Mythologies

Great Mythologies of the World

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Mythologies

Eris' children are ominous figures, which personify various physical and verbal forms of conflict. Comparative mythology is the 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. A number of commentators have argued that myths function to form and shape society and social behaviour.

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Eliade argued that one of the foremost functions of myth is to establish models for behavior [64] [65] 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. 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 "a subjective truth of people that is communicated through stories, symbols and rituals". One theory claims that myths are distorted accounts of historical events. Some theories propose that myths began as allegories for natural phenomena: Apollo represents the sun, Poseidon represents water, and so on. 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.

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. According to the myth-ritual theory, myth is tied to ritual. 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.

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The critical interpretation of myth began with the Presocratics. He interpreted myths as accounts of actual historical events — distorted over many retellings. Sallustius [83] divided myths into five categories — theological, physical or concerning natural laws , animistic or concerning soul , material, and mixed. Mixed concerns myths that show the interaction between two or more of the previous categories and are particularly used in initiations. Plato famously 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.

Interest in polytheistic mythology revived during the Renaissance , with early works of mythography appearing in the sixteenth century, among them the Theologia Mythologica The first modern, Western scholarly theories of myth appeared during the second half of the nineteenth century [82] — at the same time as the word myth was adopted as a scholarly term in European languages.

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. This theory posited that "primitive man" was primarily concerned with the natural world. It tended to interpret myths that seemed distasteful European Victorians—for example tales about sex, incest, or cannibalism—as being metaphors for natural phenomena like agricultural fertility. According to Tylor, human thought evolved through stages, starting with mythological ideas and gradually progressing to scientific ideas.

He speculated that myths arose due to the lack of abstract nouns and neuter gender in ancient languages. Anthropomorphic figures of speech, necessary in such languages, were eventually taken literally, leading to the idea that natural phenomena were in actuality conscious beings or gods.

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James George Frazer saw myths as a misinterpretation of magical rituals, which were themselves based on a mistaken idea of natural law: this idea was central to the " myth and ritual " school of thought. When they realize applications of these laws do not work, they give up their belief in natural law in favor of a belief in personal gods controlling nature, thus giving rise to religious myths. Meanwhile, humans continue practicing formerly magical rituals through force of habit, reinterpreting them as reenactments of mythical events.

Finally humans come to realize nature follows natural laws, and they discover their true nature through science. Here again, science makes myth obsolete as humans progress "from magic through religion to science. Segal asserted that by pitting mythical thought against modern scientific thought, such theories imply modern humans must abandon myth. The earlier twentieth 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 The Interpretation of Dreams.

Jung likwise 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. 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.

In other words, myth is a form of understanding and telling stories that is connected to power, political structures, and political and economic interests. These approaches contrast with approaches such as those of Joseph Campbell and Eliade that 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 s, 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 twentieth century saw rapid secularisation 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. In a religious context, however, myths are storied vehicles of supreme truth, the most basic and important truths of all.

By them people regulate and interpret their lives and find worth and purpose in their existence. Myths put one in touch with sacred realities, the fundamental sources of being, power, and truth. They are seen not only as being the opposite of error but also as being clearly distinguishable from stories told for entertainment and from the workaday, domestic, practical language of a people.

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They provide answers to the mysteries of being and becoming, mysteries which, as mysteries, are hidden, yet mysteries which are revealed through story and ritual. Myths deal not only with truth but with ultimate truth. Both in nineteenth-century research that tended to see existing records of stories and folklore as imperfect fragments of partially lost myths, and in twentieth-century structuralist work that 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 twentieth century, however, 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.

One prominent example of this movement was A. 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. In modern society, myth is often regarded as a collection of stories.

Scholars in the field of cultural studies research how myth has worked itself into modern discourses.

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Considering the historical context of what was happening in France in the s, Barthes is capturing a moment in critical theory and political discourse surrounding the crumbling empire and the rise of mass media. And doing all of this in a very entertaining way. I didn't get it all, but what I did "catch", I liked, and I am intrigued to read more. Jul 19, Khashayar Mohammadi rated it really liked it Shelves: essays , french-lit. I feel this book would have had a much stronger effect on me, if I was somewhat acquainted with the bulk of its subject matter.

Since the majority of the chapters centered around prominent figures in French popular culture of the s, the utter lack of information on such subjects by the modern reader thoroughly undermines any criticism; BUT, put in the context of its times, its a remarkable book which is still shockingly relevant. There are times when I realize that I can be very lazy in my reading, and this book is the slap that reminded me. I wish I had started with the second section first, Myth Today because it was an excellent review of semiotics, which I have minimal understanding of and what I knew was dusty and the terminology did not come easily or quickly.

By the end of the essays I was skating along, but it is not speedy reading per se. I feel like this book hasn't aged well. The ideas are still valid, but beca There are times when I realize that I can be very lazy in my reading, and this book is the slap that reminded me.

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