GRST 209 Notes (Chapter 1-2) PDF

GRST 209 Notes Chapter 1: Classical Myths and Contemporary Questions September 5 & 7 Readings: CMiC Chapter 1 “Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meani...

GRST 209 Notes Chapter 1: Classical Myths and Contemporary Questions September 5 & 7 Readings: CMiC Chapter 1 “Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning.” - Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By (2003) What is a Myth? William R. Bascom (1965) - American anthropologist - Compared myths with legends and folktales - Distinguished among them by characters that appear, description of time period, and whether original audiences considered them true - Considered them all prose narratives - Myths differ from legends and folktales bc they have high emotional content, “sacred theology and ritual”, and considered “true accounts of what happened in the remote past” - High emotional content = life and death, preventing a murder, etc. - Sacred = a force that influences the ordinary life, deserving faith and worship Don Cupitt (1982) - British theologian - Myth definition overlaps with Bascom’s - Myths discuss the “sacred” - For a story to be considered a myth, it must pertain to nonhuman beings, religion, and rituals - Represent traditional beliefs shared by a group/society - Start off passed down by oral tradition anonymously for generations before being recorded and entering written record Three Forms of Prose Narratives: Form Belief Time Place Attitude Principle Characters Myth Fact Remote past Different Sacred Nonhuman world: other or earlier Legend Fact Recent past World of today Secular or Human sacred Folktale Fiction Any time Any place Secular Human or nonhuman “So we may say that a myth is typically a traditional sacred story of anonymous authorship and archetypal or universal significance which is recounted in a certain community and is often linked with ritual; that it tells of the deeds of superhuman beings such as gods, demigods, heroes, spirits or ghosts; that it is set outside historical time in primal or eschatological [i.e., last, ultimate] time or in the supernatural world. (29)” - Cupitt’s definition (1982) Both Bascom’s and Cupitt’s definitions exclude: - Myths in form of visual art, drama, poetry - Bascom limits to primarily prose narratives or tales - Cupitt implies a work of art with one clearly identified creator might not be traditional and hence not mythic - Works with a known author - Stories that don’t include supernatural beings - Stories that don’t describe the sacred William G. Doty (1986) - Focused on the importance of the context of the mythological corpus to actually understanding myths - More inclusive definition - Embraces ancient and modern myths as well as previous definitions of myth - Myths can be told in many forms that are always rich in metaphors and symbols - Not just written/oral/verbal communication - Almost always stories, but may be conveyed with words or pictures - Not “straightforward”; not sermons, philosophical tracts, or political speeches; never explicit - Images in myth focus often on one key moment/aspect of a larger story - Rarely realistic; point to a broader idea/concept so it becomes a metaphor/symbol - A myth always exists in context - Religious group within a society, work of art that epitomizes a society’s aesthetic values - Myths are defined by the values and meanings they promote - Myths serve a function/purpose for individuals, groups, or societies Summary of Doty’s three-point definition: 1. Whether the form of a myth is an oral story, a written document, or a painted image, it always includes metaphors and symbols that engage viewers’ emotions or that compel viewers to search out what its metaphors, symbols, and stories mean 2. The content of a myth is composed of the religious, political, and cultural values and meaning about self, society, and cosmos that it offers, which are often hidden in a myth’s metaphors, symbols, images, and stories 3. The function of myths is to offer ways of locating one’s experience in a broader framework than one’s own life and of understanding this broader framework - For this reason, myths must be studied in a particular context and must be part of a mythological corpus Other Terms and Definitions Etic vs. Emic - Etic approach = using modern categories of analysis, derived or devised by the investigators on the basis of their own cultural and scientific assumptions - Emic approach = aims at analyzing and understanding a cultural phenomenon from a ‘culturally internal’ perspective; looking at how the group and their system of thought/belief/culture understands the phenomenon in relation to the other phenomena in their system “The etic approach is nonstructural but classificatory in that the analyst devises logical categories of systems, classes and units without attempting to make them reflect actual structure in particular