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The problem of the correspondence between such phenomena as myth and national consciousness continues to be the subject of intense debate and contradictory approaches to the nature of the problem abound. On the one hand, one can claim that a myth is an unchangeable part of national consciousness, and sometimes has a different appearance and meaning. On the other hand, some scholars seem to be sure that national consciousness is itself an invented myth and a consequence of nation building. We shall compare different approaches to the nature of myth and national consciousness in order to draw a picture of this phenomenon.

First of all, it is necessary to concentrate on the description of myth as a social and cultural entity as well as on possible ways to investigate myth. Then the relationships between myth and national consciousness/identity will be explored through a psychological complex, such as a belief system, i.e., a cognitive structure consisting of separate beliefs and their particular components. Also, it is important to take into account the concrete historical circumstances in which these relationships take place, and their dynamic. This means that the only way to analyze the nature of these phenomena correctly is to treat them as historically continuous.

On the whole the notion of “myth,” while it indicates one of the intrinsic attributes of human society, remains a concept which social scientists still prefer not to consider as a fundamental issue. This can be explained by the difficulties connected with the dual meaning of the term; for a long time it had an entirely religious context, and only relatively recently has it possessed a wider conceptualization and implementation. Although Claude Lévi-Strauss skeptically characterized the situation in the study of myths as “chaotic, because of the lack of a commonly assumed approach to the phenomenon” (Levi-Strauss 1983, 207), we can distinguish two main approaches toward the problem of myth, namely, the functionalist and the phenomenological. The former points out the social function of myth, putting the emphasis on those myths that serve as definite goals of the social group; whereas the latter considers the appeal to the past, treating origins as the intrinsic essence of myth.

For instance, Anthony Smith considered that “myths are neither illusions nor mere legitimation, they may perhaps be regarded as widely believed tales told in dramatic form, referring to past events but serving present purposes and/or future goals” (Smith 1988b, 2). Lévi-Strauss suggests a similar definition: “myths are actually a posteriori attempts to construct a homogeneous system on the basis of disparate rules. This hypothesis would also imply that, sooner or later, mythical thinking conceives of these rules as so many possible answers to a question” (Lévi-Strauss, 1983, 159). As a working definition therefore, the notion of “myth” further will be used in its wider context, namely, as a widely shared social belief, related to a particular event in the historical past and bound up with the present and the future. The concepts of “belief” and “belief system” are used as they were developed by Rokeach (1968, 1969) and are widely applied in cognitive psychology.

On the one hand, scholars usually agree that myth is a special means of information transfer, that “myth is the part of language where the formula traduttore, tradittore reaches its lowest truth value” (Lévi-Strauss 1983, 210). We can add that myth is a particular kind of language that consists of symbolic information in allegorical form. On the other hand, when scholars start to discuss the practical functioning of this special kind of language, their viewpoints become contradictory. For instance, Benedict Anderson estimates the role of this language in the nature of nationhood: “from the start the nation was conceived in language, not in blood, and that one could be ‘invited into’ the imagined community. ... Through that language, encountered at the mother’s knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures dreamed” (Anderson 1991, 145,154).

Harald Harman, who works on sociolinguistic problems, stressed “the relativity of language as a symbol” of national identity in itself (Harman 1986, 258). The importance of language for the national phenomenon was stressed also by Fishman (1973), though in his work language does not have such a defining role. Soviet (Russian and Ukrainian) scholars stressed that language powerfully differentiates people into “we” and “the other” (Bromley 1981; Gumilev 1989; Guboglo 1979; Nikitina 1989; Shkliar 1991), but the experience of Slavic and other national histories shows that language could well be in the shade as a national marker. There are cases when different national groups share the same language but use it for different national discourses (like Serbs and Croats, Romanians and Moldavians, Americans and Canadians, not to mention the English who “leased” their language to so many people in the world). So, it seems that to consider myth as a special kind of (national) language is not enough.

Lévi-Strauss suggested a few rules for the interpretation of the role and meaning of myths in order to encompass the opposition of different approaches. According to him: 1) a myth must never be interpreted on one level only. No privileged explanation exists, for any myth consists in an interrelation of several explanatory levels; 2) a myth must never be interpreted alone, but in its relationship to other myths which, taken together, constitute a transformation group; 3) a group of myths must never be interpreted alone, but by reference: a) to other groups of myths; and b) to the ethnography of the societies in which they originate (Lévi-Strauss 1983, 65).

