From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Myth is a
folklore genre consisting of narratives or stories that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or
origin myths. The main characters in myths are usually
gods,
demigods or
supernatural humans. Stories of everyday human beings, although often of leaders of some type, are usually contained in
legends, as opposed to myths.
Myths are often endorsed by rulers and priests or priestesses, and are closely linked to
religion or spirituality.
In fact, many societies group their myths, legends and history
together, considering myths and legends to be true accounts of their
remote past. In particular,
creation myths take place in a primordial age when the world had not achieved its later form. Other myths explain how a society's
customs,
institutions and
taboos were established and sanctified. There is a complex relationship between
recital of myths and enactment of rituals.
The study of myth began in
ancient history. Rival classes of the
Greek myths by
Euhemerus,
Plato and
Sallustius were developed by the
Neoplatonists and later revived by
Renaissance mythographers. Today, the study of myth continues in a wide variety of academic fields, including
folklore studies,
philology, and
psychology. The term
mythology
may either refer to the study of myths in general, or a body of myths
regarding a particular subject. The academic comparisons of bodies of
myth is known as
comparative mythology.
Since the term
myth is widely used to imply that a story is not
objectively true,
the identification of a narrative as a myth can be highly political:
many adherents of religions view their religion's stories as
true and therefore object to the stories being characterised as myths. Nevertheless, scholars now routinely speak of
Christian mythology,
Jewish mythology,
Islamic mythology,
Hindu mythology, and so forth. Traditionally, Western scholarship, with its Judaeo-Christian heritage, has viewed narratives in the
Abrahamic religions as being the province of
theology rather than mythology; meanwhile, identifying religious stories of colonised cultures, such as stories in
Hinduism, as myths enabled Western scholars to imply that they were of lower truth-value than the stories of
Christianity. Labelling all religious narratives as
myths can be thought of as treating different traditions with parity.
Definitions
Ballads of bravery (1877) part of Arthurian mythology
Myth
Definitions of
myth to some extent vary by scholar. Finnish
folklorist Lauri Honko offers a widely cited definition:
Myth, a story of the gods, a religious account of the beginning of the world, the creation,
fundamental events, the exemplary deeds of the gods as a result of
which the world, nature and culture were created together with all parts
thereof and given their order, which still obtains. A myth expresses
and confirms society's religious values and norms, it provides a pattern
of behavior to be imitated, testifies to the efficacy of ritual with its practical ends and establishes the sanctity of cult.
However, while myth and other folklore genres may overlap, myth is often thought to differ from genres such as
legend and
folktale in that neither are considered to be sacred narratives. Some kinds of folktales, such as
fairy stories, are not considered true by anyone, and may be seen as distinct from myths for this reason. Main characters in myths are usually
gods,
demigods or
supernatural humans, while legends generally feature humans as their main characters. However, many exceptions or combinations exist, as in the
Iliad,
Odyssey and
Aeneid.
Moreover, as stories spread between cultures or as faiths change, myths
can come to be considered folktales, their divine characters recast as
either as humans or demihumans such as
giants,
elves and
faeries. Conversely, historical and literary material may acquire mythological qualities over time. For example, the
Matter of Britain (the legendary history of Great Britain, especially those focused on
King Arthur and
the knights of the Round Table) and the
Matter of France,
seem distantly to originate in historical events of the fifth and
eighth-centuries respectively, and became mythologised over the
following centuries.
In colloquial use, the word
myth can also be used of a collectively held belief that has no basis in fact, or any false story. This usage, which is often
pejorative,
arose from labeling the religious myths and beliefs of other cultures
as incorrect, but it has spread to cover non-religious beliefs as well. However, as commonly used by
folklorists and academics in other relevant fields, such as
anthropology, the term
myth has no implication whether the narrative may be understood as true or otherwise.
Mythology
In present use,
mythology usually refers to the collected myths of a group of people, but may also mean the study of such myths. For example,
Greek mythology,
Roman mythology and
Hittite mythology all describe the body of myths retold among those cultures. Folklorist
Alan Dundes defines myth as a
sacred narrative
that explains how the world and humanity evolved into their present
form. Dundes classified a sacred narrative as "a story that serves to
define the fundamental worldview of a culture by explaining aspects of
the natural world and delineating the psychological and social practices
and ideals of a society". Anthropologist
Bruce Lincoln defines
myth as "ideology in narrative form."
