JIMMA UNIVERSITY

College of Social Sciences and Humanities

Department of Sociology
MA program in Social Anthropology
Academic Year 2018/19

MYTHOLOGY AND WORLD VIEWS

By

Mini Term paper Prepared for the partial fulfillment of the Course Anthropology of Religion
(SoAN: 521)

Course Instructor: Disasa Merga (Assistant Professor)

January, 2019

Table of Contents
Contents……………………………………………………………………………………pages
 1. Introduction
Man is curious by nature and seeks causes of effects. To us moderns, science has been able to
give satisfactory explanations for the immediate cause of phenomena, although the ultimate cause,
to be sure. But before introduction of sciences, myths were used as phenomena explanation for
human beings. The term myth is derived from the Greek mythos, meaning ‘word’ or ‘story’
(Madu, 1996, p.232). …traditional story, orally passed on from one generation to the next,
believed to be literally true by the culture that produced it, about gods and goddesses, heroes,
heroines, and other real and fantastic creatures, taking place in primeval or remote times
(Mercatente, 1988, p.xiv). Myths are narratives explaining how societies came to function as they
do. They are part of a society’s accepted tradition and relate accounts about the gods and
superhuman beings, elucidating customs, institutions and natural phenomena (Gaster 1962:481).
The study of myths and their possible interpretations is called mythology. Mythology refers to the
total corpus of a culture’s myths. Myths are religious narratives or stories that provide the basis
for religious beliefs and practices. Myths tell of the origins and history of the world and the
creation of the first human beings. They also prescribe the rules of proper conduct and articulate
the ethical and moral principles of society. Some myths exist as written texts, whereas in non
literate societies they exist as oral narratives. Religious stories also can be told in art, music, and
dance. In this chapter, we will discuss the nature of myths and provide several examples of myths
from various religious systems. Myths are sacred stories. They tell of the origin of the world and
humankind, the existence and activities of gods and spirits, the creation of order in the universe,
and the nature of illness and death. Myths relate the origins of human traditions and articulate a
society’s values and norms. They tell how to behave and distinguish well from evil. Myths are
thought by the people who tell them to recount real events that took place in the remote past in a
world different from the one we live in now. Myths, however, are believed to be relevant to
modern life and are often recounted in religious rituals. The way societies perceive and interpret
their reality is known as their world view. Their worldview provides them with an understanding
of how their world works; it forms the template for thought and behavior; and it provides them
with a basic understanding of the origin and nature of humankind and their relationship to the
world around them (Rebecca and Philip, 2016:29)
Myth is, in fact, a religious response. It is intended to account for the fundamental character and
behavior of the world - those aspects of nature and society, the raw and the cooked that define our
lives. The grand themes – first and last things, origins and endings - are addressed in myth. It
supplies accounts of the creation, structure, development, and ultimate destruction of the physical
world, of the universe in which it resides, and of the cosmic order that governs its conduct. For
our ancestors, these stories of heroes and gods established analogies between world order, natural
order, and moral order and clarified our relationships with divine power. The prevailing
congruence, harmony, and stability of the cosmos at all scales were what our ancestors meant by
the sacred. The sacred established the parameters of their lives. Through the rituals associated
with myth, they engaged in joint ventures with the gods (Spencer, 1976:11 - 12)