data. [...] in contrast, the emic approach is a mono-contextual, structural one [...] ‘it must be studied, not in isolation, but as a part of a total functioning componential system within a total culture’” -Dundes 1962, p. 101 ; Kenneth L. Pike, Glendale, 1954 Mythology < Greek mythos (spoken utterance, tale; authoritative speech) + logos (word, discourse, reason) = the study of myths, a unitarian/unified body of tales - Saga: myths supposed to have a basis in history < from the old Icelandic family/clan tales - Legend: any myth with only a kernel of truth or historicity < medieval compilations of Christian saints’ lives, labeled as legenda = things to be read/worth reading - Folk-tale: term invented in the 1800s to describe traditional, oral tales of ordinary people - Fairy story: variant of folktale, previously in scholarship used derogatorily, now more neutrally and legitimately used to describe a variety of folk-tales in which the supernatural is a dominant feature Dowden 1992, p. 8 on defining Greek Mythology; “a shared fund of motifs and ideas ordered into a shared repertoire of stories. These stories link with, and compare and contrast with, and are understood in the light of, other stories in the system. Greek Mythology is an ‘intertext’, because it is constituted by all the representations of myths ever experienced by its audience and because every new representation gains its sense from how it is positioned in relation to this totality of previous presentations”. We “access [it] above all through texts [...]. But texts were not the only medium for mythology [...]. Myths may be told orally [...]. Art too displayed myths.” - Sculptures, wall-paintings and vase paintings were important for the continuous process of (re)definition of a story, character, attributes, and domain of a god Classical Mythology in Context Myths from Ancient Greece - Classical mythology refers to the myths of ancient Greece and Rome - Ancient Greece wasn’t a nation, but refers to places where Greeks lived - Includes modern Greece, coast of modern-day Turkey, eastern edges of present-day Italy and coast of the Black Sea - Greeks didn’t organize themselves politically into one nation, dwelled in small communities (city-states; polis, translates to “city” or “political”) that had its own independent government - City-states waged wars with one another and enslaved one another, but worked together to defend against outside invasions (e.g. Persian invasions 5th century BCE) - Greeks as a whole had a shared identity, defined by a shared language, religion, and way of life/culture - Chronological period begins with the Bronze Age (c. 3000 BCE) and ends with the roman conquest of Greece (146 BCE) - Greek mythological corpus was created and circulated during all periods of Greek history, but evolved and changed as did Greek city-states and their interrelations did Myths in the Archaic Period - Many of the poems that tell these myths originated in the Archaic Period, including the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Homeric Hymns, and Hesoid’s Theogony and Works and Days - Iliad and Odyssey: two epics originally oral compositions developed over many generations before being written down - Contains descriptions of objects and customs found in the Late Bronze Age (1600-1150 BCE), Iron Age (1150-750 BCE), and Archaic Period (750-490 BCE)  - Anonymous poets composed and recited poems in hexameter (twelve beats per line poems) on subjects found in these epics - Meter enabled poets to remember and combine “formulae” phrases while adhering to a general story - No one oral performance was identical - Homeric Hymns: poems in hexameter verse, dedicated to a god or goddess and preceded performances of epics - Theogony, and Works and Days: hexameter poems, orally composed and eventually recorded in writing - These weren’t considered “sacred texts” the way we’re used to; but they’re important for making sense of Greek gods and goddesses - Herodotus = guide for understanding how Greeks viewed these poems - Hesiod and Homer described genealogical relations among gods and goddesses and detailed their appearance and traits - Initially worshiped in local temples and altars; any god/goddess might have different characteristics depending on where they’re worshiped - Relationships among a group of local gods were often geographical Myths in the Classical Period In the Classical Period, Greeks began to examine their myths, expressing skepticism about the gods - Why/how Greeks became critics is linked to the dramatic explosion of creative and intellectual activities - Classical Period thought to embody the pinnacle of the Greek commitment to reason and beauty - Also witnessed the development of mathematics, philosophy, psychology, biology, etc. that still shape how we study the world and organize knowledge - Tragedians wrote plays about them, and the Histories of Herodotus contains