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Adding to our thoughts on myths, in our last lecture we looked at some ancient
views on myth and found lots of complex and interesting ideas.
Well that tradition carries forward into the modern era.
And, and of course in antiquity, the modern era is actually defined a little
bit differently than it is in common everyday speech anything in the modern era
counts as Renaissance and forward for our course.
Throughout the Middle Ages the ideas of Euhemerism and allegorism were especially
important for those that read these ancient myths, and there they had the
different kind of value during that time. We had Medieval churchmen who read them
who were interested in these ancient tales as maybe a bit of erudition to carry
around. They gave them the term Fabulae, that's
the plural of the Greek fabu-, or sorry, the Latin of Fabula which is a story or a
tale. The, the, the Roman word means something
like a story, a tale, a tall tale. Not something that you would spend a lot
of time trying to find deep truths in if it did have any hidden ideas it would be a
little nugget of wisdom. The kind of thing you might hear in
Aesop's fable and these Fabulae were something that they had some of these
medieval churchmen had some interest in and they carried them around and they
looked at them. But not a lot of theoretical ideas
developed out of there. Much more they had a much stronger draw
for the great minds of the day in their view was an authoritative Christian
version of the Bible. They spent a lot of time thinking about
that. But these were ancient Greek and Roman
tales did survive and stick around under this name of Fabulae.
Now things changed a good little bit when a figure named Bernard de Fontenelle,
whose dates are 1657 to 1757 came along and had a look at some of these stories.
He was interested like some of his contemporaries.
He says they're kind of nice stories to have around that were fun to hear and
maybe were a little racy at times but you know, good enough to have around.
But Fontenelle had some further views too. He looked very closely at them and in his
view, the myths actually grow up as a reaction of early, early humans to the
natural environment that surrounds them. They are, in his view, an attempt to
explain otherwise difficult to understand strange features of our natural world.
So, some strange out-cropping of a mountain, a very dramatic valley perhaps a
thunder or lightning, these things Fontenelle said require that ancient
humans develop some explanation. And when they were in fear of the world
around them or found strange the world around them they tried to develop these
explanations in the language they knew how and that was the language of myth.
So according to Fontenelle, myths are attempts to explain.
And their attempts to explain strange features of the natural landscape.
Early human beings according to this narrative that he was drawing are kind of
like you and I. They try to do something like you and I
are doing. They tried to do science to explain the
world but they're working from a very limited data set and also their brains
work in a particular kind of mythic way so they don't come up with the kind of
scientific explanations that we have. Myth is an attempt at science and it's
best seen as kind of proto science or a bad science.
Doesn't quite work right but the impulse that it generates it is similar to the
impulse that we modern human beings, we modern ones living in the seventeenth and
eighteenth Century along with Fontenelle we modern human beings already exhibit in
our scientific knowledge. Advancing from here some views of the high
enlightenment. We'll take a figure called David Hume.
You're done up in Greek garb I thought that might be appropriate.
Hume's dates are 1711 to 1776 a faithful year.
And Hume, Hume has some interesting ideas on a method he passed down.
I'm just gonna highlight one aspect of it. Hume is charactaristic of an enlightenment
let's say impatience with a mythic mentality.
There is a sense in many figures in the enlightenment that what's happening around
them during their time is something phenomenal.
That there is a birth of rational thinking, and there's an expunging of old
ways of thought, that don't measure up to rationalism.
In this story, the concept of myth takes decidedly takes a backseat.
It gets lumped in with these earlier mentalities that are rational minds we
develop enlightenment human beings. Our rational minds are finally leaving
behind. We're casting it aside and developing new
scientific ways of thinking. So, for Hume, as well for others in the
enlightenment, a myth was not a source of great interest.
It was thought to be the result of fearful human beings making up stories in a way
that was comforting to them but it was not exactly going to be worth a lot of time
trying to study these things. Moving to another figure, Christian
Gottlob Heyne whose dates are 1729 to 1812, things change a lot.
Heyne moves in his characterization of myth quite a far piece from where from
where the enlightenment figures had it and has an interest in these mythic stories
from a different perspective. He's actually interested in this whole
ancient world. Heyne is an early precursor to the kind of
field that we study now in universities under the name of classics.
Heyne was interested in this ancient world of the, the Greeks and the Romans.
And he wanted to know more about it. He wanted to know everything about it he
could. So, he would have on his desk shelf a kind
of a book that would help him reference work talking about all the geography of
antiquity. Another one that might refer to all the
plants and animals of antiquity. River names, place names, proper names and
how people were related to one another in antiquity.
There was a lot of data. Background data that Heyne and his
colleagues needed in order to try to understand this ancient world that they
were so devoted to. Among those sets of background data, in
Heyne's view of things was myth. An educated person that was trying to
understand the ancient world needed to understand these ancient mythic stories.
So for him it provided a form of eradition to get a background set of understandings
that helped him understand better the Greeks and Romans he was interested in
understanding. Like geography or linguistics or
biography, it gave us contextual information.
Now, in addition to paying a little bit closer attention to these stories, Heyne
developed some different ideas than had gone before him.
Just as, or in contrast to the way that Fontenelle and Hume both thought that
myths grew up out of just fear at the natural surroundings and a kind of
twitching attempt to come up with lame explanations for things Heyne said, well
it's not just fear that's driving this it's actually a slightly more complex kind
of human reaction to the natural landscape the reaction of awe.
Now awe is fear mixed with wonder. And Heyne saw both of those things as
being guiding and driving impulses in the creation of ancient myth.
So, human beings now are put in a position, when they create myth are being
in a state of both fear but also wonder at the world around them.
