Mythic Thought Textbook

Mythic Thought
Juan José Prat Ferrer, Ph.D.

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INDEX
I Traditional oral narrative

Intangible heritage ………………………………………………………………………… 5
Orature and literature ……………………………………………………………………. 9
Definitions of myth …………………………………………………………………….… 10
Functions of myth ……………………………………………………………………..… 14
Types of myths ………………………………………………………………………….… 16
II Cosmogonies and cosmologies: How the world is and why it is so

The concept of time …………………………………………………………………….…19
In illo tempore ………………………………………………………………....................22
Cosmogonies …………………………………………………………………………….… 23
Chaos and cosmos …………………………………………………………………….… 25
The primordial sacrifice and the battle against a monster ………………..…… 27
The first humans ………………………………………………………………………… 28
Sex and submission ………………………………………………………..…………… 30
Eden, omphalos and labyrinth ……………………………………………………..… 31
Deus otiosus …………………………………………………………………………….… 34
III Heroes and heroines: Legends and adventures

The ages of man …………………………………………………………………………… 35
The hero and its types …………………………………………………………………… 37
Biography of the hero ……………………………………………………………………. 40
The heroine ……………………………………………………………………………….… 41
The dragon …………………………………………………………………….…………… 43
Katabasis …………………………………………………………………………………… 44
IV Apocalypse: How all things are going to end

Myths of destruction ………………………………………………………………..…… 45
Cyclical catastrophes ………………………………………………………..…………… 46
Apocalypse and Ragnarok ……………………………………………….……………… 47
The New Jerusalem …………………………………………………………………….… 49
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V Mythic thought and its interpretation

The interpretation of myths ………………………..…………………………………… 51
Allegorical approach …………………………………..……………………………….… 52
Myth and science …………………………………………………………....…………… 54
Euhemerism ………………………………………………………………..……………… 55
Psychoanalysis of myth …………………………………………………..……………… 57
Functionalism ……………………………………………………………………………… 58
Structuralism ………………………………………………………………..…………..… 59
VI Some conclusions
Demythologizing …………………………………………………………..………….…… 63
The concept of myth in today’s societies …………………………..………………… 64
Remythologizing …………………………………………………………………………… 68
Bibliography …………………………...…...………………………………………..…… 71
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TRADITIONAL ORAL NARRATIVE

INTANGIBLE HERITAGE
Think before reading:
Every people and every culture are in possession of a heritage they feel proud of. It
serves to preserve and support their sense of identity. How would you define
cultural heritage?
Myths are an important part of human heritage. That’s fine as a statement, but
to fully understand it, let’s first see what human heritage is: Heritage can be defined
as the collection of goods inherited by a community. Heritage can be natural
(geological formations, natural landscapes of an aesthetic, scientific or environmental
importance), or cultural (goods of historical, scientific, aesthetic or symbolic value).
Cultural heritage is divided into tangible (movable or unmovable goods) and intangible.
Tangible movable heritage is made up of items (artifacts) that have a historical,
archaeological, artistic, technological, religious, or artistic value, while the unmovable
heritage consists of buildings, monuments, archaeological sites, and of places with a
historical, artistic or scientific value. Intangible heritage (also called immaterial
heritage) is made up of verbal, kinetic, musical, social or mental products (called
sociofacts and mentifacts). Verbal heritage can be divided into lyric, dramatic, wisdom-
related or narrative products. Traditional human narrative is usually divided into
tales, legends and myths.
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Myths are an important part of culture. Let’s also look at this important
concept. Culture can be defined as the collection of knowledge, practices, objects and
texts shared by a community and socially transmitted by its members. According to
this definition, we can consider today that culture is not a prerogative of humans;
even among animals one can observe cultural facts, such as the songs of the whales or
the use of tools by chimpanzees.
Culture is divided into different types:
Elitist culture: It focuses on originality; patents and copyright are important

parts of it, and its products are directed to a reduced market of learned
people. Authors are respected.
Mass culture: It is associated with consumer goods; its items are usually created
by a team; the target is a very wide market.
Folk culture: Also sometimes called popular culture, it is created, transmitted

and maintained by common people. Usually there are no known authors.
Dominant culture: It is the culture of the groups that dominate a community and
impose it on its people; this culture is positively evaluated by the majority
of people in a society.
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Subculture: It is the culture of subaltern or dominated classes. It is not directly

opposed to the dominant culture, but it is rather absorbed and tolerated
by the dominant class.
Marginal culture: It belongs to the groups outside the dominant culture and its
subcultures; it is created and maintained by people who cannot or do not
want to integrate. It is a culture that is not positively evaluated by the
majority of people in a society.
Counterculture: It is made up of values and norms directly opposed to the

dominant culture.
Myth, as a cultural product, shares properties ascribed to all of these

categories: Some myths belong to all the people, and can be considered folk items, but
others are clearly elitists, created by and directed to a small segment of society. Myths
can be part of today’s mass culture, and can also belong to marginal segments of
society. Some myths are part of the dominant culture while others are shared only by
a small group of people.
There were people interested in classical (Greek and Roman) myths all through
the history of European civilization, and in the Germanic myths beginning in the 19th
century; in the second part of the 20th century a movement appeared whose mission
was to repair, conserve and study artifacts belonging to folk cultures around the world
in order to transit them to future generations. Together with this, a growing interest in
intangible heritage, especially folk music, dance and narratives, also arose. Preserving
this heritage is the mission of a good number of official organisms and NGO’s. It is
believed we have to maintain endangered traditions alive if we want to protect the
identity of people facing the unifying forces of globalization. In this line, the UNESCO
decided to protect the world’s intangible folk heritage, defined as cultural items that
 Are transmitted from generation to generation

 Provide a sense of identity and of cultural continuity
 Are constantly recreated
 Promote creativity
 Are compatible with human rights
 Promote respect among human communities
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 Do not impede sustainable development.
In the ranking of things to be preserved, myth is in an important position. Also,

some scholars brought the attention of Westerners to traditional myths, maintaining
that they can serve important functions in today’s societies. They have found
important psychological properties to myth that serve to help today’s individuals cope
with the world and live fuller lives.
After reading:
If artifacts are the manifestations of material culture, ¿what is then a mentifact?
Why is it important to know and care about intangible heritage?
Can you find synonyms to the word folklore?
When do you think the interest in cultural heritage arose in international

organisms?
Society produces different types of culture according to the segments of

population. Make a list and define them.
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ORATURE AND LITERATURE
In Europe, writing is very important, much more than speaking when one
studies cultural developments. Why is it so?
Can there be cultures whose tradition is mainly oral?
Bringing the past into the present is one of the reasons why myth is valued in
today’s society; together with this, there is a movement that tries to bring other
people’s myths into our own. At the same time, scholars from subaltern cultures try to
make their voices heard in the globalized market of culture, mostly controlled by
Western institutions.
In the sixties there was a discussion in some African universities about the
problematic issue of the hegemony of some European languages, namely English,
French and German, over African languages. From this intellectual debate, a concept
arose that is becoming more and more important in the study of folk narrative, even
though little attention has been paid to it outside the Third World. The word orature
was created by the Ugandan linguist Pius Zirimu to avoid expressions such as “folk
literature”, “oral literature” or “primitive literature”, which are either incorrect or
contradictory. This new word can be defined as the oral expression of productions
created by the human mind. These artistic verbal creations are recited, dramatized or
performed in front of an audience. The concept of orature encompasses most
traditional folk genres: tales, myths, legends, epic poems, oral history, prayers,
hymns, nursery rhymes, laments, riddles, or proverbs, for example; but it also
includes creations of a more learned and institutional character, such as the
production of most courtesan poets in cultures where orality is the main mode of
communication: epic poems, genealogies, panegyrics, for example, that are
transmitted without the help of writing.
Orature’s rhetoric resources are rich and varied, and many of them are also
different from those of literature. They add to the poetics reflected in literary works
resources from the world of music, and a whole system of communication through
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gestures and intonations. In orature the relationship between the performer and his or
her public determines the final product. The public, very active in these societies,
somehow cooperates with the teller and controls his or her performance.
Today we receive traditional narratives mainly through writing. The passage

from orality to writing brings significant changes in any culture, even if both
modalities coexist. If writing began as a way to help the memorizing of orature, today’s
orality is influenced by literary texts. There are no pure cultures in this respect.
After reading:
How does an oral community codify its culture?
Make a list of key words related to the concept of orature.
Why is “oral literature” contradictory?
Does orature belong to folklore?
Is orature an occidental concept?
What does “performative features” mean when speaking of orature?
Why orature has not found reception in Western universities versus literature,
for example?
DEFINITIONS OF MYTH
There are many definitions of myth, what do you think a myth is?
The concept of myth has gone through so many stages in the history of Western
societies that it would be difficult today to find a definition that would be accepted by
all scholars as well as by lay people. Our literary culture does not allow us to fully
comprehend the essence of myth, whose origins belong to oral communication and
whose roots go deeply into orality. Beginning in the 5th century before the Era, the
process of stripping the myth of its primitive religious or metaphysical meaning
developed, and after the arrival of Christianity, myth was relegated to the category of
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fiction. But in spite of the constant rejection by the intellectuals of the Ancient World,
myth continued to exist.
The Greek traveler and geographer Pausanias (115-180) was one of the first
authors to consider that myth is a form of language; he stated that ancient wise men
used to express their wisdom through enigmas more than through a clear and explicit
language.
The Neapolitan thinker Gian Battista Vico (1668-1744) was one of the first
Europeans to consider myth as a product of a creative thought. According to him, man
constructs his mythic world thanks to his poetic mind. Myth is a narrative about real
things that adopts the form of a tale of wonder. When man begins to develop his
capacity for rational thought, science and philosophy appear.
The great German folklorists Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and his brother
Wilhelm (1786-1859) studied fairy tales believing that in them there were mythic
elements from ancient times. They thought that fairy tales represented the
degeneration of the myths primitive people used to tell. The Romantic and Victorian
anthropologists followed the ideas of Vico: myths were a product of savage minds
when they tried to scientifically explain the world; only civilized people could truly
develop a scientific thought. This way of thinking changed with the arrival of
functionalism, an anthropological theory that maintained that myths were narratives
used to justify social order and to give cohesion to society. The Polish anthropologist
Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) was one of the first scholars to express the need to
go beyond the texts: the ways the story is told and heard, are as important as the text
itself, and give important clues to the function these narratives had in society.
For the anthropologist and africanist William R. Bascom (1912-1981), who

taught at Cambridge and Berkeley, in myths there are four components:
1. It is a narrative about gods or heroes

2. Its sacred character makes it be believed
3. It is a collective expression
4. It is presented as a metaphor.
The Finnish folklorist Lauri Honko (1932-2002) mentions five characteristics in

his definition of myth:
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Myth is
1. A narrative form, but not necessarily verbal

2. That contains information about the origins
3. That explain the cosmos
4. And that functions as a model or paradigm
5. And that is related to rituals.
Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), historian of religion and professor at the University

of Chicago, established the characteristics of myth as it was lived in archaic societies.
1. It presents the history of the acts of the supernatural beings

2. This history is considered absolutely true and sacred
3. It always refers to a creation; it tells how something began to exist or how
a behavior, an institution, a way of working was founded; this is the
reason why myths are paradigms for every human act which is
significant.
According to Eliade, when we know a myth, we also know the origin of the thing
connected to it, and therefore we obtain the power to control and manipulate it. This
knowledge is learned and lived through a ritual which is a reflection of the myth.
The Hungarian historian of religions at the Università della Sapienza in Rome

