Who is the woman in this image? Mean = Penelope 2.Athena 3.Sisyphus’ Wife 4.Faustina

The Ethiopians say that their gods are snub- nosed and black, the Thracians that theirs have light blue eyes and red hair? Mean = Xenophanes of Colophon 2.Theagenes of Rhegium 3.Aeschylus 4.Euripides 5.Plato

The poets pretend to know all sorts of things, but they really know nothing at all. Mean = Xenophanes of Colophon 2.Theagenes of Rhegium 3.Aeschylus 4.Euripides 5.Plato

Paradeigms = Myths are Mean = false 2.instructive models 3.venerable tradition 4.dangerous

Ways of Interpreting Myth: Tricksters Modern

Modern Interpretations of Myth Externalist Theories: Myths as Products of the Environment Internalist Theories: Myths as Products of the Mind Two modern meanings of “mythology”: a system or set of myths the methodological analysis of myths A monolithic theory of myth vs. the multifunctionalism of myth The autonomy of myth See: Some Theories of MythSome Theories of Myth

Externalist Theories: Myths as Products of the Environment Myths as Aetiology Comparative Mythology Nature Myths Myths as Rituals Charter Myths

Myths as Aetiology myth as explanation of the origin of things myth as primitive science What aetiologies are in Trickster Myths?

F. Max Müller Nature Myths Max Müller ) For Müller, the culture of the Vedic peoples represented a form of nature worship, an idea clearly influenced by Romanticismnature worship Comparative approach: Study of Vedic peoples of ancient India applied to myths of other cultures (Greece and Rome) Founder of the social scientific study of religion

Zeus as the Sky Dyaus pitrSanskrit –Dyaus = “he who shines” –pitr = father Zeus pater Greek Jupiter Latin Tiu Vater Teutonic (German) Indo-European

Myths as Ritual Sir James Frazer’ The Golden Bough ( ) myths as by products of ritual enactments stories to explain religious ceremonies The Golden Bough On-Line:

Charter Myths Bronsilaw Malinowski ( ) Selected Bibliography: S/Anthro/Anth206/malinowski.htm belief-systems set up to authorize and validate current social customs and institutions.

Internalist Theories: Myths as Products of the Mind Individual Mind Sigmund Freud ( ) Collective Mind Carl Jung ( )

Mircea Eliade ( ) Eliade's analysis of religion assumes the existence of "the sacred" as the object of worship of religious humanity. Myths reflect a creative era, a sacred time, a vanished epoch of unique holiness. More on Eliade:

Structuralism Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-) Jean-Paul Vernant Pierre Vidal-Naquet

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-) myth reflect the mind's binary organization humans tend to see world as reflection of their own physical and cerebral structure ( two hands, eyes, legs, etc.) Left/right, raw,/cooked, pleasure/pain Myth deals with the perception and reconciliation of these opposites mediation of contradictions For more on Levi-Strauss see -strauss_claude.html -strauss_claude.html How does a trickster mediate contradictions?

Narratology Vlaimir Propp ( ) Propp argued that all fairy tales were constructed of certain plot elements, which he called functions, and that these elements consistently occurred in a uniform sequence. Based on a study of one hundred folk tales, Propp devised a list of thirty-one generic functions, proposing that they encompassed all of the plot components from which fairy tales were constructed.a list of thirty-one generic functions

Feminist Approaches to Myth Marija Gimbutas ( ) Marija Gimbutas was an archaeologist with a scholarly background in folklore and linguistics, making her uniquely qualified to synthesize information from science and myth into a controversial theory of a Goddess-based culture in prehistoric Europe. Joseph Campbell said that, if her work had been available to him, he would have held very different views about the archetypes of the female Divine in world mythology. Primacy of Matriarchy

Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815 – 1887)