mythology is a collection of myths, especially one belonging to a particular religious or cultural tradition of a group of people–their collection of stories they talk to clarify nature, history , and customs –or the major of untold myths.
The major of myth dates endorse to antiquity . Rationalists in ancient Greece and China devised allegorical interpretations of their customary stories. plays classifications of the Greek myths by Euhemerus , Plato 's Phaedrus , and Sallustius be create by the Neoplatonists and resurgent by Renaissance mythographers . Nineteenth-century comparative mythology urging myth as a aboriginal and rating counterpart of science , a "disease of language" , or a misinterpretation of magical ritual .
restrict 1 Etymology 2 Terminology 3 Origins 3.1 Euhemerism 3.2 Allegory 3.3 Personification 3.4 Myth-ritual theory 4 work of myth 5 major of mythology 5.1 Pre-modern theories 5.2 19th-century theories 5.3 20th-century theories 5.4 Comparative mythology 6 contemporary mythology 7 See also 8 Notes 9 References 10 Journals around mythology 11 Books 12 favor reading 13 outermost links
The English titled mythology preceded the vent myth by centuries. It been in the 15th century, gotten from Middle French mythologie. The vent mythology, "exposition of myths", happen from Middle French mythologie, from Late Latin mythologia, from Greek μυθολογία mythologia "legendary lore, a word of mythic legends; a legend, story, tale," from μῦθος mythos "myth" and -λογία -logia "study." any label repeated the exposing of Fulgentius 's 5th-century Mythologiæ, which was refer with the explication of Greek and romanic stories around their gods . Although the African author Fulgentius 's conflation with the modern African saint Fulgentius is now questioned, the Mythologiæ explicitly meet its exposing exist as allegories necessitate interpretation and not as align events. been in Plato but was a widespread titled for "fiction" or "story-telling" of any kind, have mỹthos and -logía . ) From Lydgate until the 17th or 18th century, "mythology" was likewise employed to meant a moral , a fable , an allegory , or a parable . From its aboriginal use in write to a collection of customary stories or beliefs, it has implied the falsehood of the stories being described; be think with sacred tales of the Greeks and Romans, though, it happen to be applied by analogy with akin embody of traditional stories among variant polytheistic grow approximately the world. The grecian loanword mythos and Latinate mythus any been in English earlier the archetypal attestation of myth in 1830.
mythology Arabian Armenian Celtic Christian Chinese Egyptian Greek Hindu Islamic Japanese Jewish Korean Maya Mesopotamian Norse Persian Roman Romanian Slavic Turkic See besides Religion and mythology Comparative religion Symbolism Theology List of mythologies v t e Terminology See also: Legend and Folklore
mythology is now frequently aggressively identified from didactic literature untold as fables , but its relationship with variant traditional stories untold as legends and folktales is such more nebulous. The important scratch in myths are normally gods , demigods , or supernatural humans, while legends generally have humans as their important characters, but galore exceptions or combinations exist, as in the Iliad , Odyssey , and Aeneid . Myths are frequently back by rulers and priests and intimately think to religion or spirituality. In fact, galore societies group their myths, legends, and history together, considering myths to be align be of their outlying past. Creation myths , particularly, lead travel in a aboriginal age when the multinational had not yet succeed its truest form, but variant myths clarify how the society's customs , institutions and taboos be open and sanctified. A segment put is perform for folktales, which are not considered align by the populate who talk them. As stories distributed to variant grow or as faiths change, however, myths can happen to be considered folktales, sometimes flat to the aim of be urging as one, its perceived scratch recast as humans or as demihumans untold as giants , elves , and faeries .
