MYTH AND HISTORY

• The meaning and the differences between myth and

history
• Appear to be contradictory
• Both are narratives; arrangements of events into unified
stories which can be recounted
• Myth is a narrative of origins, taking place in a primordial
time, a time other than that of everyday reality
• History is a narrative of recent events, extending
progressively to include events that are further in the
past, but there are situated in human time
• The model of myth; the Greek god of the ancient Greece
 MYTH AND HISTORY
• The transition from myth to history, as taken place in the Greek
myths, from gods to heroes, to stories of ancestors
• The intersection between myth an history; stories reported by
anonymous sources, no determinant origin, received through
tradition, accepted as credible, with no guarantee of authenticity
other than the belief of those who transmit them
• History is an epistemological break with such mode of transmission
and reception (but after many stages and evolutions)
• The conflict between myth and history; the object of myth itself
which is the narrative of origins, as the latter extends far beyond
the history of gods, heroes, ancestors.
• Myth answers the question of origin but those founding event hs
no place in history but is situated before history – in illo tempore
 MYTH AND HISTORY
• The relation between myth to history
• In narrow sense; they are two different kinds of narratives.
• Myth is a narrative concerning the origin of everything that we can study
• History is the precise literary genre, the writing of history or
historiography. It is also what man do or suffer, human beings make
them and are affected by them, or beyond the history, how a given
culture interpret interprets its historical mode of existence.
• History as lived experience, myth gives values to history
• Historiography is the narrative of human actions in the
past , knowledge of societies and people in time. The
reference to time, may involves certain perception of time
which becomes the object of reflection; cyclical or linear
 MYTH AND HISTORY
Myth and history in ancient Greek
• Herodotus (5th BCE) work titled ‘Historie’ its principal meaning is
investigation
• He studied the causes, the effect, the responsible agents involved in
the war between the Greeks and the Persians, also the heroic ages, the
Trojan war
• Unlike myths of origins, and heroic tales situated in ancient times,
Herodotus are concerned with recent events., far mere descriptions,
they are expressions of a mode of thinking that characterizes what has
been called the Iconic Enlightenment.
• This marks the epistemological break with myth that mars the
emergence of history, geography, tehnology, cosmology and the
philosophy of nature. However, the break was not a simple genetic and
linear process. There was intermediate stages during the transition.
 THE TRANSITION FROM MYTH TO
HISTORY
• Before Herodotus, there was Hecateetus of Miletus (second half of the 6 th
BCE) who authored peiregesis and Genealogis
• The former is an account he made on the voyages around the world and
relate history to geography, cartography and ethnology. The latter is the
narrative of the greate family tree of the heroic age.
• Herodotus himself still talk about heroic age, explained the chronology
dating back to the Trojan war, the Persian war.
• Why history is important according to Herodotus;
• Man action may not be forgotten, nor things greate and wonderful, weheterh
accomplished by Greeks or barbarians, go without report, nor especially the causes of
the wars between one another.
• So, history is to avoid forgetfulness,history takes its place within te body of tradtions
that together onstitue what could be called the narrative identity of a culture.
• It is also to discove rthe cause of an essentially conflictiual event.
• To discover the causes of events and divine justice is effected by the course of events
• Thucydides was another Greek historian.
• He defines his work as means of seeing clearly into
events of the past and those yet to come by reason of
the human character they possess, offering similarities
or analogies (History of the Peloponnesian war)
• “acquisition for all times” human time will take on
consistency in the face of the time of the gods, only
when the narrative is anchored to a sort of logic of
action.
 MYTH, HISTORY AND
ARCHETYPES
• Exemplary Models," "Paradigms," And "Archetypes
In The Myths And Its’ Function In History
• To particular fact for the man of the traditional and
archaic societies, the models for his institutions and
the norms for his various categories of behavior are
believed to have been "revealed" at the beginning of
time, that, consequently, they are regarded as
having a superhuman and "transcendental" origin.
• All the myths have something in common, “the
primitive ontological conception”; an act/object
becomes real only insofar as it imitates or repeats
an archetype.
• The reality is acquired solely through repetition or
participation
• They are real. Things are lack of archetypes (the
exemplary model) is meaningless and lack of
relaity
• Man has always the tendency to be archetypal and
paradigmatic
• A sacrifice for example, not only exactly reproduces the
initial sacrifice revealed by God ab origine, it is also takes
place at the same primordial mythical moment
• This is indeed an imitation; all imitations are archetypes
• Through such imitation, man is projected into the
mythical epoch, in which the archetypes were first
revealed
• The abolition of profane time and the individual’s
projection into mythical time occur only at essential
periods through rituals, ceremony etc.
• To illustrate; the Brahmanic texts clearly bring out the
heterogeneity of the two times, the sacred and the profane, of
the modality of the gods, which is coupled with immortality,
and the modality of man, which is coupled with death.
• Insofar as he repeats the archetypal sacrifice, the sacrificer, in
full ceremonial action, abandons the profane world of mortals
and introduces himself into the divine world of the immortals.
• He himself, indeed, declares this, in the following terms: "I
have attained Heaven, the gods; I am become immortal!"
(Taittirtya Sawhita, I, 7, 9).
• Should he now descend once more to the profane world,
which he has left during the rite, he would die instantly; hence
various rites of desacralization are indispensable to restore the
sacrificer to profane time.