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Mythology - introduction to mythology
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Mythology
The word mythology (from the Greek μυϑολογία mythología, from μυϑολογείν
mythologein to relate myths, from μύϑος mythos, meaning a narrative, and
λόγος logos, meaning speech or argument) literally means the (oral)
retelling of myths – stories that a particular culture believes to be
true and that use the supernatural to interpret natural events and to
explain the nature of the universe and humanity. In modern usage,
"mythology" is either the body of myths from a particular culture or
religion (as in Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology or Norse mythology)
or the branch of knowledge dealing with the collection, study and
interpretation of myths, also known as mythography.
Term
The term mythology has been in use since the 15th century, and means "an
exposition of myths". The current meaning of "body of myths" itself
dates to 1781 (Oxford English Dictionary (OED)).[1] The adjective
mythical dates to 1678. Myth in general use is often interchangeable
with legend or allegory, but some scholars strictly distinguish the
terms.[2] The term has been used in English since the 19th century. The
newest edition of the OED distinguishes the meanings
1a. "A traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or
forces or creatures , which embodies and provides an explanation,
aetiology, or justification for something such as the early history of a
society, a religious belief or ritual, or a natural phenomenon", citing
the Westminster Review of 1830 as the first English attestation[3]
1b. "As a mass noun: such stories collectively or as a genre." (1840)
2a. "A widespread but untrue or erroneous story or belief" (1849)
2b. "A person or thing held in awe or generally referred to with near
reverential admiration on the basis of popularly repeated stories
(whether real or fictitious)." (1853)
2c. "A popular conception of a person or thing which exaggerates or
idealizes the truth." (1928)
In contrast to the OED's definition of a myth as a "traditional story",
many folklorists apply the term to only one group of traditional
stories. By this system, traditional stories can be arranged into three
groups:[4][5][6]
* myths - sacred stories concerning the distant past, particularly the
creation of the world; generally focussed on the gods
* legends - stories about the (usually more recent) past, which
generally include, or are based on, some historical events; generally
focussed on human heroes
* folktales/fairytales (or Marchen, the German word for such tales) -
stories whose tellers acknowledge them to be fictitious, and which lack
any definite historical setting; often include animal characters
Religious-studies scholars often limit the term "myth" to stories whose
main characters "must be gods or near-gods".[7]
Some scholars disagree with such attempts to restrict the definition of
the word "myth". The classicist G. S. Kirk thinks the distinction
between myths and folktales may be useful,[8] but he argues that "the
categorizing of tales as folktales, legends, and proper myths, simple
and appealing as it seems, can be seriously confusing".[9] In
particular, he rejects the idea "that all myths are associated with
religious beliefs, feelings or practices".[10] The religious scholar
Robert A. Segal goes even farther, defining myths simply as stories
whose main characters are "personalities — divine, human, or even
animal".[11]
A popular meaning (which English myth shares with Greek μῦθος) of a
rumour, misconception or mistaken belief, is in marked contrast to the
meaning "stories of deep cultural or spiritual significance". In this
article, the term is used in the latter sense, detached from the notion
of historical truth, throughout.
Characteristics
Historically, the important approaches to the study of mythological
thinking have been those of Vico, Schelling, Schiller, Jung, Freud,
Lávy-Bruhl, Levi-Strauss, Frye, the Soviet school, and the Myth and
Ritual School.[12]
Myths are narratives about divine or heroic beings, arranged in a
coherent system, passed down traditionally, and linked to the spiritual
or religious life of a community, endorsed by rulers or priests. Once
this link to the spiritual leadership of society is broken, they lose
their mythological qualities and become folktales or fairy tales.[13] In
folkloristics, which is concerned with the study of both secular and
sacred narratives, a myth also derives some of its power from being more
than a simple "tale", by comprising an archetypical quality of "truth".
Myths are often intended to explain the universal and local beginnings
("creation myths" and "founding myths"), natural phenomena, inexplicable
cultural conventions or rituals, and anything else for which no simple
explanation presents itself. This broader truth runs deeper than the
advent of critical history, and it may or may not exist as in an
authoritative written form which becomes "the story" (preliterate oral
traditions may vanish as the written word becomes "the story" and the
literate class becomes "the authority"). However, as Lucien Lévy-Bruhl
puts it, "The primitive mentality is a condition of the human mind, and
not a stage in its historical development."[14]
Most often the term refers specifically to ancient tales of historical
cultures, such as Greek mythology or Roman mythology. Some myths
descended originally as part of an oral tradition and were only later
written down, and many of them exist in multiple versions. According to
F. W. J. Schelling in the eighth chapter of Introduction to Philosophy
and Mythology, "Mythological representations have been neither invented
nor freely accepted. The products of a process independent of thought
and will, they were, for the consciousness which underwent them, of an
irrefutable and incontestable reality. Peoples and individuals are only
the instruments of this process, which goes beyond their horizon and
which they serve without understanding." Individual myths or mythemes
may be classified in various categories:
* Ritual myths explain the performance of certain religious practices or
patterns and associated with temples or centers of worship.
