The word myth derives from the Greek mythos, which has a meanings of “saying” and “story’ to “fiction” and logos means study. Myth is a symbolic narrative; usually of unknown origin and at least partly traditional; that ostensibly relates actual events and that is especially associated with religious beliefs. It is distinguished from symbolic behavior (cult, ritual) and symbolic places or objects (temples, icons). Myths are specific accounts of gods or superhuman beings involved in extraordinary events or circumstances in a time that is unspecified but which is understood as existing apart from ordinary human experience. The term mythology denotes both the study of myth and the body of myths belonging to a particular religious tradition. Every myth presents itself as an authoritative, factual account, no matter how much the narrated events are at variance with natural law or ordinary experience.
Myth has existed in every society. Indeed, it would seem to be a basic constituent of human culture. Because the variety is so great, it is difficult to generalize about the nature of myths. But it is clear that in their general characteristics and in their details a people’s myths reflect, express, and explore the people’s
self-image. The study of myth is thus of central importance in the study both of individual societies and of human culture as a whole.
Functions of Myths
- Explanation: The most obvious function of myths is the explanation of facts, whether natural or cultural. One North American Indian (Abenaki) myth, for example, explains the origin of corn (maize): a lonely man meets a beautiful woman with long, fair hair; she promises to remain with him if he follows her instructions; she tells him in detail how to make a fire and, after he has done so, she orders him to drag her over the burned ground; as a result of these actions , he will see her silken hair (viz. cornstalk) reappear , and thereafter he will have corn seeds for his use. Henceforth whenever Abenaki Indians see corn (the woman hair) , they know that she remembers them. Obeviously , a myth such as this one functions as explanation.
- Justification or Validation: Many myths explain ritual and cultic customs. According to myths from the island ‘of Ceram (in Indonesia), in the beginning life was not complete, or not yet “human”; vegetarians animals did not exist, and there was neither death nor sexuality. In a mysterious manner Hainuwele, a girl with extraordinary gift-bestowing powers, appeared. The people killed her at the end of their great annual celebration, and her dismembered body was planted in the earth.
Among the species that sprang up after this act of planting were tubers—the staple diet of the people telling the myth. With certain circularity frequent in mythology, the myth validates the very cultic celebration mentioned in the myth. The cult can be understood as a commemoration of those first events. Hence, the myth, can be said to validate life itself together with the cultic celebration.
Comparable myths are told in a number of societies where the main means of food production is the cultivation of root crops; the myths reflect the fact that tubers must be cut up and buried in the earth for propagation to take place. Ritual sacrifices are typical of traditional peasant cultures. In most cases such customs are related to mythical events. Among important themes are the necessity of death (e.g., the grain “dies” and is buried, only to yield a subsequent harvest), a society’s cyclic renewal of itself (e.g.. New Year’s celebrations), and the significance of women and sexuality. New Year’s celebrations, often accompanied by a temporary abandonment of all rules, may be related to or justified by mythical themes concerning a return to chaos and a return of the dead. - Description; In as much as myths deal with the origin of the world, the end of the world, or a paradisiacal state, they are capable of describing what people can never “see for themselves” however rational and observant they are. It may be that the educational value of myths is even more bound up with the descriptions they provide than with the explanations. In traditional, preindustrial societies myths form perhaps the most important available model of instruction, since no separate philosophical system of inquiry exists.
- Healing and Inspiration: Creation myths play a significant role in healing the sick; they are recited (e.g., among the Navajo Indians of North America) when an individual’s world—that is to say, his life —is in jeopardy. Thus, healing through recitation of a cosmogony is one example of the use of myth as a magical incantation. Another example is the case of Icelandic poets, who, in singing of the episode in old Norse mythology in which the god Odin wins for gods and men the “mead of song” (a drink containing the power of poetic inspiration), can be said to be celebrating the origins of their own art and hence renewing it.
The poetic aspect of myths in archaic and primitive traditions is considerable. Societies in which artistic endeavor is not yet specialized tend to rely on mythical themes and images, as a source of all self– expression. Mythology has also exerted an aesthetic influence in more modern societies. An example is the prevalence of themes from Greek and Roman classical mythology in Western painting, sculpture, and literature.
Myths as distinct from folklore and legends, deal with sacred and semi divine beings in a time when the world was different and they tell how, through the activity of such beings, things came to be as they are. They instruct human beings in what must be done to avoid chaos – the state that humanity, individually and collectively, fears most.
In Malinowski’s Functional Theory of Myth, myth is more than idle speculation about the origins of things. “It justifies by precedent the existing order and it supplies a retrospective pattern of moral values, of sociological discrimination , burdens and of magical belief . the myth of magic and religion is definitely a warrant of its truth, a pedigree of its filiation, a charter of its claims to validity”.
