Xenophanes complains about the anthropomorphic view of the gods in myths. If animals could draw, then ãthe horses would show their gods in the form of horses, and oxen like oxen, and they would make their bodies such as each of them had themselves · The Ethiopians say that their gods have snub noses and dark skins, while the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hairä (DK frg. 15-16). ãMen think that gods are born and that they have clothes and voices and shapes like their ownä (Frg.14). He asserts that god is rather ãunlike mortals in shape and thoughtä (23).
Plato (in Republic II-III) also criticized many of the contemporary poems, myths, or tales about the gods, because these stories depicted the gods doing horrible things. Plato thought the stories would corrupt the minds of young children who did not yet know the difference between right and wrong. (Xenophanes made this criticism also: ãHomer and Hesiod have ascribed to the gods everything that is shameful and a reproach among men, thieving, adultery, and deceiving each otherä (Fr. 11-12).)
In short, the myths were criticized for being mistaken both factually and morally.
Go beyond the surface meaning of the stories, find the Îhiddenâ meaning, which differs from the superficial appearances. Close to Îsymbolicâ meaning. Varieties of allegory.
First used by Theagenes (late 6th C. B.C.). He interpreted myths in which gods fought each other as illustrating physical/ cosmological facts about nature, and opposing natural forces. For example, in the Iliad 20.54, Apollo attacks Poseidon. Theagenes claims that this illustrates the fundamental physical opposition between the basic principles of fire and water, for Poseidon is the god of the sea, and stands for water, while Apollo stands for fire. Other contemporaneous proposed allegories: Athena is the personification of rational thought, Ares of blind violence, Aphrodite of desire. Thus philosophers could try to read deep truths about nature or how to live off the surface of the old stories. (Sometimes this backfired: the Stoics identified the god Chronus with the word for time, chronos, and then inferred that time devours all things. However, Chronus is not etymologically related to chronos.)
Around 300 B.C. Euhemerus suggested that myths might contain historical truths, instead of philosophical ones. The theogony encapsulates the history of certain early human kings. The gods were originally just great men, who came to be worshipped after they died. This would explain why the gods behave like an aristocratic family.
[[Optional: Closely related: Palaiphatosâs On Incredible Things claims that myths originate from a misunderstanding of language. For example, there is a myth that a man named Actaeon was turned into a stag and torn apart by his dogs. What really happened, Palaiphatos says, is that Actaeon spent too much money on raising dogs, and was ruined. Then people who did not know the details of the actual case overheard ãAcetaeon was devoured by his dogsä and misunderstood what was meant. Max Mueller revives this interpretation in 19th C. A. D.]]
The early Christian Church Fathers basically adopted Euhemerism, so classical mythology was explained as mere men who had been raised to superhuman or demonic status because of their deeds. By this means, Christians were able to eliminate the religious significance of these popular, well-known myths--the gods became ordinary humans. This attitude continued through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
During the Enlightenment (roughly the 18th century), reports from voyages of discovery and missionary reports (of North American Indians) made Europeans realize that previously unknown societies told myths that bore striking similarities to the myths of Western European culture. Fontenelle, a French scholar, compared Greek and American Indian myths and suggested that there was a universal human predisposition toward mythology.
Romanticism (roughly 19th century) was a reaction against the enlightenment tendencies to view myth as an artifact of culture, a product of so-called primitive mental and emotional states. Romantics uggested that myth still could reveal timeless truths about the world, which could not be gotten through cold reason.
Edward Tylor (1871): myths are created out of animism, the belief that everything has a soul. This belief must then be a universal human drive. He held myth is a mistaken proto-science or philosophy, born out of fear and ignorance of natural phenomena.
