Entry task

On a sheet of paper please answer the following questions.

How do you take good notes during a presentation?

What is mythology?

What is mythology?

• A one sentence definition of mythology? “Mythology” is what we call other people’s religion.– Joseph Campbell

According to our text. . .

• “Myths symbolize human experience and embody the spiritual values of a culture. Every society preserves its myths, because the beliefs and worldview found within them are crucial to the survival of that culture.” (Rosenberg, xiii)

Popular views

• Myths are often stories of origins, how the world and everything in it came to be in illo tempore.– Eliade.

• Sometimes myths are public dreams which, like private dreams, emerge from the unconscious mind. – Freud.

• Indeed, myths often reveal the archetypes of the collective unconscious. – Jung

Mythological study roots.

• Paleontologists, sociologists, psychologists, archaeologists, anthropologists, and many other different professions have all spent many hours, years etcetera studying the belief systems of different cultures.

Myth/religion are distinctly human.

• Many modern paleontologists have recently broached the theory that the key difference between early humans and neandertals (hominids) is possibly the belief in something beyond death.

• This belief is tracked by many to

• be representative of the earliest spiritual/religious practices.

The need for myth.

• From a sociological perspective, mythology serves a greater purpose for each society. The need to create laws and practices of acceptable behavior encourage the creation of

• mythological stories to provide

• for a motivation to reinforce

• good societal behaviors.

Psychological needs

• From an individual level, mythology serves a very basic human need.

• The need to know “Who am I?”, “Why am I here?”, “Do I serve a purpose?”, “Is there something else?”

• The contemplation of the reason for each individual’s existence is believed by many to be the foundation of mythology. Even as we need motivation as a society to follow the rules, we desperately need something as an individuals to motivate us to keep living.

Psychological continued.

• One belief system about how humans come into the world is Tabula Rasa.

• Tabula Rasa, literally defined as blank slate. This is the concept that all humans are started completely blank at birth and then create their values systems, belief systems based on what they are exposed to around them.

What happened yesterday?

• On a sheet of paper, please answer the following: (you may use your notes)– In your own words, please define mythology.– What is Tabula Rasa?– What sociological and psychological purposes

does mythology serve. (2 different things)

Carl Jung• He emphasized understanding the psyche

through exploring the worlds of dreams, art, mythology, world religion and philosophy. Although he was a theoretical psychologist and practicing clinician, much of his life's work was spent exploring other areas, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, as well as literature and the arts. His most notable ideas include the concept of psychological archetypes, the collective unconscious and synchronicity.

• Rejected Tabula Rasa theory of development.• Believed in Communal Unconscious

– Universal underlying connection to all humanity.

Jung continued…

• He believed that the universal unconscious can be seen in the universal images which all people across cultures seems to understand.

• These universals are typically called archetypes.

Archetype

• The word archetype appeared in European texts as early as 1545.[1] It derives from the Latin noun archetypum and that from the Greek noun αρχέτυπον (archetypon) and adjective αρχέτυπος (archetypos), meaning "first-moulded"[2]. The Greek roots are arkhe- ("first" or "original") + typos ("model", "type", "blow", "mark of a blow").

Archetypes continued

• Just as every object can be “boiled down” artistically to its basic shapes, so to every mythological, symbolic, and often fictional character can be reduced to its archetype(s).

Claude Levi-Strauss• Lévi-Strauss sees a basic paradox in the study of myth. On one hand, mythical

stories are fantastic and unpredictable: thus, the content of myth seems completely arbitrary. On the other hand, myths from different cultures are surprisingly similar:

• On the one hand it would seem that in the course of a myth anything is likely to happen. […] But on the other hand, this apparent arbitrariness is belied by the astounding similarity between myths collected in widely different regions. Therefore the problem: If the content of myth is contingent [i.e., arbitrary], how are we to explain the fact that myths throughout the world are so similar?[6]

• Lévi-Strauss proposed that universal laws must govern mythical thought and resolve this seeming paradox, producing similar myths in different cultures. Each myth may seem unique, but he proposed it is actually just one particular instance of a universal law of human thought. In studying myth, Lévi-Strauss tries "to reduce apparently arbitrary data to some kind of order, and to attain a level at which a kind of necessity becomes apparent, underlying the illusions of liberty".[7]

• According to Lévi-Strauss, "mythical thought always progresses from the awareness of oppositions toward their resolution".[8] In other words, myths consist of (1) elements that oppose or contradict each other and (2) other elements that "mediate", or resolve, those oppositions.

Structuralism example• For example, Lévi-Strauss thinks the trickster of many Native

American mythologies acts as a "mediator". Lévi-Strauss's argument hinges on two facts about the Native American trickster: (1) the trickster has a contradictory and unpredictable personality; (2) the trickster is almost always a raven or a coyote. Lévi-Strauss argues that the raven and coyote "mediate" the opposition between life and death. The relationship between agriculture and hunting is analogous to the opposition between life and death: agriculture is solely concerned with producing life (at least up until harvest time); hunting is concerned with producing death. Furthermore, the relationship between herbivores and beasts of prey is analogous to the relationship between agriculture and hunting: like agriculture, herbivores are concerned with plants; like hunting, beasts of prey are concerned with catching meat. Lévi-Strauss points out that the raven and coyote eat carrion and are therefore halfway between herbivores and beasts of prey: like beasts of prey, they eat meat; like herbivores, they don't catch their food. Thus, he argues, "we have a mediating structure of the following type":[8]