Angelo Brelich (1913-1977) defines myth as the story that narrates the events
happening in an ancient time, a time set before that which is remembered or recorded
and which is different from ours. The French archaeologist and historian Paul Veyne
(b. 1930) considers that myth consisted of repeating what was heard about the gods
and heroes and not telling what was seen happening. The Spanish literary critic and
Hellenist Carlos García Gual (b. 1943) states that myth is a traditional story that
narrates the memorable and exemplary deeds of extraordinary characters in a
prestigious and far away time.
On the other hand, the British classicist Geoffrey S. Kirk (1921-2003), professor
of Greek at Cambridge University, thinks that the concept of myth is too vague when
applied to all cultures, because it supposes no more than a traditional story, but to
restrict it to certain sacred narratives or to those related to rituals can lead us to error.
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The Italian professor of aesthetics at the University of Milan Gillo Dorfles (b.
1910) considers that the word myth has been frequently linked to a sacred and
religious component and to Antiquity. Instead, he prefers to avoid this use and
concentrate on studying how myth operates in today’s world.
Some scholars have tried to differentiate myth from legend and tale. No
agreement has been reached, since the categories need the point of view of the
receiver, and this varies. William Bascom developed the following chart that has
proven to be useful for university students as a first approach to myth:
Myth Legend Tale

Belief fact Fact Fiction
Time Remote past Recent past Any time
Place Different world World of today Any place

Attitude Sacred Secular or sacred Secular
Characters Non-human Human Both
While myth and legend appear as true stories, tales are always presented as
fiction. The action in myths and tales develops in a time and a place which are very far
from ours, things are not as we see them now, they follow other laws; on the other
hand, legends belong to historical time and are placed in this world as we know it.
Tales are never sacred narratives, but myths and legends may or may not be
considered sacred. Finally, in legend, the main characters are always human, and if
there is something supernatural, it causes the awe it would cause in our days, while
in myth and legends the supernatural characters and actions are usual.
We can now consider some criteria to differentiate myth from other types of
narratives and by doing so, get closer to a definition that could help us study mythic
narrative:
1. Myths are stories that tell about events that changed the world.
2. These stories are highly valued and are frequently related to another
world or another dimension.
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3. They are told as something true which really happened, no matter how
improbable the events are.
4. The events told are very difficult to be believed by those outside the
community that believe in them.
5. These stories are told and repeated with many variants. There is no
orthodox version of the myth.
6. Some myths are known mainly by their literary versions.
After reading:
According to what you have read in this section, make a list of concepts that
would serve to elaborate a definition of myth.
FUNCTIONS OF MYTH
Myths have existed for some reason. What is their purpose?
Traditionally, three functions have been assigned to myths: one of sheer

entertainment, a ritual or operative one related to rituals, and one of speculation
about the world. According to the French classicist Georges Dumézil (1898-1986), who
taught at the universities of Istanbul and of Uppsala, the main function of myth is to
express the ideology of a society, not only its values and ideals, but its structure, its
elements, links, tensions and balances, and also the rules and practices that hold a
community together. The French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-1990) held
that myths served as a way to solve a contradiction in the social conception of the
world; this way, myths
 express the ideology of a society

 maintain values, ideals, and tensions
 justify traditional rules and practices.
The Canadian literary theorist Herman Northrop Frye (1912-1991) thought that
mythologies are important to societies because they transmit a set of shared
references and of verbal experiences that help to create a cultural history of society.
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The German philosopher Hans Blumeneberg (1920-1996) referred to what he

used to call the ludic function of myths that leads us away from the horror vacui and
the stress caused by the knowledge of an existence inexorably imposed on us and
whose end we both know and are unaware of, neither have we known if there is
anything after this existence.
Gillo Dorfles maintains that myths continue alive under new forms and ways
and after having gone through different mutations and metamorphoses; they live in
the rituals and symbols of today’s mass cultures and in the collective imaginary that
creates new spaces and times, such as they appear in science fiction, for example. The
main difference from the myths of ancient societies is that those of mass culture are
created for consumption.
According to Jack Lule, professor of Journalism at Lehigh University in

Pennsylvania, myths keep alive basic values of a society and also its structure, thus
serving as a support for society. Myths offer an order, confirm traditions and inform
about beliefs, but they also demand order, shape traditions and restrict beliefs. In
order to keep social order, they delegitimize dissension and punish those who dissent.
For Lule the seven master myths that are consistently invoked by journalists when
writing their stories are: The Victim, the Hero, the Good Mother, the Scapegoat, the
Trickster, the Other World and the Flood.
Being eclectic, we could say that myths as an expression of the collective mind,
have different types of functions:
Psychological: channel the fears and doubts of the human being
Social: express the collective imaginary
Religious: ritually verbalize paradigmatic deeds
Political: control what people think
Legal: express and justify society’s values
Aesthetic: recreate discourses that produce feelings.
After reading:
Copy, in your own words the different functions myths have in society and
comment on it.
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TYPES OF MYTHS
All myths narrate the creation or the establishment of something: a being, a

custom, an institution, but are all myths creation stories?
Myths can be divided into three general types: etiological, adventure and
eschatological. Etiological myths narrate the origin of something, its creation or its
appearance in the world. Adventure myths present a hero or a heroine fighting against
the symbols of Chaos, and eschatological myths tell us about the end of the world.
Creation stories or cosmogonies constitute an important part of etiological

myths. Cosmos means everything that has been created and put in order. In
mythology, we must differentiate between cosmogonies, stories about the creation of
the world, and cosmologies, or stories that explain how the world functions. According
to Mircea Eliade, there are other types of etiological myths that tell us about the origin
of the gods or of humans and their institutions. All of them present the world when it
was young, before suffering the changes that made it be the way we know it today.
Also during this young age, heroes appeared whose stories are told in adventure
myths. The end of the world, while telling us about the future, is always presented in
traditional narrative as something that happened in a far away past.
Etiological Cosmogonies Transformations of a young world

myth
Adventure
myth
Heroic tales
Eschatological
myth
Stories about the end of the world and what
comes after
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After reading:
What is the difference between cosmology and cosmogony?
In what period of human history can you place the following?
cosmogonies
etiological stories
adventure myths
eschatological myths
Try to find an example for each of these categories.

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II
COSMOGONIES AND COSMOLOGIES: HOW THE WORLD IS AND WHY IT IS SO

THE CONCEPT OF TIME
Time is an important element in every story. How is time dealt with in myths?
Myths are set in a distant past, which some authors call illud tempus, a Latin
expression that means “that time”, which is a previous time where things do not
happen as we are used to. There are no known testimonies from that time, and of
course, there are no witnesses; all we know about it has been repeated for
generations. This far away time can be divided into three periods: the stage before
creation, which is the realm of Chaos; the beginnings or the primeval time when the
cosmos was being created; the time that follows, when the world was still young and
the world was going through important transformations, until it reached our stage.
While myth is presented as the story of things that belong to a distant past, the
fact that it is told makes it revive in the present. Time ceases to exist in myth. The
illud tempus becomes then an imaginary time, far from chronology. In this time we
also place that time in the future when the world will be destructed, and the times
that will follow. Our imaginary concept of time, divides it into three categories, if we
place them in order:
Category: begins in: ends in:

illud tempus Chaos Cosmos
Human time Golden Age Other ages
Eschatological times Apocalypse New Jerusalem
The mythic conception of time is different from the logic or the historical
ordering of time. Mythic time is circular by nature, it may have a beginning, but it has
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no end. Thanks to the fact that actions from the past are ritually repeated in the
present, making them happen again, mythic time can be recovered, since we
periodically go back to a certain point in time. Historical and scientific time is linear,
in it nothing repeats, everything happens only once, it cannot be recovered.
Circular time Myth- ritual recoverable
Linear time History-science non recoverable
Nevertheless, there are religions that adopt a historical time as their framework,
as happens in Judaism or in Christianity.
The French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913-2005), in his book Time and
Narrative presents the diverse sides of time: lived time, historical time, cosmic time,
symbolic time or mythic time.
Lived time is that of personal memories; it becomes factual through testimonies

and anecdotes, and usually appears in oral stories.
Historical time is kept in documents and archives; it belongs to the written

word.
Cosmic time is the framework where we place everything that happens.
Technological or mechanical time is an aspect of cosmic time; it is time

measured and divided in cycles and measured by machines.
Symbolic time relates to the calendar connecting special dates in the present to
other dimensions: those of mythic, legendary and historical times.
Mythic time is circular and has the power of transcending the frontiers of lineal
cosmic and historical times.
Each period in history has its own concept of time and assigns values to it
according to its own way of perceiving things. Our contemporary times are
characterized by devaluating old age while the number of senior citizens increases in
our societies. Youth becomes a rising value in the market economy, and old age is no
longer conceived as depositary of knowledge and experience and the keeper of
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traditions. The media now take over these functions. While traditions lose their
function in society there are attempts to re-invent tradition creating new false folk
materials to be consumed by the masses.
The technological environment should also be taken into account. According to

Gillo Dorfles, we are in a technological age where speed has brought new
transformations in perception and in feelings. We store a great number of fast and
unconnected perceptions that get fixed in our mind in a very fragile way, far from the
slow way of storing visual and aural images in previous times. Together with this,
there is an increasing passivity in relation to the events that happen around us. We
become mere spectators. The use of special effects in the media brings us to a general
disbelief or indifference about what happens around us. Acceleration or the increase of
speed causes things to last less. Our environment is that of fashion and obsolescence,
and in turn this creates an alienation of humans from our chronological, physiological,
and cosmic times and an increasing dependence on technological and mechanical
time.
After reading:
Can you give some examples of rituals where we can see the circular concept of
time?
Can you give some examples of linear time?
Is there a beginning and an end in scientific and in historical thought?
Give an example for each of these categories:
Lived time
Historical time
Cosmic time
Technological or mechanical time
Symbolic time
Mythic time.
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IN ILLO TEMPORE
What kind of time is represented in the days of the week and in the holidays?
Australian natives talk of alcheringa or “the times of dreaming.” We experience

our dreams in this realm, and it is the place where gods act; it becomes a stable
framework for our daily existence, according to Karen Armstrong. This is the same
realm we have named illud tempus. In the Latin mass, the reading of the gospel was
always introduced by the phrase in illo tempore; this is the reason why mythology
scholars have used it to refer to mythic times.
In many cultures, cosmogonic myths are represented in a periodical way. There

is a renovation that usually takes place in the form of festivals. All religious calendars
have a cyclic nature: every year the same ceremonies will take place and the same
texts will be read. The events told in myths are thus ritually repeated. Thus, ritual
keeps myths alive.
According to Mircea Eliade, myth goes through a cyclic process of creation and
destruction. This is the cosmic cycle:
Creation
 
Destruction  Deterioration
The laws of thermodynamics conceive time as the direction where the tendency
toward Chaos (entropy) increases, and Chaos increases with the passing of time. For
some of the scientists of our days, time may be an illusion, since our modern science
does not allow us to differentiate between past and future. If everything should stop at
the same time and begin again also at the same time, could we say that time has
passed?
A concept related to these ideas is what we call the arrow of time, or the idea
that time goes from an unchanging past to an uncertain future. According to this
concept, time is irreversible; we can never travel to the past, although science fiction
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has created time machines. Nevertheless, in quantum mechanics the concept of

reversible time is possible: things could happen in the reversed order. Time does not
pass. It just exists. In many instances scientific ideas gets very close to the mythic
thought.
After reading:
Is the concept and treatment of time the same in myth as it is in science?
Can you give some examples of celebrations that show the eternal retun?
Are there stories connected to these celebrations?
COSMOGONIES
What does create mean in creation stories?
The myths that narrate the creation of the universe can be divided into various
types, according to the way the created act is conceived: ex nihilo creation,
procreation, fabrication, separation or search.
Ex nihilo creation, that is to say, “creation from nothing,” is usually presented