Mythography
The compilation or description of myths is sometimes known as
mythography, a term which can also be used of a scholarly anthology of myths (or, confusingly, of the study of myths generally). Key mythographers in the Classical tradition include
Ovid (43 BCE–17/18 CE), whose tellings of myths have been profoundingly influential;
Fabius Planciades Fulgentius, a Latin writer of the late fifth to early sixth centuries, whose
Mythologies (Latin:
Mitologiarum libri III) gathered and gave moralistic interpretations of a wide range of myths; the anonymous medieval
Vatican Mythographers,
who developed anthologies of Classical myths that remained influential
to the end of the Middle Ages; and the Renaissance scholar
Natalis Comes, whose ten-book
Mythologiae became a standard source for classical mythology in later Renaissance Europe. Other prominent mythographies include the thirteenth-century
Prose Edda attributed to the Icelander
Snorri Sturluson, which is the main surviving survey of
Norse Mythology from the Middle Ages.
Mythos
Because
myth is sometimes used in a pejorative sense, some scholars have opted to use the term
mythos instead. However,
mythos now more commonly refers to its
Aristotelian
sense as a "plot point" or to a body of interconnected myths or
stories, especially those belonging to a particular religious or
cultural tradition. It is sometimes used specifically for modern, fictional mythologies, such as the
world building of
H.P. Lovecraft.
Mythopoeia
"Conscious generation" of mythology was termed
mythopoeia by, amongst others,
J.R.R. Tolkien. It was notoriously also suggested, separately, by Nazi ideologist
Alfred Rosenberg.
Origins of the terms myth and mythology
Odysseus Overcome by Demodocus' Song, by Francesco Hayez, 1813–15
The word
myth comes from
Ancient Greek μῦθος [
mȳthos],
meaning 'speech, narrative, fiction, myth, plot'. In Anglicised form,
this Greek word began to be used in English (and was likewise adapted
into other European languages) in the early nineteenth century, in a
much narrower sense, as a scholarly term for 'a traditional story,
typically involving supernatural beings or forces, 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'.
In turn, Ancient Greek
μυθολογία [
mythología] ("story," "lore," "legends," "the telling of stories") combines the word
mȳthos with the suffix -
λογία [
-logia] ("study"), and meant 'romance, fiction, story-telling'. Accordingly,
Plato used
mythología as a general term for "fiction" or "story-telling" of any kind.
The Greek term
mythología was then borrowed into
Latin.
Late Latin mythologia, which occurs in the title of Latin author
Fulgentius' fifth-century
Mythologiæ, denoted the explication of Greek and Roman stories about their gods, which we now call
classical mythology. Fulgentius's
Mythologiæ explicitly treated its subject matter as
allegories requiring interpretation and not as true events.
The Latin term was then adopted in
Middle French as
mythologie.
Whether from French or Latin usage, English adopted the word
"mythology" in the fifteenth century, at first in the sense 'the
exposition of a myth or myths; the interpretation of fables; a book of
such expositions'. The word is first attested in
John Lydgate's
Troy Book of c. 1425.
From Lydgate until the seventeenth or eighteenth-century,
mythology was used to mean a
moral,
fable,
allegory or a
parable, or collection of traditional stories, understood to be false. It came eventually to be applied to similar bodies of
traditional stories among other
polytheistic cultures around the world.
Thus the word
mythology entered the English language before the word "myth";
Johnson's
Dictionary, for example, has an entry for
mythology, but not for
myth. Indeed, the Greek loanword
mythos (pl.
mythoi) and Latinate
mythus (pl.
mythi) both appeared in English before the first example of
myth in 1830.
Meanings in Ancient Greece
The term μῦθος (
mythos) appears in the works of
Homer and other poets of Homer's era. In these works, the term had several meanings: conversation, narrative, speech, story, tale, and word.
Like the related term λόγος (
logos),
mythos expresses whatever can be delivered in the form of words; these can be contrasted with ἔργον (
ergon), a Greek term for action, deed, and work. The term
mythos lacks an explicit distinction between true or false narratives.
In the context of the
theatre of ancient Greece, the term
mythos referred to the myth, the narrative, the plot, and the story of a play. According to David Wiles, the Greek term
mythos
in this era covered an entire spectrum of different meanings, from
undeniable falsehoods to stories with religious and symbolic
significance.
According to philosopher
Aristotle (384–322 BCE), the spirit of a theatrical play was its
mythos. The term
mythos was also used for the source material of
Greek tragedy. The tragedians of the era could draw inspiration from
Greek mythology, a body of "traditional storylines" which concerned
gods and
heroes.
David Wiles observes that modern conceptions about Greek tragedy can be
misleading. It is commonly thought that the ancient audience members
were already familiar with the
mythos behind a play, and could
predict the outcome of the play. However, the Greek dramatists were not
expected to faithfully reproduce traditional myths when
adapting them for the stage. They were instead recreating the myths and producing new versions. Storytellers like
Euripides (c. 480–406 BCE) relied on
suspense to excite their audiences. In one of his works,
Merope
attempts to kill her son's murderer with an axe, unaware that the man
in question is actually her son. According to an ancient description of
audience reactions to this work, the audience members were genuinely
unsure of whether she would commit
filicide or she will be stopped in time. They rose to their feet in terror and caused an uproar.