stories about them - Philosophers began to question myths using rationalism (logos vs. mythos) Myths in the Hellenistic Period During the Hellenistic Period, Greek scholars began to collect and imitate earlier myths and stories - Roman scholars continued this practice of recording antiquity - By the 5th century CE the Roman Empire had become Christianized, and the mythological system became quiescent Myths from the Ancient Near East - Anatolia/Asia Minor (modern Turkey), Egypt, Levant (modern Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Palestine), Mesopotamia - Developed at different paces - Ruled by believed to be sacred kings for thousands of years - Greece was a relative newcomer compared to the empires of the ancient Near East - Developed democratic governance in contrast to ancient Near East Anatolia/Hittite - The Hittite Empire ruled Anatolia from the 18th through the 14th centuries BCE, expanded into Levant and Mesopotamia before collapsing around 1200 BCE - Hittite creation myths share similarities with Hesiod’s Theogony - Song of Kumarbi (AKA The Kingship in Heaven), The Song of Ullikummi, tell of the god Kumarbi’s rise and fall from power - The Hittites may have had contact with early kings of Troy - Location of the city of Troy in the Iliad raise the possibility - Apollo’s origin might be the Hittite god Appaliunas  - Phrygian kingdom in central-western part of Anatolia had cultural exchanges with Greeks - Fought alongside the Trojans against the Greeks - Thrived during 8th century BCE but was conquered and controlled by the Lydians, then the Persians, then conquered and Hellenized by Alexander the Great before being incorporated into the Roman Empire - The Great Mother/Cybele in Phrygia was a religious phenomenon in the Mediterranean - Forms of her worship were adopted in Greece and Roman Empire The Levant - The religious and cultural ideas of the Levant were spread throughout the Mediterranean by the Phoenicians - They were skilled sailors who developed a powerful trading empire - The Israelite residents of the Levant were isolated by their monotheistic beliefs - There are still similarities between Greek and Hebrew ideas of a moral universe and between stories like that of the flood - Both contributed to the development of Christianity - The Epic of Gilgamesh was a Sumerian myth, though it was written down during the Babylonian Empire - Gilgamesh and the Atrahasis have similar narrative patterns to Greek myths - Early contact between Greece and Egypt is well documented, and scholars question how much African influence, through Egypt, made its way into Greece Indo-European Heritage - The people we know as Greeks weren’t always living in Greece; human history and prehistory is a history of movements, contacts, migrations and settling - It’s presumed they entered and spread throughout Greece, mingling and/or ruling over the pre-existing population(s), sometime in the early second mill BCE (1900ca) - Gave shape to the Mycenaean civilization - Ancient Greek is related to other ancient languages spoken by others in an area that spans across Europe and much of Asis - Since the similarities couldn’t be explained as simple word loans or prolonged contact over time, linguists have assumed that the different peoples speaking different tongues must’ve separated, in different times and waves, from a once unitary ethnic group (Indo-Europeans, presumed to have existed sometime between 6000 and 3000 BCE) - Recent archaeological developments confirm the intuition of linguists and showing the possible areas and times for the movements of such genetically and linguistically related peoples as they spread (presumably from the steppe region of the upper Caucasus) in many directions, bringing material culture, their languages, and stories with them - Those stories were orally preserved and told - Myths tend to preserve what are perceived to be fundamental traits and change them very little - On the other hand, those aspects of a story which are felt to not be relevant anymore to the ‘present’ of the retelling may be altered/dropped, while other and more ‘presently’ relevant elements– invented by the community or taken fro, contacts with other groups– come to be incorporated and blended into the previous story patterns - There is a solid scholarly tradition of Comparative research into the mythological complexes of Indo-European culture - Scholars in this tradition investigate the ways different stories from different linguistically related cultural groups– who may or may not have come into contact in historical times after the initial separation– in search of an understanding of common original themes or story structures, and explanations for their different developments Myths from Ancient Rome - Rome’s mythological system was transformed by contact with Greece - Roman stories like that of Romulus and Remus predate contact with the Greeks, but