Theories of Myth: Crash Course World Mythology #12 Video Lecture | World Mythology: Crash Course - Personal Learning

Hey there, I'm Mike Rugnetta
This is Crash Course mythology,
and in the first episode of this series,
we defined what we mean by myth.
I also said that we weren't gonna get too theoretical
because the theory of mythology gets complicated quickly--
but you all have asked for an episode on theories of mythology;
...and if you know me, and the other things that I make,
you know how I feel.. about talking theory.
So... that's what we're gonna do;
and, ok, that ask may have just been some strong-arming from Thoth,
but who can say no to that face?!?
[intro music]
So.. let's look at how people think about mythology
and give you some ideas about how to analyze
myths yourself.
We're gonna start with the definition of
MYTH - OLOGY
Unlike myths themselves, which as we pointed out
are difficult to define, mythology
is pretty straightforward--
since in english, "ology" means basically the study of--
"mythology" is the systematic study of myths...
...a thing you probably already figured out for yourself
at this point in the series.
The real question is..
HOW are myths studied,
and for that we're gonna jump in our time-machine
--courtesy of Zurvan the zoroastrian god of time--
check your divine flux capacitor and buckle up.
So, we start in ancient Greece. In the first episode
I mentioned that critical analysis of myths has been around for a long time.
As early as the mid 500's BCE
presocratic philosophers like Xenophanes were criticizing Hesiod and Homer
for attributing all of the evil and shameful aspects of humanity to the gods.
Plato was among the first to equate myths with 'lying'
and, as we discussed in episode 1, that idea has stuck.
But Plato further complicated this issue because he claimed that myths about
gods, heroes, and fantastic creatures were irrational and therefore, 'false.'
Yet philosophical myths like the ones he put forward in "The Republic"
served a rational purpose.. and were 'true.'
Sorry Thoth, you're gonna have to talk it over with Veritas, Roman goddess of truth.
A little bit after Plato came the influential thinker Euhemeros.
He assumed that people who lived before him were primitive, with no concept of science,
so they created fanciful versions of historical events to explain things they didn't understand.
In Euhemeros's opinion, Zeus was an early human king whose deeds became legendary and,
as those legends were retold, he transformed into a god.
Euhemerism has come to mean interpreting "Myths as primitive explanations of the natural world
or as time-distorted accounts of long-past historical events."
Although Euhemeros wasn't particularly influential in his own time, his ideas were picked up later by Roman thinkers--
--especially Christians.
Early church-thinkers, like Tertullian and Clement of Alexanderia, took up the Platonic sense of myth as 'falsehood',
and upon it they based a new theory: that the Greek and Roman myths were influenced by demons
who wanted the stories to prepare their listeners for the story of Jesus, and to provide a contrast between him
and the pagan gods.
..so, I mean, those are some pretty helpful demons.. I guess?
These early mythologists set up a dichotomy between 'mythos,' associated with falsehood,
and 'logos,' which Christian thinkers associated with transcendant truth.
This synthesis of Plato and Christianity was the basis of Western mythology until the Renaissance.
For many centuries European artists drew a great deal from classical Greek and Roman myths
but, mythology as a study didn't really take off until the 18th and 19th centuries,
drawing on the linguistic discovery that the languages of India, SouthWest-Asia and Europe are all related--
they're all derived from a single language,
now known as "Proto-Indo-Europian".
The discovery of Proto-Indo-Europian led some to posit that it was spoken by a group called "Aryans,"
whose myths were the basis for all European, Indian, and Southwest-Asian myths--
--a purported explanation for their similarities.
In addition to the Aryan hypothesis, this discovery also gave way to a broadly comparative mythology
that focused much more on origin and content than function.
There's no real evidence that these Aryans ever existed,
but that didn't stop romantic thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder
who believed that their myths, along with other things, embodied the simplicity and purity of the German 'volk.'
That sounds innocuous enough until we learn that the Nazis would later appropriate Herders pro-German ideas
to justify their atrocities and legitimize their hateful ideology.
The study of myth changes again in the 20th century when it joins forces with the new discipline of anthropology.
Anthropologists wouldn't just read about myths in libraries, they would conduct fieldwork
to discover how myths functioned in living societies.
Although in the early days of anthropology the object of study was still societies considered 'primitive,'
...at least by those anthropologists.
Let's go to the thought bubble--
One of the towering figures in this new way of studying myths was the Scottish anthropologist Sir James Frazer
who could really rock a beard.
His twelve volume book, "The Golden Bough,"
centers on different versions of a myth in which sacred kings are slaughtered
in order to ensure a bountiful harvest.
Frazer supported the concepts of myths as primitive science,
which attributed to the will of deities, people or animals
that which modern science attributes to the impersonal functioning of
various physical laws and biological processes.
That's another way of saying, "Hey, if you haven't quite mastered physics, blame a god."
To be honest, that's what I do.
Ooooh! A GOD!
One of the mythologists to follow Frazer,
Bronisław Malinowski, did fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands
and outlined the new anthropological view of myth that grew out of working with living peoples.