David Wiles points that the traditional
mythos of Ancient Greece, was primarily a part of its
oral tradition. The
Greeks of this era were a literate culture, but produced no
sacred texts. There were no definitive or authoritative versions of myths recorded in texts and preserved forever in an unchanging form.
Instead multiple variants of myths were in circulation. These variants
were adapted into songs, dances, poetry, and visual art. Performers of
myths could freely reshape their source material for a new work,
adapting it to the needs of a new audience or in response to a new
situation.
Children in Ancient Greece were familiar with traditional myths from an early age. According to the philosopher
Plato (c. 428–347 BCE), mothers and
nursemaids narrated myths and stories to the children in their charge: David Wiles describes them as a repository of mythological lore.
Bruce Lincoln has called attention to the apparent meaning of the terms
mythos and
logos in the works of
Hesiod. In
Theogony, Hesiod attributes to the
Muses the ability to both proclaim truths and narrate plausible falsehoods (falsehoods which seem like real things). The verb used for narrating the falsehoods in the text is
legein, which is etymologically associated with
logos. There are two variants in the manuscript tradition for the verb used to proclaim truths. One variant uses
gerusasthai, the other
mythesasthai. The latter is a form of the verb
mytheomai (to speak, to tell), which is etymologically associated with
mythos. In the
Works and Days,
Hesiod describes his dispute with his brother Perses. He also announces
to his readers his intention to tell true things to his brother. The
verb he uses for telling the truth is
mythesaimen, another form of
mytheomai.
Lincoln draws the conclusion that Hesiod associated the "speech of
mythos" (as Lincoln calls it) with telling the
truth. While he associated the "speech of
logos" with telling
lies, and hiding one's true thoughts (dissimulation). This conclusion is strengthened by the use of the plural term
logoi (the plural form of
logos) elsewhere in Hesiod's works. Three times the term is associated with the term "
seductive" and three times with the term "falsehoods". In his genealogy of the gods, Hesiod lists
logoi among the children of
Eris,
the goddess personifying strife. Eris' children are ominous figures,
which personify various physical and verbal forms of conflict.
Interpreting myths
Comparative mythology
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.
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 "a subjective truth of people that is communicated
through stories, symbols and rituals". He adds, "unlike fantasy that is
nobody’s truth, and history that seeks to be everybody’s truth,
mythology is 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 (fifth-century BCE) and
Prodicus made claims of this kind. This theory is named
euhemerism after mythologist
Euhemerus (c. 320 BCE), who suggested that Greek gods developed from legends about human beings.
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 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.
Myth-ritual theory
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.
Frazer
claimed 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.
History of the academic discipline
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
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 – distorted
over many retellings. Sallustius
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).
European Renaissance
Interest in polytheistic mythology revived during the
Renaissance, with early works of mythography appearing in the sixteenth century, among them the
Theologia Mythologica (1532).
Nineteenth century
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, nineteenth-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.
One of the dominant mythological theories of the later nineteenth
century was "nature mythology", whose foremost exponents included
Max Müller and
Edward Burnett Tylor.
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.
Unable to conceive impersonal natural laws, early humans tried to
explain natural phenomena by attributing souls to inanimate objects,
giving rise to
animism.
According to Tylor, human thought evolved through stages, starting with
mythological ideas and gradually progressing to scientific ideas.
Müller also saw myth arising from language, even calling myth a
"disease of language". 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. Not all scholars, not even all nineteenth-century scholars, accepted this view.
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl claimed "the primitive mentality is a condition of the human mind, and not a stage in its historical development."
Recent scholarship, noting the fundamental lack of evidence for "nature
mythology" interpretations among people who actually circulated myths,
has likewise abandoned the key ideas of "nature mythology".
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.
According to Frazer, humans begin with an unfounded belief in
impersonal magical laws. 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.
Twentieth century
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 1899
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.
The mid-twentieth 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 (roughly the 1960s to 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 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 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 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. 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 that
...myth today has come to have
negative connotations which are the complete opposite of its meaning in a
religious context... 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. 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.
Twenty-first century
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.
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.
Modern mythology
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.
Mythological discourse can reach greater audiences than ever before via
digital media. Various mythic elements appear in
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 many films are not 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.
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The full text of The Interpretation of Dreams at Wikisource, a faithful copy of the third edition translated in English by Abraham Arden Brill and published in 1913 by The Macmillan Company.
The Interpretation of Dreams public domain audiobook at LibriVox
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