According To Foster What Is A Myth

Myth is a body of story that matters—the patterns present in mythology run deeply in the human psyche

Well, the word myth brings to my mind fantasy tale of good and evil and how good wins over evil. I was reading the material’s for the class but however it has brought me to a new form of thinking. For me it was like playing in the woods as a child with my older brother and younger sister they would say to me to the boogey scare, I would hurry and run home scared out my mind, crying to my mother to help me and she

From Homer to Calypso and everywhere in between, the journey through this course has allowed me to fully understand what myth is and redefine the term myth. In the beginning of this course I had described myth as “a collection of stories used to entertain readers through the use of literary devices”. This course has allowed me to change the way I define myth and fully understand what the subject is truly about.

We tend to think of myth as an untrue story or as an outdated explanation for a mystery long since cleared up by science, but myth is actually a framework of meaning, a set of collective fantasies that story our relationship to each other, the world and the universe. To tell a myth is to tell a culture 's dream about its inner workings and truths. Myth does not convey these truths literally, however. A myth tells its tale through symbol, image and metaphor. They don 't explain so much as offer an enchanting, elevating or disturbing experience, sometimes warning us about where we should or should not go. Myths continually come back to life all around us. No one leaves them behind because we always face the recurring problems of life they address.

The modern perspective of mythology has created and propelled the stigma against mythology as being a valid source of information, consequently designating mythology as nothing more than fictitious stories. Since the majority of the ancient people were non-literate, the transmission of myths relied on oral recounts, unlike modern society which relies primarily on material documentation. The oral tradition of mythology allowed for myths to assume a variety of different forms depending on the culture’s perception. The development and modification of myths were determined by the values and beliefs among the society in which they were distributed. Mythology is important to people, not because it provides a single purpose and answer, but because

Most myths involve rituals- prescribed forms of sacred ceremonials, but social anthropologists disagree as to whether rituals generated myths or myths generated rituals. Distinguishing between myth, legend and folk tale M.H. Abrams puts, “If the protagonist is a man rather than a supernatural being, the story is usually not called myth but legend story concerns supernatural beings, but is not part of a systematic mythology, it is usually classified as a folk tale”( Abrams 102). Myth, being a traditional story of unknown origin handed down from earliest times, has close resemblance to legend.

A Journey through the Hebrew Scriptures (2003) evaluates the major debate among scholars regarding the definition of ‘myth’ and its role in Christian society and literature today, particularly the Hebrew Bible and how that impacts the interpretation of God. Frick describes a ‘myth’ as a story with no grounding in fact, a pure fiction, falsehood, or fantasy. In basic terms something that is ‘not considered true in any sense’. This narrative literacy genre emerges in nearly every spiritual tradition. Yet, to many any ‘god-talk’ is considered a myth. For a text to qualify as a myth, it must be a traditional story that deals with a character(s) who is more than an ordinary human and treats events in isolated ancient times.

From before the dawn of civilization as we know it, humanity has formed myths and legends to explain the natural world around them. Whether it is of Zeus and Hera or Izanami-no-Mikoto and Izanagi-no-mikoto, every civilization and culture upon this world has its own mythos. However, the age of myth is waning as it is overshadowed in this modern era by fundamental religion and empirical science. The word myth has come to connote blatant falsehood; however, it was not always so. Our myths have reflected both the society and values of the culture they are from. We have also reflected our inner psyche, conscious and unconscious, unto the fabric of our myths.

1. A myth is a traditional story that helps convey a fundamental or cultural worldview, wherein values are established by heroes in a legendary context. These values often contain important human truths or universal truths about human nature. For example, Homer's Iliad contains many important truths even though the story itself is full of fantastic/mythological elements, such as the appearance of the gods in the midst of the battlefield at Troy. However, Homer deftly mixes Greek mythology with historical accounts of real persons. What Homer did with the Iliad was to link Greek heritage and history with Greek religion, to create a kind of historical-religious epic poem that could teach Greeks about the past, their heritage, the value of honor, truths of human nature (such as the way valor is lost and won on the battlefield, or the way a mother like Thetis will do anything to protect her son). Not only does the Iliad explore the way the Greeks believed the gods to behave and look upon them, it also showed the way they saw themselves and the characteristics they most valued as a people.

But lastly of all myths are important to today’s world because it is truthful and honest stories that people believe. So things can make more sense to people. The author declaim, “But the reason why mythology is still important is that it is pure storytelling”(Griffin Jr). This helps the article because then again if myths did not exist then storytelling would not be around possibly making kids and even some adults not understand certain things in life.

A myth is an unproved or untrue belief that is used to justify a social institution. The idea that a positive attitude can stave off cancer is a myth.

That is why studying mythology is essential here because it is the myth that forms the conscious of the peoples and somehow represents the roots from which they gain their true essence and consequently their conceptual frameworks. Linda Hogan claims that "in recent times, the term 'myth ' has come to signify falsehood, but when we examine myths, we find that they are a high form of truth. They are the deepest, innermost cultural stories of our human journeys toward spiritual and psychological growth." (qtd. in Dreese 1999: 9) Myths are, first and foremost, stories, and knowledge of these stories, through which our early ancestors speak their wisdom to us, shapes how later generations would feel about their world and the way they should react to it. Leslie Marmon Silko states that "[S]tory makes … community." (qtd. in Huang 3)

A substantial amount of the traditional tales have been rewritten in various forms and have also become printed literature. The tales are extremely important within a society because it carries culture in which is a reflection of a certain society. Due to this, myths express many differences such as social practices, the beliefs of the creators, and the wisdom behind each story. This allows us to understand that there is much more to myths than inspiration and entertainment, in fact, they express the spiritual truths of mankind. Albeit the fact that

We can say that myth plays an important role in constructing the plot of the fantasy work. Myth means ideas, thoughts, and images that have the relationship with folklores, fairy tales, spiritual stories, stories of Gods and legends. Donna Rosenberg has expressed her thoughts on myths in her introduction to the World Mythology, “ Myths symbolize human experience and embody the spiritual values of a culture....Some explain origins, natural phenomenon, and death; others describe the nature and function of divinities; while still others provide models of virtuous behaviour by relating the adventures of the heroes or the misfortunes of arrogant humans.(xv) Myths and folklores have a broad range of functions in fantasy literature. In his article ‘ Folklore and Fantastic Literature,’ C.W. Sullivan III mentions the functions of myth that is particularly important to second world, or high fantasy. J.R.R. Tolkien has made a great use of fantasy in his On Fairy-Stories.

Myths could be viewed as a representation of action, which can be analyzed from a series of consequentially related sequences. These units of action are known as mythemic sequences, made up of the following categories: agent, action, patient and consequence. Each sequence mirrors the syntactic structure of the action and serves as a schema for dividing and organizing events in the myth. In this light, an agent acts upon a patient and changes the condition or state of the patient. Although the mythemic sequence seemingly performs several roles, it maintains the integrity of the sequence as one unit. The various aspects found within the sequence are hierarchically superimposed, showing that the basic unit of action in myths can be analyzed into