Mythology has been argued about and theorized for over a hundred years, and many myths can

be read and understood in a number of ways.

When one views myths primarily as stories or as literary artifacts, it allows you to enjoy them
and think about them apart from their value as structures of religious belief. Most of the time, we
don't know who originated myths, or how, or why.
Much of the time, when we say something is a "myth," what we mean is that it's not true.
Because we use the term "myth" to mean something that isn't true, we can come away with the
definition of "myth" as a story that is false and not to be taken seriously. But myths have been
taken seriously... by scholars, sure, but more importantly, by generations and generations of
people who've heard these stories, and found in them something worth telling again. Which is
not to say people don't question their myths. Philosophers were writing about the absurdity of
Greek myths as far back as the sixth century B.C.E., probably even earlier. So, if a myth isn't
just a story that someone made up, or a word that we use to label something as false, then what
is it?

Myth comes from the Greek word "mythos"-- which means "word" or, more significantly, "story."
That doesn't mean every myth, or even the most important ones are Greek, but those will
probably be the ones most familiar with our to viewers in America and Europe. So, we're gonna
start by saying that a myth is a story, but it's a special kind of story, that for the purposes of this
series, has two primary characteristics:

 significance This means that the subject matter is about something important, something
about how the world works, or how the world itself got going... how things came to be.
 staying power. And then there's staying power. These are stories that have survived
centuries, sometimes millennia, and this is a testament to the deep meaning or functional
importance of these stories to the people who hear and tell them.

Proper myths only deal with the creation of the world, or maybe the universe, and thus, all real
myths are religious... or quasi-religious. Mythology theorists who come at myths from a religious
studies angle tend to say that the main characters of myths must be gods... but this leaves out
hero stories, which I think are pretty important, and also, those are the ones with the sea
monsters.

The fancy term for this is an "etiological narrative," or origin story. The Persephone myth
explains the seasons, relating the cycle of planting and harvest to the actions of the immortals.
For some mythologists, like E.B. Tylor, this story is an example of myth as primitive science.
Tylor and many other scientists drew a distinction between primitive people, who used myths to
explain the world in which they lived, and modern people, who use science for that purpose. For
Tylor, myth and science can't really be reconciled; science has taken the place of myth, so we
don't need myths anymore.

"Mythology" is the systematic study of myths. As early as the mid 500's BCE presocratic
philosophers like Xenophanes were criticizing Hesiod and Homer for attributing all of the evil
and shameful aspects of humanity to the gods. Plato was among the first to equate myths with
'lying' and, as we discussed in episode 1, that idea has stuck. But Plato further complicated this
issue because he claimed that myths about gods, heroes, and fantastic creatures were irrational
and therefore, 'false.' Yet philosophical myths like the ones he put forward in "The Republic"
served a rational purpose.. and were 'true.' A little bit after Plato came the influential thinker
Euhemeros. He assumed that people who lived before him were primitive, with no concept of
science, so they created fanciful versions of historical events to explain things they didn't
understand. In Euhemeros's opinion, Zeus was an early human king whose deeds became
legendary and, as those legends were retold, he transformed into a god. Euhemerism has come
to mean interpreting "Myths as primitive explanations of the natural world or as time-distorted
accounts of long-past historical events." Although Euhemeros wasn't particularly influential in his
own time, his ideas were picked up later by Roman thinker, especially Christians. Early church-
thinkers, like Tertullian and Clement of Alexanderia, took up the Platonic sense of myth as
'falsehood', and upon it they based a new theory: that the Greek and Roman myths were
influenced by demons who wanted the stories to prepare their listeners for the story of Jesus,
and to provide a contrast between him and the pagan gods. These early mythologists set up a
dichotomy between 'mythos,' associated with falsehood, and 'logos,' which Christian thinkers
associated with transcendant truth. This synthesis of Plato and Christianity was the basis of
Western mythology until the Renaissance.