Believing in a myth is more than infantile self assurance; it is a device of education and learning, of cultural or religious maintenance; Today, however, anthropological interests, while not ignoring the -function, relate myths to symbolic transformations in which change and establishment of a new order of things is of more interest than origins.
Structural Analysis of Myth (Imp for exam)
One way of studying myth is structural analysis, or structuralism, developed by Claude Levi-Strauss, a prolific French anthropologist. Levi-Straussian structuralism (1967) aims not at explaining relations, themes and connections among aspects of cultural but at discovering them. It differs in its goals and results from the methods of gathering and interpreting data usually used in the sciences. Because structuralist is as close to the humanities as it is to science, structuralist methods have been used in analyzing literature and art as well as in anthropology.
Myths and folktales are the (oral) literature of nonliterate societies. Levi-Strauss used structuralism to analyze the cultural creations of such societies, including their myths. Structuralism rests on Levi Strauss’s belief that human minds have certain characteristics which originate in features of the Homo sapiens brain. These common mental structures led people everywhere to think similarly regardless of their society or cultural background. Among these universal mental characteristics , one is the need to classify: to impose order on aspects of nature , on peoples relation to nature , and on relations between people.
According to Levi-Strauss, a universal aspect of classification is opposition, or contrast. Although many phenomena are continuous rather than discrete, the mind, because of its need to impose order, treats them as being more different than they are. Things that are quantitatively rather than qualitatively different are made to seem absolutely dissimilar. One of the most common means of classifying is by using binary opposition. Good and evil, white and black, old and young, high and low are oppositions , that, according to Levi-Strauss, reflect the human need to convert differences of degree into differences of kind.
Levi-Strauss has applied his assumptions about classification and binary opposition to myths and folk tales. He has shown that these narratives have simple building blocks – elementary structures of “mythemes”. Examining the myths of different cultures, Levi-Strauss shows that one tale can be converted into another through a series of simple operations, for example, by doing the following:
1. Converting positive element of a myth into its negative
2. Reversing the order of the elements
3. Replacing a male hero with a female hero
4. Preserving or repeating certain key element
Through such operations, two apparently dissimilar myths can be shown to be variations on a common structure, that is, to be transformations of each other. One example is Levi-Strauss’s analysis of ” Cinderella(1967) , a widespread tale who elements vary between neighboring cultures. Through reversals , oppositions and negotiations , as the tale is told, retold, diffused and incorporated within the traditions of successive societies, “Cinderella” becomes “Ash Boy”, after a series of contrasts related to the change in hero’s gender.
Structuralism has – been widely applied to the myths of nonindustrial cultures, but we can also use it to analyze narratives in our own society.
Extra Data:
Functionalism is primarily associated with the anthropologists Bronisław Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, however. Both ask not what the origin of any given social behaviour may be but how it contributes to maintaining the system of which it is a part. In this view, in all types of society, every aspect of life—every custom, belief, or idea—makes its own special contribution to the continued effective working of the whole society. Functionalism has had a wide appeal to anthropologists in Britain and the United States, especially as an interpretation of myth as integrated with other aspects of society and as supporting existing social relationships.
Structuralist
Structuralist approaches to myth are based on the analogy of myth to language. Just as a language is composed of significant oppositions (e.g., between phonemes, the constituent sounds of the language), so myths are formed out of significant oppositions between certain terms and categories. Structuralist analysis aims at uncovering what it sees as the logic of myth. It is argued that supposedly primitive thought is logically consistent but that the terms of this logic are not those with which modern Western culture is familiar. Instead they are terms related to items of the everyday world in which the “primitive” culture exists. This logic is usually based on empirical categories (e.g., raw/cooked, upstream/downstream, bush/village) or empirical objects (e.g., buffalo, river, gold, eagle). Some structuralists, such as the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, have emphasized the presence of the same logical patterns in myths throughout the world.
In earlier anthropology, “primitive mentality” was characterized by the inability to make distinctions, by a sense of “mystic participation” or identity between human beings, the cosmos, and all other beings. Beginning with complex kinship systems and later exploring other taxonomies, structuralists argue to the opposite conclusion: the supposedly primitive human beings are, if anything, obsessed with the making of distinctions; their taxonomies reveal a complexity and sophistication that rival those of modern humanity.
Myth and psychology
One of the most celebrated writers about myth from a psychological standpoint was Sigmund Freud. In his Die Traumdeutung (1899; The Interpretation of Dreams) he posited a phenomenon called the Oedipus complex, that is, the male child’s repressed desire for his mother and a corresponding wish to supplant his father. (The equivalent for girls was the Electra complex.) According to Freud, this phenomenon was detectable in dreams and myths, fairy tales, folktales—even jokes. Later, in Totem und Tabu (1913; Totem and Taboo), Freud suggested that myth was the distorted wish-dreams of entire peoples. More than that, however, he saw the Oedipus complex as a memory of a real episode that had occurred in what he termed the “primal horde,” when sons oppressed by their father had revolted, had driven out or killed him, and had taken his wives for themselves. That subsequent generations refrained from doing so was, Freud suggested, due to a collective bad conscience. The relevance of Freud’s investigations to the study of myth lies in his view that the formation of mythic concepts does not depend on cultural history. Instead, Freud’s analysis of the psyche posited an independent, trans-historical mechanism, based on a highly personal biologic conception of human beings. His anthropological theories have since been refuted (e.g., totemic [symbolic animal] sacrifice as the earliest ritual custom, which he related to the first parricide), but his analysis is still regarded with interest by some reputable social scientists. Criticism, however, has been leveled against the explanation of myths in terms of only one theme and in terms of the “repression” of conscious ideas.