Sir James Frazer (The Golden Bough) proposed the ritual theory of myth. This states that myths are explanations for (more basic, fundamental) religious rituals; a secondary elaboration of rituals. (And Durkheim said that the function of rituals, and thereby of myths, was to unite a social group, to strengthen and cement the ties between persons in a group. Thus, the myth and rituals associated with Christmas, with New yearâs, and with Easter all reinforce communal bonds.) Advocates of the so-called Ritual School contend that any myth functions, or at one time functioned, as the "explanation" of a corresponding ritual. This school gained much popularity and authority when scholars discovered that the Enuma Elish was read every year during the Babylonian New Yearâs ceremony. (See also the Maori cosmology in the Eliade collection.) That connections between myths and rituals often exist is undeniable, but whether one always came first is not certain. And although there are probably no rituals without accompanying myths of some sort, there are myths without apparent complementary rituals. A member of the Ritual School would respond to this fact by saying that there originally was a ritual associated with every myth, but sometimes the ritual falls out of practice, and the myth alone continues on in the culture (like: our hands evolved in order to hunt and gather more effectively, but today we use them to type).
Problem for us: we canât do this sort of research for ancient Greece, as modern anthropologists can collect the such data for contemporary cultures.
In response to these views of myth, functionalism arose, founded by Bronislaw Malinowski. He claimed that myth often serves as a justification and validation of economic, political, social, and religious realities. Myth thus is not the first step in the pattern of social evolution towards modern western science, but is rather a tool to deal with the practical problems of everyday life. (This would explain its universality as well.)
ãStudied alive [i.e., by the anthropologist], myth· is not an explanation in satisfaction of a scientific interest, but a narrative resurrection of a primeval reality, told in satisfaction of deep religious wants, moral cravings, social submissions, assertions, even practical requirements. Myth fulfills in primitive culture an indispensible function: it expresses, enhances, and codifies belief; it safeguards and enforces morality; it vouches for the efficiency of ritual and contains practical rules for the guidance of man. Myth is thus a vital ingredient in of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force; it is not an intellectual explanation or artistic imagery, but a pragmatic charter of primitive faith and moral wisdom.ä (Myth in Primitive Psychology, p.79).
ãMyth, as a statement of primeval reality which still lives in present-day life and as a justification by precedent, supplies a retrospective pattern of moral values, sociological order, and magical belief. · The function of myth, briefly, is to strengthen tradition and endow it with a higher, better, more supernatural reality of initial eventsä (ibid, 122).
Further, Functionalism (=form is determined by function) asks not what the origin of any given social behavior may be but how it contributes to maintaining the system of which it is a part. That is, Malinowski asks for the biological function of a given rite or myth.
Malinowski claims that religion (and its handmaiden, myth) do something for an individual: they satisfy her demands for a stable, comprehensible, and partly controllable world. Despite the massive contingency and uncertainty in the external world, myth and religion provide a sort of inner security. Myths and religion allow people to navigate through the treacherous, confusing, unfair world without being overwhelmed by the suffering, puzzles, and injustice in it. So Malinowski emphasizes what religion does for the group and individual (especially when a loved one dies).
Emile Durkheim, who can be thought of as a "proto-functionalist", stresses what ritual does for the society or tribal group alone: it creates a feeling of unity for the members of the group. Durkheim claims that religious sentiments are born out of communal experiences, for such experiences (i.) put the participant in an altered state of mind, and (ii.) make the participant conscious of something Îbigger than herselfâ÷only she mistakes society for divinity.
[[OPTIONAL. Malinowskiâs criticisms of Durkheim: 1. Religion can arise from purely individual sources. 2. Society as a crowd does not always produce religious beliefs or feelings; there can be Îcollective effervescenceâ about plainly secular/profane things. (ibid, 41).]]
So, Malinowski gives the following sort of example: a certain tribe owns and inhabits a certain part of the Trobriand islands because his ancestors were sprung from the earth in that part of the island chain.
Another example: myths and rituals about death. The death of a member of a group is a monumental crisis for its individuals; as a result, survivors often have destructive impulses towards themselves or others. The myths and rituals surrounding death serve to channel, structure, and purge these destructive impulses in a conventional and acceptable way that will allow the society to continue to function and not fall apart, by ensuring the ãmental integrityä of its surviving members. Myth and religion ãcounteract the forces of fear, dismay, demoralization, and provides the most powerful means of reintegration of the groupâs shaken solidarity and of the re-establishment of moraleä (ibid 35).