as a way of creating by the power of the creator’s thought, word or movement. The
stories that present this modality are usually composed by a learned segment of the
community. The story of the creation by the Egyptian god Ptah, the first story of the
book of Genesis, or the beginning of the gospel according to John are paradigmatic of
this kind of narratives. There are more examples. The Hindu creation began with the
sacred sound OM, and from it everything was created. According to the Australian
natives, the goddess of the Sun woke up and started cast her light, and her heat gave
rise to everything.
Procreation myths are very common. The Japanese tell that Izanagi and Izanami
beat the ocean to form an island where they could be sexually united. The fruits of this
union started the process of creation. Sometimes procreation takes place by the action
of only one god. Typical are the stories of a Mother Goddess who gives birth without
the help of a male element, but the opposite is also possible. This happened in the
creation story of the Egyptian god Atum.
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Fabrication myths begin with some primordial matter, which in many cases is
the mud, as happens with the creation of Adam in the Bible. But other materials are
also used, as the wood in Norse mythology, used by Odin to create the first human
couple; the matter used in creation can just be the wind and the water as happens
with some Turkish tribes in Asia.
Creation by division of a primordial matter can take the form of the separation
of Heavens and Earth as happens in Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and in some ancient
Greek stories. The division of the cosmic egg in two parts happens in culture as
diverse as those of India, Phoenicia, Iran, Polynesia, Finland or Central America. The
dismemberment of a sea monster is another motif that appears in these stories. It
happens in the Voluspa, in Assyrian mythology or in Japan’s Shinto tradition. In the
Bible the world is formed by the separation of upper and lower waters.
Creation myths can also be told using the search of earth under the primordial
waters. This type of narratives happens in some Asian and American cultures, in the
East of Europe and in pre-Arian India.
Ex nihilo
Procreation
Fabrication
Division
Search
Our science also presents us its own cosmogony and cosmology when today’s
scientists talk about the constant separation of galaxies, from which the theory of an
expanding universe that began with a Big Bang was formed. The cooling that followed
the first moment of expansion gave rise to the first elements; and that’s the way
matter was formed. When matter became denser in some parts, galaxies appeared.
In art, the paintings of Michelangelo and Blake express very well the European
conception of the Divine artisan in his creative process. Michelangelo worked on the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in Rome during the first decade of the 16th century, and
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Blake published its paintings and drawings in his book The Ancient Days, dated in
1824.
Traditional cosmology deals mainly with the elements that dwell in heaven: the
Sun and the Moon. The Sun travels daily from East to West and returns at night to
the East by the sea. No one has been able to reach the Sun. Remember the stories of
Icarus or Phaeton. The Moon, on the contrary, has been the goal for human beings
from the times of the writer Lucian of Samosata (125-180) to the NASA. In the poem
Orlando Furioso by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1533) it is stated that all
things lost on earth end up on the Moon, and there went Astolfo looking for the reason
lost by Orlando. The French novelist Jules Verne (1828-1905), pioneer of science-
fiction, wrote two novels on this theme: From earth to Moon (De la terre à la lune,
1865), and its sequel Around the Moon (Autour de la lune, 1870). The French filmmaker
George Méliès (1861-1938) got his inspiration from Verne for his film A Trip to the
Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune, 1902), whose famous landing of the rocket into the
Moon’s face has been shown many times in the media. In Christian tradition, the
Moon is the place where the Virgin sets her feet; this image comes from the Book of
Revelation.
After reading:
Think of examples of creation stories and catalogue them.
CHAOS AND COSMOS
What is there before creation?
All cosmogonies entail the passing from Chaos (disorder) to cosmos (order).
Cosmogonic discourse begins with the presentation of Chaos. This is generally
described by the use of negative sentences or with images of water, wind, darkness or
an endless abyss. A poem from Mesopotamia dated six hundred years before the Era is
a good example of the way a cosmogony begins:
The sacred house, the house of the gods had not been built;
No reed had been born, no tree had been created;

26

No brick had been laid, no building had been erected;
No house had been built, no city had been constructed;
No creature had begun to exist.
The whole earth was nothing but sea.
The Hebrew Book of genesis begins talking about something deserted and
empty, a chaotic and dark abyss filled with water over which the spirit of Yahweh flew.
The Altaic Turks talked of immense water with no limits, if a serpent drank this water,
it would die, and if it was drunk by a dead scorpion, it would return to life. But no
serpent or scorpion existed yet.
Water is a very rich symbol in myths; while it symbolizes Chaos, especially in

the form of deep waters, it is also the symbol of life in the form of rain or fertilizing
rivers, and also it symbolizes destruction in the form of floods, or in our times,
tsunamis. While Chaos implies lack of order (and creation is the process of ordering),
it is also full of possibilities. When creation ends, when perfection arrives, everything
becomes still, no movement is possible anymore. This is why a perfect cosmos is not
possible, and moreover, it is not desired.
After reading:
Make a description of chaos; make a list of the descriptive elements that

characterize chaos.
Can you relate the mythic concept of chaos to the scientific concept of a black
hole?
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THE PRIMORDIAL SACRIFICE AND THE BATTLE AGAINST A MONSTER
In the beginning of times there is always a fight between two forces. Why is that
so?
Why has man always sacrificed living beings to the gods?
The sometimes voluntary sacrifice of a male or female being is sometimes the

origin of cosmos. From this being all the important animals and plants emerge.
Sometimes some buried body parts spring out as new beings just as when a seed
becomes a plant. This type of stories represents the idea that from death life arises.
This first sacrifice was not performed by the first human beings, but by other
superior beings who institute this way the world order. For Christians, the primordial
sacrifice is that of Jesus on the cross, but other gods also underwent some voluntary
sacrifice; Odin sacrificed himself by hanging from the cosmic tree. Quetzalcoatl
sacrificed himself by jumping into a pyre.
According to the Rig Veda, the gods sacrificed the giant Purusha, cut his body
into pieces that were thrown in all directions. From them all created things came up.
In Mithraism, a religion that expanded all through the Roman Empire, is the
Zoroastrian divinity Mithra who sacrificed the primeval bull. The blood that sprang
from the wound was the element that fertilizes the earth. In New Guinea the story of
Hainuwele is representative of a series of myths that narrate how from the dead body
of a sacrificed girl the important plants arose.
Related to these are the stories where God demands the sacrifice of someone
beloved. The story of Jephtah, appearing in the Bible, is typical. This warrior promised
the Hebrew god that he would sacrifice the first creature met by him upon his return
home if God granted him the victory. Her daughter was the unlucky person who ran to
meet her victorious father. The story of Ifigenia in Greek mythology also tells us of the
demand of the sacrifice of this princess to appease Artemis and obtain some wind to
push the ships on their way to Troy.
The story of Abraham and Isaac are examples of the institutionalization of a

new order where human sacrifices are no longer demanded and a substitute is found.
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Some people tell that Ifigenia was not really sacrificed. At the end she was replaced by
a deer. The fact that gods no longer approve of human sacrifices becomes apparent in
the story of king Lycaon, who sacrificed his son to Zeus. In response, the god threw a
bolt of lightning and the king was transformed into a wolf.
Some mythologies tell that in the beginning there was a powerful monster that
was defeated by the creating forces. In Hebrew tradition we find Rahab, a sea dragon
that symbolizes Chaos and who Yahweh kicked him to death. At the end of the world,
Yahweh will also destroy Behemoth and Leviathan, primeval monsters that fight
against each other from the beginning of times.
The fight of the army of gods against the sea monster Tiamat, goddess of Chaos,
and her troops and their final victory is the way to narrate the instauration of the
cosmos. Better known is the fight between Michael and his angels and Lucifer and his
demons. This fight is parallel to that which will happen at the end of the worlds
between the Messiah and the Antichrist.
After reading:
Look for the myth of Hainuwele in the Internet and write a summary of it.
The stories about Isaac, Ifigenia and Rohita share some narrative elements. Try
to establish the basic structure.
What types of fights are represented in cosmogonic battles?
Can you relate the fascination produced by the monster of Loch Ness to the
archetype of the primordial monster?
THE FIRST HUMANS
Is the creation of the first human beings different from other types of creation
stories?
Some myths, not only the second creation story of Genesis, present the creator
god as a potter. Among the Yoruba, Obatala creates the first couple from clay;
Prometheus created clay figures that populated Earth when Chronus was the king of
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gods. In Chinese mythology, Nü Wa created men out of clay. Other myths talk about
the birth of the first human beings from stone or wood.
The ways in which the first human beings receive the breath of life are various;
in Hebrew tradition, Yahweh blows the breath of life into Adam’s nose. In Iran, the
creator god sheds his own blood on a drawing made on the floor. Sometimes gifts come
from various gods, just as in fairy tales fairy godmothers grant gifts on newborn
princesses. Some American Indian tribes have traditions where the first humans come
out of an egg laid by the thunder bird.
But sometimes it s enough for the creator god to imagine what he wants for it to
become reality, as happens with Gudatrigakwitl in California, he just used his
imagination and the first man appeared. This is a true creation ex nihilo.
In some traditions man is created to serve God as a slave. This happens among
Sumerians and the idea is kept in the Bible, where Adam is placed in Eden to be its
gardener. Some other religions maintained that gods created humans to be fed by
them through sacrifices. The creation of the golem in Jewish folklore reflects that of
Adam: the golem is dumb but serves the Jewish community well, and because he was
a human creation, his end is disastrous. Something similar happened with the
monster created by Dr. Frankenstein.
After reading:
Some beings some are created and some just appear. The process of creating
human beings usually happens in more than one stage. Can you make a
summary of them?
What is the moral behind the story of the Golem and that of the monster of
Frankenstein?
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SEX AND SUBMISSION
If during centuries, men and women have been different in traditional societies.
Will the creation myth reflect this? How?
Some myths tell us that the first human beings were androgynous; later, some
god separated the two sexes, sometimes extracting the woman from the man, as
happens in the myth of Adam and Eve. Just as in the Hebrew example, Greek myths
state that the original sex was the male. Other stories are less sexist. In India it is told
that Purusha was originally an androgynous creature. He divided into two and the two
parts embraced each other. From this union the first human beings were born. The
female part of Purusha felt shame and tried to disappear, but she only succeeded in
turning into a cow. The male part turned into a bull and covered her; thus cattle were
born. Through different transformations, the rest of the animals were created, all the
way to ants.
Another Hebrew story tells that Adam was originally androgynous and the two
parts were united on their backs. This made locomotion and conversation very hard,
so Yahweh separated them. But in other Hebrew traditions Yahweh creates humans
each with his and her own sex. Plato narrates in the Symposium that people originally
were as spheres. When they tried to rebel against the gods, Zeus cut them in two
parts. Since then each half is looking for the corresponding other half. Since some of
these spheres had only one sex, this explains homosexuality.
Patriarchal religions tell about the submission of women to men in some way or
other. In the Hebrew Bible is the curse of God that punishes Eve to give birth with
pain and to be subjected to man’s will. She was the cause of man’s fall. A similar story
is told about the first Greek woman, Pandora, who out of curiosity opened a box and
let out all the evils. Some stories narrate the submission of the female part of
humanity by telling an adventure in which a hero kills a female monster; the stories of
Marcum and Tiamat in Mesopotamia, or of Perseus and the Gorgon are just two
examples.
According to the British writer Robert Graves, there was a matriarchal religion
in Europe before the more modern patriarchal religions developed. Many Greek myths
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solved the conflict between an invading Indo-European god and a local goddess by
marrying both. Joseph Campbell is also of the opinion that Hellenic gods did not
destroy, but incorporated and dominated older goddesses. But in Hebrew religion they
tried to erase anything that referred to the ancient goddess, but some references to her
remain in the Bible. Campbell, influenced by Jung, developed the idea that all myths
and epic tales are related to the human psyche: they are cultural manifestations that
try to explain cosmic, social or spiritual realities.
After reading:
Why do many myths present the idea of only one sex at the beginning of times?
What are the similarities between the Greek myth of Pandora and the Hebrew
myth of Eve?
EDEN, OMPHALOS AND LABYRINTH
Why are there spaces (natural or man-built)that are considered sacred
What is a mythic place?
Sacred space is different from profane space. In sacred space the divine and
human worlds coincide; sacred space becomes a ritual space, and there are usually
taboos attached to it. Think, for example of a cemetery or a church. There is an
epiphany or manifestation of the sacred that lets us know that a place is sacred. There
are stories about sticks that flower when driven into the ground or of animals that
walk to a certain place where it lays down and dies, or of statues that become heavier
when taken away from a certain place. There are elements that at the same time
separate and connect profane and sacred space. The threshold becomes a dangerous
place and many times there are prohibitions attached to it.
Just as happens with time: the mythic conception of space divides into three:
Heavens, Earth and Hell. We live in the middle; and there is a superior and an inferior
world. These worlds are connected by an axis, the axis mundi, which take the form of
a tree, a column, stairs, or a cave, for example.
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Heavens
Earth
Hell
Today’s science makes our time and our space relative; according to modern
theories space contracts or expands depending on the observer’s state of movement.
For the common person in our societies, space has also suffered a conceptual
transformation: owing to the speed of means of transportation and of the images
offered by the mass media, we can take great leaps in space. A new way of traveling
has developed: tourism. Just as happens with time, the perception of space now tends
to be accelerated, fragmentary and superficial.
Paradise, a most beautiful garden, is a constant motif in many mythologies.

