Ways of Interpreting Myth

Modified by RL Elias from a presentation by T. Sienkewicz, Monmouth College

Ancient Ways of Viewing Myth

Archaic 750-480 B.C.

Classical 480-323 B.C.

Hellenistic 323-146 B.C.

XenophanesHeraclitus

AeschylusEuripidesSocratesPlato

EuhemerusDiodorus

Myth as Venerable TraditionQuestioning of Myths (Rationality)

Myths as Allegory

Myths as Instructive ModelsMyths as InaccurateMyths of Questionable MoralityMyths as Dangerous

Gods as Deified Heroes and Kings

Xenophanes of Colophonc.570 B.C.

Questioned the Anthropomorphism of the Gods

#170 But mortals consider that the gods are born, and that they have clothes and speech and bodies like their own.

#171 The Ethiopians say that their gods are snub- nosed and black, the Thracians that theirs have light blue eyes and red hair.

#172 But if cattle and horses or lions had hands, or were able to draw with their hands and do the works that men can do, horses would draw the forms of gods like horses, and cattle like cattle, and they would make their bodies such as they each had themselves.

Myths as AllegoryTheagenes of Rhegium (525 B.C.)Gods as symbols of human qualities; e.g., Athena = wisdom

Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (c.500-428 B.C.)The misdeeds of the gods are intended to illustrate evil and teach virtue.

Myths as Instructive Models

Orestes at trial with Apollo, Athena, and the Erinyes The Erinyes of Clytaemnestra pursue Orestes. Beside Athena, who presides the court, sits Apollo.

Aeschylus (c.525-456 B.C.) used myth to teach Athenians about the gods and the their role in the civic life of Athens.

Myths as DangerousPlato Banishes Poetry (=Myths) from his Ideal Republic

•The poets pretend to know all sorts of things, but they really know nothing at all. The things they deal with cannot be known: they are images, far removed from what is most real. By presenting scenes so far removed from the truth poets, pervert souls, turning them away from the most real toward the least.

•Worse, the images the poets portray do not imitate the good part of the soul. The rational part of the soul is quiet, stable, and not easy to imitate or understand. Poets imitate the worst parts—the inclinations that make characters easily excitable and colorful. Poetry naturally appeals to the worst parts of souls and arouses, nourishes, and strengthens this base elements while diverting energy from the rational part

•Poetry corrupts even the best souls. It deceives us into sympathizing with those who grieve excessively, who lust inappropriately, who laugh at base things. It even goads us into feeling these base emotions vicariously. We think there is no shame in indulging these emotions because we are indulging them with respect to a fictional character and not with respect to our own lives.

In Republic Book X Socrates banishes poets from the city as unwholesome and dangerous because:

EuhemerismEuhemerus of Messene, late 4th c. BCE: The gods are actually historical figures deified after death.

From Diodorus Siculus:Now Euhemerus, who was a friend of King Cassander [of Macedonia (301 to 297 B.C.)] and was required by him to perform certain affairs of state and to make a great journey abroad, says that he traveled southward as far as the [Indian] ocean; for setting sail from Arabia he voyaged through the ocean for a considerable number of days and was carried to the shore of some islands in the sea, one of which bore the name of Panachaea. On this island he saw the Panachaeans who dwell there, who excel in piety and honor the gods with the most magnificent sacrifices and with remarkable votive offerings of silver and gold.... There is also on the island, situated on an exceedingly high hill, a sanctuary of Zeus, which was established by him during the time when he was king of all the inhabited world and was still in the company of men. And in the temple there is a stele of gold on which is inscribed in summary, in the writing employed by the Panchaeans, the deeds of Ouranos and Kronos and Zeus.

Modern Interpretations of Myth

Externalist Theories: Myths as products of the environment (social, political, etc.) or as explanations of natural phenomena.

Internalist Theories: Myths as products of the mind or as reflections of

the structure of mind.

Externalist Theories:Myths as Products of the

Environment

Myths as Aetiology Nature MythsMyths as RitualsCharter Myths

Myths as Aetiologymyth as explanation of the origin of things

myth as primitive science

Europa (eponymous hero) Creation myths Arachne Apollo as source of plague

Athena and Arachne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses

F. Max MüllerNature Myths

Max Müller(1823-1900)

For Müller, the culture of the Vedic peoples represented a form of nature worship, an idea clearly influenced by Romanticism

Solar mythology

Comparative approach: Study of Vedic peoples of ancient India applied to myths of other cultures (Greece and Rome)

Founder of the social scientific study of religion

Zeus as the Sky

• Dyaus pitr Sanskrit– Dyaus = “he who shines”– pitr = father

• Zeus pater Greek• Jupiter Latin• Tiu Vater Teutonic

(German)

Indo-European

Myths as RitualSir James Frazer’ The Golden Bough (1890-1915)

myths as byproducts of ritual enactments that survive after the ritual is no longer practiced. A “decay of language”

stories to explain religious ceremonies

Charter Myths

Bronsilaw Malinowski (1884-1942)

Myths authorize and validate current social customs and institutions.

Internalist Theories: Myths as Products of the Mind

Individual Mind

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

Laistner (1889) All monsters of myth originated in nightmares. Roheim (1952) disguised version of the Oedipus complex

Collective Mind

Carl Jung (1875-1961)

Joseph Campbell (1904-1987)

Structuralism

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2010)

Jean-Paul Vernant

Pierre Vidal-Naquet

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2010)

myth reflects the mind's binary organization

humans tend to see world as reflection of their own physical and cerebral structure ( two hands, eyes, legs, etc.)

left/right, raw,/cooked, pleasure/pain

myth deals with the perception and reconciliation of these opposites

mediation of contradictions

Narratology

Vladimir Propp (1895-1970)

A formalist approach . . . concerned with HOW a myth/folktale/etc. is put together

Propp argued that all fairy tales were constructed of certain plot elements, which he called functions, and that these elements consistently occurred in a uniform sequence.

Based on a study of one hundred folk tales, Propp devised a list of thirty-one generic functions, proposing that they encompassed all of the plot components from which fairy tales were constructed.

Feminist Approaches to Myth

Marija Gimbutas (1921-1994)

Marija Gimbutas was an archaeologist with a scholarly background in folklore and linguistics, making her uniquely qualified to synthesize information from science and myth into a controversial theory of a Goddess-based culture in prehistoric Europe. Joseph Campbell said that, if her work had been available to him, he would have held very different views about the archetypes of the female Divine in world mythology.

Primacy of Matriarchy

Which theory is right?