Myth

Myth is a genre of folklore consisting primarily of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society. For scholars, this is different from the ordinary sense of the term myth, meaning a belief that is not true, as the veracity of a piece of folklore is entirely irrelevant to determining whether it constitutes a myth. Myths are often endorsed by religious and secular authorities, and may be natural or supernatural in character. Many societies group their myths, legends, and history together, considering myths and legends to be factual accounts of their remote past. In particular, creation myths take place in a primordial age when the world had not achieved its later form. Origin myths explain how a society's customs, institutions, and taboos were established and sanctified. National myths are narratives about a nation's past that symbolize the nation's values. There is a complex relationship between recital of myths and the enactment of rituals.

]] Myth is a genre of folklore consisting primarily of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society. For scholars, this is different from the ordinary sense of the term myth, meaning a belief that is not true, as the veracity of a piece of folklore is entirely irrelevant to determining whether it constitutes a myth. Myths are often endorsed by religious and secular authorities, and may be natural or supernatural in character. Many societies group their myths, legends, and history together, considering myths and legends to be factual accounts of their remote past. In particular, creation myths take place in a primordial age when the world had not achieved its later form. Origin myths explain how a society's customs, institutions, and taboos were established and sanctified. National myths are narratives about a nation's past that symbolize the nation's values. There is a complex relationship between recital of myths and the enactment of rituals.

Protagonists and structure

The main characters in myths are usually non-humans, such as gods, demigods, and other supernatural figures. Others include humans, animals, or combinations in their classification of myth. Stories of everyday humans, although often of leaders of some type, are usually contained in legends, as opposed to myths. Myths are sometimes distinguished from legends in that myths deal with gods, usually have no historical basis, and are set in a world of the remote past, very different from that of the present.

Related terms

Myth criticism

Myth criticism is a system of anthropological interpretation of culture created by French philosopher Gilbert Durand. Scholars have used myth criticism to explain the mythical roots of contemporary fiction, which means that modern myth criticism needs to be interdisciplinary. Traditional myth critics like Georges Dumézil, Hans Blumenberg, Kurt Hübner, and Pierre Brunel have created paradigmatic systems and clarified the meanings of myths within their original sources, evolution, and con texts.

Mythopoeia

Mythopoeia ( + , 'I make myth') was termed by J. R. R. Tolkien, amongst others, to refer to the "conscious generation" of mythology.

Interpretations

Comparative mythology

Comparative mythology is a systematic comparison of myths from different cultures. It seeks to discover underlying themes that are common to the myths of multiple cultures. In some cases, comparative mythologists use the similarities between separate mythologies to argue that those mythologies have a common source. This source may inspire myths or provide a common "protomythology" that diverged into the mythologies of each culture.

Functionalism

A number of commentators have argued that myths function to form and shape society and social behaviour. Eliade argued that one of the foremost functions of myth is to establish models for behavior and that myths may provide a religious experience. By telling or reenacting myths, members of traditional societies detach themselves from the present, returning to the mythical age, thereby coming closer to the divine. Honko asserted that, in some cases, a society reenacts a myth in an attempt to reproduce the conditions of the mythical age. For example, it might reenact the healing performed by a god at the beginning of time in order to heal someone in the present. Similarly, Barthes argued that modern culture explores religious experience. Since it is not the job of science to define human morality, a religious experience is an attempt to connect with a perceived moral past, which is in contrast with the technological present. Pattanaik defines mythology as "the subjective truth of people communicated through stories, symbols and rituals." He says, "Facts are everybody's truth. Fiction is nobody's truth. Myths are somebody's truth."

Euhemerism

One theory claims that myths are distorted accounts of historical events. According to this theory, storytellers repeatedly elaborate upon historical accounts until the figures in those accounts gain the status of gods. For example, the myth of the wind-god Aeolus may have evolved from a historical account of a king who taught his people to use sails and interpret the winds. Herodotus (5th century BCE) and Prodicus made claims of this kind. This theory is named euhemerism after mythologist Euhemerus ( ), who suggested that Greek gods developed from legends about humans.