most Roman myths have obvious Greek origins - Most Roman myths aren’t sacred narratives, but this doesn’t make them not myths - Deal with Roman history more so than things like the creation of the Cosmos Making Sense of Classical Myths - Each chapter is divided into four sections - History addresses the form and content of myths and provides an overview of the chapter’s subject in context - Theory surveys the ways scholars have explained the function of myth - Comparison looks at myths from neighboring societies to offer a regional perspective - Reception studies modern and contemporary art that depicts and interprets Greek myths Modern Theoretical Approaches to Myth - Different theoretical approaches (scholarly/scientific ways) of making sense of myths Why Study Classical Myths? - Mythic forms of thinking still inform how we view and understand the world in the 21st century, according to philosopher Mary Midgley - Understanding our myths is the first step towards not being controlled by them - Stories told within a society that have meaning and shape how societies view their own meaning and purpose in the world - Myths give shape to how each individual understands themselves, their place in society, their world, and why certain behaviors are accepted and others are condemned Chapter 2: Creation September 7 & 12 Readings: CMiC Chapter 2 Creation Stories - Reflect understanding of how the world works - Set ethical, social, and religious patterns for a society - Provide explanations of the order of a society Hesiod’s Theology - Began as oral history - Recorded sometime in the Archaic Period - Many scholars assume Hesiod is more fiction than fact - Not considered sacred by ancient Greeks - Hesiod’s Theogony (between 750-650 BCE) - Historical Settings - Poems attributed to Homer and Hesiod recited orally for generations - Epic hexameter formulae and epithets - The Theogony wasn’t considered sacred scripture - Homer and Hesiod nevertheless of religious significance The Late Bronze Age (1600-1150 BCE): Mycenae - Three distinct regional civilizations in the Bronze Age  - Crete, the Cyclades, and mainland Greece - Late Bronze Age is also called the “Mycenaean Age” - Mycenae and other Late Bronze Age settlements - Pylos, Thebes, Sparta, Argos, etc. - Mycenae was an important Bronze Age settlement in Greece - It was a fortified settlement, probably the home of the king (wanax), located on a hilltop - Complex social/economic networks - Specialization of labor - All classes served in the army - Slavery was common - Farmers and herders paid taxes in kind - The script Linear B (for an early form of Greek) attests administration records, production and distribution as well as names of some gods - Artemis, Dionysus, Zeus, and Hera - Mentions wanax (a king) in Mycenae - Bronze Age settlements disappear soon after 1200 BCE– The Sea Peoples, unclear references - Records are useless as hypothetical support - Could be natural disasters or internal factors The Iron Age (1150-700 BCE): Ascra - Few records remain from this period - Events of Hesiod’s Works and Days take place in Ascra (Mt. Helicon), Boeotia, at the end of this period - Hesiod’s dispute with his brother Perses over inheritance - Kings (basileis) have lost central authority - Called “gift-eating” - Archaeological evidence at Ascra - Small town located on the slopes of Mount Helikon in Boeotia - Farming life: characteristics and obligations - Most residents are small, independent farmers - Farmers dwelled in their own residence (oikos) with a wife, children, and slaves or hired workers - Self-reliant The Archaic Period (750-490 BCE): Olympia - Increase in populations and colonization - Bigger towns - More extensive government - Greek traveling - The emergence of tyrants - People who helped tyrants gain power developed identity as people (demos) - Central organization fostered emergence of civic identities - Self-recognition as “Hellenes” - Panhellenic sanctuaries - Delphu, Isthmia, Nemea, and Olympia - Serve all Greeks, opportunities for Greek cities to worship their shared gods and compete in athletic/musical competitions - Contribution of Homer and Hesiod to Greek religious understanding - Gradual homogenization of beliefs and worship further encouraged by greater social exchanges among Greek-speaking communities Panhellenism and Greek Divinities - Panhellenism and the cultural unification of the Greeks - Studies focus on four main types of divinity stories: - Spheres of influence - Activities - Associates on Olympus and earth - Important sanctuaries or rituals - Hellenic identity developed during the Archaic Period - Colonization intensifies - Sense of identity maintained by Panhellenic sanctuaries and festivals - Oral performances of works by Homer and Hesiod helped develop a shared understanding of gods and goddesses - Led to a gradual homogenization of belief and worship, developing coherence of