Download Chapter Twenty-Four Lecture Two

Chapter 25
Lecture Two of Two
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Romantic Theories
THEORIES OF THE NINETEENTH AND
TWENTIETH CENTURIES
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Romantic Theories
• Romantic theories reject the idea that myths
are just inert, cultural relics.
• The Romantics saw myth as containing lost,
emotional truths.
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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
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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.
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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.
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Anthropological Theories
THEORIES OF THE NINETEENTH AND
TWENTIETH CENTURIES
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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.
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Anthropological Theories
• Edward Tylor
– Primitive Culture
– Andrew Lang, Myth, Literature, and Religion
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Anthropological Theories
• 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
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Anthropological Theories
• 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.
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Linguistic Theories
THEORIES OF THE NINETEENTH AND
TWENTIETH CENTURIES
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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
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Psychological Theories
THEORIES OF THE NINETEENTH AND
TWENTIETH CENTURIES
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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
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Psychological Theories
• 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.
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Psychological Theories
• 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.
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Psychological Theories
• 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.
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Structuralist Theories
THEORIES OF THE NINETEENTH AND
TWENTIETH CENTURIES
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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
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Contextual Approaches
THEORIES OF THE NINETEENTH AND
TWENTIETH CENTURIES
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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
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CONCLUSION
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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End
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