Conclusion
Page 173 →This book was originally conceived as a synchronic history of rhetoric from 2650 to 355 bce, but in reality, it was a history of the relationship of two ideas. Most histories constitute a series of chronologically arranged events presented, each with some element of narrative causal relation. Mythic history, however, possesses historical verisimilitude precisely because its accounts never actually happened in the physical space we inhabit. The last chapter represented not a conclusion, but a placeholder that showed how ancient forms of myth shaped both Plato’s theory of myth and the way he used myth for rhetorical ends. Plato concluded that myths, which obeyed a skema, operated like a grammatical shape of truth. But in Plato’s perception, many other symbolic artifacts such as art or music might have a skema; he did not assert any symbolic form, but myth conveyed innate truths. These truths existed because they were retold in the same forms to deliver differing content. His theory suggests that he, too, created rhetorical myths cut from the same conceptual cloth of truth in the narrative of Critias. Over several millennia, rhetorical myths varied in detail and culturally situated function but tended to appear in eerily similar forms.
Arguably, this book is an extension of Barry Sandywell’s (2013) observation that rhetoric, long cast as a logocentric phenomenon, is akin to philosophy’s origins, namely as a “system of rational knowledge that has its origins in the sacred ethos of Greek myth” (p. 1). Cultural spaces that preceded and followed the mythic world of the Hellens were ones “in which our distinctions between the ‘natural’ and the ‘supranatural’ have no relevance” (p. 1). Rhetoric, like Sandywell’s image of early Greek philosophy, enfolds “experiences, values, and institutions that are older and other than the language” which was “older even than the Homeric world” as “the matrix of everything Hellenic” (p. 1). This book has attempted to provide a lens of analysis for the myths of specific cultures and historical periods to provide a more lucid image of rhetoric in Egypt, Sumer, and Greece. I suggest in conclusion that there exists a vast reservoir of Page 174 →material from other cultures and times outside the scope of this volume, which warrant further scrutiny.
Rhetorical myths shaped rhetorical history or perhaps reflected the rhetorical theory already present in their culture in memorable forms. Mythic forms of rhetorical theory, or myths deployed for rhetorical ends, represent a diverse but attenuated tradition in geographic and temporal proximity to one another. One must consider the general patterns occurring across these cultures to understand how rhetorical myths treated their more specific messages. In the cultures this volume has examined, rhetorical myths have engaged the ontological nature of rhetoric and its relational role to other definite beings, both concrete and abstract. Nearly all of them use exempla, whether in the form of persons, gods, or even cities, to stand in analogically for rhetorical concepts. They impose a relationship between human symbolic action, other beings, and concepts and often attribute rhetoric’s being and origin to a conceptually distinct world.
But this book might be misconstrued by some to infer from its thesis that myths are simple fabrications deployed to further human rhetorical ends. I have resisted an impulse toward theories of mythography, relying on a descriptive and historicizing account. I would briefly address mythographic matters in the context of rhetoric. Bruce Lincoln (2024), one of the most revered living scholars of myth, has recently explained that he rejected a view of myth as a storehouse of wisdom from which other human ideas arose; in mid-career he viewed them for “the way they normalized, legitimated, and thus helped reproduce asymmetric social structures and practices that are rigidly hierarchic … oppressive … exploitative” (p. 62). Initially, he was uncertain “whether myth reflects and helps reproduce local realities, mystifies and legitimates otherwise indefensible aspects of reality, or constructs the consciousness through which “reality” is perceived” (p. 63). He ultimately concluded that myth does “all three” (p. 63). But Lincoln’s perspective omits a foundational part of myth he once acknowledged. He has grown to see the perspective of myth as a manifestation of collective, nonlocal forces as antiquated. I posit this discarded perspective on myth is not only viable but indispensable to understanding mythic rhetorical processes. To dismiss the fundamentally magical character of the transcultural operations of myth reflects a degree of cynicism rampant in our time and one that has served us poorly (see Eliade, 1957). This is equally true of a view of rhetoric as a largely transactional persuasive enterprise.