Allegory

Some theories propose that myths began as allegories for natural phenomena: Apollo represents the sun, Poseidon represents water, and so on. According to another theory, myths began as allegories for philosophical or spiritual concepts: Athena represents wise judgment, Aphrodite romantic desire, and so on. Müller supported an allegorical theory of myth. He believed myths began as allegorical descriptions of nature and gradually came to be interpreted literally. For example, a poetic description of the sea as "raging" was eventually taken literally and the sea was then thought of as a raging god.

Personification

Some thinkers claimed that myths result from the personification of objects and forces. According to these thinkers, the ancients worshiped natural phenomena, such as fire and air, gradually deifying them. For example, according to this theory, ancients tended to view things as gods, not as mere objects. Thus, they described natural events as acts of personal gods, giving rise to myths.

Ritualism

According to the myth-ritual theory, myth is tied to ritual. In its most extreme form, this theory claims myths arose to explain rituals. This claim was first put forward by Smith, who argued that people begin performing rituals for reasons not related to myth. Forgetting the original reason for a ritual, they account for it by inventing a myth and claiming the ritual commemorates the events described in that myth. James George Frazer—author of The Golden Bough, a book on the comparative study of mythology and religion—argued that humans started out with a belief in magical rituals; later, they began to lose faith in magic and invented myths about gods, reinterpreting their rituals as religious rituals intended to appease the gods.

Academic discipline history

Historically, important approaches to the study of mythology have included those of Vico, Schelling, Schiller, Jung, Freud, Lévy-Bruhl, Lévi-Strauss, Frye, the Soviet school, and the Myth and Ritual School.

Ancient Greece

and Assyria (1916)]] 's Mythology has been a major channel for English speakers to learn classical Greek and Roman mythology]] The critical interpretation of myth began with the Presocratics. Euhemerus was one of the most important pre-modern mythologists. He interpreted myths as accounts of actual historical events, though distorted over many retellings. Sallustius divided myths into five categories: theological; physical (or concerning natural law); animistic (or concerning soul); material; and mixed, which concerns myths that show the interaction between two or more of the previous categories and are particularly used in initiations. Plato condemned poetic myth when discussing education in the Republic. His critique was primarily on the grounds that the uneducated might take the stories of gods and heroes literally. Nevertheless, he constantly referred to myths throughout his writings. As Platonism developed in the phases commonly called Middle Platonism and neoplatonism, writers such as Plutarch, Porphyry, Proclus, Olympiodorus, and Damascius wrote explicitly about the symbolic interpretation of traditional and Orphic myths. Mythological themes were consciously employed in literature, beginning with Homer. The resulting work may expressly refer to a mythological background without itself becoming part of a body of myths (Cupid and Psyche). Medieval romance in particular plays with this process of turning myth into literature. Euhemerism, as stated earlier, refers to the rationalization of myths, putting themes formerly imbued with mythological qualities into pragmatic contexts. An example of this would be following a cultural or religious paradigm shift (notably the re-interpretation of pagan mythology following Christianization).

European Renaissance

relates the second half of the Metamorphoses. In the upper left, Jupiter emerges from clouds to order Mercury to rescue Io. ]] Interest in polytheistic mythology revived during the Renaissance, with early works of mythography appearing in the sixteenth century, among them the Theologia Mythologica (1532).