For many centuries European artists drew a great deal from classical Greek and Roman myths
but, mythology as a study didn't really take off until the 18th and 19th centuries, drawing on the
linguistic discovery that the languages of India, SouthWest - Asia and Europe are all related -
they're all derived from a single language, now known as "Proto-Indo-Europian".The discovery
of Proto-Indo-Europian led some to posit that it was spoken by a group called "Aryans," whose
myths were the basis for all European, Indian, and Southwest-Asian myths--a purported
explanation for their similarities. In addition to the Aryan hypothesis, this discovery also gave
way to a broadly comparative mythology that focused much more on origin and content than
function. There's no real evidence that these Aryans ever existed, but that didn't stop romantic
thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder who believed that their myths, along with other things,
embodied the simplicity and purity of the German 'volk.'

The study of myth changes again in the 20th century when it joins forces with the new discipline
of anthropology. Anthropologists wouldn't just read about myths in libraries, they would conduct
fieldwork to discover how myths functioned in living societies. Although in the early days of
anthropology the object of study was still societies considered 'primitive,' One of the towering
figures in this new way of studying myths was the Scottish anthropologist Sir James Frazer. His
twelve volume book, "The Golden Bough," centers on different versions of a myth in which
sacred kings are slaughtered in order to ensure a bountiful harvest. Frazer supported the
concepts of myths as primitive science, which attributed to the will of deities, people or animals
that which modern science attributes to the impersonal functioning of various physical laws and
biological processes.

One of the mythologists to follow Frazer, Bronisław Malinowski, did fieldwork in the Trobriand
Islands and outlined the new anthropological view of myth that grew out of working with living
peoples. Studied alive, myth
 ... is not symbolic, but a direct expression of its subject-matter;
 ... a narrative resurrection of a primeval reality,
 ... Myth fulfills in primitive culture an indispensable 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.

Building on the work of anthropologists, recent mythologists have tried to connect their work to
the lived experiences of actual human beings.

Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, posit that the source of myths is the human unconscious, and
that mythical characters are projections of that unconscious. For Freud, the unconscious is the
true psychical reality; but our conscious minds, like Tom Cruise, "CAN'T HANDLE THE
TRUTH!!" So we make these terrible realities palatable, by creating imaginative works, like
myths, which are strategies for managing the internal forces that shape our thoughts, feelings
and actions. Jung similarly saw myths as a projection of the unconscious, but for him.. the
unconscious was collective and universal --NOT individual. Jung defined a number of
archetypes that he saw as aspects of every person's psyche and, in his estimation, the
characters that appear in myths are versions of these archetypes. The collective nature of
human consciousness may be one reason we can find similar mythic characters from stories
originating in many parts of the world.

For Joseph Campbell, "Mythology is ultimately and always the vehicle through which the
individual finds a sense of identity and place in the world." Campbell synthesized the ideas of
psychoanalysts, comparative mythologists, and literary and cultural critics to create his own
theory of a single "mono-myth" that underlies all mythical stories.

Meanwhile, French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss developed a theory for describing

myths by looking at their structure. Structuralism holds that specific instances of culture, like
myths, betray a much more complicated underlying structure. What that structure is, and how it
works, depends upon which structuralist you're talking to. Levi-Strauss, arguably the first
structuralist, was all about BINARIES. For him, myths, like all units of culture, sit atop these
inescapable opposing binaries.

Mircea Eliade was also a fan of binaries; particularly the sacred and the profane, as well as the
archaic and the modern. For Eliade, archaic people were more in-touch with the sacred. And
today myths allow us to escape the profane, to travel back to the past, and re-encounter the
sacred.

Contemporary approaches have pioneered some new methods of asking and answering these
questions.
William Doty proposes giving students of myth a toolkit which includes a series of questions to
ask when reading myths, centering on several concerns:
 the social,
 the psychological,
 the literary,
 textual and performative,
 the structural and, finally, the political.
These provide a broader way of looking at myths. Wendy Doniger provides an updated version
of comparative mythology, asking myth readers to look also at the context in which the myth is
told exploring difference.

Because the variety is so great, it is difficult to generalize about the nature of myths. But it is
clear that in their general characteristics and in their details a people’s myths reflect, express,
and explore the people’s self-image. The study of myth is thus of central importance in the study
both of individual societies and of human culture as a whole.

