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)