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Chapter 25 Lecture Two of Two ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. Romantic Theories THEORIES OF THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. Romantic Theories • Romantic theories reject the idea that myths are just inert, cultural relics. • The Romantics saw myth as containing lost, emotional truths. ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. 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 ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. 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. ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. 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. ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. Anthropological Theories THEORIES OF THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. 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. ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. Anthropological Theories • Edward Tylor – Primitive Culture – Andrew Lang, Myth, Literature, and Religion ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. 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 ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. 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. ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. Linguistic Theories THEORIES OF THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. 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 ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. Psychological Theories THEORIES OF THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. 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 ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. 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. ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. 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. ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. 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. ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. Structuralist Theories THEORIES OF THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. 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 ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. Contextual Approaches THEORIES OF THE NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. 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 ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. CONCLUSION ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. 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. ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. 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. ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. 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. ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. 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." ©2012 Pearson Education Inc. End ©2012 Pearson Education Inc.