In Western culture there are a number of literary or narrative genres that scholars have related
in different ways to myths. Examples are fables, fairy tales, folktales, sagas, epics, legends, and
etiologic tales (which refer to causes or explain why a thing is the way it is). Another form of tale,
the parable, differs from myth in its purpose and character. Even in the West, however, there is
no agreed definition of any of these genres, and some scholars question whether multiplying
categories of narrative is helpful at all, as opposed to working with a very general concept such
as the traditional tale. Non-Western cultures apply classifications that are different both from the
Western categories and from one another. Most, however, make a basic distinction between
“true” and “fictitious” narratives, with “true” ones corresponding to what in the West would be
called myths.
If it is accepted that the category of traditional tale should be subdivided, one way of doing so is
to regard the various subdivisions as comparable to bands of colour in a spectrum. Within this
figurative spectrum, there will be similarities and analogies between myth and folktale or
between myth and legend or between fairy tale and folktale. In the section that follows, it is
assumed that useful distinctions can be drawn between different categories. It should, however,
be remembered throughout that these classifications are far from rigid and that, in many cases,
a given tale might be plausibly assigned to more than one category.

The word fable derives from the Latin word fabula, which originally meant about the same as
the Greek mythos. Like mythos, it came to mean a fictitious or untrue story. Myths, in contrast,
are not presented as fictitious or untrue. Fables, like some myths, feature personified animals or
natural objects as characters. Unlike myths, however, fables almost always end with an explicit
moral message, and this highlights the characteristic feature of fables—namely, that they are
instructive tales that teach morals about human social behaviour. Myths, by contrast, tend to
lack this directly didactic aspect, and the sacred narratives that they embody are often hard to
translate into direct prescriptions for action in everyday human terms. Another difference
between fables and myths relates to a feature of the narratives that they present. The context of
a typical fable will be unspecific as to time and space—e.g., “A fox and a goose met at a pool.”
A typical myth, on the other hand, will be likely to identify by name the god or hero concerned in
a given exploit and to specify details of geography and genealogy—e.g., “Oedipus was the son
of Laius, the king of Thebes.”

The term fairy tale, if taken literally, should refer only to stories about fairies, a class of
supernatural and sometimes malevolent beings—often believed to be of diminutive size—who
were thought by people in medieval and postmedieval Europe to inhabit a kingdom of their own;
a literary expression of this belief can be found in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The term fairy tale, however, is normally used to refer to a much wider class of narrative,
namely stories (directed above all at an audience of children) about an individual, almost always
young, who confronts strange or magical events; examples are “Jack and the Beanstalk,”
“Cinderella,” and “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” The modern concept of the fairy tale
seems not to be found earlier than the 18th century in Europe, but the narratives themselves
have earlier analogues much farther afield, notably in the Indian Katha-saritsagara (The Ocean
of Story) and in The Thousand and One Nights.
Like myths, fairy tales present extraordinary beings and events. Unlike myths—but like fables—
fairy tales tend to be placed in a setting that is geographically and temporally vague and might
begin with the words “Once upon a time there was a handsome prince….” A myth about a
prince, by contrast, would be likely to name him and to specify his lineage, since such details
might be of collective importance (for example, with reference to issues of property inheritance
or the relative status of different families) to the social group among which the myth was told.

There is much disagreement among scholars as to how to define the folktale; consequently,
there is disagreement about the relation between folktale and myth. One view of the problem is
that of the American folklorist Stith Thompson, who regarded myths as one type of folktale;
according to this approach, the particular characteristic of myth is that its narratives deal with
sacred events that happened “in the beginning.” Other scholars either consider folktale a
subdivision of myth or regard the two categories as distinct but overlapping. The latter view is
taken by the British Classicist Geoffrey S. Kirk, who in Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in
Ancient and Other Cultures (1970) uses the term myth to denote stories with an underlying
purpose beyond that of simple story-telling and the term folktale to denote stories that reflect
simple social situations and play on ordinary fears and desires. Examples of folktale motifs are
encounters between ordinary, often humble, human beings and supernatural adversaries such
as witches, giants, or ogres; contests to win a bride; and attempts to overcome a wicked
stepmother or jealous sisters. But these typical folktale themes occur also in stories normally
classified as myths, and there must always be a strong element of arbitrariness in assigning a
motif to a particular category.
A different and important aspect of the problem of defining a folktale relates to the historical
origin of the concept. As with the notion of folklore, the notion of folktale has its roots in the late
18th century. From that period until the middle of the 19th century, many European thinkers of a
nationalist persuasion argued that stories told by ordinary people constituted a continuous
tradition reaching back into the nation’s past. Thus, stories such as the Märchen (“tales”)
collected by the Grimm brothers in Germany are folktales because they were told by the people
rather than by an aristocratic elite. This definition of folktale introduces a new criterion for
distinguishing between myth and folktale—namely, what class of person tells the story—but it
by no means removes all the problems of classification. Just as the distinction between folk and
aristocracy cannot be transferred from medieval Europe to tribal Africa or Classical Greece
without risk of distortion, so the importing of a distinction between myth and folktale on the later
European model is extremely problematic.

