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Mythology

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Literature types

   The word mythology ( Greek: μυθολογία, from μύθος mythos, "story";
   "legend," and λόγος logos, "word"; "discourse") is the "branch of
   knowledge that deals with myths; the study of myths" In addition, it
   refers to the body of myths from a particular culture or religion,
   (e.g., Egyptian mythology, Norse mythology, or Christian mythology).
   Mythology primarily focuses on stories that a particular culture has
   believed to be true and which may use supernatural events or characters
   to explain the nature of the universe and humanity.

   In common usage, myth can mean a falsehood, or a fable — a story which
   is widely believed to be based on fact but which is not true. However,
   the academic study of mythology does not use these definitions.
   Mythography and comparative religious studies also acknowledge the
   cultural and spiritual value of all myth systems.

Essence

   Myths are narratives about divine or heroic beings, arranged in a
   logical manner, and passed from generation to generation and culture to
   culture in syncretic mimetic shifts (i.e., changes which attempt to
   include material from newly-absorbed cultures and to reconcile any
   subsequent contradictions). All sacred traditions have myths, and use
   of the term does not imply crticism or any depreciation in importance,
   as there often is in common usage.

   Some myths descended originally as part of an oral tradition and were
   only later written down, many existing in multiple versions. Oral
   traditions may diminish, or in some cases vanish, as the written word
   becomes "the story" and the literate become "the authority"; however,
   this depends on the culture.

   Most often the term mythology is used in a compound expression with
   another adjective to refer specifically to ancient tales from very old
   cultures, such as Greek mythology or Roman mythology.

   According to Friedrich von Schelling in the eighth chapter of
   Introduction to Philosophy and Mythology,

     "Mythological representations have been neither invented nor freely
     accepted. The products of a process independent of thought and will,
     they were, for the consciousness which underwent them, of an
     irrefutable and incontestable reality. Peoples and individuals are
     only the instruments of this process, which goes beyond their
     horizon and which they serve without understanding."

Classifications

   The practice of classifying mythical narratives and figures is the work
   of the mythologist. Classification is based on a number of criteria,
   chiefly recurring themes and objectives, regardless of cultural,
   geographical, and chronological origins. An individual myth may meet
   the criteria of more than one of the following categories:

   Ritual myths
          explain the performance of certain religious practices or
          patterns and are associated with temples or centers of worship.

   Origin myths
          describe the beginnings of a custom, name, or object.

   Cult myths
          are often seen as explanations for elaborate festivals that
          magnify the power of the deity.

   Prestige myths
          are usually associated with a divinely chosen hero, city, or
          people.

   Chthonic myths
          involve death and rebirth motifs, typically characterized by a
          journey to and return from the underworld.

   Eschatological myths
          are stories which describe catastrophic ends to the present
          world order of the writers. These extend beyond any potential
          historical scope, and thus can only be described in mythic
          terms. Apocalyptic literature such as the New Testament Book of
          Revelation is an example of a set of eschatological myths.

   Social myths
          reinforce or defend current social values or practices.

   Creation myths
          describe how a culture believes the universe was created.

   Trickster myths
          are concerned with the pranks or tricks played by gods or
          heroes.

Other concepts

   Myths are not the same as fables, legends, folktales, fairy tales,
   anecdotes, or fiction, but the concepts may overlap. Notably, during
   Romanticism, folk and fairy tales were perceived by collectors such as
   the Brothers Grimm and Elias Lönnrot as eroded fragments of earlier
   mythology.

   Mythological themes have often been consciously employed in literature,
   beginning with the works of Homer. The resulting work may expressly
   refer to a mythological background without being itself part of a body
   of myths (e.g., Cupid and Psyche). The medieval romance in particular
   plays with this process of turning myth into literature.

   Euhemerism is the theory that mythology has its origins in history. It
   suggests that gods are deified heroes of the past, and when used, the
   term often refers to the process of explaining myths, putting topics
   formerly imbued with mythological qualities into pragmatic contexts. An
   example would be the reinterpretation of pagan mythology following the
   rise of Christianity. On the other hand, historical and literary
   material may become more myth-like over time; for example, the Matter
   of Britain and the Matter of France; based on historical events of the
   5th and 8th centuries, respectively, were first made into epic poetry
   and over the following centuries became more mythical. "Conscious
   generation" of mythology has been termed mythopoeia by J. R. R.
   Tolkien, and also by the notorious Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg.