Historical Background of Mythology

In the early stages of Greek civilization, as in other ancient cultures, the truth of myths was taken
for granted. The Greek word mythos, from which the English word myth is derived, was originally
used to describe any narrative. Early Greek authors who employed the term drew no rigid
distinction between tales that were historical or factual and those that were not. In the 6th century
B.C, however, Greek thinkers began to question the validity of their culture's traditional tales, and
the word mythos came to denote an implausible story. Greek philosopher Xenophanes argued that
much of the behavior that the poets Homer and Hesiod attributed to the gods was unworthy of
divine beings. By the 5th century B.C, serious Greek thinkers tended to regard the old myths as
naive explanations for natural phenomena or simply to reject them altogether. Nevertheless,
myths retained their cultural importance, even after they had come under attack from
philosophers. The ancient Greek tragedies, which remained central to civic and religious life in
Athens through the end of the 5th century be, drew their subject matter largely from myths. In the
early 4th century B.C, Greek philosopher Plato systematically contrasted logos, or rational
argument, with myth of which in Plato's view was little better than outright falsehood. In his
philosophical dialogue The Repliblic, Plato argued that the ideal commonwealth should exclude
traditional mythological poetry because it was full of dangerous falsehoods. Plato himself
nevertheless devised myths of a solely to explore such topics as the birth of the world and death
and the afterlife, which in his view fell outside the boundaries of logical explanation.
In the middle Ages (5th century to 15th century) allegorical interpretation of the ancient myths
predominated. Mythological interpretation in the Renaissance (14th century to17 th century)
continued the allegorizing approach of the middle Ages. An old idea that enjoyed a new vogue in
the Renaissance was astrology, which associated the personalities with the planets that bore their
names - Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and so forth. In a more philosophical vein, the Neo-Platonist
thinkers in Italy - especially Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola attempted to
reconcile “pagan” mythology with Christian theology. Typically, however, Renaissance thinkers
interpreted the material of “pagan” mythology in an imaginative rather than theoretical manner,
drawing upon it for inspiration in painting and poetry. During the Age of Enlightenment, (17th and
18th centuries), with its emphasis on rationality the allegorical interpretation of myths fell into
disfavor. At the beginning of this period, myths were dismissed by intellectuals as absurd and
superstitious fabrications, in part because of a climate of hostility toward all forms of religion. In
the late 17 century, a different approach to mythology provoked the context of new information
about myth-making peoples, especially in America. Europeans had become aware of these
peoples in the course of the voyages of discovery of the 16th and 17th centuries. Working on the
assumption that these cultures could provide insight into the experience of prehistoric societies,
European scholars sought the origins of mythology in the 'childhood of man’, when human beings
supposedly first formulated myths as a response to their physical and social environment. Later in
the 19th century, the theory of evolution put forward by English naturalist Charles Darwin heavily
influenced the study of mythology. Scholars excavated the history of mythology, for relics from
the distant past. This approach can be seen in the work of armchair British anthropologist Edward
Burnett Taylor. In his book Primitive Culture (1871), Taylor organized the religious and
philosophical development of humanity into separate and distinct evolutionary stages. Similarly,
British anthropologist Sir James George Frazer proposed a three-stage evolutionary scheme in
The Golden Bough (3rd edition, 1912-1915). According to Frazer's scheme, human beings first
attributed natural phenomena to arbitrary supernatural forces (magic), later explaining them as the
will of the gods (religion), and finally subjecting them to science (Blumenberg, 2003). In the 20th
Anthropologists like Franz Boaz, A. R. Brown, Malinowski and Claude Levi-Strauss profoundly
studied and argued importance of myth in understanding any societies and lays foundation for the
current study of myth in Anthropological study of religion.
 1.2 Methodology

I employed secondary written literature for this paper. Book, and research conducted specially by
Anthropologists are employed for this paper

1.3 Statement of the problem

This paper was given as an assignment for the course of Anthropological religion. But, I eager to
know more about mythology after the assignment given to me and I was digging for different
kinds of literature written through ethnography and written as the course guide book for
Anthropological studies of religion.
1.4. Objective
 Introduce mythology and world views from Anthropological view points
 Myth and Mythology