* Origin myths (aetiologies) describe the beginnings of a custom, name
or object.
* Creation myths, which describes how the world or universe came into
being.
* Cult myths are often seen as explanations for elaborate festivals that
magnify the power of the deity.
* Prestige myths are usually associated with a divinely chosen king,
hero, city, or people.
* Eschatological myths are stories which describe catastrophic ends to
the present world order of the writers. These extend beyond any
potential historical scope, and thus can only be described in mythic
terms. Apocalyptic literature such as the New Testament Book of
Revelation is an example of a set of eschatological myths.
* Social myths reinforce or defend current social values or practices.
* the Trickster myth, which concerns itself with the pranks or tricks
played by gods or heroes. Heroes do not have to be in a story to be
considered a myth.
Religion and mythology
Significantly, none of the scholarly definitions of "myth" (see above)
imply that myths are necessarily false. In a scholarly context, the word
"myth" may mean "sacred story", "traditional story", or "story about
gods", but it does not mean "false story". Therefore, scholars may speak
of "religious mythology" without meaning to insult religion. (For
instance, a scholar may call Christian and Muslim scriptures "myths"
without meaning to insult Christianity and Islam.) However, this
scholarly use of the word "myth" may cause confusion and offense, due to
the popular use of "myth" to mean "falsehood".
Many myths, such as ritual myths, are clearly part of religion. However,
unless we simply define myths as "sacred stories" (instead defining them
as "traditional stories", for instance), not all myths are necessarily
religious. As the classicist G. S. Kirk notes, "many myths embody a
belief in the supernatural [...] but many other myths, or what seem like
myths, do not".[15] As an example, Kirk cites the myth of Oedipus, which
is "only superficially associated [...] with religion or the
supernatural", and is therefore not a sacred story.[16] (Note that
folklorists would not classify the Oedipus story as a myth, precisely
because it is not a sacred story.[17])
Examples of religious myths include:
* the Hebrew creation account in Genesis, which is clearly a sacred
story about the creation of the world
* the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish, a creation account around which the
Babylonians' religious New Year festival revolved[18]
* an Australian myth describing the first sacred bora ritual[19]
Related concepts
Myths are not the same as fables, legends, folktales, fairy tales,
anecdotes or fiction, but the concepts may overlap. Notably, during
Romanticism, folktales and fairy tales were perceived as eroded
fragments of earlier mythology (famously by the Brothers Grimm and Elias
Lönnrot). Mythological themes are also very often consciously employed
in literature, beginning with Homer. The resulting work may expressly
refer to a mythological background without itself being part of a body
of myths (Cupid and Psyche). The medieval romance in particular plays
with this process of turning myth into literature. Euhemerism refers to
the process of rationalization of myths, putting themes formerly imbued
with mythological qualities into pragmatic contexts, for example
following a cultural or religious paradigm shift (notably the
re-interpretation of pagan mythology following Christianization).
Conversely, historical and literary material may acquire mythological
qualities over time, for example the Matter of Britain and the Matter of
France, based on historical events of the 5th and 8th centuries,
respectively, were first made into epic poetry and became partly
mythological over the following centuries. "Conscious generation" of
mythology has been termed mythopoeia by J. R. R. Tolkien[20], and was
notoriously also suggested by Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg.
Formation of myths
Robert Graves said of Greek myth: "True myth may be defined as the
reduction to narrative shorthand of ritual mime performed on public
festivals, and in many cases recorded pictorially." (The Greek Myths,
Introduction). Graves was deeply influenced by Sir James George Frazer's
mythography The Golden Bough, and he would have agreed that myths are
generated by many cultural needs. Myths authorize the cultural
institutions of a tribe, a city, or a nation by connecting them with
universal truths. Myths justify the current occupation of a territory by
a people, for instance. All cultures have developed over time their own
myths, consisting of narratives of their history, their religions, and
their heroes. The great power of the symbolic meaning of these stories
for the culture is a major reason why they survive as long as they do,
sometimes for thousands of years. Mâche distinguishes between "myth, in
the sense of this primary psychic image, with some kind of mytho-logy,
or a system of words trying with varying success to ensure a certain
coherence between these images[21]. Joseph Campbell is one of the more
famous modern authors on myths and the history of spirituality. His book
The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1948) outlined the basic ideas he would
continue to elaborate on until his death in 1987.