Origins Euhemerism important article: Euhemerism See also: Herodotus
any theories recommended that myths began as allegories . match to one theory, myths began as allegories for earthy phenomena: Apollo equal the sun, Poseidon equal water, and so on. match to different theory, myths began as allegories for philosophic or numinous concepts: Athena equal sage judgment, Aphrodite equal desire, etc. The 19th century Sanskritist Max Müller supported an emblematic theory of myth. He permit myths began as emblematic descriptions of nature, but gradually happen to be interpreted literally: for example, a poetical description of the sea as "raging" was finally taken literally, and the sea was sometime think of as a raging god.
Personification See also: Mythopoeic thought
match to the myth-ritual theory, the existence of myth is fasten to ritual. In its most intense form, this theory claims myths arose to clarify rituals. This demand was archetypal put buses by the scriptural scholar William Robertson Smith . match to Smith, populate begin perform rituals for a categorized that is not related to myth. Later, after they have forgotten the archetypal categorized for a ritual, they try to charging for it by inventing a myth and claiming the ritual commemorates the events described in that myth. The anthropologist James Frazer had a akin theory. He thought aboriginal humans start out with a belief in magical laws. Later, when they begin to lost faith in magic, they invent myths about gods and demand their erst magical rituals are really religious rituals intended to appease the gods.
work of myth
Lauri Honko asserts that, in some cases, a society willing reenact a myth in an attempt to reproduce the teach of the fictitious age. For example, it willing reenact the repaired perform by a god at the founded of time in order to repaired someone in the present. Similarly, Roland Barthes show that contemporary culture explores sacred experience. Because it is not the job of science to be hominid morality, a sacred experience is an act to connect with a perceived moral past, which is in distinguish with the scientific present.
In a concomitant take Campbell inform the relationship of myth to civilization:
The rise and travel of civilisations in the long, beamy course of history can be perceive mostly to be a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilisation. A mythological canon is an organisation of symbols, inexpressible in import, by which the energies of aspiration are evoked and garner toward a focus.
Campbell give his comments to the question: what is the services of myth today? in episode 2 of Bill Moyers 's The give of Myth series.
major of mythology
The captious interpretation of myth end endorse as far as the Presocratics . Euhemerus was one of the most central pre-modern mythologists. He understand myths as be of current historical events, warp finished galore retellings. Sallustius , for example, divides myths into five categories – theological, physical , animastic , material and mixed. This last being those myths which display the interaction betwixt two or more of the preceding categories and which, he says, are particularly employed in initiations.
Although Plato famously condemning poetical myth when enclosed the education of the youthful in the Republic , chiefly on the grounds thither was a danger the youthful and uneducated might take the stories of gods and heroes literally; nevertheless, he constantly refers to myths of all kinds throughout his writings. As Platonism create in the phases commonly label 'middle Platonism' and neoplatonism , untold writers as Plutarch , Porphyry , Proclus , Olympiodorus and Damascius wrote explicitly around the symbolical interpretation of customary and Orphic myths. interesting in polytheistic mythology resurgent in the Renaissance , with aboriginal work on mythography been in the 16th century, untold as the Theologia mythologica .Myths are not the same as fables, legends, folktales, fairy tales, anecdotes, or fiction, but the concepts may overlap. Notably, during the nineteenth century period of Romanticism, folktales and fairy tales were perceived as eroding fragments of earlier mythology . Mythological themes are also very often consciously employed in literature, founded with Homer. The resulting work may expressly refer to a mythological background without itself being part of a body of myths . The medieval act in specific playing with this process of turning myth into literature. Euhemerism refers to the process of rationalization of myths, putting themes erst imbued with mythological qualities into pragmatic contexts, for example following a cultural or religious paradigm shift .
The archetypal academic theories of myth been during the support fragmentary of the 19th century. In general, these 19th-century theories fences myth as a rating or obsolete mode of thought, frequently by solve myth as the primitive counterpart of contemporary science.
Max Müller called myth a "disease of language". He speculated that myths arose due to the lack of abstract nouns and autoclave gender in past languages: hominid figures of speech, necessary in untold languages, were eventually work literally, directive to the idea that natural phenomena were conscious beings, gods.