Mythology is a cultural document. Mythology is properly meant the scientific and historical
study of myths; but the word is often used in a looser sense to mean the body of myths belonging
to any people or group of peoples. Mythology is the body of myths of a particular culture, and the
study and interpretation of such myths. There are a number of ways to define myth, none of them
entirely satisfactory. So perhaps the best way to think about myths is in terms of their
characteristics. First, myths are narratives. That means they are stories, in the sense that they have
characters and a plot, a beginning and an end. Something happens in myth that is brought about
by the actions of individuals. But myths are different in important ways from other cultural stories
that we tell. For one thing, myths are sacred. That means that myths touch on the same aspects of
culture as religion does, important things like why the world is the way it is or where we came
from. In terms of the definition of religion we started with, myths therefore provide direct answers
to some of those important questions that religion deals with (Susan A. Johnston, 2009:17).
Regarding defining Myth Several of definition employed across disciplines like sociology,
psychology and folklore and Anthropology. Anthropologists define myth as follows;
Edward Burnett Taylor: Myths are born from the ignorance regarding the natural phenomenon,
being considered as proto science;
James George Frazer: Myths are explanations for religious rituals
Bronislaw Malinowski: Myths are used justifications and validations of the religious, social,
economical and political realities, and
Claude Lévi-Strauss: the myths incorporate logical models and represent a language which
needs to be decoded.
According David Eller, myth is a story or a “history”; the word derives from the ancient Greek
mythos or muthos for story or fable. However, it is not just any kind of story but one involving the
doings of the gods or ancestors or spirits or other religious beings. Myths, in a word, are
narratives about the activities and adventures of these beings (Eller, 2007:83). In addition to this
David Eller quotes from Mircea Eliade in his books Introducing Anthropology of religion as
follows.
Myth narrates a sacred history; it relates an event that took place in primordial Time, the
fable time of the beginnings. In other words, myth tells how, through the deeds of
 Supernatural Beings, a reality came into existence, be it the whole of reality, the Cosmos,
or only a fragment of reality—an island, a species of plant, a particular kind of human
behavior, an institution. Myth, then, is always an account of a ‘creation’; it relates how
something was produced, began to be. Myth tells only of that which really happened,
which manifested it completely. The actors in myths are Supernatural Beings. Hence
myths disclose their creative activity and reveal the sacredness (or simply the super
naturalness) of their works (Ibid)
According to Rebecca and Philip, myths are sacred stories. They tell of the origin of the world
and humankind, the existence and activities of gods and spirits, the creation of order in the
universe, and the nature of illness and death. Myths relate the origins of human traditions and
articulate a society’s values and norms. They tell how to behave and distinguish good from evil.
Myths are thought by the people who tell them to recount real events that took place in the remote
past in a world different from the one we live in now. Myths, however, are believed to be relevant
to modern life and are often recounted in religious rituals (Rebecca and Philip, 2016:31)
Some peoples negatively tried to interpret myth as false, but Anthropologists stressed as myth is
sacred religious as of written in holy and Holy Quran in which peoples believe as truth (Ibid)

Myth, folktale and legend

A legend is a fictional story associated with a historical person or place. For example, many early
saints of the Christian church are historical figures whose lives have been embellished with
legend. Legends often provide examples of the virtues of honored figures in the history of a group
or nation. Folktales are usually simple narratives of adventure built around elements of character
and plot for example, The Greek tale of Perseus, who saves the Ethiopian princess Andromeda
from a sea monster and then marries her. Folktales may contain a moral or observation about life,
but their chief purpose is entertainment. What make myth unique are its serious purpose and its
importance to the culture. Myths explain, for example, how the world began; how humans and
animals came into being; how customs, gestures, or forms of human activity originated; and how
the divine and human worlds interact. Many myths take place at a time before the world, as
human beings know it came into being. Myth has always had a very significant position in human
psychology and society from its beginning as religious narrative to human beings as recent
 adaptation to an aid in the exploration of the unconscious mind. Myths relate the events,
conditions and deeds of gods or superhuman beings that are outside ordinary human life and yet
basic to it. These events are set in a time altogether different from historical time, often at the
beginning of creation or at an early stage of prehistory. A culture's myths are usually closely
related to its religious beliefs and rituals. The following table summarizes the difference between
folktales, Legend an

Narratives Myth Folktale Legend

Regarded as fact; accepted Regarded as fiction; not Based on real people,
Fact on faith ;source of authority considered to be sacred; places, or events and are
on moral and ethical issues meant to entertain considered to be factual
Include a great many Include supernatural Include few if any
supernatural supernatural elements; are elements, yet are secular supernatural elements; can
considered to be sacred be sacred or secular
Character Human and non human Human and / or Non human Generally human
Take place in the remote Exist independent of time Take place in the present or
Time and past in another world or in and place recent past; in the modern
Place an earlier manifestation of world
today’s world
About creation of the world Greek tale of perseus or The heroes Robin Hood or
Examples
written in Bible / Quran Snow white story of the Holy Grail.

