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Who is the woman in this image?
Mean = 1.2857
1 2 3 4
82%
0%
11%7%
1. Penelope
2. Athena
3. Sisyphus’ Wife
4. Faustina
The Ethiopians say that their gods are snub- nosed and black, the Thracians that theirs have light blue
eyes and red hair?
Mean = 2.9643
1 2 3 4 5
29%
21%
29%
18%
4%
1. Xenophanes of Colophon
2. Theagenes of Rhegium
3. Aeschylus
4. Euripides
5. Plato
The poets pretend to know all sorts of things, but they really know nothing at
all.
Mean = 4.8148
1 2 3 4 5
0%4%
93%
0%4%
1. Xenophanes of Colophon
2. Theagenes of Rhegium
3. Aeschylus
4. Euripides
5. Plato
Paradeigms = Myths are
Mean = 2.3571
1 2 3 4
7%11%
21%
61%
1. false
2. instructive models
3. venerable tradition
4. dangerous
Ways of Interpreting Myth:Tricksters
Modern
Modern Interpretations of Myth
Externalist Theories: Myths as Products of the Environment
Internalist Theories: Myths as Products of the Mind
Two modern meanings of “mythology”:• a system or set of myths• the methodological analysis of myths
A monolithic theory of myth vs. the multifunctionalism of mythThe autonomy of mythSee: Some Theories of Myth
Externalist Theories:Myths as Products of the Environment
Myths as Aetiology Comparative MythologyNature MythsMyths as RitualsCharter Myths
Myths as Aetiology
myth as explanation of the origin of things
myth as primitive science myth as primitive science
What aetiologies are in Trickster Myths?
F. Max MüllerNature Myths
Max Müller1823-1900)
For Müller, the culture of the Vedic peoples represented a form of nature worship, an idea clearly influenced by Romanticism
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 Ritual
Sir James Frazer’ The Golden Bough (1890-1915)
myths as by products of ritual enactments stories to explain religious ceremonies
The Golden Bough On-Line:http://www.bartleby.com/196/
Charter Myths
Bronsilaw Malinowski (1884-1942)
Selected Bibliography:http://www.vanderbilt.edu/AnS/Anthro/Anth206/malinowski.htm
belief-systems set up to authorize and validate current social customs and institutions.
Internalist Theories: Myths as Products of the Mind
Individual Mind
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)
Collective Mind
Carl Jung (1875-1961)
Mircea Eliade (1907-1986)
Eliade's analysis of religion assumes the existence of "the sacred" as the object of worship of religious humanity.
Myths reflect a creative era, a sacred time, a vanished epoch of unique holiness.
More on Eliade: http://www.angelfire.com/electronic/bodhidharma/mircea.html
Structuralism
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-)
Jean-Paul Vernant
Pierre Vidal-Naquet
Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-)
•myth reflect 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
For more on Levi-Strauss see http://www.mnsu.edu/emuseum/information/biography/klmno/levi-strauss_claude.html
How does a trickster mediate contradictions?
Narratology
Vlaimir Propp (1895-1970)
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
Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815 – 1887)
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