One of its characteristics is that all animals that live there are tame, it is populated by
wonderful trees, especially the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, and wonderful
rivers, sometimes of honey or milk, bathe it. The paradise appears at the beginning of
the story of humanity. Somehow it is lost and man has ever since tried to recuperate
it. At the end of their lives some people can enter this wonderful place to live there for
eternity. In the Middle Ages this motif appears again as the locus amoenus, the garden
of love, that garden where lovers meet with their loved ones.
The center of Earth is usually the place where the three worlds are united. And
just as the baby is tied to its mother by the umbilical cord, this world is tied to the
Other World that sustains it by its navel, the omphalos. The center of the world is also
a city sacred to the people. Delphi, Jerusalem, Mecca, Rome or Santiago de
Compostela have been considered centers of the world. Churches and mosques are
oriented toward these centers when built. Sometimes the center of the world is a
mountain, as happens with Mount Olympus or Mount Sinai. Some human
constructions, such as the pyramids or the ziggurats try to copy this concept. These
buildings symbolize the ascension of man to the heavens.
Together with the idea of a center is that of a pilgrimage to reach it. The most
powerful symbol that expresses this way toward the center is the labyrinth. Ancient
sacred labyrinths had only one course. One can still see examples of them in some
33

gothic cathedrals in France or in Italy. The labyrinth inside the cathedral of Chartres
is the most famous. Going through it on one’s knees was equivalent to the pilgrimage
to Santiago for those who had some kind of impediment. Some people consider that
the game of the goose is a type of labyrinth that represented the mystical way. It is
sometimes related to the way to Santiago and to the Knights Templar.
But the most famous labyrinth of all is that of Crete, invented by Daedalus to
house the Minotaur, monster destroyed by the Greek hero Theseus.
The maze is another type of labyrinth. In it there are many options, but only
one takes you to the center. These ways are related to the riddles, and are some kind
of test for those who want to become a hero.
After reading:
There are constructions and buildings that reflect a sacred concept of space.
Can you find examples and explain how this happens?
What are the key words for the concept of paradise?
What s the main quality a paradise must have?
When are paradises created? Do they last forever?
Where is the center of the world?
How do people know a place is the center of the world?
What is the difference between the concept of omphalos and that of labyrinth?
34

DEUS OTIOSUS
Is the idea of God equivalent to that of a Creator? Are there differences?
The god of the primeval heaven, the creator of all things, ended up being in a
position that was too high for humans to reach. This hampered the maintenance of a
direct relationship with humans. He became an idle god (deus otiosus), and he was
replaced by his son, younger and nearer to humans.
There are many myths that narrate how the Creator or the Father retires to a
far place in the highest regions of Heaven, leaving to others the mission of ruling over
creation. This all mighty god becomes less and less interested in human affairs. A new
generation of gods takes over the cosmos and a new order ends up being established.
Active God Takes care of the world Receives cult
Deus otiosus Lives far away from the world Does not receive cult
After reading:
At what point in mythic time does the Creator retire and becomes a deus
otiosus?
How does a god retire from the world and why?
Can a deus otiosus be a supreme god?

35

III
HEROES AND HEROINES: LEGENDS AND ADVENTURES

THE AGES OF MAN
Try to describe a past time where you could write a mythic narrative. How
would this world be?
Time in myths is a cyclic structure whose events are repeated periodically. The
world presented is ruled by laws that are not the ones we know. In the Bible we have a
good example of this: Yahweh blesses his creatures at the end of the creation. He
ordered that all animals on Earth should eat green grass. After the Flood, Yahweh
blesses his creatures once again, but this time he stipulates that some animals should
eat others, and that man should participate in the fight for domination. As can be
seen, the second blessing marks the end of a time when Nature had a set of laws
different from ours.
The first writings show the belief of an earlier stage in human development
where things were much better and happiness was the normal state. From then on,
humanity has suffered a process of deterioration, and each generation has been less
perfect than the previous one. In the first generations, humans didn’t have to suffer or
to work; this lost stage can be perceived, the point of view of space, in the paradisiacal
islands, the Fortunate isles, as the Romans used to call them. From the point of view
of time, we have the belief of a Golden Age, a mythic time of bliss. These conceptions
gave rise to the myth of the Noble Savage, the utopias, the anthropological theories
about primitivism, or even some science fiction narratives.
According to the Italian-Anglo-American thinker Giorgio Diaz de Santillana

(1902-1974), there are more than two hundred myths from different cultures where a
cyclic vision of humanity is presented: human kind has gone, according to these
myths, the development of humanity has happened in stages called ages. When Greek
36

historians wrote their general and local history books, they conceived history as a
generational movement of births and deaths which was symbolized by the phoenix.
They divided the development of humanity into periods or ages, a traditional method of
study that continues up to our days; think of the divisions of Prehistory into
Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age, for example. Legends about the ages
of man can be seen in Hesiod’s Works and Days, where five stages are presented.
During the Golden Age gods and humans live coexist and participate together in
banquets. This period ends when gods either destroy humanity or leave the Earth and
move to Heaven. Other ages follow in which humans and their conditions get worse
and worse: Silver Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. Hesiod interpolates an Age of Heroes
between the Bronze and the iron Ages. If humanity is destroyed at the end of each age,
a new creation follows, but some authors present a steady deterioration of humanity.
According to the Phaenomena of the Greek poet Aratus (315-240 before the Age) and
the Metamorphoses of Ovid, in the first generation humans live on vegetables, there
was no commerce and the goddess of justice dwells among them; goods were shared.
In the Silver Age Justice comes to visit humans now and then, the year is divided in
four seasons and agriculture and houses are institutionalized; in the Bronze Age the
sword is invented, people begin to eat meat and Justice definitively moves to Heaven
in the constellation of Virgo. People fight, but there is still no evil in the world. Aratus
said that in the Iron Age modesty was put aside and thus humans started to satisfy
their most primary impulses; According to Ovid, in this age private property is
institutionalized, people hurt Mother Earth trying to get minerals from her entrails,
and religious duties are forgotten. Herodotus tells us that the Egyptians divided the
world in three stages: the Age of Gods, the Age of Heroes, and the Age of Men. Latin
writers reduced the ages to only two: the age of Saturn or Golden Age and the Age of
Jupiter.
 Golden Age
Better Silver Age
Worse Bronze Age
 Iron Age
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The idea of human decadence can be seen in the Bible if we look at the age lived
by the patriarchs. Adam lived 930 years; Sem lived 600, and Abraham only 175, which
is still a lot, according to our standards. Christians developed a system of ages based
on biblical divisions.
The division of the world in ages shows a degenerative vision of humanity

according to which we are headed to disaster. From the 19th century on a vision based
on science developed that showed a belief in progress: Science and technology will
take us to a progressively better world. A third vision is the one based on a cyclic
vision or the eternal return: everything gets repeated, nothing really changes.
Vision based on progress Cyclic vision Vision based on the Ages of Man
The world is headed to a Everything is repeated, We are headed towards disaster

better stage nothing changes
After reading:
In what age you would place a mythic story just as Tolkien did in his Lord of the
Rings?
In what age in relation to ours should you place the age of heroes?
THE HERO AND ITS TYPES
What are the characteristics of heroes and heroines in our times?
Hesiod curiously placed an Age of Heroes between the Bronze Age and the Iron
Age. He said that this was a bright intermediate period in the progressive decadence of
humanity. In this time, the Earth is inhabited by heroes of heavenly lineage. There we
should place the great adventures narrated by Homer and other poets. This period
ends with the wars in which the descendants of these heroes engaged. Some of the
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heroes received the gift of eternal bliss and were sent to the Isle of the blessed, a place
which reminds us of the Golden Age.
Plato also talked of an Age of Heroes. The division he offers seems to reflect a
structure in which there was an Age of Gods placed before the creation of humanity,
another age in which gods coexisted with humans, a third age of heroes which came
once the gods had left Earth, and finally our age. The Bible also talks of an age of
heroes placed at the time when the sons of Yahweh had intercourse with the
daughters of men, before the Flood.
Greek heroes are well known; among the most important, we can name
Heracles (Hercules), Perseus, Theseus, whose adventures are in solitary. The
generation of Atreus, Laius and Oedipus are famous for their crimes. The heroes of
next generation (Jason and the Argonauts and the heroes of the Trojan War: Achilles,
Agamemnon, Ulysses or Hector), used to act in groups. The next and last generation of
Greek heroes is that of Telemachus and Orestes, with them the Heroic Age ends.
 Stories about adventurous o tragic heroes who perform alone

 Stories about epic heroes who perform in groups
 Stories about the children of heroes
The concept of hero or heroic age does not end with Antiquity. In the Middle
Ages another heroic period appears. This is remembered in the chansons de geste and
other epic poems. In this period we can find heroes like those of the Arthurian cycle
like king Arthur, Merlin and the knights of the Round Table; those of the Carolingian
cycle, like Roland, and Charlemagne; those of the Old Norse cycle, like Siegfried; and
Spanish Medieval heroes such as Mudarra, Bernardo del Carpio or El Cid. In today’s
popular culture we have a new concept of the hero arising in fantastic literature, the
comic and in cinema: the superhero.
Not all heroes are alike. Some of them are semi-divine beings, descending from
the union of a god or goddess and a mortal; on rare occasions they are granted
immortality, as happened to Asclepius or to Heracles. Other heroes belong to
aristocratic families; they are usually adventurous or tragic characters. Some heroes
39

received some kind of religious cult. According to the type of story they originate, we
can divide them into the following types:
Trickster: The intelligent, astute, wily, mischievous character that tricks and
fools other character in order to obtain some benefit: Sisyphus,
Prometheus, Ulysses, Jacob, Eshu (Eleggua) or Bugs Bunny.
Civilizing: The hero who brings some art, law, technology or knowledge to his
people: Prometheus, Cadmus, Habis (Habidis), Triptolemus, Moses.
Patriarch or founder: The hero that founds and gives his name to a people,
dynasty or city: Romulus, Abraham, Cadmus, Theseus, Pelops.
Adventurous: He who goes for a quest: Perseus, Theseus, Jason Siegfried, Robin
Hood.
Epic: The hero whose destiny is to be a warrior, and is in war where he acquires
his glory: Achilles, Hector, El Cid.
Tragic: The character whose destiny brings a fatal outcome: Oedipus, Roderick,
Pentheus.
As can be seen, these types are not mutually exclusive; heroes can adopt
characteristics from different types. But one characteristic shared by all heroes,
according to Mircea Eliade and René Girard, is their monstrosity. The features that
place them above the rest of humans make them monstrous human beings: They are
different; the events in their stories are different; the acts they perform are different;
and the time in which they live is different. In many cases, the size of a hero makes
him a giant; sometimes it is just the opposite: they are extremely small. Sometimes
they are theriomorphic, that is to say, they have animal characteristics or the capacity
to transform into an animal. There are androgynous heroes or heroes who change sex
along their lives. Their sexuality is also strange: either they are extremely potent or
suffer from a great weakness. Their temperament is also extreme and many times
tends to be very violent.
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After reading:
Are there differences between the idea of ancient hero and our idea of hero or
superhero?
Find differences between the character and adventures of lone heroes and those
of the heroes who act in teams.
BIOGRAPHY OF THE HERO
Think of a character that can be a hero in a story you may write. Think of a
great adventure for this hero. In what period of his or her life would you
place this adventure?
In the second half of the 20th century there was a lot of interest among scholars
of diverse disciplines inside Humanities in heroic stories. Some of them noticed that
the lives of the heroes showed patterns that repeated over and over. This showed that
the hero is a cultural construction or an abstract model that determines the
construction of this type of character in a story. The archetypes for the hero are so
strong that cause real characters to adjust to these patterns in a process of
mythification. As the Spanish investigator Julio Caro Baroja (1914-1995) stated, there
are two possibilities in tradition: either a real character adopts legendary
characteristics or a fictitious character is presented with characteristics taken from
reality.
Grouping the motifs that appear in various authors who studied the patterns in
the life of heroes, we see that they are grouped around seven thematic cycles:
1. Birth. The pattern of birth shows his parents and the strange way of
conceiving, his extraordinary birth, the dangers from persecutions from
the king or from his father, and his adoption.
2. Rearing. There is usually little said about his rearing; many times a
supernatural mentor guides him while he lives an obscure life, but from
time to time he shows strange powers.
3. Adventures. When he reaches some age, he engages in different
adventures in faraway lands or he travels to the Other World; he usually
41