Myths as depictions of historical events
As discussed above, the status of a story as myth is unrelated to
whether it is based on historical events. Myths that are based on a
historical events over time become imbued with symbolic meaning,
transformed, shifted in time or place, or even reversed. One way of
conceptualizing this process is to view 'myths' as lying at the far end
of a continuum ranging from a 'dispassionate account' to 'legendary
occurrence' to 'mythical status'. As an event progresses towards the
mythical end of this continuum, what people think, feel and say about
the event takes on progressively greater historical significance while
the facts become less important. By the time one reaches the mythical
end of the spectrum the story has taken on a life of its own and the
facts of the original event have become almost irrelevant. A classical
example of this process is the Trojan War, a topic firmly within the
scope of Greek mythology. The extent of a historical basis in the Trojan
cycle is disputed, see historicity of the Iliad.
This method or technique of interpreting myths as accounts of actual
events, euhemerist exegesis, dates from antiquity and can be traced back
(from Spencer) to Evhémère's Histoire sacrée (300 BCE) which describes
the inhabitants of the island of Panchaia, Everything-Good, in the
Indian Ocean as normal people deified by popular naivety. As Roland
Barthes affirms, "Myth is a word chosen by history. It could not come
from the nature of things". [22]
This process occurs in part because the events described become detached
from their original context and new context is substituted, often
through analogy with current or recent events. Some Greek myths
originated in Classical times to provide explanations for inexplicable
features of local cult practices, to account for the local epithet of
one of the Olympian gods, to interpret depictions of half-remembered
figures, events, or to account for the deities' attributes or entheogens,
even to make sense of ancient icons, much as myths are invented to
"explain" heraldic charges, the origins of which has become arcane with
the passing of time. Conversely, descriptions of recent events are
re-emphasised to make them seem to be analogous with the commonly known
story. This technique has been used by some religious conservatives in
America with text from the Bible, notably referencing the many
prophecies in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation especially.
It was also used during the Russian Communist-era in propaganda about
political situations with misleading references to class struggles.
Until World War II the fitness of the Emperor of Japan was linked to his
mythical descent from the Shinto sun goddess, Amaterasu.
Mâche argues that euhemerist exegesis, "was applied to capture and seize
by force of reason qualities of thought, which eluded it on every
side."[23] This process, he argues, often leads to interpretation of
myths as "disguised propaganda in the service of powerful individuals,"
and that the purpose of myths in this view is to allow the "social
order" to establish "its permanence on the illusion of a natural order."
He argues against this interpretation, saying that "what puts an end to
this caricature of certain speeches from May 1968 is, among other
things, precisely the fact that roles are not distributed once and for
all in myths, as would be the case if they were a variant of the idea of
an 'opium of the people.'"
Contra Barthes Mâche argues that, "myth therefore seems to choose
history, rather than be chosen by it" [24], "beyond words and stories,
myth seems more like a psychic content from which words, gestures, and
musics radiate. History only chooses for it more or less becoming
clothes. And these contents surge forth all the more vigorously from the
nature of things when reason tries to repress them. Whatever the roles
and commentaries with which such and such a socio-historic movement
decks out the mythic image, the latter lives a largely autonomous life
which continually fascinates humanity. To denounce archaism only makes
sense as a function of a 'progressive' ideology, which itself begins to
show a certain archaism and an obvious naivety."[25]
Catastrophists [26] such as Immanuel Velikovsky believe that myths are
derived from the oral histories of ancient cultures that witnessed
cosmic catastrophes. The catastrophic interpretation of myth, forms only
a small minority within the field of mythology.
Theoretical descriptions
Middleton argues that, "For Lévi-Strauss, myth is a structured system of
signifiers, whose internal networks of relationships are used to 'map'
the structure of other sets of relationships; the 'content' is
infinitely variable and relatively unimportant."[27]
In their book Hamlet's Mill, Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von
Dechend suggest that myth is a "technical language" describing cosmic
events, [28] They write:
"One should pay attention to the cosmological information contained in
ancient myth, information of chaos, struggle and violence. [..] Plato
knew .. that the language of myth is, in principle, as ruthlessly
generalizing as up-to-date "tech talk". .. There is no other technique,
apparently, than myth, which succeeds in telling structure [..] The main
merit of this language has turned out to be its built-in ambiguity. Myth
can be used as a vehicle for handing down solid knowledge independently
from the degree of insight of the people who do the actual telling of
stories, fables, etc"
Modern mythology
Film and book series like Star Wars and Tarzan have strong mythological
aspects that sometimes develop into deep and intricate philosophical
systems. These items are not mythology, but contain mythic themes that,
for some people, meet the same psychological needs. An example is that
developed by J. R. R. Tolkien in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the
Rings.