To illustrate the last point, we can take the example of the myth of common ancestry that is very common in different ethnic communities. The listed rules suggest we analyze this particular myth not only in the context of other similar myths but also in relationship to other main attributes of the ethnic community (ethnie), which Smith, for example, identifies as 1) a collective proper name; 2) shared historical memories; 3) one or more differentiating elements of common culture; 4) an association with a specific “homeland”; and 5) a sense of solidarity in significant sectors of the population (Smith 1991a, 21).

Also, according to Lévi-Strauss, we should take into account that there must be, and that there is, a correspondence between the unconscious meaning of a myth—the problem it tries to solve—and the conscious content it makes use of to reach that end, i.e., the plot. “However, this correspondence is not necessarily an exact reproduction; it can also appear as a logical transformation” (Lévi-Strauss 1963, Vol. 1, 204)

Such an interpretation leads to a completely new view of the nature of myth as a social phenomenon, namely, that the kind of logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science, and that the difference lies, not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the things to which it is applied. As Lévi-Strauss put it: “What makes a steel ax superior to a stone ax is not that the first one is better made than the second. They are equally well made, but steel is quite different from stone” (Lévi-Strauss 1963 Vol. 1, 230). Or, as Leszek Kołakowski said, the difference between scientific knowledge and narrative (mythical) knowledge is that the former uses one universal language, while the latter usually uses different ones (Kołakowski 1990). By analogy, if we follow the logic of Lévi-Strauss “the same logical process operates in myth as in science, and … man thinks equally well in both. The improvement lies, not in an alleged progress of man’s mind, but in discovery of new areas to which it may apply its unchanged and unchanging powers” (Lévi-Strauss 1963 Vol. 1, 230). The Russian philosopher Aleksei Losev stated something similar when he defined myth as “poetic estrangement given as a thing.” Losev wrote: “Science, morality and art are intelligent constructs while mythology realizes in fact these or other constructs” (Losev 1991, 163). Therefore it is important to differentiate our understanding of the usage of the term “myth” from another possible variant wherein it is implied in wider social concepts, namely, belief systems.

For instance, John Talmon (1981) used the term in this way:

The French Revolution bequeathed a colossal myth, which continues to have an incalculable effect as an inspiration and example all over the world: the vision of a people’s revolutionary war, in which patriotism and ideological revolutionary ardor became fused. The defense of native land then became identified with the struggle for a political-social ideal; against a counter-revolutionary league of selfish traitors and foreign reactionary powers. “Patrie” became synonymous in France with ‘La Revolution’, revolutionary “Liberté,” “La République une et indivisible.” Such slogans as “la patrie en danger,” “levée en masse,” and symbols like the tricolor, the “Marseillaise” and the red cap, came to evoke an almost religious response. In the cases of the Bolshevik, Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese and other revolutions, the memory and legends of similar struggles have proved to be far more potent and more cohesive influences than social-economic doctrines and innovating aspirations. (Talmon 1981, 5)

In this case, we should speak not about “colossal myth” (too many components and different aspects are included), but about the complexities of a belief system, i.e., a perception of the world order.

The crucial difference between the usage of these two terms, “belief system” and “myth,” can be found in the scale of the phenomena. These two terms reflect different levels of self-perception by social agents. A belief system tends to be based on the whole of a human being’s self-identity, whereas a myth is instead a particular component of this self-identity. For example, Smith (1984) describes ethnic myths and their components as a particular part of ethnic identity.

The term “belief system” is consistent with both social identity theory as well as with “reflection theory,”, since the former is a part of the same framework of the cognitive tradition in psychology, and the latter defines consciousness as a means of relation between the individual and the world (and this relation is defined by the socially developed system of knowledge fixed in language and all its meanings). This system of knowledge is adopted by the individual from early unconscious childhood and is in fact the first belief system to be built upon. Later on, this initial belief system develops and is accomplished with other belief systems, creating altogether a complex of beliefs or, in other words, an individual worldview, i.e., a cognitive scheme of the world.

In this way a myth as a particular kind of social belief can be a part of a belief system not only as a particular component, but also in the form of a transformation group of myths, as mentioned above. The dynamic between belief systems as a whole and their components remains debatable; however, it is important to stress the inherent differences which exist between them.