Formation of myths

   What forces create myths? Robert Graves said of Greek myth:

     "True myth may be defined as the reduction to narrative shorthand of
     ritual mime performed on public festivals, and in many cases
     recorded pictorially."

   Graves, who was deeply influenced by Sir James George Frazer's
   mythography The Golden Bough, agreed that myths are generated by many
   cultural needs.

   Myths authorize the cultural institutions of a tribe, a city, or a
   nation by connecting them with universal truths. Myths justify the
   current occupation of a territory by a particular people, for instance.

   All cultures have developed their own myths consisting of narratives of
   their history, their religions, and their heroes. The great power of
   the symbolic meaning of these stories for the culture is a major reason
   why they survive as long as they do, sometimes for thousands of years.
   François-Bernard Mâche distinguishes between "myth, in the sense of
   this primary psychic image, with some kind of mytho-logy, or a system
   of words trying with varying success to ensure a certain coherence
   between these images.

   A collection of myths is called a mythos (e.g., the Roman mythos). A
   collection of mythos is a mythoi (e.g., the Greek and Roman mythoi).

   Joseph Campbell is one of the more notable recent authors to write
   about myths and the history of spirituality. His book The Hero with a
   Thousand Faces (1948) outlines the basic ideas upon which he continued
   to elaborate until his death in 1987. These ideas, popularized in a
   series of books and videos, are considered to be inspirational rather
   than scholarly, and are more widely-accepted among the general public
   than in academic circles.

Religion and mythology

   Mythology figures prominently in most religions, and most mythologies
   are related to at least one religion. Note that here myth, refers to a
   spiritual, psychological, or symbolical notion of truth unrelated to
   materialist or objectivist notions. While there are many adherents of
   Abrahamic religions who regard the symbols and events surrounding the
   origin and development of their faith's mythical tradition as literal
   history, there are other followers who instead regard them as
   figurative representations of their beliefs. Most of the new age
   religions, such as Neopaganism, have no objection to characterizing
   their religious texts as mythical.

   The word mythology is used to refer to stories that, while they may not
   be strictly factual, reveal fundamental truths and insights about human
   nature, often through the use of archetypes. These stories also express
   the viewpoints and beliefs of the country, time period, culture, and/or
   religion in which they originated. Thus, it is possible to describe the
   mythic elements within various faiths as "mythology" (e.g., " Hindu
   mythology"; " Yoruba mythology"; " Islamic mythology") without
   addressing the issue of the truth of the faith's fundamental beliefs or
   claims about its history.

Myths as depictions of historical events

   Although the status of a story as myth does not depend on it being
   based on historical events; myths which surround a historical nucleus
   gradually become filled with symbolic meaning, and can be transformed,
   shifted in time or place, or even reversed.

   One way to conceptualize this process is to view myths as lying at the
   far end of a continuum ranging from an impartial report at one extreme,
   through legendary occurrence, and reaching mythical status at the other
   extreme. As an event progresses towards the mythical, facts become less
   important while the thoughts, feelings, and interpretations of the
   people take on progressively greater historical significance. By the
   time the story reaches the mythical end of the spectrum, it has taken
   on a life of its own and the facts of the original event have become
   nearly irrelevant. One example of this process is the Trojan War, a
   topic firmly within the scope of Greek mythology, though the extent of
   its historical basis in the Trojan cycle is disputed.

   This method of interpreting myths as accounts of actual events,
   euhemerist exegesis, dates from antiquity and can be traced back to
   Evhémère's Histoire sacrée (300 B.C.E.) which describes the inhabitants
   of the island of Panchaia ("Everything-Good") in the Indian Ocean as
   normal people deified by popular naïveté. As Roland Barthes affirms,
   "Myth is a word chosen by history. It could not come from the nature of
   things."

   This process occurs in part because events become detached from their
   original context and new context is substituted, often through analogy
   with current or recent events. Some Greek myths originated in Classical
   times to provide explanations for inexplicable features of local cult
   practices, to account for the local epithet of one of the Olympian
   gods, to interpret depictions of half-remembered figures and events, to
   account for the deities' attributes or entheogens, or even to make
   sense of ancient icons. Some myths are invented in an attempt to
   explain a harbinger's instructions, the origins of which have become
   obscured with the passage of time. Conversely, descriptions of recent
   events are reemphasised in order to seem analogous with tradition. This
   technique has been used by some religious conservatives in America to
   reinterpret prophecies in the Bible, particularly those of the Book of
   Daniel and the Book of Revelation. It was also used during the Russian
   Communist era in propaganda about political situations to create
   misleading references to class struggles. Until World War II, the
   fitness of the Emperor of Japan was linked to his mythical descent from
   the Shinto sun goddess, Amaterasu.