Another example of a Îproto-functionalistâ: an ancient Greek (Critias, in his Sisyphus) suggested that tribal lords invented the idea of vengeful gods of justice to maintain order and lawfulness, even when no human was watching. ãWhen the laws prevented men from committing open deeds of violence, they continued to do them in secret. Then it seems to me that a man of clever and cunning wit first invented for men the fear of the gods, so that there might be something to frighten the wicked, even if they do or say or think something in secret. · The place he said the gods lived in was one by the mention of which he could most frighten men÷the upper circuit, with lightning and fearful claps of thunder, and the starry frame of heaven.ä (quoted in Lloyd 1979 p.15)
Structuralist approaches to myth are based on the analogy of myth to language. Just as a language is composed of significant oppositions, so myths are formed out of significant oppositions between certain terms and categories. Structuralist analysis aims at uncovering what it calls the Îlogic of myth,â which is different from standard logic. The terms of this logic are not those with which modern Western culture is familiar. Instead, they are terms related to items of the everyday world in which the "primitive" culture exists. This logic is usually based on empirical categories (e.g., raw/cooked, upstream/downstream, bush/village) or empirical objects (e.g., buffalo, river, gold, eagle). Some structuralists, such as the French anthropologist Claude LŽvi-Strauss, have emphasized the presence of the same logical patterns in myths throughout the world.
In earlier anthropology, "primitive mentality" was characterized by the inability to make distinctions, by a sense of "mystic participation" or identity between man, his cosmos, and all other beings. Beginning with complex kinship systems and later exploring other taxonomies, structuralists argue to the opposite conclusion: the supposedly primitive man is obsessed with making distinctions; his taxonomies reveal a complexity and sophistication that rival those of modern man.
Levi-Straussâs central contention: ãmythical thought always works from the awareness of opposition toward their progressive mediation.ä That is, we inhabit a world of irreconcilable contraries: hot and cold, night and day, birth and death. Now, there is something in us (Levi-Strauss seems to say in places: Îsomething in human natureâ) that cannot tolerate unmediated contraries; we need some middle ground that will allow us to think about both contraries simultaneously. So, since logic seems like it will be no help (a sentence of the form Îx and not-xâ is always logically false), we bridge these oppositions by telling stories. Thus myth bridges the gap between death and life by positing a sort of Îsecond life.â
Myth is a byproduct of personal, individual psychological forces which are shared by many people in a particular group. He brought the Oedipus complex into popular culture. He thought myths were like Îcollective dreamsâ of the whole human race. Freud also believed that individual psychological development repeats the psychological history of the whole race (Îontogeny recapitulates phylogenyâ). A personâs dreams reflect the same Îprimitiveâ mode of consciousness that we find in myth, which are collective dreams preserved from the childhood of the human race.
Jung thought there is a Îcollective unconscious,â which is not the exclusive possession of the individual. (Also, Jung was ot as sexual as Freud.) He thought Îarchetypesâ were the key building blocks in this collective unconscious, and myths often brought these archetypes to the fore. E.g., wise old man, earth mother.
~ In most of the Mesopotamian myths that have come down to us, the ãcosmos is a state, an organization of individuals. And the myths are one in the approach they take to the problems. It is a psychological approach: the key to understanding the forces which one meets in nature is felt to lie in the understanding of their characters, exactly as the key to understanding men lies in understanding their charactersä (Frankfort, 168). For example, the storm-god Enlil is strong and powerful, and at times uncontrollable. He is a temperamental ruler. Even something as ordinary and commonplace as salt was thought to have a character.
~ When? Mesopotamian (especially Babylonian) cosmogony/ theogony. Composed (in the form we have it) probably around 1500 B.C. How far the myth itself goes back is unclear.
~ First wave of gods:
0. Apsu (fresh water) and Tiamat (salt water).
Tiamat bore
1. Lahmu and Lahamu (who probably represent silt), then
2. Anshar
and Kishar (who represent the ring of the horizon). Anshar and Kishar bore
3. Anu
(sky), who in turn bore
4. ÎNudimmudâ (=Ea, Enki), the earth-god, who was mightier
than the other gods (?Does this include Apsu and Tiamat??).