Table 1.1: Narrative forms (Adopted from Rebecca and Philip, 2016:32)

Approaches to Analysis of Myths

In the 19th century, the evolutionary theorists concluded than societies passed unilinear systems
from simple to complex mode of life and religion also passes through similar way. Myth seen by
evolutionary theorists as it belongs to “primitive” peoples. Evolutionary school of Anthropology
immediately criticized by 20th early 20th century Anthropologists and argued that myth is derived
from the far long ritual practices. They didn’t answer the question of origin as they approach
origin of myth from ritual that provokes question of where ritual from? …But, this approach
strength to go beyond to know the relationship between myth and culture. Currently more
accepted idea is that myth and rituals going parallel to each other rather than saying and
concluding one emerge from another. Boaz and Malinowski encouraged in depth study of culture
and myth by comparing to each through participant observation and filed works. Rebecca and
Philip queted on their book … from functionalist school of Malinowski words about myth as
follows:
Studied alive, myth, as we shall see, is not symbolic but a direct expression of its subject-
matter; it is not an explanation in satisfaction of a scientific interest, but a narrative
resurrection of a primeval reality, told in satisfaction of deep religious wants, moral
cravings, social submissions, assertions, and even practical requirements. Myth fulfills in
primitive cultures an indispensable function; it expresses, enhances, and codifies belief; it
safeguards and enforces morality; it vouches for the efficacy of ritual and contains practical
rules for the guidance of man. Myth is thus a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not
an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force; it is not an intellectual explanation or an
artistic imagery, but a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and wisdom (Rebecca and Philip,
2016:40)

Structuralist school leaded by Claude Lévi-Strauss focuses structure of the myth and pointed out
humans approached to think and classify/categorize the world in terms of binary opposites, such
as black and white. Edmund Leach Studied and pointed out myth in the Genesis of Holy bible as
Light/dark, day/night, heaven/earth, man/animal, and man/woman and concluded that life and
death will mediated by third mediator after death. Structuralist focuses on structure of myth, not
content, narratives of religion and criticized by ultimately dehumanizing myth (Rebecca and
Philip, 2016:40)

Common Themes in Myth

1. Origin myth: in all societies origin myth will answer the questions: who are we? Why
are we here? What is our relationship to the world? It is more sacred narratives of religion
and birth metaphor is basic element of origin myth.
 2. Apocalyptic Myths. The world created will destruct one day through many forms as
catastrophic. One of catastrophic is flood. For instance, The Judeo-Christian flood myth
the story of Noah’s ark in which God sends the flood to rid the earth of the wickedness of
man.
3. Trickster Myths. It is common in the myth of the world and tried to explain as half man
and half animal existence.
4. Hero myth. The hero’s journey is a common theme encountered in many myths.
Sometimes the hero is based on a real person whose story has been idealized. Other times
the hero has no basis in real life (Rebecca and Philip, 2016:52)

Types and themes of myth

Creation is one through the world and various societies have their own myth about the nature of
the world. As Rooth (1957) quoted by Eller on his book ‘introducing Anthropology of religion’
Rooth investigated 300 North American Indian creation myths and discovered that 250 of them
fell within eight types of myth as follows:
1. Earth-diver: in which some being retrieves mud or sand from the bottom of primordial
body of water, from which the Earth grows.
2. World-parents: in which creation ensues from the joining of a sky father and an earth
mother.
3. Emergence: in which the human world begins when ancestral beings emerge from a
lower world.
4. Spider as creator: in which a spider-like being weaves the world like a web.
5. Creation of the world through struggle and robbery: in which a supernatural being
(like Prometheus) steals something and gives it to humans, or else fights other
supernatural beings (giants, dragons, etc.) out of which the world is made.
6. Ymir type: in which the world is created out of the dead body of a slain giant oral
primordial man or woman.
7. Two creators:in which two beings—sometimes brothers, sometimes father and son or
uncle and nephew—create the world jointly, often as part of a competition or a display for
each other.
 8. Blind Brother: in which one brother blinds the other in some sort of trick, such as getting
him to open his eyes before reaching the surface during an emergence moment (note in the
next chapter the significance of keeping one’s eyes closed until the right moment in the
Huichol pilgrimage).