ends up fighting some kind of monstrous being that symbolizes Chaos

and defeats it.
4. Return. He returns home and rescues his mother or his whole family
from disgrace.
5. Reign. He is given a princess to marry and reigns for some time in a wise
way.
6. Fall. But he is betrayed by someone near him and loses his kingdom; he
loses the favor of the gods and is forced to leave.
7. Death. He dies in an extraordinary way, and many times disappears
leaving no trace. His burial place is not known, but there are some
sanctuaries that claim this privilege. His children do not succeed him.
After reading:
Compare the story of Superman to that of Jesus, Oedipus or to Theseus. Find

similarities.
Construct the biography of a hero.
THE HEROINE
Think of a character that can be a heroine in a story you may write. How would
you characterize her?
Stories about heroines many times imply some kind of search. The object of this
search many times is someone beloved who has disappeared. This narrative motif is
ritually represented in Spain during the Holy Week with processions of the Virgin
looking for Jesus. In Greek mythology we can see it in the stories about Demeter
looking for his daughter, or Isis looking for her husband.
The German historian of religions Walter Burkert detected in Greek myths some
patterns belonging to a narrative structure he named “the girl’s tragedy”:
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1. The girl leaves her house.

2. She suffers a period of reclusion, sometimes with other girls.
3. She is raped by a god.
4. She suffers threats coming from her own family.
5. After bearing a child, she is rescued by him.
According to Burkert, this pattern reflects a biological program: puberty, loss of

virginity, pregnancy, and birth. A typical example for this pattern is the story of
Cassandra. Sometimes the heroine adopts characteristics usually assigned to heroes.
Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter, talked before she was born.
Heroines can adopt different types:
Divine Mother, sometimes she is also a virgin: She is the nurturing mother who
empowers her children and guides them to success. She is the opposite
of the dominant mother who ends up devouring her children and who
destroys all who try to save them. Gaia, Demeter, Isis, Mary.
Fertility character: She is associated to beauty, sex, pregnancy and birth, but
also to rain and agriculture. Ishtar, Lilith, Aphrodite.
Destructive character: She represents the feminine anger and becomes a terrible
symbol of death. Medusa, Kali.
Fatal temptress: She is the femme fatale, the vamp, that beautiful and
mysterious woman who seduces men and leads them towards their own
destruction. Many times she is not conscious of her destructive powers;
other times she finds pleasure in humiliating other people. Salome,
Delilah.
Witch: A powerful enchantress related to the mysterious forces of nature. She

has shamanic powers that she uses to help heroes in their quest, but she
also has the power of overcoming men transforming them into animals or
imprisoning them inside mountains. Medea, Morgana le Fay, Circe.
Faithful wife: She is the keeper of the family and of traditions, protecting her
house and children and fighting with intelligence those who try to
subdue her when her husband is absent. Penelope, Atalanta.
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Unfaithful wife: She betrays her husband with another lover, and kills him
when he returns from a trip overseas. Clytemnestra.
Platonic ideal: She represents the object of love in courteous literature. She is
high above her lover, who only worships her from afar. Laura (muse of
Petrarch), Beatrice Portinari (muse of Dante) Dulcinea.
In today’s mass culture, heroines often adopt the traditional features assigned
to male heroes, effacing the differences between these two types.
After reading:
Compare the characteristics of classical heroines in myths and fairytales and

those of today’s mass media. Are there differences?
THE DRAGON
The hero must fight or perform certain tasks. Can you think of the different
tasks heroes perform?
The dragon is the villain of the stories of adventure; it the symbol of Chaos and
the opposer of heroes and heroines. The appearance traditionally given to the dragon
is that of a winged serpent with legs. It is capable of throwing fire through its mouth.
The eagle, monarch of birds, is its greatest enemy. Just as serpents do, dragons
usually are the keepers of some treasure kept in a secret place. Its destiny is to be
defeated by the hero, a narrative motifs that repeats in medieval literature. The most
famous dragon of Antiquity is the one that guarded the Golden Fleece. In Medieval
tradition, Siegfried killed the dragon that guarded the treasure of the Nibelung. Its
blood made him invulnerable. In medieval Christian traditions the fight against the
dragon is given to Michael the archangel and to Saint George. But more than one
hundred saints seem to have had encounters with these creatures, thought to be the
incarnation of the devil. Here are a few of these saints: Perpetua, Anthony of Egypt,
Margaret the Virgin, Gregory, Martin of Tours.
After reading:
Why does the dragon symbolize chaos in adventure myths?

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The fight between a hero and a monster many times substitutes that between
the hero and the villain. What are the similarities between a villain and a
monster?
¿Can you create the sequences of a scene representing a fight between a hero
and a dragon?
KATABASIS
Heroes must leave their home and go to the Other World to perform their tasks
and return victorious. How is this world that awaits a hero?
In most mythologies Hell is just the world under Earth, not a place of
punishment, but that place where the ancestors dwell. It is the realm of some
monarch of the inferior world, and is open only to those who have received proper
burial. That is why some souls wander on earth. But some heroes have visited this
place. The voyager into Hell can be male, like Gilgamesh, Orpheus, Ulysses, Aeneas,
Christ, or female like Ishtar or Demeter. Sometimes the heroes and heroines succeed
in their adventure and get what they were looking for, other times they come back
empty handed, as happened to Orpheus; and sometimes some kind of agreement is
reached, as happened to Demeter.
Ritual combats between gods or heroes and the dark forces are reflected in
Christian mythology in the descent to Hell and the fight between Christ and Satan.
After reading:
Find heroes that have descended into Hell. What were they searching? Did they
get what they were looking for?
Is our concept of Hell the same as that of the Underworld in other mythologies?

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IV
APOCALYPSE: HOW ALL THINGS ARE GOING TO END

MYTHS OF DESTRUCTION
If cosmogonies are marked by the fight between chaos and cosmos; the same
thing happens with myths of destruction. The general belief is that the cosmos will
disappear and we will return to chaos. At a certain point in time, the gods may decide
to destroy a town or a community, the whole human race or the entire creation. The
Flood is, in this respect, one of the first myths that tell this type of story. In
Babylonian mythology, the Flood marks the withdrawal of the gods from this world
and the creation of a new world order, finishing a period that could be equated to the
Golden Age of other cultures. The Hebrew myth of the Flood shows the end of an order
and the beginning of a new one. Babylonian story states that the gods sent the Flood
because humans made too much noise. Water is one of the symbols of chaos, no
wonder then, that it is an important element in myths of destructions.
A myth form the Bible tells us how the sons of God who descended to Earth,
and the daughters of men produced the race of the giants and of heroes. Yahweh then
repented from having created man and decided to eliminate all living things with a
flood. Only a man, his family, and a couple of every living animal on earth survived;
this constitutes the story of Noah and his Arch. The Mesopotamian story of Gilgamesh
is very similar to that of Noah, and there are other stories of this kind, as the one
narrated by Berossus in the 3rd century before the Common Era. In Greek mythology,
Zeus also decided to eliminate humanity with a flood, and the man who was saved was
Deucalion, son of Prometheus. The account of the Tower of Babel and the dispersion
of languages is also a myth of destruction, what is destroyed this time is the original
unity of Mankind. There are also myths that tell of the dispersion of the people, for
example, in Philippine mythology, it was the god Captan who caused the dispersion of
people and the formation of different races.
Another form of destruction is by fire. In the Bible we can read the story of the
destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, destroyed by a rain of fires sent by Yahweh-.
War is another means the gods use for the destruction of humans. It is said that the
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War of Troy happened because the gods were upset with the humans, who had
multiplied excessively.
CYCLICAL CATASTROPHES
What is the structure of the tale about the Flood?
Myths about the destruction of the world are related to New Year rites. These
ceremonies have a similar structure: The end of the finishing year reminds us of the
Chaos before Creation and order is restored with the arrival of the New Year. This is
sometimes represented with the fight against a monster and the victory of the hero.
Gods also have their end, even though their life is much longer, some of them
also die, and some descend into Hell. Attis, Adonis, Osiris and Christ are examples of
gods that suffer from death. When Earth is left without the protection of the god, it
falls into Chaos. The order will only be restored when the god returns victorious from
Hell. In Carnival we ritualize this Chaos by dressing in strange ways, acting in ways
not allowed at other times, and by making noise. Social laws are not valid during this
period, and it was typical for masters to act as servants and servants as masters. The
twelve days of Christmas also represent a period of Chaos and the beginning of a new
order. In Spanish tradition, on December the 28th people play tricks on each other,
just as they do in other cultures on April fool’s day. In many cultures, the passage
from the old order to the new one is represented by putting out a fire and lighting a
new one. Christian’s ceremonies on Holy Saturday night reflect this. The blowing of
candles on birthdays is also reminiscent of this ritual.
In Spain there are noise-making traditions from Good Friday to Easter. These
noises also served to scare away demons and evil spirits that run free during these
days when Earth is in great danger. Other people did the same during the eclipses:
when light left the world it was necessary to protect it with great agitation and
shouting. The world upside down is then a typical motif that symbolizes Chaos. This
period is always short and the order is always restored.
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After reading:
Even though the Flood is a universally known myth, water is only one of the
ways the world can be destroyed. Can you find examples of other ways
the world could be destroyed?
APOCALYPSE AND RAGNAROK
Why do we tell stories about future destruction of the world?
The end of the world will arrive either due to the sins of the people or because
the world is old and worn out; it has had its day. These myths are consequence of the
idea that the world irreversibly deteriorates as time goes by. A new and more perfect
world waits. This idea is expressed in mythologies in different ways; one is by the
progressively shorter height of humans; another is by their progressive shorter age, as
we have already seen.
Most ancient mythologies talk of a cyclical process of destruction and

