Chapter 25 Lecture Two of Two ©2012 Pearson Education Inc

Chapter 25Lecture Two of Two

©2012 Pearson Education Inc.

THEORIES OF THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES

Romantic Theories


Romantic Theories

• Romantic theories reject the idea that myths are just inert, cultural relics.

• The Romantics saw myth as containing lost, emotional truths.


Romantic Theories

• Friedrich Creuzer– Symbolism and Mythology of the Ancient Peoples,

Especially the Greeks

• All world myth points to the same abstract truths, which are expressed in myth in symbols and concrete action.– E.g., Zeus' rope symbolizes the cosmic energy that

holds the world together, the same as the string of pearls from the Bhagavad gita


Romantic Theories

• Johann Bachofen– Das Mutterrecht

• In myth, we can see evidence of pre-historic levels of human culture, the age of Aphrodite and the age of Demeter, when women ruled. The later was overthrown by the last phase, the Apollonian, male phase.


Romantic Theories

• Bachofen's thesis is at the core of the two Marxist thinkers:– Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private

Property, and the State– Vladimir Propp

• The notion that an earlier matriarchal world as overthrown by male hierarchy is still official state doctrine in the People's Republic of China.



Anthropological Theories



• The effort to understand Greek myth occurred in light of myths coming into Europe through exploration of primary cultures.

• The general theme of these approaches is that myth is a primitive way of understanding the world, which now science does better, and that science evolved from mythic thinking through phases or periods.



• Edward Tylor– Primitive Culture– Andrew Lang, Myth, Literature, and Religion



• James Frazer — The Golden Bough• All world myth is essential a ritual of the dying

king, who must be replaced by a new, younger king to revitalize his people.

• Hence myth is tied to actual ritual which governed the replacement of an old king.– Thus myth is ritual charter



• Bronislaw Malinowski -- Magic, Science and Religion

• Myth isn't proto-science; its function and purpose is to account for why things are the way they are, to order the practical things of daily life.

• This is charter theory of myth, and Malinowski is often called the founder of Functionalism.



Linguistic Theories


Linguistic Theories

• Max Müller– Solar mythology– Disease of language

• William Jones– Discovered "Indo-European" – Indo-European comparative mythology

• George Dumézil– Three functions and classes in IE society



Psychological Theories



• Sigmund Freud• Myth springs from individual psychological

mechanisms, not from social structures.• Like dreams, which code reality with symbols,

so also myths are dream structures that can be unravelled using the same methods that interpret dreams.– condensation and replacement



• Hence a myth is a collective expression of repressed thoughts.– The Oedipus myth springs from a man's latent

desire to replace his father as the sexual partner of the mother.

– The thought is so horrible that it is encoded by the mind and hidden from conscious thought.

– This is a universal desire in all men, so all world myth will be reducible to this primordial impulse.



• Carl Jung– The individual mind is a part of the collective

mind.– Its mechanisms are more than merely sexual.– Our minds are shaped around certain primordial

archetypes – images of eternal realty – hence they are present in all myth.



• Erich Neumann– Heroic dragon combat represents our struggle to

achieve individuality from the collective whole, represented by the dragon.

– Great Mother similarly is the collective whole who gives us life and at the same time threatens to absorb us.



Structuralist Theories


Structuralist Theories

• Claude Lévi-Strauss– The meaning of myth is not in its content but it

the relationship of its various elements.– The origin of myth comes from the reconciliation

of exclusive opposites

• Paris school of myth criticism– “Syntax” of the interrelations of myths– E.g. Hestia and Hermes



Contextual Approaches


Contextual Approaches

• Walter Burkert– Structure and History in Greek Mythology and

Ritual– Programs of action in the palaeolithic hunter

rituals.

• Feminist criticism– Some myths explain and reinforce women’s social

roles


CONCLUSION


Conclusion

• The earliest theorists among the Greeks tried to correct primitive myth in light of new ways of thinking.

• This same effort can be seen in subsequent approaches to myth.


Conclusion

• The process uses allegorical and symbolic interpretations throughout its history.

• By examining the history of myth interpretation, we can actually track the development of thought, since all ages will try to understand things – including myth -- in light of the prevailing ideas of the time.

• These approaches change; myth does not.


Conclusion

• But these different theories are, and must be, selective in the evidence it examines.

• Their failing lies in the effort to extend their conclusions to all myth, when in fact the thesis can be applied only to select myth.

• As myth is illustrative of the human capacity to create alternate realities, so also myth interpretation is an expression of this same capacity.


Conclusion

• Classical myth is so complex that it must be approached from a variety of methods at the same time.

• "To understand it, we must make use of insights offered by different schools of interpretation. No one method of analysis will dissolve the endless mysteries of classical myth."


End


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Chapter 25 Lecture Two of Two ©2012 Pearson Education Inc