divine identities and representations - But unified personality of a god or goddess is inaccurate: local variations on the traits and worship of gods remained - Variation and cult titles (a descriptor of a god or goddess that’s tied to the divinity’s worship and has religious connotations) Alternative Creation Stories - Communication and abstract thought in the Archaic Period - Organizing info and promoting exchanges and communication - Writing and coins - Philosophers of the Archaic Period each imagined that a substance or process created the universe (e.g. Thales of Miletus, Heraclitus of Ephesus et. al.) - The Orphics– Orphic creation stories include gods not found in Hesiod (e.g. Phanes, Protogonos, Chronus) as well as Zeus and Earth - The Orphic hymn recorded by Damascius - Orpheus’s account of creation: Chronus generated an egg with male and female natures and an unnamed winged god that’s part bull and serpent, then created other gods - No other creation story dislodged the cultural authority of Hesiod’s Theogony Hesiod’s Creation Story: the Theogony - Hesiod was instrumental in shaping Panhellenic ideas of the gods - Theogony was a collection of oral poems: Hymns, catalogs, and dramatic tales - Hymns to divinities: prayer and praise - To the Muses (1-115) - To Hecate (413-455) - Catalogs: - First catalog of early features of existence - Second catalog: mothers and suffering - Dramatic Tales: - The first generation of gods: Cronus’s castration of Uranus/Ouranos - Birth of the Olympains - The secret birth of Zeus and liberation of other Olympians - Zeus’s victory over his enemies, including Typhoeus - Zeus’s defeat over Typhoeus demonstrates his power - Zeus’s transformation of the universe from a chaotic place into a cosmos - Zeus imprisons chaotic gods - Institutes marriage to control female reproduction  - Creates order and justice - Described the Greek understanding of the creation of the universe Hymns Catalogs Dramatic Tales 1-115 | To the Muses 116-134 | Chaos gives birth 134-210 | Cronus defeats his father, Uranus 410-452 | To the goddess Hecate 211-232 | Night gives birth 453-506 | Zeus escapes from his father, Cronus 233-409 | Gods and goddesses of 507-616 | Zeus defeats the sea give birth Prometheus and creates Pandora 736-819 | Places in the 617-735 | Zeus defeats his universe/Tartarus father, Cronus 886-962 | Zeus’s marriages 820-885 | Zeus defeats Typhoeus 935-969 | Unions between immortals and immortals or mortals 970-1030 | Unions between goddesses and heroes Hymns - Meant to be recited aloud - Primary purpose is prayer to and praise of the gods - Hesiod’s hymn to the Muses praises them for inspiring his poetry - Gave him authority to sing about the gods, but took it away; even if the Muses inspire Hesiod, they mockingly imply they might give him false/misleading info - Hymn to Hecate presents her as a protective goddess - Counterbalances his depiction of the Muses; the Muses are disdainful of shepherds who must eat to survive, while Hecate helps men obtain food, victory, and success if they pray to her and offer sacrifices - Seems that the Greeks simultaneously imagined both scornful distrust and rapturous harmony between gods and men Catalogs - Genealogies of the gods - Designed to be recited aloud - Describes creation as a genealogy of the earliest gods - Story of creation that describes how certain features of the cosmos came into existence - Chaos (Abyss) appears, followed by Gaia (Earth), Tartarus (region in/below Earth), and Eros - Eros represents passion, early presence in the Theogony may explain motive for procreative acts - Chaos, without a partner, births Erebus (Darkness) and Night, who mate and birth Aether (Bright Air) and Day  - Gaia, of her own initiative, births Uranus (Heaven), with whom she bears many offspring in addition to the “fearsome” offsprings she bears on her own - Presents two methods of procreation: - Spontaneous (autonomous, female) - Most often connotated as bringing about bad things - Night produces Doom, Fate, Death, Sleep, Dreams, Blame, Frief, the Hesperides (female goddesses), the Destinies, the Avenging Fates, Nemesis (Resentment), Deception, Friendship, Old Age, and Eris (Strife) - Eris produces Toil, Forgetfulness, Famine, Pains, Battles, Fights, Murders, and Manslaughters - All bring suffering to the world - Within marriage (male-governed) - Especially at the end of the poem, connotated as positive and brings about good things - Zeus’s unions - Themis: births the Seasons, Eunomia (Lawfulness), Dike (Justice), and Eirene (Peace) - Zeus swallowed Metis (meaning cunning intelligence) after being advised her son will challenge him, and births Athena from his own head - Benefit mankind Dramatic Tales - Describe how Zeus came to occupy his supreme position - First dramatic tale describes the first generation of gods (Olympians) - Gaia produces Uranus, they mate and produce Titans, who are