So for him, myth is not just fear-based irrationality or misguided attempts to
explain, it also grows up from an innate sense of wonder that all of us presumably
are gonna feel when we when we look at great sublime kinds of features of our
natural landscape. Standing at the top of a mountain,
surveying a beautiful stretch of the ocean or a wonderful river, there's a sense of
wonder that's a common human reaction to such a thing.
Sure maybe some fear, but also wonder, too.
Now, when this sense of awe arose Heyne thought that there was some new dimension
of human expression that had to get developed in order to express that sense
of awe at the natural world. And this is something that Heyne said was
identic-, identical to myth. Myth is the particular genre that human
beings used to express a sense of awe at their natural surroundings.
Now for him, the category that his other Latin speaking, and Latinate speaking
colleagues nearby would've put another category of Fabula or fabulae.
For him Heyne, the Fabula Fabulae that, that was just not rich enough to describe
what he was talking about. He didn't mean tall tales that might have
a little nugget of wisdom in them or not. He wasn't talking about that.
He was talking about a, something else a spontaneous kind of human expression of
amazement at the world around us. And for that, he needed a new term.
Fabulae was not gonna label the kind of stories he was interested in.
So what he did is reach down into the Greek and pull back out that term he saw
in the first of our lectures. Greek term, muthos.
And when he did, he bequeathed the category of myth to modern human beings.
That's where myth comes from, when Heyne decides to revive a Greek term and bring
it into contemporary German in the term muthos and from there it moves into
English and Latin and French and all the other terms that have this similar term
for myth. Heyne was doing this because the Latin
term that he had nearby him was just he thought unhelpful to describe a different
kind of picture he thought these stories were fulfilling than the once that his
earlier colleagues had thought. He said sure it's true that early people
were a little bit more irrational than you and I and they were prone to a grandiose
reaction of stuff. They were twitchy in that way that may be
little kids are. So he saw that was kind of a
characteristic of earlier mentality. Their language also Heyne said was very
concrete. They did not have abstract words for
complex things around them so they just pointed to concrete things to represent
these more abstract ideas. So myth is a concretization of abstract
ideas he thought he would find abstractions underneath the concrete
language. They are especially related to the natural
landscape so rather than talking about fear or some scary thing that happened
Heyne talks about the human connection to a landscape.
So when a human is in, in the face of a certain kind of a landscape, one kind of
reaction is going to happen when the human is in the different kind of a landscape
perhaps a different kind of reaction is going to happen.
So myths now gets connected to the world around them.
This is an idea that carries forward into the world around the people and make them
up and this is an idea that's going to carry forward in an important way into the
thinking of our next figure coming up Johann Gottfried Herder.
Herder's dates are 1744 to 1803 and Herder as an early precursor to Romanticism
carried forward this kind of reaction against the enlightenment.
Reacted so strongly that in fact he develops this other view that says that no
it's not the case that myths are just lies or wrong or mistakes such as maybe my
enlightenment colleagues thought. But instead they're actually true and not
only are they true and truths, they are deeply profound truths.
The most profound truths humans have to express, heard or thought, they expressed
through myth. So we have come a good long piece from the
earlier views and now we have now embraced the idea that myths are the most profound
manifestations of the human spirit that are possible to be found.
Myths in, in Herder's view of things and he, his views are inherited later by the
Romantics thought that myths were innate to human beings.
It was a kind, innate behavioristic thing that human beings did when faced with
their natural surroundings and having these feelings of awe that came over them.
Myths just came out of them. It just kind of bubbled up automatically,
out of human beings. It was further not just myth that we
talked about under this category of myth Herder thought it was instead a larger
capacity for human expression that was coming out.
So myth was actually identical with poetry.
Myth was identical with religion. It was identical with language.
All of these things were human attempts at coming up and expressing deep ideas that
resulted from human beings feeling of being alive.
What it is to be a living, breathing creature is what we capture in our myths.
So we have now an autonomous response, that is very different in Herder's view
from this attempt to explain that we had show up in some of the earlier figures.
So, as we move forward we're gonna see that there are lots of different ideas on
myth that developed we've given a brief overview of some of the ancient ones and
now those from the modern era at least from the renaissance up to the
enlightenment in to the romantics. We're gonna carry forward with some more
contemporary views specifically in this course and when do we'll take a little bit
of time out of our course, step back and introduce some, some ideas in some more
detail. Before we do that I wanted to close with
some an idea About myth, a definition of myth that we'll be using as our, as our
standard way of talking about what we're working on in the course.
Walter Burkert, a still living, classicist from Switzerland.
A wonderful man, very generous man has taught, has taught, has taught many of us
in the field a great deal. Walter was born in 1931.
Still alive, still active as a scholarly figure.
Writes books and articles and keeps all of us busy.
The definition of myth that Burkert comes up with is one that we'll use as a
standard tried and true definition in this class.
According to Burkert, myth is a traditional tale told with secondary
partial reference to something of collective importance.
I'll just repeat that. Myth is a traditional tale told with, with
secondary partial reference to something of collective importance.
I want to add a coda to that so put a comma after Burkert's definition and this
is the struck coda told by someone for some reason.
Myths don't float around in space remember our first slide.
They are told in language by people of our species and they are told by particular
examples of us and they are always told for a reason.
People don't do things pointlessly they do things for a reason.
So, we will use this as our rough and ready, tried and true definition when we
need one in this class and at the same time we will remember that all the other
ideas about myth that we've been developing these first few lectures are
gonna be still going to be still at the table as well.
We'll keep all of them as best we can in our sights.
So with these ideas in mind soon enough we're going to start turning to some real
mythic material. We're just about ready.