Myth

Definitions of myth vary to some extent among scholars, though Finnish folklorist Lauri Honko offers a widely-cited definition:[10]

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.

Scholars in other fields use the term myth in varied ways.[11][12][13] In a broad sense, the word can refer to any traditional story,[14][15][16] popular misconception or imaginary entity.[17]

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.[18][19] 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.[20][21][22] Main characters in myths are usually gods, demigods or supernatural humans,[1][2][3] while legends generally feature humans as their main characters.[1] However, many exceptions or combinations exist, as in the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid.[23][24] 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.[2][25][26] 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)[27] and the Matter of France, seem distantly to originate in historical events of the 5th and 8th-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.[28] This usage, which is often pejorative,[29] arose from labelling the religious myths and beliefs of other cultures as incorrect, but it has spread to cover non-religious beliefs as well.[30] 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.[31]

In present use, mythology usually refers to the collected myths of a group of people, but may also mean the study of such myths.[32] 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."[33] Anthropologist Bruce Lincoln defines myth as "ideology in narrative form."[34]

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).[35]

Key mythographers in the Classical tradition include:[36]

• Ovid (43 BCE–17/18 CE), whose tellings of myths have been profoundly influential;
• Fabius Planciades Fulgentius, a Latin writer of the late-5th to early-6th 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
• 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.

Because myth is sometimes used in a pejorative sense, some scholars have opted to use the term mythos instead.[33] 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.[37] It is sometimes used specifically for modern, fictional mythologies, such as the world building of H. P. Lovecraft.

Mythopoeia (mytho- + -poeia, 'I make myth') was termed by J. R. R. Tolkien, amongst others, to refer to the "conscious generation" of mythology.[38][39] It was notoriously also suggested, separately, by Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg.

The term μῦθος (mȳthos) appears in the works of Homer and other poets of Homer's era, in which the term had several meanings: 'conversation,' 'narrative,' 'speech,' 'story,' 'tale,' and 'word.'[58]

Similar to the related term λόγος (logos), mythos expresses whatever can be delivered in the form of words. These can be contrasted with Greek ἔργον (ergon, 'action,' 'deed,' or 'work').[58] However, the term mythos lacks an explicit distinction between true or false narratives.[58]

In the context of Ancient Greek theatre, mythos referred to the myth, narrative, plot, and the story of a play.[59] 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.[59]

According to philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BCE), the spirit of a theatrical play was its mythos.[59] 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.[59] 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.[59] 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.[59]

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.[60] 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.[60]

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.[60]

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 (i.e., falsehoods which seem like real things).[61] 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.[61] 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.[61]

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).[61] 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.[61] 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.[61]

Comparative mythology is a 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.[62]

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[63][64] 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.[4][64][65]

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.[10] 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.[66]

Pattanaik defines mythology as "the subjective truth of people communicated through stories, symbols and rituals."[67] He says, "Facts are everybody's truth. Fiction is nobody's truth. Myths are somebody's truth."[68]

One theory claims that myths are distorted accounts of historical events.[69][70] According to this theory, storytellers repeatedly elaborate upon historical accounts until the figures in those accounts gain the status of gods.[69][70] 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.[69] Herodotus (fifth-century BCE) and Prodicus made claims of this kind.[70] This theory is named euhemerism after mythologist Euhemerus (c. 320 BCE), who suggested that Greek gods developed from legends about human beings.[70][71]

Some theories propose that myths began as allegories for natural phenomena: Apollo represents the sun, Poseidon represents water, and so on.[70] According to another theory, myths began as allegories for philosophical or spiritual concepts: Athena represents wise judgment, Aphrodite desire, and so on.[70] 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.[72]

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.[73] For example, according to this theory, ancients tended to view things as gods, not as mere objects.[74] Thus, they described natural events as acts of personal gods, giving rise to myths.[75]

According to the myth-ritual theory, myth is tied to ritual.[76] In its most extreme form, this theory claims myths arose to explain rituals.[77] This claim was first put forward by Smith,[78] 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.[79] Frazer argued 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.[80]

Myths and legends of Babylonia and Assyria (1916)

The critical interpretation of myth began with the Presocratics.[82] Euhemerus was one of the most important pre-modern mythologists. He interpreted myths as accounts of actual historical events, though distorted over many retellings.

Sallustius divided myths into five categories:[83]

• theological;
• physical (or concerning natural law);
• animistic (or concerning soul);
• material; and
• mixed, which 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.[84]

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).

This panel by Bartolomeo di Giovanni relates the second half of the Metamorphoses. In the upper left, Jupiter emerges from clouds to order Mercury to rescue Io.[85][86]

Interest in polytheistic mythology revived during the Renaissance, with early works of mythography appearing in the sixteenth century, among them the Theologia Mythologica (1532).

The first modern, Western scholarly theories of myth appeared during the second half of the 19th century[82]—at the same time as the word myth was adopted as a scholarly term in European languages.[28][37] They were driven partly by a new interest in Europe's ancient past and vernacular culture, associated with Romantic Nationalism and epitomised by the research of Jacob Grimm (1785–1863). 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.[87]

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.[87] In general, 19th-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.[88]

One of the dominant mythological theories of the latter 19th century was nature mythology, the foremost exponents of which 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 to European Victorians—such as tales about sex, incest, or cannibalism—as being metaphors for natural phenomena like agricultural fertility.[89] Unable to conceive impersonal natural laws, early humans tried to explain natural phenomena by attributing souls to inanimate objects, thus giving rise to animism.

According to Tylor, human thought evolved through stages, starting with mythological ideas and gradually progressing to scientific ideas.[90] Müller also saw myth as originating 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.[72] Not all scholars, not even all 19th-century scholars, accepted this view, however: Lucien Lévy-Bruhl claimed that "the primitive mentality is a condition of the human mind and not a stage in its historical development."[91] 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."[92][89]

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.[93] 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."[80] Segal asserted that by pitting mythical thought against modern scientific thought, such theories imply modern humans must abandon myth.[94]

Prometheus (1868) by Gustave Moreau. In the mythos of Hesiodus and possibly Aeschylus (the Greek trilogy Prometheus Bound, Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus Pyrphoros), Prometheus is bound and tortured for giving fire to humanity.

The earlier 20th 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 likewise 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.[95]

The mid-20th 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.[96] 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.[97] Thus, following the Structuralist Era (c. 1960s–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 are connected to power, political structures, and political and economic interests.

These approaches contrast with approaches, such as those of Joseph Campbell and Eliade, which 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.[98]

The 20th 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;[99] and other religious scholars embraced the idea that the mythical status of Abrahamic narratives was a legitimate feature of their importance.[94] 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:[100]

[M]yth 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.

Both in 19th-century research, which tended to see existing records of stories and folklore as imperfect fragments of partially lost myths, and in 20th-century structuralist work, which 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 20th 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.[101] 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".[102][103]

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.[104]