As pointed out earlier in this Chapter, national identity usually consists of national myth in the form of an ethnic myth or a complex of ethnic myths, because nations certainly built upon a preexisting “ethnic mosaic” in Europe and, mostly, outside. As Smith observes: “Myths of national identity typically refer to territory or ancestry (or both) as the basis of political community” (Smith 1991, viii). According to the author, the main features and characteristics of these myths vary. For instance, myths of ethnic descent can include, in different combinations, myths: 1) of origins, both temporal and spatial, telling us when we were born and from where we came; 2) of migrations and/or liberation (charting our wanderings and our road to freedom); 3) of descent proper, with a special emphasis upon the nature of our ancestors; 4) of the heroic age, which is an idealized past, a golden age when the community was great and glorious, when our national genius flourished and men were heroes; 5) of communal decline and, perhaps, conquest and exile; 6) of rebirth, a reawakening of the community which involves a summons to political action.

Myths usually exaggerate and dramatize historical events in order to make necessary conclusions more obvious. The Ukrainian philosopher N. Hamitov stated that national mythology is “the way to solve the tragic contradictions of the nation, which are not to be solved in an ‘ordinary’ life” (Mala 1996, 100) and one can only add that the “tragic” character of its perception could be well conditioned by the mythology itself. The function of myths in national (social) consciousness therefore is in mobilizing social opinion and social action. “The myths not only inspire, and even require, certain kinds of regenerative collective action; they answer the all-important questions of identity and purpose which religious tradition no longer seems able to resolve. In the shape of ancient heroes, they give us our standards of collective morality ... By ‘replacing’ us as links in an unbroken chain of generations, the myths of descent disclose our national destinies” (Smith 1984b, 115-123).

At the same time, Gellner argued: “nationalist ideology suffers from pervasive false consciousness. Its myth inverts reality...” (Gellner 1983, 125). In response to this, one can say that a myth of national identity represents reality in another dimension by another language. In fact, a myth successfully performs a real mobilizing function within the national community. If so, it might mean that either reality is already inverted (that is, unreasonable) or that myth is a special form of this reality.

We can apply this consideration not only to nationalist myth but also to all kinds of myths. For instance, Smith writes: “we might well see the emergence of a new European identity and community forging its own myths and symbols, and unifying itself around common values and memories out of the many cognate traditions to hand” (Smith 1988, 25). The basic assumptions for a belief system of European identity are much more amorphous and bleak than for a nationalist one;10 however, its belief system is rather successful. This means that where the nature of myth and its successful functioning are concerned, it is not necessary to follow rational knowledge.

“Under normal circumstances, most human beings can live happily with multiple identifications and enjoy moving between them as the situation requires” (Smith 1991b, 59) But, sometimes, one or another of these identities can come into confrontation with external reality, or enter into conflict with another individual identity. In this case it is a myth that very often can make confrontation less painful for the individual. Myth can become a kind of irrational medicine in order to encompass, or at least to simplify, contradictions within national consciousness. This mechanism is also applicable to social identities where conflicting knowledge can be encompassed through forgetting:

All profound changes in consciousness, by their nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias ... As with modern persons, so it is with nations. Awareness of being imbedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet of “forgetting” the experience of this continuity—product of the ruptures of the late eighteenth century—engenders the need for a narrative of “identity.” (Anderson 1991: 204-205)

On the other hand, the virtue of a social consciousness is that it can assist in maintaining collective myths much longer than would be possible for an individual consciousness:

Collective identities, however, tend to be pervasive and persistent. They are less subject to rapid changes and tend to be more intense and durable, even when quite large numbers of individuals no longer feel their power. This is especially true of religious and ethnic identities, which even in pre-modern eras often became politicized. It is particularly true of national identities today, when the power of mass political fervour reinforces the technological instruments of mass political organization, so that national identities can outlast the defection or apathy of quite large numbers of individual members. (Smith 1991b, 59)

We can now summarize some conclusions from the previous description of the relationships between national identity and myth. Contrary to the assumption of some “modernists” that national identity within a nation-state was created by industrial society and would be overcome with the establishment of post-industrial society, Philip Schlesinger has precisely noted that such assumptions have failed to conceptualize national identity, as opposed to the identities of emergent collectivities within established nation-states: “The parameters of the nation-state are taken for granted.” Schlesinger concludes that national identity “is to be understood as a particular kind of collective identity. In other words, it is an identity constituted at a given strategic level of a society” (Schlesinger 1987, 260-264).

