New York: Harper & Row, 1990) p. 62.

[8] OED 2nd Edition on CDROM

[9] Henry Corbin in Robert Avens, Blake Swedenborg & the Neo-Platonic Tradition (New York: Swedenborg Foundation ) p. 5.

[10] Robert Bly in Robert Bly and Marion Woodman, The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1998) p. 138.

[11] Andrew Newberg, M.D., Eugene d’Aquili, M.D., Ph.D., and Vince Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science & the Biology of Belief (New York: Ballantine, 2001) pp. 73-74.

[12] Richard Schechner, Magnitudes of performance, By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual ed. Richard Schechner and Willa Appel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) p. 39-41.