renovation, but Judaism, Islam and Christianity perceive history as lineal, and the
end of our world will happen only once. Political ideologies which are products of
Western thought also reflect this thinking: Nazism and communism announce the end
of the world as we know it, and the appearance of a new era of happiness and
abundance: The Paradise. Plastic Art and Music in the 20th century also followed this
pattern of thought: Artistic language was considered to be worn out and with nothing
else to say. A new mode of expression, more valid and more in accordance with the
times appears. Modern humanity lives under the threat of nuclear destruction, or of a
collision with an asteroid or of the changes due to the ozone layer, or even of a new
flood caused by the melting of the poles.
The Book of Revelation shows the mythical fight between a red dragon named
Armageddon, associated to Satan and to the ancient serpent, and Michael the
archangel, or between the Prostitute of Babylon and the Mother-Virgin. Many symbols
of destruction come from this book: the seven seals and the seven trumpets, and the
four horse riders are good examples. The Antichrist represents the personification of
chaos. He will deceive humanity by performing all types of miracles. He will build an
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empire that will last one thousand years. The Antichrist is identified by its number:
666. Many historical characters have been identified with this number: Nero, Hitler,
Castro, or Bush are some examples.
Norse mythology believed in the Twilight of the Gods, and in a final fight in
which all gods would succumb. The end of the world arrives because gods are not
perfect and their sins accumulate, causing at the end a period of wars. Narrating the
future poses its own problems. These are solved by representing the story by a dream
or by a revelation, and then they can be narrated in the past. Science-fiction has taken
up this idea in many films and novels, which represent the world during or after a
nuclear disaster.
These myths are related to those of the lost paradise and the arrival of death.
Humans, by disobeying the commands of the gods, lose their privileges and are
expelled from Paradise. Therefore, they return to some form of chaos from which they
will have to fight to escape.
According to the Big Bang theory, the universe will keep its expansion until the
force of gravity forces its reversal and the universe begins to contract until it will
collapse: the Big Crunch. Other people say that the universe will not collapse, but
then the stars will slowly die out becoming black holes; the universe will get colder
and colder until it reaches absolute zero. The entropy stored in black holes will grow
preventing new organized energy to be formed; black holes will become more
numerous. Then thermal death will be produced.
The end of the world also has an individual dimension. In various religions
there are myths about the judgment of the souls after death. Egyptian ritual had a
great preoccupation in maintaining the body of the dead and of assuring that their
souls would receive a favorable sentence, after being weighted on scales. Christianity
also shows this belief in a double way: After death, each individual is judged and sent
to Hell or to Heaven according to his or her deeds. At the end of the world there will be
another judgment where all souls will be divided in two groups once again.
After reading:
What elements do we find in the Book of Revelation that we use to structure our
apocalyptic vision of the end of the world?
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How does modern Mass media use the idea of the end of the world in science
fiction stories?
THE NEW JERUSALEM
Relate the mythic structures of: the cyclical structure of our year, the Ages of
Man, cyclical catastrophes and the idea of life beyond death.
After the destruction of our world, a new world will appear. This will be the
paradise restored, open only to those who have been elected after the Final Judgment.
A savior will arrive (Advent): He will be the prophet who fights the Antichrist and
dominates him, leading the people to a new and perfect system.
This belief of a savior has also been applied to historical and legendary
characters, such as prince Sebastian of Portugal, Emperor Frederick or Charlemagne.
Vikings believed in the return of their god Balder. The myth of the king of the
mountain, compiled by the Brothers Grimm shows an old king or emperor sitting
inside the mountain waiting for the time for him to come and fix the world. He will
know the time has come because a shepherd will inform him that birds have stopped
flying round the mountain.
In Christianity, Human kind lost its Paradise at the beginning of times, but they
will return to it after the end of the world. The new world has been portrayed in
different ways: Isaiah prophesized that in it men will turn their swords into plows and
their lances into sickles, and there will be no more war. Another vision, this time
coming from Virgil, shows the lion resting next to a lamb. Germanic mythology says
that Balder will resurrect and rule a new world where men will work, suffer, love and
laugh once again.
According to Zoroastrianism, after the battle between the forces of good and
those of evil, there will be a Last Judgment for all souls. Sinners will be punished, but
after three days of purification, they will be pardoned. Then poverty, illnesses, thirst,
hunger and death will disappear. Christian beliefs are similar. At the end of times, all
the dead will resurrect and Christ will preside over a Final Judgment, but rewards and
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punishments will be eternal. And a never-ending kingdom will be created, and the new
holy city will be seen, New Jerusalem.
After reading:
Relate the idea of the New Jerusalem after the destruction to Paradise.

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MYTHIC THOUGHT AND ITS INTERPRETATION

THE INTERPRETATION OF MYTHS
What do myths offer human beings?
Myth has been defined in different ways along history. For centuries, it was
considered as a story not supported by evidence and many times it was equated with
old women’s tales. But learned people never felt quite comfortable with this conception
and found other ways to understand this phenomenon. Myth was then considered as
an allegorical story, or as a rudimentary scientific explanation, as a distortion of
history, as product of artistic fantasy, as a degeneration of religious thought, as a
projection of astral phenomena, as the explanation of a rite, or as the product of the
collective unconscious. All these interpretations had as a result the permanence of
myth in society both among the people, and in learned circles. Myths were not only
transmitted as part of folklore, but also as part of high culture.
The preoccupation to understand myths in order to obtain some kind of truth,

paradigm or knowledge from them, has continued in our days. The Finnish
investigator Lauri Honko has called our attention to different modern approaches
dealing with myth:
As a source of cognitive categories to explain enigmatic phenomena
As a symbolic expression, as happens with poetry
As a projection of the subconscious
As a cosmic vision that integrates humans in their lives
As a paradigm for behavior
As a way to legitimate institutions
As a sign of what is socially important
As a mirror of culture
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As the result of some historical situation
As a way of religious communication
As a way to structure society.
After reading:
Myths are interpreted in many ways. Discuss whether they should be

interpreted.
ALLEGORICAL APPROACH
What is an allegory?
Many Greek thinkers doubted the existence of the gods at least as they were
portrayed in the works of poets. Pythagoras placed the souls of Homer and Hesiod in
Hell as punishment for what they did to the gods. Other thinkers could not agree with
the idea of immoral gods or imagine them with human characteristics. The image the
gods had in Hellenic society was the poets’ fault. But this elitist skepticism was not
shared by the rest of the population. Many Greek philosophers and scientists were
persecuted for having made agnostic statements. Plato believed in the gods, but he
also said that they could not be the way they were described by the poets. Aristotle
stated that humans create the gods in their own image. But even if Greek
philosophers treated their gods and their myths with irony or even disdain, myth kept
nourishing Greek thought, art and literature.
Once the idea that myths could not be real stories was well established among
the learned, two ways of analyzing them were created: as allegories and as distorted
history. Mythology had provided explanations for physical or psychological
phenomena, and Greek scientists contributed another point of view: myths could be
explained by Mechanics and Physics.
The allegorical approach begins at the same time that philosophers begin to
criticize myths. It was a way to find a valid sense for this type of narrative whose
objectivity and truthfulness could not be accepted anymore. Myth had to be analogies
that explained the movements of the celestial bodies and the working of nature. Gods
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became for them the embodiment of natural elements, and myths were the way of
representing in a hidden way a primitive science that dealt with the primordial forces
of the cosmos. When approaching a myth, one had to go beyond the obvious but
superficial meaning and look for a deeper one. Epicurus even preferred the message
given by myths when dealing with the Other World to scientific explanations. Myth
gave humanity a sense of freedom and hope.
When Christianity became the dominant religion, classical myths survived.

Greek and Roman gods became devils disguised in different forms, or they were
subjected to various interpretations: Myths were as parables, a didactic narrative
genre to teach and control humans. From its beginnings, Christianity used this
important part of Classical culture, which is the base of our civilization. Learned
writers considered that myths were allegories about moral ideals or cosmic forces. The
name of the days of the week or the planets and constellations are evidence to the fact
that classical gods survived transformed into cosmic forces studied by astrologers and
alchemists. Thanks to their moralizing interpretation, old gods survived in Christianity
transformed into symbols of vices, virtues, moral truths, or disciplines of study; this
way they could obtain from these stories Christian morals and they could also use the
old gods to teach them. For Medieval scholars, myths were codes for moral philosophy.
To justify this, Christians used an allegory: they were doing just like the Hebrews did
when leaving Egypt; they ran off with valuable goods taken from the Egyptians. After
all, they were the winners and myths were part of their booty. During the Renaissance,
myths became very important in humanistic circles: Boccaccio, Ficino, Landino or
Bacon considered that myths, together with the Bible, were the main source of
knowledge. Nineteenth century intellectuals continued this concern about the origin
and meaning of myths. Some, as Georg Friedrich Creuzer, stated that myths were a
set of esoteric dogmas about natural forces written in a poetic style by priests. From
this interpretation came comparative mythology, also called “solar mythology”.
Moral: Virtues & vices

Allegory
Scientific: Cosmic and natural forces
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After reading:
Write the main ideas of allegorical interpretations of myths.
Do allegorical interpretations of myths help understanding them?
MYTH AND SCIENCE
Do mythic and scientific thoughts oppose each other?
European intellectuals developed an interest in classical mythology by the 14th

century, and as a consequence of this, mythology became part of the curriculum in
education. But in the 18th century, with the arrival of the cult of reason, myths began
to be interpreted as the irrational product of human mind. In the 19th century and up
to World War I, myths were considered fiction; they were a set of fables opposed to
reason and to reality. But after the great disaster that was this great war, Westerners
became interested in mythic thought. Rational minds and scientific thought had to
begin facing the absurd and try to understand it.
According to the historian of human sciences and Western thought Georges

Gusdorf (1912-2000), human thought developed in stages: first was natural instinct;
then came mythic culture, still in close contact with nature. In this stage, when
individuals participate in communitarian life, myths justify and validate the present by
presenting it as past, as fundaments; at this time, human mind is not surprised by
what is being told; it accepts these stories as valid truths and any marvel is presented
as something natural. In the next stage philosophical thought develops, and
individuals discover truths and begin separating them from allegories. Poets begin
turning myths into symbols and fables and myths become separate from reality. But
some, as Lawrence J. Hatab, contended that philosophical thought retains a great
quantity of mythic thought, since myths are stories that reveal a sacred world.
Science has substituted myth as holder of truth in today’s world, and this has
given us a false optimism. Kurt Hübner (1921-), professor at the University of Kiel,
states that there are no absolute truths that can serve as foundations of any science,
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and no science will ever have them. Progress, which is nothing but the advancement of
science through time, does not mean an improvement; in many instances progress has
brought disaster to humanity. For Hübner, mythic thought is not inferior to scientific
thought, it just goes in a different way in its search for meaning and it is applied to
other objects. In myths that which is material and that which is ideal, what is
collective and what is individual, original time and our days are all united in one.
What science separates myth unites; both are complementary ways of human thought.
Sigmund Freud, in a letter to Albert Einstein, stated that all sciences are, after all,
some kind of mythology.
The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) stated that sciences begin
to be formulated by using mythological images and expressions. For him, humans are
animals that communicate through symbols; all cultures are then symbolic. Myth is a
type of thought that is not intellectual or discursive, but it is based in mental images.
In myths there is no preparation of real and unreal things. Myths then develop in two
ways one goes toward arts and another toward science. But it is in poetry where the
original characteristic of myth is retained: the creative power of the word.
After reading:
How do scientific and mythic thoughts contribute in building cultures?
Is scientific thought purely logic or are there mythic elements in it?
EUHEMERISM
What is the importance of legend and myth as compared to history, in building

a nation’s identity?
The Greek thinker Euhemerus lived between the 4th and the 3rd centuries before
the Era. He published a famous account of his journey to India titled Hiera anagrafe
(sacred writings); in it, he presented the idea that the old gods were made up of
memories of leaders, wise men and famous historic characters who people had deified
because they had been great benefactors. He was the first investigator in giving to
myths a rational and systematic explanation based on history. Euhemerus believed
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that one could arrive to historical facts if the supernatural elements were eliminated
from myths.
Euhemerism as a theory prospered and his book was translated by Quintus

