Central human figure dominating pendant animals symbolizes Man’s authority over Nature

Above: The ‘Mistress of Beasts’ [Potnia Theron ] in a 6th c. B.C. image recalls early Greek female deity.

Below: Achilles carrying Ajax after his suicide.

The single image helps recall the entire tragic story.

http://www.parthenonfrieze.gr

Don’t let the Greek flip you out…

Mythos Myth: primarily concerned with the

gods and their relations with mortals.

 Saga or legend: a story containing a kernel of historical truth

 Folktale: a story, usually of oral origin, that contains elements of the fantastic

Truth

Religion

Etiology

Euhemerus (ca. 300 B. C.) claimed that the gods were great men of old who had become deified.

Max Müller [19th c. A.D.]: myths are to be defined as explanations of meteorological and cosmological phenomena

Freud

Oedipus Complex

Sophocles’ Jocasta to Oedipus: “But this is natural. All men, in their dreams, kill their fathers and sleep with their mothers.”

His destiny moves us only because it might have been ours – because the oracle laid the same curse upon us before our birth as upon him. It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. Our dreams convince us that this is so.

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, chapter V, "The Material and Sources of Dreams.

Carl Jung

Collective unconscious

Archetypes

J.G. Frazier, the golden bough

Examines similar rituals in different cultures, see similarities of culture expressed in similar rituals.

Ex: "Take thy choice, Gyges, of two courses which are open to thee. Slay Candaules, and thereby become my lord, and obtain the Lydian throne, or die this moment in his room. Thus you will never again, obeying all the laws, behold what is not lawful for thee.” Herodotus on the Lydian kingship

Bronislav Malinowski

Fieldwork among the Trobriand islanders = ‘the natives’ point of view’

Myth as ‘charter’ of belief and custom

Etiology, but refined

Levi-Strauss

www.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/world/europe/04levistrauss.html

Binary oppositions in ritual and society

Ex: Football vs. Aggravated Assault

“In his analysis of myth and culture, Mr. Lévi-Strauss might contrast imagery of monkeys and jaguars; consider the differences in meaning of roasted and boiled food (cannibals, he suggested, tended to boil their friends and roast their enemies); and establish connections between weird mythological tales and ornate laws of marriage and kinship.” NYTimes

Vladimir Propp

Russian folklorist

The 31 ‘motifemes’, or actions

Walter Burkert

5 motifemes [whew!] [Splitters vs. lumpers]

Myth is a traditional tale with secondary, partial reference to something of collective importance.

So: myth reflects culture >> art

Joseph Campbell

Examined similar structures in myth and religion, like coming of age rituals.

Danger!

Feminist studies

Ethnic Studies

Gender studies

Apollo and Daphne, by Bernini