μῦθος - mythos

• Comes from greek "mythos", a speech or a story

• William R. Bascom (1912-1981) created 3 categories(myths, legends, folktales) to interpret "myth"- "Three Forms of
Prose Narrative" [* Prose: language in its ordinary form, without metrical structure, not poetry. ]
Form Belief Time Place Attitude Principle Characters

Myth Fact Remote Past Different world: Sacred Nonhuman

other or earlier

- have high emotional content

- have sacred theoriology and ritual associated with them
- Didactic(can teach you sth), engaging and entertaining.
- Hold sacred significance, explain the world through media possess patterns and rule in the form of the
gods for the Greeks and Romans
- Not sacred texts like koran or bible, but explain a greek theology and cosmology
- Exists between folktale and legends, audience believe it to be the fact and the character are nonhuman

Legend Fact Recent Past World of today Secular or sacred Human

- Based in facts (real feats & character) Or the audience choose to believe in

Folktale Fiction Any time Any place Secular世俗 Human or nonhuman

- Doesn't serve theological purpose (vampire doesn't align with existing religion)
- More nebulous narrative, can take place in anywhere, any time
- Almost always false

• Don Cupitt adds:

“ So we may say a myth is typically a traditional sacred story of anonymous authorship and archetypal
or universal significance which is recounted in a certain community and is often linked with ritual; that
it tells of the deeds of superhuman beings such as gods, demigods, heroes, spirits or ghosts; that it is set
outside historical time in primal or eschatological [i.e., last, ultimate] time of in the supernatural
world.”
- myth often told in oral tradition
→ Oral tradition has variations, each variant keeps the same core story but the detail differ
- Excludes:
- visual representation (Ex. painting on ceramic)
- literary (myth told on stage, like theater, drama, comedy, tragedy...)
- anything with single author
- human characters
-Story that serves meaningful, but non-sacred propose

• William G. Doty (b. 1939) provides 17-point definition of myth

- mythical corpus (consists of a network of myths)
- Myth exists in context (group of ppl, aesthetic values or period of time...)
- Myth exists in many forms (can be visual, or told on stage…@ Don Cupitt)
→ These forms can be rich in metaphors/symbolism
- Has functions (Explain natural world, divine realm, ritual activity and cosmos)
- “Myths provide systems of interpreting individual experience within a universal perspective.”
⇒ (content = religious, political, cultural values)

Theories of Myth
• James Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890): James Frazer collected reports of myths and compared the myths to rituals and
magic, codifying the emergence of myth. He concluded 3 stages to the development of myth and to the development of societies
in general.
 (1) first stage: magical practices, a society would first develop magical practices and then, (2) develop a
formalized religion and then (3)have scientific reasoning.
NOTE: this is problematic, it doesn;t connect with economy, education and many other things, they are also offensively
simplified

• Bronislaw Malinowski, Myth in Primitive Culture (1926)

- He studies myth in the context and suggests that myth is part of a larger “whole” society. You need to consider other
aspects of the society from which the myth is originating.
- He writes: “Myth is not the nature of fiction, such as we read today in a novel, but it is a living reality, believed to have
once happened...”
- myth has a function, there is no unifying answer.

Zeus and Hera:

Wendy Doniger (1998)
- We explored a lot of myths that are shared throughout the Mediterranean. Some very obvious narratives like
the flood, but others are more thematic and symbolic elements.
- Wendy Doniger suggests that very similar to how Mediterranean languages share common roots, myths of the
Mediterranean also share common values.
- She asked some universal questions: "Why are we here? What happens when we die? Is there a god?
How are men different from women?"
- And Plato had the same ideas about shared human experience, he wrote: "Every one of these stories comes
from the very same experience, and in addition to these thousands of others even more amazing, but in the
course of time some of them have been lost and others have been scattered in diaspora and are told each one
separated from the others. But the thing that is the cause of all these, the experience, no one has told. (Plat. Stat.
269b)"
→ The last line, "But the thing that is the cause of all these" means why are we here? What cosmic
force created life?

Ancient ‘feminism’
- anachronistic: belonging to another period
- Aphrodite/Athena not feminist icons
- from modern reception, we have reclaimed characters like Aphrodite as sex positive icons. But that is not the Aphrodite
of the ancient Greeks. We are not the Greeks and that's not the context in which they existed. Athena had to be given an
entire backstory to how she was actually more masculine than she is feminine in order to be considered a respectable
female deity.
- Aphrodite’s mythical corpus is a series of cautionary tales. She is unable to control her sexual urges and therefore
transmits a message of keep your women at home or they will sleep with the shepherd. To the ancient Greeks, women
were far less capable of controlling their sexual desires than men. Zeus may be a player, but his offspring were all heroes
and positive Divinities. Not to mention that it is Aphrodite cause him to be unfaithful to Hera. The offspring of female
deities are often flawed and chaotic.

