Often times we hear the word Myth and don’t have a complete understanding of what the word means. Mythology can vary greatly but it is one thing that countries, cultures, and religions have in common. While beliefs, knowledge, mythology and religion may intersect they also can differ greatly from each other. Like other countries myths have come to help sculpt and shape American cultural values and behaviors.
A myth is a symbolic way of expressing truths and beliefs that are accepted by society. Myths, which are reading literature that is imaginative, teach truths that may not always have a basis for historical fact. Myths, which communicate ideas in story form, are creative stories that explain and teach religious truths of sin and consequence.
But there are many ways one could interpret myths, Bronislaw Malinowski, an anthropologist, believed that myths tell people about the origins of the early world and that it gives them a reality of how things are to repeat. Malinowski believed that myths weren’t kept alive because of interest, or because they are true tales, but because they give people are a reality of how mankind is to be determined. Malinowski even gives us an example of a grandmother and granddaughter that realize that although everyone still has that youth they once were, they have to come to the realization that everyone gets old and
Myth is a body of story that matters—the patterns present in mythology run deeply in the human psyche
Mythology serves to create an explanation for why the world is the way it is. All religions have mythology in them and myths help people understand history. Myth can mean so many different things to different people. Some myths are total fiction, while others may have a hint of truth in them. But most myths are more of a symbolic and metaphoric truth, rather than a literal truth, because most of the time myths cannot be proven and people are not trying to prove that they are true. Myths become true to the people who believe in them and they use them as a sort of lens through which they see the world. They use myths to create explanations for themselves as to why the world is the way it is and they use them to help cope with the difficulties of life. Myths are a natural outgrowth of our imagination and our passions.
Greek mythology, as in past ways humans detailed lives, was used as a way to explain the environment in which everything around us happened and lived. The natural wonders they witnessed and the passing of time through the days, months, and seasons. Myths were also in a way connected to religion and explained where they came from and what are the lives of the gods. Also stated where humanity had come from and what it they should expect after death. It gave almost a rule on the best way to be in a happy life.(History Staff) Myths were used to tell historical events so that people could maintain contact with their ancestors, the wars they fought, and the places they explored. (Cartwright)
Myths influence the beliefs, theories, and the life style of people and their culture. There’s a huge variety of myths around the world belonging to cultures based on how the world started. Australian mythology says the myth of Aborigines believe that during Dreamtime the god Wandjina created the galaxy and earth along with Baiame teaching the humans their morals.
Mythology is something that has always gone hand in hand with human development, so it must be addressed in relation to the human psychology as well as the impact that human culture has on an individual’s psychology. In order to interpret mythology accurately, a variety of psychological approaches must be used in order to guarantee an adequate understanding of the material. The most useful approaches originate from the schools of thought initiated by Sigmund Freud and Caldwell’s work in theoretical psychology, and they are very helpful when used to interpret Hesiod’s myths The Sacred Marriage of Uranus and Gaia and Their Offspring/The Castration of Uranus and the Birth of Aphrodite (M&L, p64-66, 72-73)
Myths are universal and transcendent through time; many ancient myths are seen recreated in modern times. The author uses Oedipus as a way of comparing myth to psychology. Dreams have also played a major role in civilization; the people who could interpret dreams can understand and create myths.
Oedipus Rex, an ancient Greek tragedy authored by the playwright Sophocles, includes many types of psychological phenomena. Most prominently, the myth is the source of the well-known term Oedipal complex, coined by psychologist Sigmund Freud in the late 1800s. In psychology, “complex” refers to a developmental stage. In this case the stage involves the desire of males, usually ages three to five, to sexually or romantically posses their mother, and the consequential resentment of their fathers. In the play, a prince named Oedipus tries to escape a prophecy that says he will kill his father and marry his mother, and coincidentally saves the Thebes from a monster known as the Sphinx. Having unknowingly killed his true father Laius during his
Overtime, each culture group had developed popular traditional tales that are worldly studied and discussed. Despite their different areas of origins and the distinct story plots, they all share a similar purpose and that is to guide humans to behave properly. Since these stories share an identical purpose and are plotted in a way resembling our real lives, their characters have a similar pattern of behavior, which reveals a great deal about human nature. With this in mind, there are similarities between the two most widely known pieces of literature, Greek mythology and the biblical stories, namely, the Greek myth of Hera and Io compared with the biblical story Cain and Abel, the myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha compared with the story of Noah’s ark, and the myth of Pandora compared with Adam and Eve. These stories vividly reveal aspects of human nature.
In order to look at the reason why mythology has survived as part of our common understanding in the world today, we must first look at the reason they were written. These stories were not written for the purpose of entertaining but were intended to teach us lessons. Lessons of human stupidity, errors or failure of principles. The same mistakes that people were making back then, they are still making in today’s society. The men who wrote them such as Plato, Euripides, and Sophocles were extremely wise men that wrote myths which rarely had happy endings to teach lessons without being drab or uninteresting. If you were waiting on a happily ever after, you were sorely disappointed. The mistakes that were made usually ended in tragedy. These
In many of tradition, a myth carries within it a sense of sacred tradition and primordial relation. These myths are also serving as model for chosen tradition. Myths are extremely complex cultural reality that can be approached and interpreted from various viewpoints. These viewpoints are often related to the whole of
Myths differ from other kinds of signifiers. For one thing, they are never arbitrary. They always contain some kind of analogy, which motivates them. Motivation is necessary to the very duplicity of myth: myth plays on the analogy between meaning and form. There is no myth without motivated form. In contrast to ideas of false consciousness, Myth doesn’t hide things, it distorts them. It alienates the history of the
Mythos, the Greek word for myth means story, appertain to colorful tales that enlightens about the origins of humans and the universe. Myths, as amazing as it sounds, is also a cause for birth of new religions, where and how they originated. Many cultures have myths about how the gods and goddesses came to be, even elucidating the origin of humanity and its traditions. Even ideas about how this world of ours came to existence have many myths, creation myths behind it, disparate in every culture and society, which demonstrates a view on its role in the world. Mythology is simply the study of the myth. There are many psychological theories and meanings that explicate mythology. The most recurrent belief about the psychological value of myth is that myths emblematize contrasting elements of our own psyches or souls. The psychoanalytical frames of reference on myths have indisputably been ineluctable. Myths were and still are progressively seen as expressions of desideratum in the human psyche. But the big question is, what is the beneficence of mythology towards the amelioration of society? If there are myths to decipher or exhibit certain things, character or situations, there also are science and technology, which accommodate every explanation needed to understand each of those things. Many go to science for such interpretation, which conveys the impression of taking care of the signification behind all those natural phenomena,