19th century

, the wise demigod and one of the significant characters of Finnish mythological 19th-century epic poetry, The Kalevala (Väinämöinen's Play, Robert Wilhelm Ekman, 1866) |upright=1.05]] . Thor is the god of thunder in Norse mythology.]] The first modern, Western scholarly theories of myth appeared during the second half of the 19th century —at the same time as "myth" was adopted as a scholarly term in European languages. They were driven partly by a new interest in Europe's ancient past and vernacular culture, associated with Romantic Nationalism and epitomised by the research of Jacob Grimm (1785–1863). This movement drew European scholars' attention not only to Classical myths, but also material now associated with Norse mythology, Finnish mythology, and so forth. Western theories were also partly driven by Europeans' efforts to comprehend and control the cultures, stories and religions they were encountering through colonialism. These encounters included both extremely old texts such as the Sanskrit Rigveda and the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, and current oral narratives such as mythologies of the indigenous peoples of the Americas or stories told in traditional African religions. The intellectual context for nineteenth-century scholars was profoundly shaped by emerging ideas about evolution. These ideas included the recognition that many Eurasian languages—and therefore, conceivably, stories—were all descended from a lost common ancestor (the Indo-European language) which could rationally be reconstructed through the comparison of its descendant languages. They also included the idea that cultures might evolve in ways comparable to species. In general, 19th-century theories framed myth as a failed or obsolete mode of thought, often by interpreting myth as the primitive counterpart of modern science within a unilineal framework that imagined that human cultures are travelling, at different speeds, along a linear path of cultural development.

20th century

(1868) by Gustave Moreau. In the mythos of Hesiodus and possibly Aeschylus (the Greek trilogy Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus Pyrphoros), Prometheus is bound and tortured for giving fire to humanity.|upright=1.3]] The earlier 20th century saw major work developing psychoanalytical approaches to interpreting myth, led by Sigmund Freud, who, drawing inspiration from Classical myth, began developing the concept of the Oedipus complex in his 1899 The Interpretation of Dreams. Jung likewise tried to understand the psychology behind world myths. Jung asserted that all humans share certain innate unconscious psychological forces, which he called archetypes. He believed similarities between the myths of different cultures reveals the existence of these universal archetypes. The mid-20th century saw the influential development of a structuralist theory of mythology, led by Lévi-Strauss. Strauss argued that myths reflect patterns in the mind and interpreted those patterns more as fixed mental structures, specifically pairs of opposites (good/evil, compassionate/callous), rather than unconscious feelings or urges. Meanwhile, Bronislaw Malinowski developed analyses of myths focusing on their social functions in the real world. He is associated with the idea that myths such as origin stories might provide a "mythic charter"—a legitimisation—for cultural norms and social institutions. Thus, following the Structuralist Era ( –1980s), the predominant anthropological and sociological approaches to myth increasingly treated myth as a form of narrative that can be studied, interpreted, and analyzed like ideology, history, and culture. In other words, myth is a form of understanding and telling stories that are connected to power, political structures, and political and economic interests. These approaches contrast with approaches, such as those of Joseph Campbell and Eliade, which hold that myth has some type of essential connection to ultimate sacred meanings that transcend cultural specifics. In particular, myth was studied in relation to history from diverse social sciences. Most of these studies share the assumption that history and myth are not distinct in the sense that history is factual, real, accurate, and truth, while myth is the opposite. In the 1950s, Barthes published a series of essays examining modern myths and the process of their creation in his book Mythologies, which stood as an early work in the emerging post-structuralist approach to mythology, which recognised myths' existence in the modern world and in popular culture. The 20th century saw rapid secularization in Western culture. This made Western scholars more willing to analyse narratives in the Abrahamic religions as myths; theologians such as Rudolf Bultmann argued that a modern Christianity needed to demythologize; and other religious scholars embraced the idea that the mythical status of Abrahamic narratives was a legitimate feature of their importance. This, in his appendix to Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, and in The Myth of the Eternal Return, Eliade attributed modern humans' anxieties to their rejection of myths and the sense of the sacred. The Christian theologian Conrad Hyers wrote:

21st century

Both in 19th-century research, which tended to see existing records of stories and folklore as imperfect fragments of partially lost myths, and in 20th-century structuralist work, which sought to identify underlying patterns and structures in often diverse versions of a given myth, there had been a tendency to synthesise sources to attempt to reconstruct what scholars supposed to be more perfect or underlying forms of myths. From the late 20th century, researchers influenced by postmodernism tended instead to argue that each account of a given myth has its own cultural significance and meaning, and argued that rather than representing degradation from a once more perfect form, myths are inherently plastic and variable. There is, consequently, no such thing as the 'original version' or 'original form' of a myth. One prominent example of this movement was A. K. Ramanujan's essay "Three Hundred Ramayanas". Correspondingly, scholars challenged the precedence that had once been given to texts as a medium for mythology, arguing that other media, such as the visual arts or even landscape and place-naming, could be as or more important. Myths are not texts, but narrative materials (Erzählstoffe) that can be adapted in various media (such as epics, hymns, handbooks, movies, dances, etc.). In contrast to other academic approaches, which primarily focus on the (social) function of myths, hylistic myth research aims to understand myths and their nature out of themselves. As part of the Göttingen myth research, Annette and Christian Zgoll developed the method of hylistics (narrative material research) to extract mythical materials from their media and make possible a transmedial comparison. The content of the medium is broken down into the smallest possible plot components (hylemes), which are listed in standardized form (so-called hyleme analysis). Inconsistencies in content can indicate stratification, i.e. the overlapping of several materials, narrative variants and edition layers within the same medial concretion. To a certain extent, this can also be used to reconstruct earlier and alternative variants of the same material that were in competition and/or were combined with each other. The juxtaposition of hyleme sequences enables the systematic comparison of different variants of the same material or several different materials that are related or structurally similar to each other. In his overall presentation of the hundred-year history of myth research, the classical philologist and myth researcher Udo Reinhardt mentions Christian Zgoll's basic work Tractatus mythologicus as "the latest handbook on myth theory" with "outstanding significance" for modern myth research.

Modernity

banknote, depicting Ceres, Neptune and caduceus]] Scholars in the field of cultural studies research how myth has worked itself into modern discourses. Mythological discourse can reach greater audiences than ever before via digital media. Various mythic elements appear in popular culture, as well as television, cinema and video games. Although myth was traditionally transmitted through the oral tradition on a small scale, the film industry has enabled filmmakers to transmit myths to large audiences via film. In Jungian psychology, myths are the expression of a culture or society's goals, fears, ambitions and dreams. The basis of modern visual storytelling is rooted in the mythological tradition. Many contemporary films rely on ancient myths to construct narratives. The Walt Disney Company is well known among cultural study scholars for "reinventing" traditional childhood myths. While few films are as obvious as Disney fairy tales, the plots of many films are based on the rough structure of myths. Mythological archetypes, such as the cautionary tale regarding the abuse of technology, battles between gods and creation stories, are often the subject of major film productions. These films are often created under the guise of cyberpunk action films, fantasy, dramas and apocalyptic tales. 21st-century films such as Clash of the Titans, Immortals and Thor continue the trend of using traditional mythology to frame modern plots. Authors use mythology as a basis for their books, such as Rick Riordan, whose Percy Jackson and the Olympians series is situated in a modern-day world where the Greek deities are manifest. Scholars, particularly those within the field of fan studies, and fans of popular culture have also noted a connection between fan fiction and myth. Ika Willis identified three models of this: fan fiction as a reclaiming of popular stories from corporations, myth as a means of critiquing or dismantling hegemonic power, and myth as "a commons of story and a universal story world". Willis supports the third model, a universal story world, and argues that fanfiction can be seen as mythic due to its hyperseriality—a term invented by Sarah Iles Johnston to describe a hyperconnected universe in which characters and stories are interwoven. In an interview for the New York Times, Henry Jenkins stated that fanfiction 'is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.'

Notes

Sources

"Myth ". Encyclopædia Britannica. 2009. 21 March 2009. — (1997). "Binary Opposition in Myth: The Propp/Levi-Strauss Debate in Retrospect." Western Folklore 56(Winter): 39–50. Fabiani, Paolo "The Philosophy of the Imagination in Vico and Malebranche". F.U.P. (Florence UP), English edition 2009. PDF Northup, Lesley (2006). "Myth-Placed Priorities: Religion and the Study of Myth." Religious Studies Review 32(1):5–10. . . Simpson, Jacqueline, and Steve Roud, eds. 2003. "Myths." In A Dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford: Oxford University Press. .

External links

Amaltea, Journal of Myth Criticism

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