- William Hansen (2004): the promiscuity of (ancient Greek) women cannot be controlled
- a greek female icon of female empowerment: Sappho.
→ This is a female author of ancient Greece who caused waves with her erotic poetry and had an all women
book club. She lived on the island of Lesbos, which the people who lived on Lesbos were called lesbians. Staff
was poetry was largely homosexual
→ she can be viewed as a feminist icon in the Greeks because she was talented enough to break through the
barriers on ancient women and become this prolific poet which was remembered for centuries.
→ And one of her most famous works is actually a plea to Aphrodite, hoping that Aphrodite will console her
after she's been rejected.
Theory
Dualities of Myth
- Claude Lévi-Strauss - oppositions → “mythemes”; settings, characters, events in Opposition
→ dualities in mythos is a phenomenon noted by Claude Lévi-Strauss in the 20th century. He claimed that myth
being a creation of the human mind was bound by the structure of the human mind. And we as humans like to
organize information in the form of oppositions, things like good and evil, Life and death.
→ Therefore, Lévi-Strauss argues that in order to understand myth, we need to understand these oppositions
and to do this. He breaks myths down into “mythemes”, which are settings or characters which are in
opposition.
→ EX: the Titanomachy resulting in the titans bound in Tartarus, but the Olympians in the heavens of
Olympus.
→ when talking about creation myths, we saw order coming out of chaos. Specifically how Zeus was
credited with taming the chaos and bringing about justice and order.
* left side of the table represent a summary of Greek values. [order, progress(new), piety(sky),
humility, fidelity and intellect.]
* Everything on the right represents what the ancient Greeks are standing against, what they
are in opposition to.[chaos, regression despotism, death, hubris and unnecessary violence.]

- DO NOT fall into binary thinking when it comes to myth, be wary of categorizing characters in myth, since
they almost always serve more than one purpose.
- What Lévi-Strauss argues is that we as human beings, are drawn to these binaries and therefore invent
narratives which use them. But even with these dualities, with standing many characters in myth, cross
these boundaries and are variable.

- Simon Goldhill (2004) → Athena as “in-between”

→ So Simon Goldhill specifically draws attention to Athena as a media vary between roles. One of these does
not subscribe to this kind of binary thinking.
→ So Gold Hill says that men(Male) and myth tend to consider social relations over blood relations.
Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter in order to help his men and his fellow Greeks. Clytemnestra then chooses
blood over marriage and kills her husband in retaliation. Orestes then kills his own blood in order to eventually
reassert the social order of the patriarchy.
Quotes:
"She is a warrior who wears armour and fights; she is associated with the head, as a goddess of wisdom and
guile, and because she sprang fully armed from the head of Zeus. She is also a virgin goddess without a male
partner. This strange status of Athene must be remembered when she gives her reasons for voting for
Oretes...she has no mother...[she] is separated from any association with a mother, with a female line, with
female blood...the vote is delivered by someone who fits uneasily into such categorizations...the narrative’s
ending depends on a figure who does not fit easily into such an opposition."
"The Oresteia becomes viewed as a complex example of what anthropologists have called “myth of matriarchy
overturned,” that is, a story that tells of the overthrow of female authority or female search for power as a way
of justifying the continuing status quo. (Goldhill, 2004)"
→ The duality exists in myth so does the character that serve the purpose of mediating these dualities
and reconciling questions of social and sacred policy

Theory
- Carl Gustav Jung, a German psychologist who identified a number of character archetypes or patterns which existed in
myth. Jung suggested that we categorize characters into standardized sets of characteristics and so these included things
like the great mother, the sage, the child, the father, but also among these was the trickster and in the same work.
- “shadow persona”
 → He also says that characters each sort of have a persona and to that persona, there is a shadow persona. And
he gives the example that in Christian narratives satan would be considered the shadow persona to christ. So the
Tricksters are a type of shadow persona.
- List of traits associated with Tricksters:
- mock social, religious, political or moral institutions.
- disrupt situations to their own benefit by means of tricks and antics
- change form: they frequently change their form into animals or other crude shapes like a
phallus.
- They invent stories and they again to their own benefit
- they are often considered culture heroes, they give their inventions to mankind and they
benefit mankind in some way. they steal goods from characters in power and offer those to
mankind.
- William J. Hynes, William G. Doty summarized that Tricksters are “fundamentally ambiguous, anomalous, and
polyvalent” (Haynes and Doty 1997)
- Hermes can be a Tricksters