Another theorist preoccupied with psychological aspects of myth was the Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who, like Freud, was stimulated by a theory that no longer has much support—i.e., the theory of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, a French philosopher, associating myth with prelogical mentality. This, according to Lévy-Bruhl, was a type of thought that had been common to archaic human beings, that was still common to so-called primitives, and in which people supposedly experienced some form of “mystical participation” with the objects of their thought, rather than a separation of subject and object. Jung’s theory of the “collective unconscious,” which bears a certain resemblance to Lévy-Bruhl’s theory, enabled him to regard the foundation of mythical images as positive and creative, in contrast with Freud’s more negative view of mythology. Jung evolved a theory of archetypes. Broadly similar images and symbols occur in myths, fairy tales, and dreams because the human psyche has an inbuilt tendency to dwell on certain inherited motifs (archetypes), the basic pattern of which persists, however much details may vary. But critics of Jung have hesitated to accept his theory of archetypes as an account of mythology. Among objections raised, two may be mentioned. First, the archetypal symbols identified by Jung are static, representing personal types that conflate aspects of the personality: they do not help to illuminate—in the way that the analyses of Propp and Burkert do—the patterns of action that myths narrate. Second, Jungian analysis is essentially aimed at relating myth to the individual psyche, whereas myth is above all a social phenomenon, embedded in society and requiring explanation with reference to social structures and social functions.
Myth and religion
The place of myth in various religious traditions differs.
Ritual and other practices
The idea that the principal function of a myth is to provide a justification for a ritual was adopted without any great attempt to make a case for it. At the beginning of the 20th century, many scholars thought of myths in their earliest forms as accounts of social customs and values. According to Sir James Frazer, myths and rituals together provided evidence for humanity’s earliest preoccupation—namely, fertility. Human society developed in stages—from the magical through the religious to the scientific—and myths and rituals (which survived even into the scientific stage) bore witness to archaic modes of thought that were otherwise difficult to reconstruct. As for the relationship between myth and ritual, Frazer argued that myths were intended to explain otherwise unintelligible rituals. Thus, in Adonis, Attis, Osiris (1906) he stated that the mythical story of Attis’s self-castration was designed to explain the fact that the priests of Attis’s cult castrated themselves at his festival.
In a much more articulate way, biblical scholars stressed the necessity to look for the situation in life and custom (the “Sitz im Leben”) that mythical texts originally possessed. A number of scholars, mainly in Britain and the Scandinavian countries and usually referred to as the Myth and Ritual school (of which the best-known member is the British biblical scholar S.H. Hooke), have concentrated on the ritual purposes of myths. Their work has centred on the philological study of the ancient Middle East both before and since the rise of Islam and has focused almost exclusively on rituals connected with sacred kingship and New Year’s celebrations. Of particular importance was the discovery that the creation epic Enuma elish was recited at the Babylonian New Year’s festival: the myth was, it was argued, expressing in language that which the ritual was enacting through action. Classical scholars have subsequently investigated the relations between myth and ritual in ancient Greece. Particularly influential has been the study of sacrifice by Walter Burkert titled Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (1983).
Connections between myths and cult behaviour certainly exist, but there is no solid ground for the suggestion, following Frazer, that, in general, ritual came first and myth was then formulated as a subsequent explanation. If it is only the subsequent myth that has made the sense of the earlier ritual explicit, the meaning of the ritual may remain a riddle. There is in fact no unanimous opinion about which originated first. Modern scholars are inclined to turn away from the question of temporal priority and to concentrate instead on the diversity of the relationship between myth and ritual. While it is clear that some myths are linked to rituals, so that it makes sense to say that the myth is expressing in the language of narrative that which the ritual expresses through the symbolism of action, in the case of other myths no such ritual exists.
The content of important myths concerning the origin of the world usually reflects the dominant cultural form of a tradition. The myths of hunter-gatherer societies tell of the origin of game animals and hunting customs; agricultural civilizations tend to give weight to agricultural practices in their myths; pastoral cultures to pastoral practices; and so on. Thus, many myths present models of acts and organizations central to the society’s way of life and relate these to primordial times. Myths in specific traditions deal with matters such as harvest customs, initiation ceremonies, and the customs of secret societies.