This summary contains all the important information for the course Stories of the university minor Mirror of Myth. It's a summary of all the lectures and includes some extra overviews, explanations, seminar notes and answers to prepatory questions. With this, a good grade is guaranteed!
MOM: Stories
Week 1 defining myth
HC 1
- You can miss one of the sessions per module
- No reading seminar on 22 December
- Week 7: no class for functions
- Excursion: Thursday 23, Friday 24 February
Acquire your own tickets
- Deadlines
Exam stories: 16 January 2024
Theories essay: 2 February 2024
Functions video essay/podcast 3 February
- Defining ‘myth’
Notions of: antiquity, sense of timelessness, pleasure, deeper meaning
Prose narratives = myths
Notions of: past, truthful
Notions of: traditional, supernatural, explanation or a justification for something
Plato: the myth (mythos) is taken as a whole, false, but there is truth in it also
Quotes:
‘Myth conveys an aura of great antiquity and at the same time projects a
sense of timelessness. The content of a story gives pleasure, yet there is also a
feeling that it means something more’ Zajko/O’Gorman
‘Prose narratives which, in the society in which they’re told, are considered to
be truthful accounts of what happened in the remote past’ Csapo
‘a traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces, which
embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology, or justification of something
such as the early history of a society, a religious belief or ritual, or natural
phenomenon’ Oxford English Dictionary
There are 2 kinds of stories (logoi), one false and one true, ‘and the myth
(mythos) is, taken as a whole, false, but there is truth in it also’ Plato
- Do you think ‘myths’ are true, untrue, or truth doesn’t come into it
- Do you think myths are narratives?
Not a sufficient condition, but there are no myths without narratives
So, do you think they’re prose narratives?
For instance, viewing conspiracy theories as myths, this is then not about the past
- Do you think myths involve supernatural beings or forces?
- Do myths serve to provide/embody an explanation?
Like how Rome was made
This can happen, but not necessary
- Do myths project timelessness?
No: I can’t think of many myths that are still believed today
, Possibly, the context is not relevant for us anymore
- Defining myths
Definitions tend to be complex, many different criteria put together
It’s not easy to agree on the individual criteria
- Some neighboring terms:
Legend
Difference myth-legend: legend has less to do with the supernatural;
Folktale
Fairy-tale
- The etymological origin of ‘myth’
Originally (e.g. Homer), meant ‘speech’ and ‘story’, often with the connotation of
authority
Then gradually acquired a sense closer to our own, ‘myth’, including a sense of
falsehood, as in the Plato quote from earlier
This is a reminder that terminology is not constant
Question: what is the relevance of an original Greek meaning to us? Yes, our word
‘myth’ comes from the Greek, but does the original meaning matter?
- There are reasons not to be aporetic (twijfelachtig)
‘Family resemblance’ (Wittgenstein): a useful concept for many complex
definitions. Thus the standard definition of myth are not wrong because there are
countless counter-examples
Consider why/when we speak of ‘myth’: not only something that one can define
perse, but also a term that we use to achieve something
E.g. “that’s only a myth”
E.g. a ‘collection of Greek myths’
Context and purpose matter
- What can one do with myth
3 aims:
1. Further specify what myth is
2. Demonstrating the variety of what myth does
3. Introduce some of the issues that will come in in detail in subsequent classes
- What to do with myths:
1. Tell stories
2. Unearth meaning
3. Express identity
4. Explain causes
5. Gain access to cross-cultural truths
6. Label a current story/belief as false
7. Catalogues, mythography
,- What to do with myth I: tell stories
Here: particularly actually telling, speaking
In theater/on stage, in books, in paintings
Communal story-telling probably goes back as far as huma civilization, and so
probably do myths
That itself has many function: the pleasure of stories, bonding, propagation of
values, etc.
Informal story-telling, e.g. by parents to children
Attested for Greece, practiced in modern western cultures too
Formal tellings
In Greece, e.g. Homeric rhapsodes and tragic plays
In the modern world, e.g. novels, films, comics, opera
Brief allusions rather than complete tellings: e.g. names, images, videogames (?)
Is it right to distinguish between a myth and its (re-)tellings?
- What to do with myth II: unearth meaning
Taking myths and trying to find the deeper meanings
Allegorical interpretation
E.g. ancient re-reading of deities as natural forces, Christian reinterpretations,
more recent mystical interpretations
Symbolic, stands for something different
Freud
Oedipus complex, narcissus
Used myths to identify broader truths about humans
Finding universal truths
Structuralism
Myth as reflecting structural patterns of thoughts in a society (divine-human-
animal, city-country, etc.
Seeing underlining patterns in the myth
About how all big myths structure society, looking for a truth about a culture
Gender studies
Myths as reflecting underlying ideologies of gender in a society
2 general observations on the above
Some of these assume universal truth of myth; others the myth to its society
For many of these it matters less that myths are stories and more that they
don’t have a single author
- What to do with myth III: use them to express/define who you (and others) are
Many ancient cities had foundations myths
Spartoi in Sparta
Autochthony in Athens
Romulus/Remus, Aeneas in Rome
Modern uses:
Zeus on Greek Euro-coins
Suffragettes referred to as ‘Amazons’
Sports teams called ‘Titans’
, - What to do with myth IV: explain causes
Aetiological myths frequent in antiquity
Aetiological: a myth that tells the origin of something (it explains a cause)
Prometheus deceiving gods explains practice of eating sacrificial meet
(Hesiod)
Origi of rituals explained through myths (e.g. end of Euripides plays)
‘Cambridge ritualist’: explaining myth (and Greek tragedy) as originating in
ritual
The mythical story explains something that is the practice now
‘survivals’ theory
Very 19th century
You study a myth, encoding what this culture practice
Difference with structuralist: try to find common structures looking at several
myths, survival theorists look at one myth (at a time)
E.B. Tylor, James Frazer: Proposes that earlier elements of a culture survive
later in fossilized form; e.g. in the Roman myth of the golden bough survives
an older belief in the magic of the mistle toe.
Myth (and other things) thus give access to lost earlier cultural practices and
beliefs
- What to do with myth V: gain access to cross-cultural truths
Looking at different cultures of myths
Already antiquity was occasionally interested in similarities between (e.g.) Greek
and foreign gods (Herodotus)
Comparative method becomes important in 19th cent., with the rise of
anthropology and comparative philology
Max Müller: comparative mythology; sun myths
James Frazer: generalizing explanations for recurring mythical features
Both within Indo-European (i.e. a linked system) and beyond Indo-European,
incl. e.g. semitic cultures (human universals)
st
21 cent.: evolutionary psychology and cognitive science of religion
Tries to understand religion as a sort of byproduct of the human brain
‘Minimally counterintuitive concepts’
‘Intentionalist fallacy’
- What to do with myth VI: label a current story/believe as false
‘Populist myths’
N.B. the significance of myth in 2022
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957)
Analyses modern myths, e.g. red wine in France, bleu guides, steak frites,
einstein’s brain
Already in antiquity
E.g. the historian Thucydides (5th cent. BC) implies that his predecessors didn’t
distinguish myth and history
More positive: Plato uses myths to convey philosophy in a different mode
- What to do with myths VII: catalogues, mythography
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