Fiction, however, does not reach the level of actual mythology until
people believe that it really happened. For example, some people believe
that fiction author Clive Barker's Candyman was based upon an actual
event, and new stories have grown up around the figure. The same can be
said for the Blair Witch and many other works of fiction.
Mythology is alive and well in the modern age through urban legends, New
Age beliefs, certain aspects of religion and so forth. In the 1950s
Roland Barthes published a series of essays examining modern myths and
the process of their creation in his book Mythologies. Swiss
psychologist Carl Jung (1873-1961) and his followers also tried to
understand the psychology behind world myths.
Notes
1. ^ In extended use, the word can also refer to collective or personal
ideological or socially constructed received wisdon, as in "At least
since Tocqueville compared American society to 'a vast lottery', our
mythology of business has celebrated risk-taking." (2000 The New
Republic, 29 May 2000)
2. ^ Doyle
3. ^ Earlier editions of the OED also present this quote as the earliest
attestation of myth, but consider it an example of the definition
corresponding to definition 2.
4. ^ Glenn
5. ^ Segal, p. 5
6. ^ Zong, p. xxi
7. ^ Segal, p. 5
8. ^ Kirk, p. 37-41
9. ^ Kirk, p. 22
10. ^ Kirk, p. 11
11. ^ Segal, p. 5
12. ^ Guy Lanoue, Foreword to Meletinsky, p.viii
13. ^ Simpson & Roud (2000). Dictionary of English Folklore, 254.
14. ^ Mâche (1992). Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion, 8.
15. ^ Kirk, p. 11
16. ^ Kirk, p. 11
17. ^ Dundes, p. 4
18. ^ Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 77
19. ^ Reed, p. 33-36
20. ^ Tolkien (1997). The Monsters and the Critics. HarperCollins; New
Ed edition.
21. ^ Mâche (1992). Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion,
20.
22. ^ Mâche (1992). Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion,
20.
23. ^ Mâche (1992). Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion,
10.
24. ^ Mâche (1992). Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion,
21.
25. ^ Mâche (1992). Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion,
20.
26. ^ Researchers include Dwardu Cardona (author of God Star ISBN
1-4120-8308-7), Ev Cochrane (The Many Faces of Venus ISBN
0-9656229-0-9), Alfred de Grazia (Quantavolution series), David Talbott
and (Saturn Myth ISBN 0-385-11376-5), and authors at Catastrophism! Man,
Myth and Mayhem in Ancient History and the Sciences
27. ^ Middleton (1990). Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion,
222.
28. ^ Santillana & Dechend (1990). Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating
the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth, 222.
References
* Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957)
* Kees W. Bolle, The Freedom of Man in Myth. Vanderbilt University
Press, 1968.
* Reed, A. W. Aboriginal Myths, Legends and Fables. Chatswood: Reed,
1982.
* Thomas Bulfinch, Bulfinch's Mythology (1880s).
* Caillois, Roger (1972). Le mythe et l'homme. Gallimard.
* Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University
Press, 1949.
* Mircea Eliade
o Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. Princeton
University Press, 1954.
o The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans. Willard R.
Trask. NY: Harper & Row, 1961.
* James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890).
* Louis Herbert Gray [ed.], The Mythology of All Races, in 12 vols.,
1916.
* Edith Hamilton, Mythology (1998)
* Lucien Lévy-Bruhl
o Mental Functions in Primitive Societies (1910)
o Primitive Mentality (1922)
o The Soul of the Primitive (1928)
o The Supernatural and the Nature of the Primitive Mind (1931)
o Primitive Mythology (1935)
o The Mystic Experience and Primitive Symbolism (1938)
* Charles H. Long, Alpha: The Myths of Creation. George Braziller, 1963.
* Meletinsky, Eleazar Moiseevich The Poetics of Myth (Translated by Guy
Lanoue and Alexandre Sadetsky, foreword by Guy Lanoue) 2000 Routledge
ISBN 0415928982
* Barry B. Powell, "Classical Myth," 5th edition, Prentice-Hall.
* Santillana and Von Dechend (1969, 1992 re-issue). "Hamlet's Mill: An
Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission
Through Myth", Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-87923-215-3.
* Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
o Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, 1856.
o Philosophy of Mythology, 1857.
o Philosophy of Revelation, 1858.
* Segal, Robert A. Myth: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP,
2004
* Welker, Glenn. "Stories/Myths/Legends". Indigenous Peoples Literature.
14 August 2004 <http://www.indigenouspeople.net/stories.htm>.
* Zǒng In-Sǒb. Folk Tales from Korea. Elizabeth: Hollym International,
1982
* Kirk, G. S. Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other
Cultures. Berkeley: Cambridge UP, 1973
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