Myth as religious language

Myth transfer from generation to generation as language of religion. It can be said that a
mythology is a religion in which we no longer believe. Poets, however, after having ceased to
believe in them, have persisted in using Jupiter, Venus, Adam and Eve. When a myth tells of The
Creation, what it is really expressing is something about creativity. Or when it speaks about A
Birth and Resurrection, it is really talking about the general cycle of birth and death and rebirth.
The events in myth, from this perspective, are not events at all but rather ideal or typical situations
that did not happen just once in the long ago but that happen (or should happen) continuously. To
say it another way, myths are less about the then than the now. They set the stage and the
standard for our present lives (Eller, 2016: 86).

World Views

The world has different kinds of culture and living ways of life. In their living from generation to
generation every societies had have their own views or understanding and interpretation. They
way they perceive and interpret the reality exist in this physical and social world called World
view (Rebecca and Philip, 2016:29). For instance Navaho of North Americal always stressing
about creating harmonious relationship with the nature and acting properly to create harmonious
relation with environment through respect of the nature to escape from illness. But, But for Judo-
Christian Human beings born to control the nature and ritual founded to create harmony (Ibid).
World view will answer us about the anthropological question about the origin, nature and destiny
of human beings. Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? Depending on views of
societies had have existed in the world in the past or today through worldview they had have to
generation through myth. Robert Redfield defines world view as;
The way people characteristically look outward upon the universe, the designation of the
existent as a whole. Associated with issues of what is and ought to be, patterns and forms of
thought, attitudes, time, emotions, etc. The structure of things as man is aware of them. The
way we see ourselves in relation to all else and World view is as old as humankind and as
old as other human matters, like culture, human nature, personality (jjjj)
There is only one world itself, variously interpreted. Everyone has a world views, no exceptions
and world view has a set of common themes which manifested via oneself: I and me, other:
human (young and old, male, female, us, and them) and non-human (God and nature), Space and
time, and Birth and death

Conclusion and comment from writer of the paper

Myths are generally dateless, transmitted from generation to generation by word of mouth, often
retaining the fruit but undergoing transformation in details. What is important is the nature of a
myth's basic content in which human wishes find both expression and fulfillment. Mythology is
common to all races and every attempt to trace the pattern of man's development has to consider
it. It is the expression of man's early efforts to find an explanation for the world he/she lived in,
for the forces that governed his/her life. When man gave names to these forces, he/she started on
the path that led to the formalizing of belief and so to religion. Myths are universal, occurring
almost in all cultures. They typically date from a time before the introduction of writing, when
they were passed orally from one generation to the next. Myths deal with basic questions about
the nature of the world and human experience, and because of their all-encompassing nature,
myths can illuminate many aspects of a culture. It is by no means easy to define a myth; but all
myths seem to have certain characteristics in common.

The relations of myth and ritual, or the various forms of religious worship, are also very close,
since ritual supplies, the means whereby the desire contained in the definition of religion can be
effective; and these means evidently depend on the nature of the powers to be worshipped through
myth.
References

Blumenberg, H., 2003. Trabajo sobre el mito. Barcelona: Paidós.

Gaster, T.H., 1962, ‘Myth, mythology’, in G.A. Buttrick (ed.), Interpreter’s Dictionary of the
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Jack David Eller, 2007, Introducing Anthropology of Religion, ultimate culture, New York and
London, Routledge
Levi-Strauss, Claude. 1995. Myth and Meaning. New York: Schocken Books,

Madu, Raphael O. (1996), African Symbols, Proverbs and Myths the Hermeneutics of Destiny,
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Mercatante, Anthony S. (1988), The Facts on File Encyclopaedia of World Mythology and
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