Ennius (236-169 b. E.), being one of the first Greek works to be translated into Latin.
Although this work is lost, we know of it by the writings of the Christian apologist
Lactantius (241-320) who used this translation in his Divinae Institutiones. Other early
Christian writers used the theory of Euhemerus to demonstrate that myths are a
product of idolatry, and therefore false stories. But at the same time they were saying
that the characters portrayed in myths were historical and very soon synchronic
parallels between the characters that appear in the Bible and those of Greco-Roman
mythology. Thus euhemerism became an auxiliary tool for historians up to the
eighteen century.
When the historic reality of pagan gods was admitted their permanence and
even their significance in Western culture was assured. During the Middle Ages and in
the Renaissance the memory of these gods was maintained; many noble families, cities
and even countries traced their origins up to them. Thus Brittany came from Brutus,
Italy from Italo, Tuscany from Tusco, and so on. In a similar manner, Biblical heroes
and patriarchs were also used to give pedigree to different countries.
As happens with many theories that are widely accepted, euhemerism simplified
things too much. It is true that in Antiquity there were deifications and divinizations,
as happened with pharaohs and Roman emperors, but this does not mean that all
myths come from distorted memories of ancestors. But at the same time, thanks to
euhemerism the tradition of venerating certain deeds, names and symbols of classical
cultures was maintained, and this way cultural unity originated by the pride of
belonging to an old and prestigious tradition was also maintained in Europe.
After reading:
What are the differences of historic texts compared to myths or legends?
The obsession to transform myths into historic or scientific realities continues

in our days. Can you find examples of this?
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PSYCHOANALYSIS OF MYTH
Are myths related to dreams?
Psychologists study myth not from a historical or social perspective, but in

relation to the individual, especially to the subconscious, but it ended up being
considered collective phenomena.
The French sociologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1875-1939), professor of modern

philosophy at La Sorbonne, develop a theory of pre-logic thought. He stated that what
people call “primitive” societies develop a different way of thinking, feeling and
behaving, because they are based on different principles. He was one of the first
researchers to use the concept of mentality. For him, the mentality that stems from
these societies is pre-logic and its main characteristic is that it is dominated by the
principle of participation; while logic mentality is dominated by that of contrast. The
supernatural is perceived in an emotional way and a mystic experience is produced
from the contact with a nature full of mystery that can only be expressed in symbolic
forms. Mystic thought is pre-logic because it does not look for objective causal
connections. Nevertheless, this way of thinking is compatible with the scientific
reasoning. For him, individual thoughts are influenced by collective representations,
which guide them one way or another.
Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the founder of

psychoanalysis, exerted a significant influence on the development of folk studies,
and, therefore, of myth. He realized that the symbols that occur in dreams also appear
in myths, tales, and proverbs. At the same time, he saw that the meaning of myths is
very ample and a myth have many different meanings. Myths are related not to the
cosmos but to the human mind, they are manifestations of an interior world and they
can be conscious or not. On the other hand, the range of objects symbolized in dreams
and myths is not very wide; it is confined to the human body, home, family and
important phases or elements of life, such as birth, death, sex or nakedness.
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Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), professor at the

Technological University of Zurich, divides the human mind into three parts: the ego,
the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. In the collective
unconscious we find the archetypes, the primary images, and the tendency to
experiment things in a certain way. Thanks to the collective unconscious we can share
experiences and images in dreams, fantasies, myths and tales. The symbols that we
immediately recognize are the conjunction of our interior unconscious world with
exterior reality.
From this idea of collective unconscious that of collective imaginary was formed.
Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), the first professor of sociology at the Sorbonne, carried
out synchronic studies of societies, considering them as organisms. He came out with
the idea of a collective consciousness, which considers things in their essential and
permanent aspects and serves as a framework for individuals. US philosopher George
Herbert Mead (1863-1931) applied this concept to his studies. Thanks to symbolic
communication through language and social interaction, human minds are formed.
Human mind emerges from communication, since no idea exists if it is not discovered,
named and communicated.
After reading:
Summarize the contribution of psychoanalysis to the understanding of myths.
What is collective memory, collective unconscious?
FUNCTIONALISM
Do myths serve any purpose in society?
Myths, as cultural phenomena perform an important function in their narrative

form. This function is related to what people believe in, and these beliefs support their
communitarian structures.
The Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942), professor at

London and Yale Universities, realized that cultural elements in any society can only
be understood from inside the culture it operates. He distinguished between myth,
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fairytale, legend, historical account not only by their forms, but also by their social
use. For him, myths were the way people explain that which is unexplainable. There is
a point beyond which no member of a community can give a logical explanation of
things. This lack of knowledge is alleviated by myths. The function of a mythology is to
secure the survival of a society by offering stories that justify the existence of rituals,
beliefs, moral and social rules bestowing upon them a halo of sacredness and
antiquity. Myths explain the present and secure an uncertain future by making
reference to a known archetype which serves as a frame for the knowledge of reality.
Myths express, reinforce and codify beliefs; safeguard and enforce rules and guide in
the performance of ceremonies and rituals.
The British social anthropologist Alfred R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1962),

professor at Oxford University, introduced the concept of structure in social sciences.
Structure means the way individuals and groups are linked in a lasting way inside a
social body. For Radcliffe-Brown the function of an element within a given social
structure became very important. He believed that myths serve as narrative
encyclopedias where the memory of primordial acts and places is kept. Myths, then
justify social order by placing its creation at the beginning of the world, when things
began to exist. But they also give cohesion to societies by offering the feelings their
members must have toward certain positive or negative phenomena.
After reading:
Summarize the contribution of anthropological functionalism to the

understanding of myths.
STRUCTURALISM
What do you think of the statement “Structures have meaning”?
The search of meaning by studying the form and the explanation of form and
meaning by the structure is an important development in Literary Criticism and in
Folkloristics. Structuralism gave to these disciplines and to Art criticism the scientific
rigor they lacked. Structuralism developed thanks to the influence of the works of
Freud, Marx and Saussure. For them, the structure has a meaning and a function.
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The process of structuralist analysis is as follows: segmentation in minimal

units, definition of distinctive traits and grouping of variants inside an invariant.
Semiotics is a natural consequence of structuralism because it tries to find the way to
study a message and the ways it is presented, considering that every message
produces its own laws.
The most important structuralist was the French social anthropologist Claude
Lévi-Strauss (1908-1990). He tried to explain why myths from very different cultures
are similar. As he saw it, this similarity lays basically in the structure of the tale, and
characters, objects and actions tend to suffer many variations. The structure of myths
can give us important clues to understand the symbolic language of a culture. Every
culture possesses a symbolic thought; a system of relations and principles, whose
foundations is primarily subconscious. In this system, the form, which is invariant,
precedes the content, which varies. The units forming the structure of a myth have
little importance, the relations among them and their order within a system is what
gives meaning to the narrative.
To the structures known at his time, Lévi-Strauss added those of reversible and
irreversible time. Myth as a story is irreversible, because it depends on time, what has
been told cannot be changed; but as an idea it is reversible; that is why they are
placed in a time before all times. Even though there are many similarities between
myth and poetry, Lévi-Strauss maintained that they are different because myths are
malleable, they can be manipulated in many ways (translated, paraphrased, reduced
or amplified), but poems cannot change their form.
For the Hungarian professor of history of religions at the Università della

Sapienza in Roma Angelo Brelich (1913-1977), who studied myths taking into account
their variants and other myths inside the same cultural tradition; for him, the study of
an isolated myth will not give its precise meaning, we must take into account the
context of tradition, and the economic and social environments in which a set of
myths is told. Brelich maintained that the function of myth is to give value to things,
even if it does not explain them.
Harry Slochower (1900-1991) studied myths from a double perspective that he

names historic and recurrent. From the historic point of view, every myth taken as a
symbolic system or mythopoeic work is a center that organizes multiple cultural forms
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in society, art, psychology or religion; from the recurrent point of view, there is in each
heroic myth a universal pattern which has a tripartite form: cosmos-chaos-cosmos.
The first act presents a cultural harmony which is disrupted with the arrival of the
hero and his quest; the hero’s creative impulse brings to the community a new state of
harmony. But in it are the seeds of new conflicts.
After reading:
Summarize the contribution of structuralism to the understanding of myths.

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63

VI
SOME CONCLUSIONS

DEMYTHOLOGIZING
What is the meaning of the word myth in every day speech?
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in his work Die

fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Gay Science, 1882) wrote this statement: “God is dead.
God remains dead. We have killed him”. In Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der
Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, 1872) he already had declared that
Man in his age, stripped of myth, anxiously looked in the remote past for his roots.
The death of God seems to complete the process initiated by Plato and the Greek
philosophers against mythic thought and in favor of logical and scientific thought.
During the Romantic and the Victorian periods and with the arrival of
positivism, modern and civilized Western society had also lost the capacity of living
myths as transcendental stories and of communicating them. What has prevailed
since then are scientific explanations. Only through science can truth be reached.
Myths could only be understood if they were transformed into something else.
The German Lutheran theologian Rudolf K. Bultmann (1884-1976) stated that

myths express the certainty humans have that there is another world whose meaning
cannot be found here but in the Other World. Myths are constructed by means of
symbols and imaginary language to express truths that emanate from the Other
World. He asserted that today myths are no longer necessary for Christians to
understand their religion. He came with the idea of demythology: to arrive to the truth
one must disregard mythic elements in the story. Christian myths are the belief in a
spiritual world; the activity of angels, devils and saints; the visions of the Other World;
the existence of sin and the redemption of humans by a god who became man; and the
second coming of Christ. All of this occurs in a tripartite universe made of Heaven,
Earth and Hell; but the truth is far beyond these myths.
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Laury Honko studied the process of demythologization in our societies; he has

found three ways in which this occurs:
Terminological: The word myth is avoided, but the story itself is retained. This is what
has happened with Christian myths, called Sacred History.
Total and compensatory: Myths are rejected because they are considered to be false,
but this rejection creates some problems: their existence and their influence on
society have to be explained, and others have to be persuaded of their
worthlessness. Here is where substitutions are made: the structure of mythic
and non mythic periods in the development of humanity appears as an
explanation. Scientific thought tends to fill the gap left by myth.
Partial and interpretative: Myths are symbolic representations; one must not believe in
myths literally.
After reading:
What are the consequences of the process of demythologizing?
Do you think globalization has any influence on myths?
Find definitions for collective imaginary.
THE CONCEPT OF MYTH IN TODAY’S SOCIETIES
Do we have myths in our societies? Are they similar to ancient and classical
myths?
The horrors of the 20th century forced European scholars to question the false
security science provided and to appreciate the positive aspects mythic though
possesses. Sigmund Freud stated, in a letter to Albert Einstein that all sciences are,
after all, some kind of mythology, and the novelist Thomas Mann defined myth as “an
eternal truth in contrast to an empirical truth”. Some 20th century thinkers, such as
Kurt Hübner (1921- ), Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996), or Lluis Duch(1936- ), have
defended myth as different from scientific thought but just as valid a way of thinking.
In fact, they complement each other. The myth is a system that communicates using
different laws from those of logic thought, but it is capable of transmitting a great
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amount of meaningful messages and of answering many questions that science can’t
address.
Some mythology scholars, especially Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade,

inspired by Carl Jung, emphasize the value old myths continue to have for the people
of our culture because they make transcendental a life that contemporary societies
has dispossessed of its traditional values. Myths have an eternal and universal power.
The Rumanian scholar Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), a historian of religions, held the
opinion that contemporary human beings still need basic mythic elements, such as
sacred time and then eternal return, to be able to escape from the stress caused by a
linear time that takes us to unknown places, and that creates in us what he calls the
terror of history, with its catastrophes, genocides and massacres. The New Yorker
scholar of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) is of the opinion that
myths and epic poems are cultural manifestations of the need to explain cosmic, social
or spiritual realities. Myths with their symbols, archetypes and paradigms, guide
individuals towards happiness through the labyrinth of human existence. Only myths
can capture and communicate that which is transcendental and indescribable. For the
German philosopher Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996), myths have always accompanied
humans, overcoming the rational forces and dogmatic beliefs coming out of conceptual
minds. Myths cannot be destroyed and the demystification society is going through is
only apparent. Myths still give name, put order and master the terror produced by the
chaotic monstrosity of the unknown, the unexplainable; this way, it facilitates human
existence. Karen Armstrong, just as Eliade had done before, emphasizes the need for
sacredness in our contemporary society. She has shown how fragile technology is to
our eyes as various disasters, such as the sinking of the Titanic, have demonstrated.
The World Wars have also shown that science can be turned against us. Auschwitz,
Gulag and Bosnia, also remind us of what can happen if life is not considered sacred
anymore. To this list we can add the nuclear killings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and
the wars of Viet-Nam, Iraq or Afghanistan our countries have been engaged in our
days.
Nevertheless, in our industrial societies and in those that assume new