Mythic framers of rhetoric often conveyed a belief that ideas possessed their own independent existence. Often, they interrogated or dialectically engaged Page 175 →the proposition. Among these ideas was the nature of rhetoric. The history of rhetoric itself is a history of individuals and their relationship to an idea, as well as how they use, adapt, and transmit that idea into new forms for specific purposes. In ancient cultures, rhetorical myths played a fundamental role in shaping and expressing concepts, understanding the real, and functioning as tools for collective persuasion. To take one of Lincoln’s three perspectives as exemplary, it would be a tremendously reductive and transactional view of myth to allege that they only represented a hegemonic reification of power structures. It would be equally reductive and transactional to say the same of rhetoric. A single perspective would not only be a cynical view of myth but also of rhetoric. Likewise, a fundamentally transactional view of rhetoric and myth marginalizes deep strata of human impulses and experience. Ironically, such a perspective intellectually impoverishes us all with each new transaction. Ultimately, myths conveyed perceptual and conceptual rhetorical principles and utilized distinctive rhetorical techniques. Myths were likewise instrumental in conveying rhetorical concepts that extended beyond the narrative details or characteristics of the mythical figures they depicted. However, the improbable similarity of rhetorical myths leaves a profound lacuna and an open question about myth itself that might never find a conclusive and authoritative answer.
I offer the following speculative rumination that the reader may consider secondary, but I would argue it is primary if we extend these findings beyond rhetoric. On its surface, this book is a synchronic analysis of how myth shaped the ancient world’s rhetoric and how rhetoricians used myths. Scratch the surface and you will find something far more mysterious. The foregoing chapters have reexamined the implications of ancient rhetoric, extending its historical measure considerably backward in time. Yet this book does not posit that myth is the origin of human rhetorical thought. What this book suggests is the existence of a fabric within the deep latent mental structure of humanity. This latent fabric of collective awareness ultimately does not derive from human motives or cultures alone. Some fundamental force exists outside of simple historical causation or human desire that impels humans to make myths about the nature of persuasion, writing, and speech. The use of myth to explain rhetorical processes is one thread of this fabric representing a human need to conceptually address the being of rhetoric and its relations. Egypt, Sumeria, and Greece represent early evidence of a reflective consideration on the nature of persuasion and the manipulation of symbolic forms. But they are merely the first recorded manifestation of a pervasive phenomenon that may comprise part of what makes us fundamentally human. The forms of these myths are Page 176 →attempts to make meaning and order on webs of conceptual and individual relations. They also address rhetoric as a force that exists outside of humans and the human systems in which rhetoric operates. But this book points to the existence of a rhetoric that is older and far stranger than this book can comprehensively convey.
Consider an early assertion of this book: the rhetorical function of myth gestures to the epistemic limits of verifiable human knowledge. If human knowledge were a glass of still water, the rhetorical function of myth is to gesture at the depth, width, height, and circumference of the glass itself, to define the ontological beginning of this knowledge. There exist verifiable connections between Sumeria and Egypt sufficient to explain the appearance of Seshat at the same time as Nisaba. There likewise exist demonstrable connections with Egypt to explain the presence of Thoth in Greece or why Ptolemaic Hellene conquerors identified Seshat as a rhetorical goddess. Common ideal objects, personifications, and anthropomorphic analogies exist in Thoth, Enmerkar, Nisaba, Seshat, and many others. In our contemporary perspective, we do not credit that these mythic entia ever really existed, but we certainly credit the ideas they represented as real. Plato (1925) himself advanced his protreptic arguments with myth because myth might convey a skema muthos of truth: myths could convey truth because they took on an analogical “shape” or “form” of the truth for which historical or rational proofs are absent (see Timaeus, p. 107d–e). Plato explained that the continuous life of myths over time largely owed to their necessity: they exist in a highly memorable form to convey truth when the arts of writing are lost (p. 109a–d). Both Aristotle and Plato assert that certain myths have the same uncanny power; they represent the form of a concept and seem to move in discourse with a life of their own, even when their utility is exhausted. In his theory of myth, Plato reified a traditional form of rhetorical expression he put into practice. Arguably, however, it was consistent with the perspective of other ancient cultures tailored to fit a fresh protreptic aim.
