Mythology

C

The Middle Ages and Renaissance

In the Middle Ages (5th century to 15th century) allegorical interpretation of the ancient myths predominated. Even the works of the ancient Roman poet Ovid, whose writings about the pagan gods were famous for their irreverence and bawdiness, received allegorical interpretation. For example, Ovid’s Metamorphoses includes a story of how Zeus fathered Perseus by approaching Danae in a shower of gold; this tale was interpreted in light of the biblical story of Mary’s virgin conception of Jesus. The entire Metamorphoses offered a rich source of material for medieval Christian allegory, starting with its tale of the creation and universal flood, and continuing through the flight of Phaëthon (who foolishly tried to drive the chariot of the sun) to the long philosophical speech of Greek philosopher Pythagoras at the end.

Mythological interpretation in the Renaissance (14th century to 17th century) continued the allegorizing approach of the Middle Ages. An old idea that enjoyed a new vogue in the Renaissance was astrology, which associated the personalities of the pagan gods with the planets that bore their names—Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and so forth. In a more philosophical vein, the Neoplatonist thinkers in Italy—especially Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola—attempted to reconcile pagan mythology with Christian theology. Typically, however, Renaissance thinkers interpreted the material of pagan mythology in an imaginative rather than theoretical manner, drawing upon it for inspiration in painting and poetry.

D

The Age of Enlightenment

During the Age of Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries), with its emphasis on rationality, the allegorical interpretation of myths fell into disfavor. At the beginning of this period, myths were dismissed by intellectuals as absurd and superstitious fabrications, in part because of a climate of hostility toward all forms of religion. The so-called Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns, in which the relative merits of classical and modern literature were debated, lent additional force to the devaluing of myths and myth-making. French writer Pierre Bayle, in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (Historical and Critical Dictionary, 1697), ridiculed the absurdity of the ancient Greek and Roman myths.

In the late 17th century, a different approach to mythology arose in the context of new information about myth-making peoples (especially those in the Americas). Europeans had become aware of these peoples in the course of the voyages of discovery of the 16th and 17th centuries. Working on the assumption that these cultures could provide insight into the experience of prehistoric societies, European scholars sought the origins of mythology in the 'childhood of man,' when human beings supposedly first formulated myths as a response to their physical and social environment. The studies made in this period were consolidated in the work of German scholar Christian Gottlob Heyne, who was the first scholar to use the Latin term mythus (instead of fabula, meaning 'fable') to refer to the tales of heroes and gods.

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E

The 19th-Century Science of Mythology

As more and more material from other cultures became available, European scholars came to recognize even greater complexity in mythological traditions. Especially valuable was the evidence provided by ancient Indian and Iranian texts such as the Bhagavad-Gita and the Zend-Avesta. From these sources it became apparent that the character of myths varied widely, not only by geographical region but also by historical period. German scholar Karl Otfried Müller followed this line of inquiry in his Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie (Prolegomena to a Scientific Mythology, 1825). He argued that the relatively simple Greek myth of Persephone reflects the concerns of a basic agricultural community, whereas the more involved and complex myths found later in Homer are the product of a more developed society.

Scholars also attempted to tie various myths of the world together in some way. From the late 18th century through the early 19th century, the comparative study of languages had led to the reconstruction of a hypothetical parent language to account for striking similarities among the various languages of Europe and the Near East. These languages, scholars concluded, belonged to an Indo-European language family. Experts on mythology likewise searched for a parent mythology that presumably stood behind the mythologies of all the European peoples. German-born British scholar Max Müller concluded that the Rig-Veda of ancient India—the oldest preserved body of literature written in an Indo-European language—reflected the earliest stages of an Indo-European mythology. Müller attributed all later myths to misunderstandings that arose from the picturesque terms in which early peoples described natural phenomena. For example, an expression like “maiden dawn” for “sunrise” resulted first in personification of the dawn, and then in myths about her.

Later in the 19th century the theory of evolution put forward by English naturalist Charles Darwin heavily influenced the study of mythology. Scholars excavated the history of mythology, much as they would excavate fossil-bearing geological formations, for relics from the distant past. This approach can be seen in the work of British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor. In Primitive Culture (1871), Tylor organized the religious and philosophical development of humanity into separate and distinct evolutionary stages. Similarly, British anthropologist Sir James George Frazer proposed a three-stage evolutionary scheme in The Golden Bough (3rd edition, 1912–1915). According to Frazer’s scheme, human beings first attributed natural phenomena to arbitrary supernatural forces (magic), later explaining them as the will of the gods (religion), and finally subjecting them to rational investigation (science).