Another important aspect here is that an individual internalizes reality (“national relationships” as it was called in Soviet Russian or Ukrainian terminology)11 in the context of the cultural and historical conditions of a particular society. In other words, an individual perceives and adopts national relationships not separately but in the context of other theoretical and practical aspects of reality.12 This complex determines the specifics of an individual consciousness. That is why we can easily observe that the conditions of social life, which become more intensive in societies during some transformations and especially in a period of national revival, cause meaningful changes within national consciousness. Sometimes these changes can provoke a confrontation between the multiple identities of an individual and his or her different loyalties. And it is myths that play an important role in overcoming this confrontation.

On the social level of national consciousness, a myth (ethnic, national, etc.) can also serve the important function of mobilizing public opinion and collective action in order to solve contemporary contradictions in social (national) development. The fact that the importance of myths increases mainly during periods of social transformation only underlines the importance of these mobilizing functions.

In an ideological sense, a myth as part of different, broader cognitive schemes (as a part of a complex belief system) is required to reconstruct the connections between the past, present and future in social consciousness if, for instance, the chain of historical self-perception is destroyed or broken. The Ukrainian scholar Oksana Zabuzhko stressed that the mythologization of national life is a result of “weak or uncompleted national worldviews” (Zabuzhko 1993, 51). At the same time, a myth itself can also successfully initiate a new chain in the process of social organization, and this is the case of so-called “invented communities.” Nationalism as an ideology and doctrine habitually employs different myths in order to subjugate the masses. As Eric Hobsbawm notes: “Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so. ‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation’ (Renan)” (Hobsbawm 1990, 12). Even nationalists themselves are conscious of their use of myths. For instance, Mussolini, one of the founders of fascism, said: “Our myth is the greatness of the nation.” The founder of Ukrainian integral nationalism, Dmytro Dontzov, in his main work Nationalism, wrote at the same time (1923) that each nation has and needs a myth for its own reinforcement (Dontsov 1966). So, we can sum up that myth within nationalist ideology is supposed to play a certain functional role such as mass mobilization or reinforcement of “weak national,” or rather nationalist, worldviews.

It is important to stress the extreme ability of myths to survive under any conditions and the hopelessness of attempts to deny a myth from a rational point of view. This situation of mythical thinking continues to exist in the present and, as Leszek Kołakowski said, contemporary people believe in absurdities no less than ancient people did. Individuals may deny myth for themselves, but not for other people. “Through life in a myth people become aware of transcendence, and in this encounter the objective and the subjective are inseparable; thus it is as impossible to find scientific truth in a myth as to reduce a myth to its personal, existential content” (Kołakowski 1990, 102). This must be what Losev meant when he wrote in his “final dialectical formula of myth” that myth is “a miraculous personal history given in words” (Losev 1991, 169).

Kołakowski also believed that narrative knowledge, to which some myths belong, is, in fact, much more positive for mankind than one can imagine. This point can be illustrated by the following passage:

When I try ... to point out the most dangerous characteristic of modernity, I tend to sum up my fear in one phrase: the disappearance of taboos. There is no way to distinguish between “good” and “bad” taboos, artificially to support the former and remove the latter; the abrogation of one, on the pretext of its rationality, results in a domino effect that brings the withering away of others. Various traditional human bonds which make communal life possible, and without which our existence would be regulated only by greed and fear, are not likely to survive without a taboo system, and it is perhaps better to believe in the validity of even apparently silly taboos than to let them all vanish. (Kołakowski 1990, 13).

Of course, Kołakowski does not mean that myth should remain a core of the modern worldview as it was in ancient times; but, presumably, as he suggests, it does make sense to restore, reluctantly, some of those irrational values, in order to survive, and thus to deny our rationality, thereby proving that perfect rationality is a self-defeating goal.

In the concept of nation a myth has not only a mobilizing and ideological function but also transfers its own ability to be perennial (if not endless) to national belief systems. This suggests two main conclusions: on the one hand, that any approach which oversimplifies the role of myth in national consciousness is destined for failure (such an approach would not take into account the fact that internal, irrational logic is as successful for myth as rational logic is for science); and on the other hand, myth is a necessary element of a complex belief system for an “orderly” group outlook, i.e., a cognitive schema of the world or worldview. For the latter, myth is required as a legitimizing factor under conditions when other legitimacy is not available. Psychologically, this is possible because the fundamentals of belief are “deeper than knowledge or thinking” (Psikhologia 1990, 50). Belief precedes knowledge and thinking precisely because the latter both rely on it. And since belief comes first it is stronger than knowledge and thinking.