The word saga is often used in a generalized and loose way to refer to any extended narrative
re-creation of historical events. A distinction is thus sometimes drawn between myths (set in a
semidivine world) and sagas (more realistic and more firmly grounded in a specific historical
setting). This rather vague use of saga is best avoided, however, since the word can more
usefully retain the precise connotation of its original context. The word saga is Old Norse and
means “what is said.” The sagas are a group of medieval Icelandic prose narratives; the
principal sagas date from the 13th century and relate the deeds of Icelandic heroes who lived
during the 10th and 11th centuries. If the word saga is restricted to this Icelandic context, at
least one of the possible terminological confusions over words for traditional tales is avoided.
While saga in its original sense is a narrative type confined to a particular time and place, epics
are found worldwide. Examples can be found in the ancient world (the Iliad and Odyssey of
Homer), in medieval Europe (the Nibelungenlied), and in modern times (the Serbo-Croatian epic
poetry recorded in the 1930s). Among the many non-European examples are the Indian
Mahabharata and the Tibetan Gesar epic. Epic is similar to saga in that both narrative forms
look back to an age of heroic endeavour, but it differs from saga in that epics are almost always
composed in poetry (with a few exceptions such as Kazak epic and the Turkish Book of Dede
Korkut). The relation between epic and myth is not easy to pin down, but it is in general true that
epics characteristically incorporate mythical events and persons. An example is the ancient
Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, which includes, among many mythical episodes, an account
of the meeting between the hero Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim, the only human being to have
attained immortality and sole survivor (with his wife) of the flood sent by the gods. Myth is thus a
prime source of the material on which epic draws.

In common usage the word legend usually characterizes a traditional tale thought to have a
historical basis, as in the legends of King Arthur or Robin Hood. In this view, a distinction may
be drawn between myth (which refers to the supernatural and the sacred) and legend (which is
grounded in historical fact). Thus, some writers on the Iliad would distinguish between the
legendary aspects (e.g., heroes performing actions possible for ordinary humans) and the
mythical aspects (e.g., episodes involving the gods). But the distinction between myth and
legend must be used with care. In particular, because of the assumed link between legend and
historical fact, there may be a tendency to refer to narratives that correspond to one’s own
beliefs as legends, while exactly comparable stories from other traditions may be classified as
myths; hence a Christian might refer to stories about the miraculous deeds of a saint as
legends, while similar stories about a pagan healer might be called myths. As in other cases, it
must be remembered that the boundaries between terms for traditional narratives are fluid, and
that different writers employ them in quite different ways.

The term myth is not normally applied to narratives that have as their explicit purpose the
illustration of a doctrine or standard of conduct. Instead, the term parable, or illustrative tale, is
used. Familiar examples of such narratives are the parables of the New Testament. Parables
have a considerable role also in Sufism (Islamic mysticism), rabbinic (Jewish biblical
interpretive) literature, Hasidism (Jewish pietism), and Zen Buddhism. That parables are
essentially non-mythological is clear because the point made by the parable is known or
supposed to be known from another source. Parables have a more subservient function than
myths. They may clarify something to an individual or a group but do not take on the revelatory
character of myth.

Etiologic tales are very close to myth, and some scholars regard them as a particular type of
myth rather than as a separate category. In modern usage the term etiology is used to refer to
the description or assignment of causes (Greek aitia). Accordingly, an etiologic tale explains the
origin of a custom, state of affairs, or natural feature in the human or divine world. Many tales
explain the origin of a particular rock or mountain. Others explain iconographic features, such as
the Hindu narrative ascribing the blue neck of the god Shiva to a poison he drank in primordial
times. The etiologic theme often seems to be added to a mythical narrative as an afterthought.
In other words, the etiology is not the distinctive characteristic of myth.