The research of British scholar William Robertson Smith, published in Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889), also influenced Frazer. Through Smith’s work, Frazer came to believe that many myths had their origin in the ritual practices of ancient agricultural peoples, for whom the annual cycles of vegetation were of central importance. The myth and ritual theory, as this approach came to be called, was developed most fully by British scholar Jane Ellen Harrison. Using insight gained from the work of French sociologist Émile Durkheim, Harrison argued that all myths have their origin in collective rituals of a society. This approach reached its most extreme form in the so-called functionalism of British anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, who held that every myth implies a ritual, and every ritual implies a myth.

F

20th-Century Approaches

Most analyses of myths in the 18th and 19th centuries showed a tendency to reduce myths to some essential core—whether the seasonal cycles of nature, historical circumstances, or ritual. That core supposedly remained once the fanciful elements of the narratives had been stripped away. In the 20th century, investigators began to pay closer attention to the content of the narratives themselves. Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud held that myths—like dreams—condense the material of experience and represent it in symbols. Freud’s pupil Carl Jung took this psychological approach in a different direction. Jung viewed myths not as relics of the infancy of the human race, but as revelations of humanity’s tendency to draw on a collective store of what he called archetypes—a set of patterns in the unconscious mind that people in all cultures express through similar images and symbols. French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that the primary function of myths is to resolve contradictions between such basic sets of opposites as life and death, nature and culture, and self and society.

What has become clear is that myth-making is an extremely varied and complex human activity. As in other creative activities, an enormous number of social, environmental, and personal factors come into play that make it difficult to summarize or explain myth-making from a single vantage point. While every theory offers something illuminating and useful to the understanding of some myths or mythological traditions, it seems unlikely that anyone will ever devise a theory that accounts for every type of tale that is classified as myth.

V

Influence of Myths

Mythology has exerted a pervasive influence on the arts in all parts of the world from the earliest times. In the Americas, people expressed mythological themes using materials such as sand (in the sandpaintings of the Navajo) and stone (in the jade masks of the Olmec). In Oceania, wood was a preferred material, used to created sculptures and masks. The indigenous peoples of Central and South America used ceramics for funerary urns and sculptures of gods and mythological figures. In ancient Europe as well, mythological themes were treated in a variety of media, including stone, wood, and metal.

Some of the richest artistic traditions involving mythology are found in the cultures of West Africa. Particularly prominent in sculpture are the Nommo, celestial twins whose representations can be studied both in the way they have changed over time and in the way they vary across cultures. Despite the artistic value of pieces inspired by myth, it is misleading to isolate the art objects of myth-making cultures from their religious and intellectual context. The statuettes and masks of the Dogon people, for example, do not exist primarily to satisfy an aesthetic impulse, but to serve as instruments in religious acts.

Even apart from cultures in which myth-making is bound up with ritual, myths have provided a wealth of material for the writer and artist since the beginning of recorded history. The divine characters employed by Homer in his epics—principally Zeus, Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, Apollo, and Ares—became the common property of poets throughout antiquity. In addition, Greek writers of tragedy drew upon the traditional body of myth to create such human characters as Agamemnon and Clytemnestra (in the Oresteia of Aeschylus); Antigone (in the play of the same name by Sophocles); and Electra (in plays by Sophocles and Euripides).

The gods have also provided inspiration to many visual artists through the centuries. As an ideal of masculine beauty, Apollo figures prominently in artworks of all periods. The most famous representation of Apollo is the Apollo Belvedere, an ancient Roman sculpture copied from a Greek original, in the Vatican Museum in Rome. Many artists of the Renaissance and the Baroque Era (1600 to 1750) represented Apollo as well. The goddess Venus, equally renowned for beauty, has inspired many artists since ancient times. Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli copied an ancient sculpture in his famous painting Birth of Venus (after 1482, Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy).

In literature and music the debt to mythological themes is equally pronounced. Antigone, a daughter of Oedipus, became famous in the play by Sophocles, which portrays the conflict between obedience to the laws of the state and to the higher laws of the gods. Among those who later used themes from her life are French playwrights Jean Cocteau (Antigone, 1922) and Jean Anouilh (Antigone, 1942) and German playwright Bertolt Brecht (Antigone, 1948). Electra, the unhappy daughter of Agamemnon who seeks to avenge her father’s murder, has been the subject of plays by French playwright Jean-Paul Sartre (The Flies, 1943) and American playwright Eugene O’Neill (Mourning Becomes Elektra, 1931), and of a celebrated opera by German composer Richard Strauss (Elektra, 1909). It is no exaggeration to say that art, music, and literature throughout the world would be unimaginably different without the influence of mythology.

See also Greek Mythology; Roman Mythology; Egyptian Mythology; Scandinavian Mythology; Ancient Middle Eastern Religions; Native American Religions.

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