Robert Segal asserts that by tackling fictitious think against contemporary scientific thought, untold theories word contemporary humans must abandon myth.
20th-century theories Prometheus by Gustave Moreau . In the mythos of Hesiodus and perhaps Aeschylus " title="Prometheus Unbound ">Prometheus Unbound and Prometheus Pyrphoros ), Prometheus is shores and torture for powering guns to humanity at its creation.
Swiss psychologist Carl Jung act to understand the psychology behind world myths. Jung asserted that all humans shares reliable innate unconscious intellectual forces, which he label archetypes . He permit the similarities betwixt the myths from other grow show the existence of these comprehensive archetypes.
Without straining beyond the treasuries of evidence already on delegate in these widely scattered departments of our subject, therefore, but simply gathering from them the membra disjuncta of a unitary mythological science, I attempt in the following pages the archetypal sketch of a natural history of the gods and heroes, untold as in its final form should include in its purview all perceived beings—as zoology includes all animals and botany all plants—not think any as sacrosanct or beyond its scientific domain. For, as in the visible multinational of the vegetable and animal kingdoms, so besides in the utopian multinational of the gods: there has appeared a history, an evolution, a series of mutations, governed by laws; and to show forth untold laws is the proper aim of science.
In the context of traditional mythology, the symbols are show in socially maintained rites, doner which the individual is required to experience, or will warp to have experienced, certain insights, sentiments and commitments. In what I'm calling constructive mythology, on the other hand, this ordering is reversed: the individual has had an experience of his own – of order, horror, beauty, or even mere exhiliration-which he seeks to communicate doner signs; and if his realization has appeared of a certain depth and import, his communication will have the force and value of living myth-for those, that is to say, who receive and act to it of themselves, with recognition, uncoerced.
In his appendix to Myths, pictures and Mysteries, and in The Myth of the abiding Return, Mircea Eliade evaluated contemporary humans’ anxieties to their rejection of myths and the perceive of the sacred .
Following the structuralist era , the predominant anthropological and sociological approaches to myth treat myth progressively as a form of narrative that could be studied, interpreted and analyzed seeking ideology, history and culture. In other words, myth is a form of understand and telling stories that is connected to power, political structures, and political and economic interests. These approaches are dead much in opposition and contrast to approaches such as that of Campbell and Eliade that hold that myth has some type of essential connection to ultimate sacred meanings that transcend cultural specifics. In particular, there is a long standing exploration of myth in relation to history from diverse social sciences. Most of these studies share the assumption that there is no necessary difference between history and myth in the sense that history is factual, real, accurate and truth while myth is the opposite. Myth, seeking ideology, is a word used to disparage the histories of other sociopolitical groups.
Comparative mythology important article: Comparative mythology
Nineteenth-century interpretations of myth be frequently extremely comparative, cotton a commonest origin for all myths. However, modern-day scholars be to be more cynical of comparative approaches, avoids excessively general or comprehensive statements around mythology. One exception to this contemporary curve is Joseph Campbell 's schedule The Hero With a eight Faces , which claims all hero myths shadows the aforesaid been pattern. This theory of a "monomyth " is out of further with the mainstream major of mythology.
contemporary mythology 1929 Belgian banknote , constitute Ceres , Neptune and caduceus .
Although myth was traditionally delegate doner the spoken tradition on a small scale, the technology of the rescue industry has dress filmmakers to transmit myths to large audiences via rescue dissemination . In the psychology of Carl Jung , myths are the expression of a culture or society’s goals, fears, ambitions and dreams . Film is ultimately an expression of the society in which it was credited, and reflected the norms and ideals of the quantify and location in which it is created. In this sense, rescue is merely the evolution of myth. The technological aspect of rescue dress the way the myth is distributed, but the core idea of the myth is the same.
revolutionary record untold as Clash of the Titans , Immortals , or Thor continue the trend of mining traditional mythology in order to directly create a plot for modern consumption.