Theories About Myth

MYTH AND SOCIETY

Myth and Ritual

• J. G. Frazer

Sir J. G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough remains a pioneering monument in its attempts to link myth with ritual. Frazer believed that primitive man starts out with a belief in magical laws; later, when man begins to lose faith in magic, he invents myths about gods and claims that his formerly magical rituals are religious rituals intended to appease the gods.

• Robert Graves

The novelist and poet Robert Graves has written an influential treatment of Greek myths, full of valuable factual information, accompanied by dubious and idiosyncratic interpretations. He definition of true myth is as a kind of shorthand in narrative form for ritual mime performed in public festivals, and in many cases recorded pictorially on temple walls, vases, seals, bowls, mirrors, shields and the like.

MYTH AS SOCIAL CHARTERS

• Bronislav Malinowski

Bronislav Malinowski’s work as an anthropologist among the Trobriand Islanders (off New Guinea) led to his identification of the close connection between myths and social institutions. Myths are related to practical life and explain existing practices, beliefs, and institutions by reference to tradition; they are “charters” of social customs and beliefs.

THE STRUCTURALISTS

• Claude Lévi-Strauss

The structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss sees myth as mode of communication in which the structure or interrelationships between the parts, rather than the individual elements alone, establish meaning. In the belief that human behavior is patterned and that the human mind has a binary structure, Lévi-Strauss argues that the creations of the mind, including myths in particular, partake of a binary structure. One of the principal aims of myth is to negotiate between binary pairs or pairs of opposites (e.g., raw/cooked, life/death, hunter/hunted, nature/culture, male/female, inside/outside), and to resolve them. Since the meaning of a myth is “coded” in its structure, all versions of a myth have the capacity to be equally valid.

• Vladimir Propp

Vladimir Propp, a Russian folklorist, developed the structuralist approach to myth before Lévi-Strauss by analyzing a select group of tales with similar features and isolating the recurrent, linear structure manifest in them. In this pattern Propp identified 31 functions or units of action, which have been termed motifemes (or mythemes). All these motifemes need not be present in one tale, but those that are will always appear in the same sequential order.

This comparative approach to mythology has proven useful in analyzing a wide range of seemingly dissimilar tales across many different cultures, which satisfy the sequential pattern, such as those about a hero’s quest or, in particular, the thematic details concerning his mother and his birth, which Walter Burkert has broken down into five motifemes:

• The girl leaves home.
• The girl is secluded.
• She becomes pregnant by god.
• She suffers.
• She is rescued and gives birth to a son.

The understanding of classical mythology can be made both easier and more purposeful if underlying structures are perceived and arranged logically. The recognition that these patterns are common to stories told throughout the world is also most helpful for the study of comparative mythology.

• Walter Burkert

Walter Burkert has attempted a synthesis of various theories about the nature of myths, most important being those having a structuralist and a historical point of view. To Burkert, of great significance is the fact that a myth has a “historical dimension.” In its development a myth may incorporate “successive layers” of narrative, each of which has addressed the particular needs of a particular storyteller with a particular audience in a particular time. To support his synthesis, he has developed four theses:

• Myth belongs to the more general class of traditional tales.
• The identity of a traditional tale is to be found in a structure of sense within the tale itself.
• Tale structures, as a sequence of motifemes, are founded on basic biological or cultural programs of actions.
• Myth is a traditional tale with secondary, partial reference to something of collective importance.

http://www.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780195397703/student/materials/chapter1/?view=usa