1. Ways of Interpreting Myth: Modern

2. Modern Interpretations of Myth
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 Myth
Externalist Theories: Myths as Products of the Environment
Internalist Theories: Myths as Products of the Mind

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

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

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

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

7. Myths as Ritual Sir James Frazer’ The Golden Bough (1890-1915)
Comparative mythology
myths as by products of ritual enactments
stories to explain religious ceremonies

8. Turner’s “Golden Bough”
Joseph M. W. Turner ( ) The Golden Bough  1834
Tate Gallery, London

9. Myths as Ritual Sir James Frazer’ The Golden Bough (1890-1915)
Comparative mythology
myths as by products of ritual enactments
stories to explain religious ceremonies
The Golden Bough On-Line:
Is the myth of Tantalus a product of ritual enactment?

10. Charter Myths
belief-systems set up to authorize and validate current social customs and institutions.
Bronsilaw Malinowski
( )
Selected Bibliography:
Does the myth of Tantalus validate social customs and institutions?

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

12. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-)
myth reflect the mind's binary organization
diachronic vs. synchronic reading of myth
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
How does Tantalus mediate contradictions?
For more on Levi-Strauss see

13. Mediating Contradictions in Tantalus

14. Narratology Vlaimir Propp (1895-1970)
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.
What narrative functions are in the myth of Tantalus?

15. Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815 – 1887)

16. 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
What about Tantalus?

17. Myths as Products of the Mind
Individual Mind
Sigmund Freud ( )
id / ego / superego
dream world of the individual
Does Tantalus appeal to our individual dream world?

18. Myths as Products of the Mind
Collective Mind
Carl Jung ( )
dream world of society
collective unconscious
archetypes: recurring myths characters, situations and events
archetype as primal form or pattern from which all other versions are derived
Does Tantalus appeal to our collective unconscious?

19. Students of Jung Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) Victor Turner (1920-1983)
Ernst Cassirer ( )
Mircea Eliade ( )
Victor Turner ( )
Joseph Campbell ( )

20. 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. Is Tantalus living in a vanished epoch?
More on Eliade:

21. Joseph Campbell 1904-1987 Hero's rite of passage journey of maturation
Growth into true selfhood (Jung's individuation)
More on Campbell:

22. Myth and Dream Myths as Products of the MIND
The Monomyth (James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake)

23. Rite of Passage separation—initiation--return (See Hero Pg. 30)

24. Tragedy and Comedy in the Monomyth
“The universal tragedy of man”
“The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read , not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.” (pg. 28)
It is the business of mythology proper, and of the fairy tale, to reveal the specific dangers and techniques of the dark interior way from tragedy to comedy. (pg. 29)
Is Tantalus part of the Monomyth?

25. The World Navel The omphalos
The world navel is ubiquitous. And since it is the source of all existence, it yields the world’s plentitude of both good and evil.”
(Campbell, Pg. 44)
The omphalos
The effect of the successful adventure of the hero is the unlocking and release again of the flow of life into the body of the world.
(Campbell, pg. 40)
Delphi, the navel of the Greek world