placed inside Earth - Gaia prompts them to revolt against Uranus, but only Cronus is willing and, with Earth’s help, castrates Uranus with a sickle - As consequence, the other Titans are able to leave Earth - Aphrodite is born from Uranus’s bloody genitals, along with the Furies (female spirits of revenge), Giants, and Meliai (nymphs) - Catalogs of Night’s offspring and the sea creatures immediately follow Uranus’s castration - Creation/organization of second generation of gods is described in a series of dramatic tales - Rhea and Cronus birth the Olympians, including Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus - Cronus wants to control the new generation of gods and swallows them whole so they can’t resist his rule - Rhea wants to revolt but can’t reach her children - She gives Cronus a rock to swallow instead of Zeus, who she births in secret on Crete - Cronus coughs up all his children after swallowing the rock - Zeus frees his powerful uncles (Hundred-handers) from Tartarus, where Uranus imprisoned them - Foreshadows the Titanomachy, the battle between the Titans and the Olympians led by Zeus, aided by the Hundred-handers - Last dramatic tale devoted to Zeus’s victory in battle and eventual control of the universe - Typhoeus (offspring of Earth and Tartarus), many snakelike heads and speaks all sorts of languages (humane, divine, beastial) - Embodies a confusion of categories between divinity and humanity, man and beast, and represents social anarchy  - Earth’s creation of Typhoeus hints that she’ll challenge anyone who tries to supplant her - Zeus battles and defeats Typhoeus, consolidating his control of the universe - Typhoeus would’ve ruled if Zeus hadn’t defeated him, leadership would’ve been chaotic and disorganized - Demonstrates that he can conquer and martial enemy - Zeus found a way to contain and control female reproduction (suggested by catalog of hs marriages) - Zeus did not create the universe; his institution of order and justice transformed it from a chaotic place to a cosmos (Greek word meaning “government”, “ruler”, or “universe”, or simply “good order”) Prometheus and Pandora - Dramatic tale in the Theogony - Addresses both the institution of marriage and the ideal of order in society - First half focuses on Prometheus and Zeus in the divine realm - Prometheus challenges Zeus to a battle of wits - Hesiod doesn’t offer an explanation as to why - Prometheus tries to trick Zeus into choosing a portion of food at Mekone (mythical place) consisting of inedible bones in fat; Zeus retaliates by taking fire away from human beings; Prometheus steals it back and returns it to humankind - Second half focuses on Pandora’s creation and the human world - The gods create Pandora, Zeus punishes humanity by sending her to them - Beautiful but deceitful; represented women, meant to be like the portion of food Prometheus gave him - Meant to explain how Hesiod and his audience saw women (“gorgeous”, yet “a great infestation among mortal men”) - Pandora marries Epimetheus (Prometheus’s brother) and births several children, including Pyrrha (her and her husband repopulate the earth after a great flood) - Two important institutions: sacrifice and marriage - Men no longer dine at Mekone with the gods, instead will be sacrifice to the gods - Men must marry and produce children with their wives, who stay in the house and take the toil of others into their own “bellies” - The recurring image of “bellies”, suggests a uniquely masculine perspective on the human condition - Between birth and death, men toiled to serve the needs of many “bellies” as well as those of their wives and children through constant agricultural/pastoral labors - Linked to cosmic order controlled by Zeus that embodied beauty and stability The Social World Shapes Myth - James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) - Stages of human development - Comparative myth and ritual - Frazer examined myths collected from reports of European missionaries, traders, and explorers during and after the age of exploration - Compared myths, rituals, and magical practices, which he treated as related phenomena - Argued that all human societies pass through three stages of development: - Magical practices - Formalized religions - Scientific reasoning  - Argued that societies that engage in magical practices and lack certain technologies (i.e. writing) are at one end of this evolutionary spectrum, while societies that rely primarily on scientific reasoning are at the other - Weaknesses in Frazer’s understanding, challenged by Malinkowski’s work - Treated myths/rituals/magical practices in isolation from the societies they came from; didn’t try to connect them to education, marriage patterns, economics, or other social institutions and structures - Myths only had meaning in terms of his ability to plot them on his spectrum of man’s intellectual progress - Bronislaw Malinowski’s fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands - Culture and its coherent, integrated components - Education, economics, beliefs, marriage, kinship, agriculture, tools, houses, artistic expression, and symbols or signs - Serve a purpose/function - Only a social context can indicate a myth’s function - Developed general principles that “would be applicable to all societies” - Bronislaw Malinowski placed myths within social context - Myths can be ‘charters’: practical guides about how to behave for the people who hear them - Excerpt from Ivan Strenski - Studies Malinknowski’s thinking about how to define myths and how creation myths serve as charters The Ancient Near East - Ancient Greece, a part of the Mediterranean world, was also greatly influenced by the Near East - Comparative mythology studies the similarities between myths in different societies; or the ways in which they move among related societies Levant: Creation Stories - Jane Harrison’s Mythology, compared Greek religions/myths from Greece’s neighbors - ““We are all Greeks… our laws, our religion, our art, have their roots in Greece.” Our religion is not rooted in Greece; it comes to us from the East, though upon it. Too, the spirit of the West and of Greece itself has breathed. What Greece touches she transforms. Our religion, Oriental as it is in origin, owes to Greece a deep and lasting debt. To formulate this debt– this is the pleasant task that lies before us.” (p. xi) - Earlier view of the Ancient Near East (“the Orient”) - Orient culture categorized as inherently inferior to those of the West - Ancient Greece, the Mediterranean, and the Ancient Near East - “The Mediterranean” = areas that border the Mediterranean Sea, doesn’t designate any particular time period - “The Ancient Near East” = roughly 4000-400 BCE, large landmass that stretches from Anatolio to Egypt, includes Levant and Mesopotamia - Influenced Greece - Two main approaches to comparative mythology - Studying a single myth that appears in societies that have no contact with one another - Draws broad conclusions about the nature of myth - Studying the diffusion of a myth across societies that have had contact with one another (diffusionists) - The ways in which ideas move among societies (trade, colonization, travel, war) to determine the origin of a particular myth or how myths change over time in different societies  - Several similarities between several creation myths from Ancient Near East and Hesiod’s Theogony - Enuma Elish (also sometimes called The Epic of Creation or When on High), the Babylonian creation story, may have indirectly influenced Greek oral poetry and especially Hesiod’s Theogony - Male gods succeed one another as the universe becomes increasingly well defined - Apsu, Anu and his son Ea, and Marduk = Uranus, Cronus, and Zeus - Goddess Tiamat produces monstrous offspring = Earth/Gaia creates Typhoeus - Marduk’s victory against Tiamat and establishment of orderly universe = Zeus’s victory over Typhoeus - Marduk and Babylon = Zeus and Olympus - Hittite creation myth called Kingship in Heaven - Egyptian myths about Osiris, Horus, and Set - Depicts the Gods as fighting the forces of chaos - The Genesis book is distinguished by the Hebrew’s monotheistic beliefs (belief in one god) and focus on the creation of humanity - It also emphasizes the creation of order - Creation proceeds from intention and thought of one unchallenged god - Centerpiece of his creation is the human race - Genesis: hymns, catalogs, and dramatic tales - Two creation stories, not one - The Yahwist narrative and the Priestly document - Priestly = genealogical catalogs and dramatic stories - God is called “Elohim”, creation of the world emphasizes order and balance; “Then God said, ‘Let there be light’ and there was light.” - Following days created plants, animals, and finally men and women - Yahwist = second account - God is called “Yahweh” - Contains stories in which Israelites are lively protagonists that Lord God offers protection and blessings - Described the Lord God’s creation of the earth and heavens, then creates Adam and Eve - Tree of knowledge, the serpent, Eve’s disobedience, and Adam’s complicity Titans in Modern Art - The Titans as powerful symbols of danger and rebellion - Represented as providers of systemic order to the social world - Rockefeller Center in Manhattan - Paul Manships’ Prometheus - Inscription suggesting faith in technology and industry (adapted from Aeschylus’s tragedy Prometheus Bound) - Carrying a ball of fire to humanity, emerging from a ring featuring the signs of the zodiac = border between the world of the gods and the world of men - Lee Oscar Lawrie/Rene Chambella’s Atlas - Also suggests a promise that technology will solve social ills - Atlas’s cosmic burden and the achievements of men appear to rest on his might shoulders - Can one individual save a failing society or planet?