technologies as an important element, myths continue to be created and recreated,
told and retold, incorporating in this process new technologies, new narrative forms
and new media. Urban or contemporary legends are a good sign of this, but also the
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mythic narrative created by the film industry or by television networks. Even computer
games profusely use mythic structure and models.
The French thinker Roland Barthes talked in his book Mythologies (1957) of the
contemporary eagerness to connect our technological present to a paradigmatic past
which could give it some sense. Something similar was stated by Georges Gusdorf
(1912-2000) in Mythe et métaphysique (Myth and Metaphysics, 1952) where he states
that myth justifies and validates the present by showing it as past. Contemporary
cultures have not lost their power to create myths, and today modern myths are being
created.
The Greek thinker Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) called collective imaginary

the collection of all the memories and representations that a society uses and all the
meanings that can be expressed in a language. The collective imaginary operates not
only through myths and symbols, collective utopias and shared fantasies; it can also
be found in rational thought.
The French art critic Gilbert Durand, founder of the Centre de Recherches sur
I´imaginaire (1966), studied European mythology from the perspective of the
symbolizing capacity and the creative imagination of human beings. For Durand, the
imaginary acts as an antidote to fear, and in particular fear of death. Myths give
humans strength to fight anxiety. The roots of the collective imaginary can be found in
cosmogonies. In order to understand it one must also know what is forbidden or
taboo, and then look at how time is conceived. The Church maintains its power
making people believe that the collective imaginary it manipulates to its own
convenience is reality. But this power, kept for centuries is being attacked by
scientists and mass communicators. Museums, movie theaters, and other cultural
centers are meeting places opposite to churches and religious facilities. Besides,
Western collective imaginary pays more attention to the visual than to the aural; we
believe more in what we see than in what we hear. The electronic image should reveal
how false this assumption is, but it is still too early to reach any trustworthy
conclusion.
The French historian and political analyst Raoul Girardet (1917- ) has shown in
his book Mythes et mythologies politiques (Political Myths and Mythologies, 1986), how
European political imaginary feeds on the elaboration of its own discourses. H
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identifies four mythic ways of thinking, or constellations of mythic themes, that

influence European society: the conspiration, the savior, the Golden Age, and the
unity. These myths nourish collective responses to crises and end up being
incorporated into diverse political ideology. Girardet considered contemporary myths
as fantasies from the collective mind that are projected at moment of crisis.
The Italian professor of aesthetics Gillo Dorfles (1910- ), has defended the
priority of myth over any other types of thinking. He considers myth to be something
necessary and positive in any culture. In his book Nuovi riti, nuovi miti (New Rituals,
New Myths, 1965) he studied the processes of transmitting myths and
demythologizing, the rituals, icons and fetishes in contemporary global and mass
cultures. He analyzed cultural manifestations such as pop art (seen as ready-to-use
art for the consumption of the mass), the kitsch taste (bad taste substitutes related to
the world of fashion), the planned obsolescence, modern sports, science fiction, the
world of discos for teenagers, or the cult of cars.
Dorfles places us inside a civilization based on consumption and image;

consumption leads to constant use and wear, but also fast obsolescence due to the
phenomenon of fashion; image leads to newness in messages, but despite repetitions
and redundancy, it falls into entropy, loses its communicative efficacy fast unless it
becomes an emblem.
He asks whether what we have today is democracy or mass culture, because the
only power the individual has is that of turning on (voting for), turning off (voting
against) or zapping (choose another candidate). The public (the audience) is considered
today as a being that does not think autonomously, but reacts automatically. In spite
of what is being repeated, the concept of fame is disappearing, and today individuals
must choose between anonymity and an ephemeral popularity, which usually does not
come from the appreciation of his or her individual work.
Dorfles has analyzed the degree of rationality in myths, and conceives the
process of demythologizing as the overcoming of irrationality in myths. He compares
traditional myths and heroic poetry with the work of today’s artists; if in tradition we
have an irrationality based on reality with a universal language and meaning shared
by all, in today’s art we find an irrationality that seeks refuge in an individual symbolic
limbo. He has also looked into the perversion of our age’s rituals, using as examples,
68

Santa Claus, the Christmas tree or the Halloween celebrations. He considers this
demythologizing as a crisis of what is sacred, as the dissolution of a rich symbolic
framework which has been already consumed. This process causes a renovation, a
new mythologizing or symbolization of new elements, analogous to those that myths
had in previous times. Degraded myths become fetishes and end up being only
superstitions. Positive elements in myths serve to construct new myths, negative
elements degrade them. The same happens with technology: it liberates human beings
from work but at the same time enslaves them. But it also happens that the cult to
technology creates new aesthetic system capable of producing new myths.
After reading:
What is the pattern of a hero’s adventure in westerns?
What are the characteristics of superheroes?
What types of heroes are depicted in detective or police movies?
REMYTHOLOGIZING
Are myths necessary? Do we keep creating myths?
Hugo Bauzá, from the University of Buenos Aires, has studied the process of
remythologizing. He states that after scientificism has been overcome, a new interest
for the irrational, especially in arts, has appeared, as can be seen in surrealism,
Dadaism, the theory of the absurd, and the revival of magic and religion. Our
intellectuals have understood that irrational myths and symbols are part of human
nature, even if in certain rationalistic periods of our history, they were discredited.
But the process of remythologizing cannot be done by importing alien cultural

elements. This is the danger of movements such as New Age, which looks in the Orient
for the answer to spiritual crises in our civilizations. Many times these foreign
elements come into our society through the media. Individuals in our societies can end
up being reduced to simple consumers, capable of consuming anything coming from
anywhere.
69

In popular literature and in the media there is are great amounts of topics that
nourish our collective imaginary and that no doubt are connected to our mythic
thought, and that operate in the process of remythologizing. We find those concerning
secret societies, real or invented, past or present, such as the Knights Templar, the
Rosicrucian, and the Priory of Sion; we also encounter characters coming from
literature that become manifestations of archetypes, such as Don Juan, Faust, the
monster of Frankenstein, count Dracula; or those coming from the Bible, such as
Mary Magdalene or Joseph of Arimathea, who connect to the cycles of the Grail or the
Merovingian dynasty; to those we can add the search for the Ark of the Covenant, or
what is secretly kept in the archives of the Vatican. Our present collective imaginary is
also being nourished by facts connected to geographical events, as the Bermudas
triangle, Machu Picchu, Easter Island, Stonehenge, the Egyptian pyramids or the
Nazca drawings. Some facts possess a secret meaning which has to be discovered, as
the gothic cathedrals. Historical characters as Madame Blavatsky or Count Saint
Germain or other that can be found when looking at esoteric believes, the Kabala or
Gnosticism are also part of our imaginary, as are other issues connected to
millenarism, the Antichrist and his symbol, 666; the cult to Lucifer and to the Great
Mother, with the theory of the original matriarchate, the poltergeist and other
paranormal phenomena, or the beliefs about the Celtic religion and the power of
druids. To this list we could also add other issues related to conspirations such as the
control that the CIA, the KGB or the Mossad have over governments and institutions.
After reading:
How will a global mythology be in today’s world?

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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Armstrong, Karen. (2005): A Short History of Myth. Penguin Books Australia.
Bascom, William R. (11965): “The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives”, Journal of American
Folklore 307: 3-20. Online version:
<homepage.mac.com/dr_eret/Sites/coursearticles/William_Bascom.pdf> Accessed:
June 21, 2011.
Brelich, Angelo (1978): Gli eroi greci: Un problema storico-religioso. Rome: Ateneo & Bizzarri.
Campbell, Joseph (1956): The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Meridian, 1956.
Campbell, Joseph (1990): The Flight of the Wild Gander: Explorations in the Mythological
Dimension of Fairy Tales, Legends, and Symbols. New York: Harper Perennial. Original
edition: Zurich: Rhein, 1951.
Csapo, Eric (2005): Theories of Mythology. Malden (Massachusetts), Oxford & Carlton
(Victoria, Australia): Blackwell.
Dorfles, Gillo (1965): Nuovi miti, nuovi riti. Turin: Enaudi. Another edition: Skira, 2003.
Duch, Lluis (1995): Mite i cultura Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat.
Duch, Lluis (1996): Mite i interpretació. Barcelona: Abadia de Montserrat.
Dumézil, Georges (1969): Heur et malheur du guerrier. Paris: P. U. de France.
Eliade, Mircea (1961): The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (trans. Willard R.
Trask). New York: Harper Torchbooks. Original: Le sacré et le profane. Paris:
Gallimard, 1957.
Eliade, Mircea (1963): Aspects du mythe. Paris: Gallimard.
Eliade, Mircea (1969): The Quest. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Feldman, Burton y Robert D. Richardson Jr. (1972): The Rise of Modern Mythology 1680–
1860. Bloomington (Indiana): Indiana U. P., reprinted in 2000.
Finnegan, Ruth (1977): Oral Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge U. P.
Frye, Northrop (1981): The Great Code. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
García Gual, Carlos (1999): Introducción a la mitología griega. Madrid: Alianza.

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Graves, Robert (1955): The Greek Myths, 2 vols. London: Penguin, revised in 1957 and 1960.
Graves, Robert y Raphael Patai (1964): Hebrew Myths. New York: Anchor Books-Doubleday.
Havelock, Erick A. (1963): Preface to Plato. Harvard U. P.
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York: Bantam, 1988.
Honko, Lauri (1984): “The Problem of Defining Myth,” Sacred Narrative. Los Angeles &
London: University of California: 41-52.
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Chicago P.
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Juan José Prat Ferrer, Ph.D.

I Traditional oral narrative

II Cosmogonies and cosmologies: How the world is and why it is so

III Heroes and heroines: Legends and adventures

IV Apocalypse: How all things are going to end

V Mythic thought and its interpretation

TRADITIONAL ORAL NARRATIVE

Think before reading:

Culture is divided into different types:

Elitist culture: It focuses on originality; patents and copyright are important

Folk culture: Also sometimes called popular culture, it is created, transmitted

Subculture: It is the culture of subaltern or dominated classes. It is not directly

Counterculture: It is made up of values and norms directly opposed to the

Myth, as a cultural product, shares properties ascribed to all of these

 Are transmitted from generation to generation

 Do not impede sustainable development.

In the ranking of things to be preserved, myth is in an important position. Also,

If artifacts are the manifestations of material culture, ¿what is then a mentifact?

Why is it important to know and care about intangible heritage?

Can you find synonyms to the word folklore?

When do you think the interest in cultural heritage arose in international

Society produces different types of culture according to the segments of

ORATURE AND LITERATURE

Think before reading:

Can there be cultures whose tradition is mainly oral?

Today we receive traditional narratives mainly through writing. The passage

How does an oral community codify its culture?

Make a list of key words related to the concept of orature.

Why is “oral literature” contradictory?

Does orature belong to folklore?

Is orature an occidental concept?

What does “performative features” mean when speaking of orature?

Think before reading:

For the anthropologist and africanist William R. Bascom (1912-1981), who

1. It is a narrative about gods or heroes

The Finnish folklorist Lauri Honko (1932-2002) mentions five characteristics in

1. A narrative form, but not necessarily verbal

Mircea Eliade (1907-1986), historian of religion and professor at the University

1. It presents the history of the acts of the supernatural beings

The Hungarian historian of religions at the Università della Sapienza in Rome

Myth Legend Tale

Place Different world World of today Any place

Think before reading:

Myths have existed for some reason. What is their purpose?

Traditionally, three functions have been assigned to myths: one of sheer

 express the ideology of a society

The German philosopher Hans Blumeneberg (1920-1996) referred to what he

According to Jack Lule, professor of Journalism at Lehigh University in

Psychological: channel the fears and doubts of the human being

Social: express the collective imaginary

Religious: ritually verbalize paradigmatic deeds

Political: control what people think

Legal: express and justify society’s values

Aesthetic: recreate discourses that produce feelings.

Think before reading:

All myths narrate the creation or the establishment of something: a being, a

Creation stories or cosmogonies constitute an important part of etiological

Etiological Cosmogonies Transformations of a young world

What is the difference between cosmology and cosmogony?

In what period of human history can you place the following?

Try to find an example for each of these categories.

COSMOGONIES AND COSMOLOGIES: HOW THE WORLD IS AND WHY IT IS SO

THE CONCEPT OF TIME

Think before reading: