1 - The past, the present and the historian

Summary

Remembrance and Reflection how ally'd;

What thin partitions Sense from Thought divide

(Alexander Pope, An essay on man, I.225–6)

The historian as mythmaker

I use the word myth here in a non-pejorative, or at least neutral, way. For the late Romans and most of the postclassical world, Greek múthos and its derivatives have had senses like ‘fabulous’, ‘naive’, ‘erroneous’ (late L mȳthos= fibula). There is an older interpretation too: myth is vera narration, universal truth in allegorical disguise. I have in mind something less tendentious, more modern: a myth in the widest sense is a story or image that structures some epistemic field (knowledge, thought, belief) in a particular culture.

Myths come in many forms. Some are large-scale origin-stories, like (neo-)Darwinism or ‘scientific creationism’. Others are shorter, more local: acne may be caused by youthful onanism, or infection of the sebaceous glands; thunder by electrical discharge or the borborygmus of Zeus. There are non-narrative or static myths as well, powerful images of things now existing or that once existed: the abyss over which the Spirit of God broods dovelike in Genesis 1, or the singularity preceding the Big Bang.