Mythology

Mythology is a set of myths created within a civilization or people, or in a historical period. She studies stories of fantastic content in which the heroes are gods, demigods and heroes. These stories are recorded in myth (Greek mýthos). A myth is a story from folklore that talks about supernatural beings, ancestors or heroes and their unusual, supernatural deeds. It represents a creation by which the people at the primitive stage of development explain the origin of natural beings and phenomena. Myths are among the first manifestations of the human imagination and arise due to the deep need for a metaphorical interpretation of all the phenomena that a person encounters during his life. Ancient cultures were based on myths and legends about gods and heroes with divine characteristics. Their stories were passed down from generation to generation, being upgraded and changed in accordance with the needs, as well as the degree of development of each epoch.

Unreal and real, lies and truth, primordial stupidity and the highest wisdom - these have always been labels for myth, for traditional stories about gods and heroes, both in science and in everyday life. The resolute rejection of these stories from all areas of intellectual and civilized life or, conversely, their fiery defense and apologetics characterize almost all articles about myth and divide into irreconcilable camps researchers of various professions, as well as all those interested in this phenomenon of human culture. Countless books have been written about myth, especially Greek, and yet, as soon as rational thought reveals some truths about it, it, like the many deities it speaks of, is miraculously transformed, bringing to the surface many new apparitions that are yet to come. master and explain.

The origin of the myth

The constant interest in myths over the centuries is a proof of the general recognition of the power that these poetic narratives have. However, there are still significant disputes over what that power actually lies in. For Plato, who was the first to use the term mythología, it is nothing more than telling stories about, most often, legendary personalities. The main characters in these stories are not always gods, since the Greeks had a large number of heroes, such as Achilles, Heracles, Jason and Theseus, to mention only the most famous. Perhaps the enmity of the goddess Hera drove Hercules to his twelve difficult deeds, but his superhuman deeds still do not have the nature of divine deeds. He remains the prototype of the disobedient individual. Moreover, the theory that myths originate from rituals, derived from the idea that they are stories about gods, is being questioned even in the West Asian tradition, the main source of alleged evidence for that theory. Gilgamesh, the demigod king of the Babylonian epic, is obsessed with his own mortality. Like Hercules, he is the son of a deity and a human being, but for the most part of the epic, he is a man for the poet, not a god.

According to another theory about the origin of myth, folk literature and mythology are almost indistinguishable. An Eskimo once remarked: "Our stories are about human experiences, and what we hear is not always pleasant. When I tell legends, I do not say that, but the wisdom of our ancestors speaks from me. ” Myths are seen here as folk tales reworked by poets, incorporating elements of religious belief. It would be strange, however, if some holy legend did not draw details from life - the wrath of the Babylonian gods because of the noise that people made "on the ground floor" is even mentioned as the cause of the flood. Although the inhabitants of heaven were pleased that humanity had freed them from the burden of labor, they could not endure human roar and commotion. Therefore, they sent a cosmic catastrophe on people in the form of a flood. The myth differs from the folk tale in such an emphasis on the supernatural, which is also a reflection of preoccupation with the ultimate issues of human existence. In the folk tale, the most important is the plot. This antithesis is illustrated by Coyote, the god-subjugator from the mythology of the North American Indians, and his European cousin from medieval folk literature, the fox Renard.

Studying the life of the inhabitants of the Trobriand Islands in Melanesia, the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) stated that the myth is not primarily symbolic or etiological in nature. "Myth in primitive society," wrote Malinowski, "that is, in its original form, is not a mere story but a lived reality - a confirmation of the original, higher and much more important reality that governs the present life, destiny and actions of humanity." between the past and the future that the myth establishes in everyday life. This also rejected the universalist arguments of psychoanalysts, who argued that creative images of the psyche should be attributed to sexual repression. Sigmund Freud's theory (1856-1939), according to which the Oedipus complex is "the primordial source of fons et origo everything", says Malinowski, "I cannot accept" as a unique source of culture, organization and belief ". Carl Jung (1875–1961), the second colossus of psychoanalysis, also disagreed with Freud on this issue, concluding that the individual possesses a personal and collective unconscious: the personal unconscious is filled with material specific to a particular individual, while the collective unconscious contains the mental heritage of humanity - archetypes, or primordial images, which "introduce into our transient consciousness an unknown psychic life from the distant past." As Jung claimed, "that psychic life is the thinking of our ancient ancestors, the way in which they perceived life and the world, gods and people."

The problem of prehistory

If we accept Jung's theory, then the fantasies of the collective unconscious come from the real experiences of our distant ancestors, people who lived at least a million years ago, and prehistoric development, as a serious area of ​​research, is of great importance to mythology researchers. There is, however, a real danger of projecting the ideas we have formed based on known mythologies onto the few available archaeological data. Some facts are indisputable. The mother goddess in western Asia and Europe was certainly preceded by the incarnation of fertility in the so-called figurines of Venus. These statuettes often depict a woman with huge breasts, thighs and buttocks. The message is clear to them: the most important need of primitive hunting and gathering communities is the constant fertility of their wives. In prehistoric cave painting, we come across the figure of the beast-lord. A horned ghost or witch hunter appears on the walls of caves, just as his horned counterpart in the ceremonies of today's Australian natives performs dramatic depictions of tribal myths about "dream time", a long time ago when ancestral spirits walked the earth. What is not present in prehistoric art, however, is the emphasis on human sacrifice, which we find in early agricultural societies. By all accounts, primitive hunters did not equate human destiny with the vegetative cycle of growth, maturation, decay, death, and rebirth.

Prehistory was undoubtedly a creative period of myth. But in the civilizations of the first farmers, cities that grew on the banks of the Nile and Indus and in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, along with mythologies, the clergy also developed. The Sumerians even considered themselves the property of their gods, the cultivators of divine possessions. The oldest known myths today were formed and recorded there. Only in the living tradition of Indian mythology can a direct connection with this formative period of myth be revealed. Namely, perhaps the Vedic deities, revered by the Aryan conquerors, were suppressed due to the revival of older beliefs that originated in the Indus Valley civilization.

Literature:

1. Dragoslav Srejović - Aleksandrina Cermanović-Kuzmanović, Recnik grčke i rimske mitologije, drugo izdanje, Beograd: Srpska književna zadruga, 1987

2. Arthur Koterel, Dictionary of World Mythology, Belgrade: Nolit, 1998