Studied alive, myth... is not symbolic, but a direct expression of its subject-matter;
... a narrative resurrection of a primeval reality,
... Myth fulfills in primitive culture an indispensable function;
it expresses, enhances and codifies belief;
it safeguards and enforces morality;
it vouches for the efficiency of ritual
and contains practical rules for the guidance of man.
Yeah, that 'primitive peoples' part is a little hard to take. Early anthropology was pretty judgy.
But this new approach had the advantage of
focusing on what so-called primitive people know,
rather than what they don't.
Building on the work of anthropologists, recent mythologists
have tried to connect their work to the lived experiences of actual human beings.
--Thanks, Thought Bubble!
At around the same time that anthropology was gaining prominence,
the new field of psychology was also looking to myths
for an explanation of human experience.
Two of the best known psychologists,
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung,
posit that the source of myths is the human unconscious,
and that mythical characters are projections of that unconscious.
We're gonna return to these thinkers in a later episode,
but for now it's helpful to understand the fundamental difference between the two.
For Freud, the unconscious is the true psychical reality;
but our conscious minds, like Tom Cruise,
"CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH!!"
So we make these terrible realities palatable, by creating imaginative works,
like myths,
which are strategies for managing the internal forces that shape our thoughts, feelings and actions.
Jung similarly saw myths as a projection of the unconscious,
but for him.. the unconscious was collective and universal
--NOT individual.
It's like a reservoir, from which we all drink.
A reservoir with more dreams... and less flouride
They put that in the reservoir itself, right?
Jung defined a number of archetypes that he saw as aspects of every person's psyche
and, in his estimation, the characters that appear in myths
are versions of these archetypes.
The collective nature of human consciousness
may be one reason we can find similar mythic characters
from stories originating in many parts of the world.
And of course, we couldn't do an episode on thoeries of mythology
without mentioning the best known mythologist of the twentieth century,
Lets hear it for: Joseph Campbell.
Campbell became famous in the 1980s for a television series,
"The Power of Myth," also with Bill Moyers.
And George Lucas also credited Campbell with influencing Star Wars.
Luke, guess... he's your father.
More on that later.
Campbell's understanding of myth, and particularly of hero stories,
is a reflection of the American valorization of rugged individuals.
For Campbell, "Mythology is ultimately and always
the vehicle through which the individual
finds a sense of identity and place in the world."
Campbell synthesized the ideas of psychoanalysts,
comparative mythologists, and literary and cultural critics
to create his own theory of a single "mono-myth"
that underlies all mythical stories.
Meanwhile, French anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss
-- no relationship to the blue-jeans --
developed a theory for describing myths by looking at their structure.
Structuralism holds that specific instances of culture,
like myths, betray a much more complicated underlying structure.
What that structure is, and how it works,
depends upon which structuralist you're talking to.
Levi-Strauss, arguably the first structuralist, was all about...
BINARIES.
Culture is built a relationship between..
male and female,
hero and villain,
even cooked and raw, among many others.
For him, myths, like all units of culture,
sit atop these inescapable opposing binaries.
And, since many students of mythology will have heard of him and his theories,
we should also mention Romanian religious historian,
Mircea Eliade.
Even though his personal politics have overshadowed his scholarship in many circles.
Eliade was a Romanian nationalist who associated with a proto-fascist group
and thus his reputation, like that of Herder and Nietzsche, has suffered.
Hey!
Mythologists!
No more chillin' with fascists, ok?
I feel like I shouldn't even have to ask this.
Eliade was also a fan of binaries;
particularly the sacred and the profane,
as well as the archaic and the modern.
For Eliade, archaic people were more in-touch with the sacred.
And today myths allow us to escape the profane,
to travel back to the past,
and re-encounter the sacred.
Structuralist theory was very popular at the end of the twentieth century,
but it also left a lot of people wondering, "so what?"
What do we gain by reducing all myths to a set of patterns,
or even to one single pattern?
What does that really tell us about-
-why cultures use myth, or how myth reveals culture?
Contemporary approaches have pioneered some new methods
of asking and answering these questions.
William Doty proposes giving students of myth a toolkit
which includes a series of questions to ask when reading myths,
centering on several concerns:
the social,
the psychological,
the literary,
textual and performative,
the structural and, finally, the political.
These provide a broader way of looking at myths.
Wendy Doniger provides an updated version of comparative mythology,
asking myth readers to look also at the context in which the myth is told--
exploring difference.
These more contemporary ways of looking at myths
fit well with the complex view of the world that we try to take here at Crash Course.
but, we're not going to follow any one school of thought
when it comes to how we "-ology" these here "myths".
We like being eclectic,
and have no interest in forcing you to see myths in one particular way.
Hadúr, Hungarian god of forests?
Got my eye on you!
Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.
Check out our Crash Course Mythology
"Thoth-Tote Bag" and poster, available now at DFTBA.COM.
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Thanks for watching and, you know what?
I've been thinking about it, I think I'm going to come clean:
I don't feel great about that Star Wars joke earlier.
I'm real sorry.