   Mâche argues that euhemerist exegesis, "was applied to capture and
   seize by force of reason qualities of thought, which eluded it on every
   side." This process, he argues, often leads to interpretation of myths
   as "disguised propaganda in the service of powerful individuals," and
   that the purpose of myths in this view is to allow the "social order"
   to establish "its permanence on the illusion of a natural order." He
   argues against this interpretation: "[W]hat puts an end to this
   caricature of certain speeches from May 1968 is, among other things,
   precisely the fact that roles are not distributed once and for all in
   myths, as would be the case if they were a variant of the idea of an
   'opium of the people.'"

   Against Barthes, Mâche argues that,

     "[M]yth therefore seems to choose history, rather than be chosen by
     it." "[B]eyond words and stories, myth seems more like a psychic
     content from which words, gestures, and musics radiate. History only
     chooses for it more or less becoming clothes. And these contents
     surge forth all the more vigorously from the nature of things when
     reason tries to repress them. Whatever the roles and commentaries
     with which such and such a socio-historic movement decks out the
     mythic image, the latter lives a largely autonomous life which
     continually fascinates humanity. To denounce archaism only makes
     sense as a function of a 'progressive' ideology, which itself begins
     to show a certain archaism and an obvious naivety."

Other uses

   Middleton argues that, "For Lévi-Strauss, myth is a structured system
   of signifiers, whose internal networks of relationships are used to
   'map' the structure of other sets of relationships; the 'content' is
   infinitely variable and relatively unimportant."

   In their book Hamlet's Mill, Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von
   Dechend suggest that myth is a "technical language" describing cosmic
   events. They write:

     "One should pay attention to the cosmological information contained
     in ancient myth, information of chaos, struggle and violence. [..]
     Plato knew .. that the language of myth is, in principle, as
     ruthlessly generalizing as up-to-date "tech talk"... There is no
     other technique, apparently, than myth, which succeeds in telling
     structure[....] The main merit of this language has turned out to be
     its built-in ambiguity. Myth can be used as a vehicle for handing
     down solid knowledge independently from the degree of insight of the
     people who do the actual telling of stories, fables, etc."

   Catastrophists such as Immanuel Velikovsky believe that myths are
   derived from the oral histories of ancient cultures that witnessed
   cosmic catastrophes. In his book Worlds in Collision, he writes:

     "The historical-cosmological story of this book is based on the
     evidence of historical texts of many peoples around the globe, on
     classical literature, [..] to establish (1) that there were physical
     upheavals of a global character in historical times; (2) that these
     catastrophes were caused by extraterrestrial agents; and (3) that
     these agents can be identified."

   The catastrophic interpretation of myth forms only a small minority
   within the field of mythology.

Modern mythology

   Film and book series like Star Wars and Tarzan may have strong
   mythological aspects that sometimes develop into deep and intricate
   philosophical systems. These items, though not mythology, contain
   mythic themes that meet similar psychological needs for certain people.
   One example of a fictional mythological system is that developed by J.
   R. R. Tolkien in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. In
   addition, fans will sometimes incorrectly use the term mythology to
   refer to a complex fictional world such as that of the Star Trek
   series.

   Fiction, however, does not reach the level of actual mythology until
   people believe that it really happened. For example, some people
   believe that fiction author Clive Barker's movie Candyman was based
   upon a true story, and new stories have grown up around the figure. The
   same can be said for the Blair Witch and other such stories. Many
   generated contemporary myths have achieved the status of urban legend.

   The word is also used to refer to common, rarely-questioned
   contemporary value systems, especially when seen as ideological or
   socially constructed (e.g., "the mythology of love"). In the 1950s,
   French structuralist thinker Roland Barthes published a series of
   semiotic analyses of such modern myths and the process of their
   creation, collected in his book Mythologies.

Books on mythology

     * Mythologies by Roland Barthes
     * Bulfinch's Mythology by Thomas Bulfinch
     * The Golden Bough by James George Frazer
     * The Hero with a Thousand Faces and other titles by Joseph Campbell
     * Mythology by Edith Hamilton

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