While these patterns of mythic thought were a causal force in the history of rhetoric, there remains a wholly different sort of entia at play that gave impetus to them. Once spoken, myths may come and go, may seem to die, transform, and are later reborn. Consider first the proposition in this book that ancient peoples’ viewed ideas as possessing autonomy or even possessing personalities of their own. Then consider only some examples outside this history’s geographical and temporal scope. In cultures, most historians categorize them separately from the interconnected ones examined herein, and similar myths exist. Though we conventionally believe myths have no life of their own, Page 177 →their structural similarity has a kind of reproductive life that informs our understanding of causation, time, and historical logic. Recall the ontological mythmaking of the Torres Strait and the Western Desert discussed in the introduction. Because contemporary myths are examined through the lens of wholly different ontological and metaphysical assumptions than their creators, we have fundamentally lost access to a world they so readily perceive (Stanner, 1979, p. 29). Yet in our discourse, we have paradoxical and fundamental beliefs in the autonomy and agency of Tjukurrpa-like entia in our own conceptual life (e.g., “justice”), and we elevate these abstract entia to an actuated mythological presence (Roheim, 2017). No group of people, for example, has ever arrived at an agreed upon definition of justice. Yet this idea is persistent in our discourse: this autonomous idea of an ideal world intrudes incorrigibly into our assumptions and everyday activities.
Other ancient myths in radically different cultural contexts represented structurally similar narratives deployed for rhetorical ends. The myth of Cangjie (蒼頡) and primary sources such as the Shuowen Jiezi (1870; 說文解字), Lunheng (論衡), Huainanzi (淮南子), and Hanfeizi (韓非子) provide a composite image of his mythic narrative. There is no single text with the “complete” myth; it seems to have accumulated details over time, but a primary source may exist from which all others borrowed details. The Xunzi, a comprehensive presentation of Confucian thought, states that the script developed by Cangjie was the earliest to be fully transmitted from antiquity. The Lunheng elaborates that this development enabled humans to finally progress and improve themselves. Additionally, the Huainanzi recounts that upon the completion of Cangjie’s work, ghosts cried throughout the night, and the heavens showered millet upon the earth. Hauinanzi reads, “When Cangjie created the characters, millet fell from the heavens and the ghosts wailed in the night, and as human wisdom increased, the virtue of the humankind diminished” (Schwenger, 2019, 91). Han Fei’s mention of Cangjie dates from the mid-third century bce and is one of the earliest. In chapter 49, Han Fei discusses rhetorical principles associated with counsel, the rules for civil governance, and their relationship to the original characters and their lexicographical meanings.
In ancient times, when Cangjie invented writing, he called acting in one’s own interest si; what opposes si, he called gong. So Cangjie certainly knew already that gong and si oppose each other (Chen, 2004, 19.49.1105). But the conceptual substructure of rhetorical myth would suggest that both newer and much older versions are both true and untrue in equal measure. To inquire which set of true falsehoods is the most authentic does not bring us nearer to Page 178 →their central truth propositions. They possess a life as independent ideas into which new details are often embroidered. The postface of Xu (xù 敘) states: “The Scribe of the Yellow Emperor, Cangjie, observing the traces of the footprints and tracks of birds and wild animals, understood that their linear structures could be distinguished by their differences. When he first created writing by carving in wood, the hundred officials became regulated, the myriad things became discriminated… . This is saying that wen 文 ‘cultured pattern’ (writing) is a means to disseminate education and illuminate ethical influence for the king at court” (O’Neill, 2016, p. 259).
Much like the myth of Thoth, the mythic character of Cangjie provides the technology of writing and the means to make categorical distinctions between a world of related things. Another commentary advances a nuanced interpretation of the episode. The structural similarity of Cangjie’s narrative to Sumerian myths is striking, and its general similitude to the story of Enmerkar has been the subject of inquiry (see, e.g., Yushu, 2006, 2010; Yushu et al. & Yinghui, 2009). Perhaps Cangjie’s marked similarity to Enmerkar is an outgrowth of the deep strata of mythic consciousness itself to recursively grapple with the mystery of symbolic action.
The myth of Cangjie demonstrated a distinct connection between the means of persuasion and natural signs, and as in Sumerian culture, very overtly connected the presence of liminal actions and writing to social organization. In the details syncretically composing the myth, Cangjie wanders in the wilderness and is temporally in a space unrelated to his ordained social position and his customary geography. Cangjie is liminal agent between categorical spheres of knowledge, in this case, natural signs or the path of the stars themselves. Like ritual liminars in preliterate society, he must travel to discover and manipulate symbols to return to the Yellow Emperor. Many similar ancient accounts in China or India share a general similitude. The goddesses are likewise present. In India they occur notably in the Ramayana and in the goddess Saraswati (Goldman, 1984). Saraswati makes her first appearance in the Rigveda and was said to exist on the tip of a poet’s tongue. Her cult spread to Japan, China, Myanmar, Nepal, Indonesia, and Cambodia (see, e.g., Ludvik, 2001). In fact, her name in Chinese might be precisely translated “Great Eloquence Deity” (Ludvik, 2001, p. 228). The world is fairly bristling with rhetorical myths and reflections upon the rhetorical nature of myth.
