Myth
What is it?
What is myth today?
• Take 2 minutes. Write it down. Discuss it
with your neighbor. Stick it in a jar and sail
it down the Hudson. This doesn’t have to
be a “dictionary definition.” (Be prepared
to share what you wrote ;-) )
Myth Today
• (psst…this is the part where you tell me what the
word “myth” means to you)
Myth Today – My 20 second
Answer ;-)
• Usually old folktales or stories, maybe with a
grain of historical truth to them, but essentially
fantastical & fictional.
– How’d I do?
Academic Definitions of Myth
• This course analyzes Greek
myths via a few different
methods:
–
–
–
–
–
Allegorical
Comparative
Psychological
Functional
Structural
• Structural and Psychological
methods will be especially
important to us. Allegorical,
comparative, and functional
methods, however, are often
subsumed by both structural
and Psychological
approaches.
Joseph Campbell
• Comparative mythology
– It’s difficult to avoid some of
the similarities in theme or
action that occur in the myths
of disparate cultures. For
example:
• Christian Old
Testament/Hebrew Torah
(Genesis)
• Mesopotamian epic
(Gilgamesh)
• Indian epic (Mahābhārata)
• Greek epic (Iliad)
• Roman epic (Aeneid)
• Anglo-Saxon/Scandinavian
epic (Beowulf)
• Modern epic (Star Wars, Lord
of the Rings)
Structuralism
• Roland Barthes
– 20th Century, French philosopher
– “myth is a system of communication…a
message”
– “since myth is a type of speech, everything
can be a myth provided it is conveyed by a
discourse.”
Roland Barthes
•
Myth is a semiological system (a system of signs)
–
–
A sign is a signifier + signified. You might think of it as a representational system: the
alphabet is a system of signs where the letter A is a signifier for the sound of a short A in “pat”
or a long A (ā) in “plate.”
“But myth is a peculiar system, in that it is constructed from a semiological chain which
existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system.” Again, language is a secondorder system. It starts with the alphabet, which represents sounds, and uses those soundsigns of the alphabet to create words that are signifiers of other things. Thus, the word tree
is the signifier of the idea of a tree (the mental image of a tree or an actual, physical tree).
The point is, one sign system is built by using another.
Roland Barthes
• Myth naturalizes events: “We reach here the very
principle of myth: it transforms history into nature.”
• “myth is a semiological system which has the pretension
of transcending itself into a factual system.”
• “What the world supplies to myth is an historical reality,
defined, even if this goes back quite a while, by the way
in which men have produced or used it; and what myth
gives in return is a natural image of this reality.”
• “In passing from hisotry to nature, myth acts
economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts,
it gives them the simplicity of essences…it organizes a
world which is without contradictions because it is
without depth”
Roland Barthes
• “Myths are nothing but this ceaseless,
untiring solicitation, this insidious and
inflexible demand that all men recognize
themselves in this image, eternal yet
bearing a date, which was built of them
one day as if for all time.”
Myth – the history of the Word
• Myth is a direct transcription of the Greek
word muthos.
• Its most basic meaning in ancient Greece
was story, tale, or narrative. But there is
no one, clear-cut definition of “muthos” in
any ancient Greek lexicon.
Defining Muthos
• From approximately 700s BCE
to the 400s BCE, the word
muthos primarily meant
narrative or story in the widest
sense.
• 5th Century BCE (400s) saw
creation of new disciplines that
directly influenced “mythology”
as Greeks knew it:
– Philosophy
– History
• These new disciplines
challenged the truth value of
poetry (poetry was the medium
of Greek myths – Homer,
Hesiod, et al.).
Truth and Fiction
• Truth = Alêtheia in Greek
• A + lêthê = not + forget
– Truth = not forgetting
• How do people not forget (i.e., remember)
something?
– They talk about it. They tell stories. In short,
they spread myths.
J. P. Vernant
• “Between the eight and fourth centuries B.C. a
whole series of interrelated conditions couased
a multiplicity of differentiations, breaks, and
internal tensions within the mental universe of
the Greeks that were responsible for
distinguishing the domain of myth from other
domains: The concept of myth peculiar to
classical antiquity thus became clearly
defined through the setting up of an
opposition between muthos and logos,
henceforth seen as separate and contrasting
terms.”
Vernant
• Myth “has nothing to offer anyone who seeks to
understand, in the strict sense of the word, because
understanding refers to a form of intelligibility that
muthos does not encompass and that only explanatory
discourse possesses.”
– Logos cannot codify muthos. Logos cannot fit the semiological
system of myth within its own system of signs.
• “From now on to choose one of the two types of
language is in effect to dismiss the other.”
– Logos vs. Muthos
– Non-fiction vs. Fiction
– Truth vs. Lie
Vernant
•
Three basic characteristics of Greek myths:
I.
Different version can coexist in the same collected mythology:
•
II.
Despite the divergences of myths (about the same basic event),
“they are all connected with the same tradition.”
The myths deal with fundamental truths of human life:
•
III.
“the mythical accounts have to be ‘serious’; they adopt a fictional,
fantastical manner to speak of things that are essential, touching
upon most fundamental truths of existence.”
A kind of knowledge is attained:
•
“they present ‘agents’ who, in the course of the story, perform
such actions as to alter the initial situation so that by the end it is
quit different from what it was at the beginning.”
Enough about structure. What
about content?
• There are two kinds of Greek myths:
– Klea Andrōn
• Fames of men
– Klea Theōn
• Fames of gods