ãIn speculating about the origin of the world, the Mesopotamians thus took as their point of departure things they knew and could observe in the geology of their own country. Their earth, Mesopotamia, is formed by silt deposited where fresh water [the Tigris and Euphrates] mixes with salt water [the Persian Gulf: every year, the land there gets a little bigger]; the sky, seemingly formed of solid matter like the earth, must have been deposited in the same manner and must have been raised later to its lofty positionä (Frankfort, 172). The mythmakers took what they saw at the present, and projected it back to the beginning of time. This is not totally unlike one aspect of modern science: we observe a certain regularity, and postulate that this regularity holds for all places and all times. We generalize or Îuniversalizeâ our limited experience to the vast reaches of the cosmos, in modern astronomy. Of course, we might later find out we were wrong, and that the generalization which we believed to hold everywhere actually holds for a restricted class of phenomena. But if we never make any generalizations from limited data, then we simply wonât have science as we know it.
~ In Enuma Elish, a fundamental conflict between the gods creates the world order that we see. The conflict is between the old gods and the new, or more generally, between the force of inactivity, rest, inertia and the force of activity and movement. This general conflict is put in concrete, particular terms: the new gods Îdanceâ in Tiamatâs Îbelly.â This concreteness is often thought of as a characteristic of mythic or poetic thinking.
~ Apsu wants to kill the new gods, Tiamat does not. The only new god who is brave enough to stand up to Apsu is Ea, who recites a magic spell which puts Apsu to sleep, so Ea can murder him. Ea won using words, not physical force. How does this relate to the beginning of the poem, where there seems to be a strong connection between naming and being, between word and existence? Also, Apsu is killed, even though he is a god; this is unlike the Judeo-Christian god, certainly, but we will see this again in Hesiod (though not Homer).
~ Ea sets up his house on Apsu, and has a son, Marduk, the hero of the story and the local god of Babylon. Marduk is truly great, perhaps surpassing all previous gods (ãHe was the loftiest of the gods,ä p. 100). He is the sun. (It is interesting and puzzling that the earth (Ea), not the sky (Anu), begets the sun.)
~ Tiamat, who came to the new godsâ defense before, now decides to attack the new gods, perhaps to avenge Apsuâs murder. To accomplish this, she bears 11 monsters to help her. The new gods hear of her plan to destroy them, and Ea, then Anu, attempt to overcome her, but they fail. Anshar decides to send Marduk to fight Tiamat. Marduk agrees to this plan, but only on a condition: if he destroys Tiamat, then he must be given supreme power over the gods (102-3). The young comes to the defense of the old, but only in return for power being passed to the younger. The gods assemble together and all confer power (the ãKingshipä) on Marduk; this is a more social/ political action than the previous actions.
~ Marduk defeats Tiamat and her allies: he uses his winds to prevent her mouth from closing upon him. He splits her corpse in half, using half to create the sky, the other half stays down here as water. In short: ãheaven and earth were two great disks deposited by silt in the watery chaos and forced apart by the wind so that the present universe is a sort of inflated sack surrounded by waters above and belowä (Frankfort, 180).
~ Then, each of the gods is given her/ his current location/ association: ãAnu, Enlil, and Ea he [Marduk] made occupy their placesä (106) (i.e., sky, wind, earth). And Marduk stations hundreds of gods into their proper positions: this is a fairly complex, bureaucratic form of organization. And there is a hierarchy of gods too: the 7 most important make the final decisions, there are 50 second-tier gods, and then all the rest. He sets up an internal organization, starts building.
~ Analogy with development of human society: ãUnder pressure of an acute crisis, a threatening war, a more or less primitively organized society has developed into a stateä (180). However, Marduk in the end does defeat Tiamat alone, but he is given weapons by the other gods: ãthey gave him matchless weapons to ward off foesä (104), e.g., his grandfather Anu gave him the net of the four winds.
~Question: how Îliterallyâ could we read this, if we wanted to? (Do we want to? Could the Babylonians?) How is it that the new gods are inside Tiamatâs belly when all these things are occurring? The place/ space in this myth is extremely alien to our ordinary intuitions about space. E.g., the sky does not exist until the very end of the myth. We canât even think that. Admittedly, there are strongly anthropomorphic elements (e.g., the feast on p. 103), but there are also deeply non-anthropomorphic elements in this myth. Further, what exactly is the relationship between (for example) the sky-god Anu and the sky itself? Are they somehow identical? Or is it more similar to a king and his domain?