First, collectively, these accounts show that they have an inextricable place in the textual corpus of rhetorical myth and that those myths, in number, exceed the sheer scalar limitations imposed by only one book. As to their true Page 179 →nature, a rhetorician with a true grasp of Sinological or Vedic scholarship could grapple with the historical, cultural, and linguistic milieu of their origins. Likewise, they could elaborate the philosophical perspectives that underpin these myths. In so doing, they might expand the idea of rhetorical myths and by extension, the history of rhetoric. Nor are these the only cultures that possess rhetorical myths. The presence of rhetorical myths of strikingly related character suggests their presence elsewhere. Take, for example, the gods who patronized rhetoric in many other ancient cultures: Tyr, in ancient Armenian myth, was the god of rhetoric. What do we know of Tyr? This accounting is, and must be, limited because the rhetorical gods of Africa, North America, Meso-America, and Australasia are likely without number.1 The gods of our collective Dreamtime get lonely for people and press against the margins of our scholarly awareness.
Yet another example of the operation of rhetorical myth in the ancient Chinese textual corpus is in the Zhuangzi. Regarding the relationship of truth propositions in mythic accounts, Zhuangzi states that “The understanding of the men of ancient times went a long way. How far did it go? To the point where some of them believed that things have never existed” (Watson, 2013, p. 11). This observation is contained in an observation about the relationship of right speech to the nature reality itself, often translated as “the Way.” Many other ancient rhetorical myths exist. They do not represent a linear or evolutionary narrative from a single source, but a manifestation of our collective dreams from the deep structure of myth. To Austro-Aboriginal people, myths are a turiku of the dreaming to transmit principals that preexisted humans. Such principles live autonomously in a world that occupies the same space as the visible one. Tjukurrpa is not just a parallel reality, but a set of laws; sometimes when discussing it, Austro-Aboriginal sources have said “It’s a big law. We must sit down alongside that Law like all the dead people who went before us” (F. R. Myers, 1991, p. 53). The sheer scale of global rhetorical myths therefore requires a limited historical survey as a beginning, to understand the influence, nature, and transmission of rhetorical concepts omitted from conventional histories.
A central assertion of many rhetorical myths is that our capacity to use symbols is of numinous origin and exists in sacred liminal space. This space exists between us and other entia, whether concrete or abstract. While this may evoke a degree of instinctive trepidation in the contemporary mind beset by academic reality, this trepidation owes largely to our materialist and rationalist ontology. Conversely, the ancient assertion of mythic reality was meant to convey a more pertinent observation about our collective nature. They expressed this reality Page 180 →in mythic conventions because the sacred nature of consciousness derives from the human capacity for rhetorical agency. It was not merely a space we occupy but might share with relationally ontological entities. Our ability to transgress this relational space through symbols is ontological in nature because it is what we are. A reductive expression of rhetoric to a merely functional or transactional set of operations would be a blasphemy of the highest order to ancient people. Sadly, this is often the way in which rhetorical power has been theorized in a technologized and commodified world.
Rhetoric may be a key to understanding the underlying structure of myth, but myth is likewise key to understanding the history of rhetoric. Rhetorical myth posits that humanity’s exceptional nature owed to its ontological presence in rhetorical agency. Though ancient people conveyed rhetorical precept through metaphor, its central conceit remains valid today. The greatest of our innate human capacities remain rhetorical and is evident in the way we extend symbols in novel and constructive forms to order the world around us. Myth underscored this innate capacity and gestured to our ontological presence in sacred space by virtue of this capacity. The capacity for symbolic action made us participants in another world where our higher cognitive presence had a distinct being. Thus, the proposition that the rhetorical act was also a sacred act remains essential today. In myth, the uniquely human affinity for symbolic action was an expression of rhetorical agency that marked our ontological relationship to a higher order of reality. This expression implicated our capacity to integrate a panoply of experiences in novel and dispositionally rhetorical forms we share in common.