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Mythology
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The word mythology (from the Greek μυϑολογία mythología, from μυθολογείν mythologein to relate myths, from μύθος mythos, meaning a narrative, and λόγος logos, meaning speech or argument) literally means the (oral) retelling of myths – stories that a particular culture believes to be true and that use the supernatural to interpret natural events and to explain the nature of the universe and humanity. In modern usage, "mythology" is either the body of myths from a particular culture or religion (as in Greek mythology, Egyptian mythology or Norse mythology) or the branch of knowledge dealing with the collection, study and interpretation of myths, also known as mythography.

Contents [hide]
1 Term
2 Characteristics
3 Religion and mythology
4 Related concepts
5 Formation of myths
6 Myths as depictions of historical events
7 Modern mythology
8 Notes
9 References
10 See also
11 External links



[edit] Term
The term mythology has been in use since the 15th century, and means "an exposition of myths". The current meaning of "body of myths" itself dates to 1781 Oxford English Dictionary (OED).[1] The adjective mythical dates to 1678. Myth in general use is often interchangeable with legend or allegory, but some scholars strictly distinguish the terms.[2] The term has been used in English since the 19th century. The newest edition of the OED distinguishes the meanings

1a. "A traditional story, typically involving supernatural beings or forces or creatures , which embodies and provides an explanation, aetiology, or justification for something such as the early history of a society, a religious belief or ritual, or a natural phenomenon", citing the Westminster Review of 1830 as the first English attestation[3]
1b. "As a mass noun: such stories collectively or as a genre." (1840)
2a. "A widespread but untrue or erroneous story or belief" (1849)
2b. "A person or thing held in awe or generally referred to with near reverential admiration on the basis of popularly repeated stories (whether real or fictitious)." (1853)
2c. "A popular conception of a person or thing which exaggerates or idealizes the truth." (1928)
In contrast to the OED's definition of a myth as a "traditional story", many folklorists apply the term to only one group of traditional stories. By this system, traditional stories can be arranged into three groups:[4][5][6]

myths - sacred stories concerning the distant past, particularly the creation of the world; generally focussed on the gods
legends - stories about the (usually more recent) past, which generally include, or are based on, some historical events; generally focussed on human heroes
folktales/fairytales (or Märchen, the German word for such tales) - stories whose tellers acknowledge them to be fictitious, and which lack any definite historical setting; often include animal characters
Religious-studies scholars often limit the term "myth" to stories whose main characters "must be gods or near-gods".[7]

Some scholars disagree with such attempts to restrict the definition of the word "myth". The classicist G. S. Kirk thinks the distinction between myths and folktales may be useful,[8] but he argues that "the categorizing of tales as folktales, legends, and proper myths, simple and appealing as it seems, can be seriously confusing".[9] In particular, he rejects the idea "that all myths are associated with religious beliefs, feelings or practices".[10] The religious scholar Robert A. Segal goes even farther, defining myths simply as stories whose main characters are "personalities — divine, human, or even animal".[11]

A popular meaning (which English myth shares with Greek μῦθος) of a rumour, misconception or mistaken belief, is in marked contrast to the meaning "stories of deep cultural or spiritual significance". In this article, the term is used in the latter sense, detached from the notion of historical truth, throughout.


[edit] Characteristics

In Shintoism, the Kappa are a type of water imp and are considered to be one of many suijin (literally "water-deity").Historically, the important approaches to the study of mythological thinking have been those of Vico, Schelling, Schiller, Jung, Freud, Lávy-Bruhl, Levi-Strauss, Frye, the Soviet school, and the Myth and Ritual School.[12]

Myths are narratives about divine or heroic beings, arranged in a coherent system, passed down traditionally, and linked to the spiritual or religious life of a community, endorsed by rulers or priests. Once this link to the spiritual leadership of society is broken, they lose their mythological qualities and become folktales or fairy tales.[13] In folkloristics, which is concerned with the study of both secular and sacred narratives, a myth also derives some of its power from being more than a simple "tale", by comprising an archetypical quality of "truth".

Myths are often intended to explain the universal and local beginnings ("creation myths" and "founding myths"), natural phenomena, inexplicable cultural conventions or rituals, and anything else for which no simple explanation presents itself. This broader truth runs deeper than the advent of critical history, and it may or may not exist as in an authoritative written form which becomes "the story" (preliterate oral traditions may vanish as the written word becomes "the story" and the literate class becomes "the authority"). However, as Lucien Lévy-Bruhl puts it, "The primitive mentality is a condition of the human mind, and not a stage in its historical development."[14]

Most often the term refers specifically to ancient tales of historical cultures, such as Greek mythology or Roman mythology. Some myths descended originally as part of an oral tradition and were only later written down, and many of them exist in multiple versions. According to F. W. J. Schelling in the eighth chapter of Introduction to Philosophy and Mythology, "Mythological representations have been neither invented nor freely accepted. The products of a process independent of thought and will, they were, for the consciousness which underwent them, of an irrefutable and incontestable reality. Peoples and individuals are only the instruments of this process, which goes beyond their horizon and which they serve without understanding." Individual myths or mythemes may be classified in various categories:

Ritual myths explain the performance of certain religious practices or patterns and associated with temples or centers of worship.
Origin myths (aetiologies) describe the beginnings of a custom, name or object.
Creation myths, which describes how the world or universe came into being.
Cult myths are often seen as explanations for elaborate festivals that magnify the power of the deity.
Prestige myths are usually associated with a divinely chosen king, hero, city, or people.
Eschatological myths are stories which describe catastrophic ends to the present world order of the writers. These extend beyond any potential historical scope, and thus can only be described in mythic terms. Apocalyptic literature such as the New Testament Book of Revelation is an example of a set of eschatological myths.
Social myths reinforce or defend current social values or practices.
the Trickster myth, which concerns itself with the pranks or tricks played by gods or heroes. Heroes do not have to be in a story to be considered a myth.
Middleton argues that, "For Lévi-Strauss, myth is a structured system of signifiers, whose internal networks of relationships are used to 'map' the structure of other sets of relationships; the 'content' is infinitely variable and relatively unimportant."[15]


[edit] Religion and mythology
Main article: Religion and mythology
Significantly, none of the scholarly definitions of "myth" (see above) imply that myths are necessarily false. In a scholarly context, the word "myth" may mean "sacred story", "traditional story", or "story about gods", but it does not mean "false story". Therefore, scholars may speak of "religious mythology" without meaning to insult religion. (For instance, a scholar may call Christian and Muslim scriptures "myths" without meaning to insult Christianity and Islam.) However, this scholarly use of the word "myth" may cause confusion and offense, due to the popular use of "myth" to mean "falsehood".

Many myths, such as ritual myths, are clearly part of religion. However, unless we simply define myths as "sacred stories" (instead defining them as "traditional stories", for instance), not all myths are necessarily religious. As the classicist G. S. Kirk notes, "many myths embody a belief in the supernatural [...] but many other myths, or what seem like myths, do not".[16] As an example, Kirk cites the myth of Oedipus, which is "only superficially associated [...] with religion or the supernatural", and is therefore not a sacred story.[17] (Note that folklorists would not classify the Oedipus story as a myth, precisely because it is not a sacred story.[18])

Examples of religious myths include:

the Hebrew creation account in Genesis
the Mesopotamian Enuma Elish, a creation account around which the Babylonians' religious New Year festival revolved[19]
an Australian myth describing the first sacred bora ritual[20]

[edit] Related concepts
Myths are not the same as fables, legends, folktales, fairy tales, anecdotes or fiction, but the concepts may overlap. Notably, during Romanticism, folktales and fairy tales were perceived as eroded fragments of earlier mythology (famously by the Brothers Grimm and Elias Lönnrot). Mythological themes are also very often consciously employed in literature, beginning with Homer. The resulting work may expressly refer to a mythological background without itself being part of a body of myths (Cupid and Psyche). The medieval romance in particular plays with this process of turning myth into literature. Euhemerism refers to the process of rationalization of myths, putting themes formerly imbued with mythological qualities into pragmatic contexts, for example following a cultural or religious paradigm shift (notably the re-interpretation of pagan mythology following Christianization). Conversely, historical and literary material may acquire mythological qualities over time, for example the Matter of Britain and the Matter of France, based on historical events of the 5th and 8th centuries, respectively, were first made into epic poetry and became partly mythological over the following centuries. "Conscious generation" of mythology has been termed mythopoeia by J. R. R. Tolkien[21], and was notoriously also suggested, very separately, by Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg.


[edit] Formation of myths
Robert Graves said of Greek myth: "True myth may be defined as the reduction to narrative shorthand of ritual mime performed on public festivals, and in many cases recorded pictorially." (The Greek Myths, Introduction). Graves was deeply influenced by Sir James George Frazer's mythography The Golden Bough, and he would have agreed that myths are generated by many cultural needs. Myths authorize the cultural institutions of a tribe, a city, or a nation by connecting them with universal truths. Myths justify the current occupation of a territory by a people, for instance. All cultures have developed over time their own myths, consisting of narratives of their history, their religions, and their heroes. The great power of the symbolic meaning of these stories for the culture is a major reason why they survive as long as they do, sometimes for thousands of years. Mâche distinguishes between "myth, in the sense of this primary psychic image, with some kind of mytho-logy, or a system of words trying with varying success to ensure a certain coherence between these images[22]. Joseph Campbell is one of the more famous modern authors on myths and the history of spirituality. His book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1948) outlined the basic ideas he would continue to elaborate on until his death in 1987.


[edit] Myths as depictions of historical events

Relief of the "Descent of the Ganga" in Mahabalipuram (also Mamallapuram), India; detail of the central part, the complete relief is 9 m high and 27 m wide.As discussed above, the status of a story as myth is unrelated to whether it is based on historical events. Myths that are based on a historical events over time become imbued with symbolic meaning, transformed, shifted in time or place, or even reversed. One way of conceptualizing this process is to view 'myths' as lying at the far end of a continuum ranging from a 'dispassionate account' to 'legendary occurrence' to 'mythical status'. As an event progresses towards the mythical end of this continuum, what people think, feel and say about the event takes on progressively greater historical significance while the facts become less important. By the time one reaches the mythical end of the spectrum the story has taken on a life of its own and the facts of the original event have become almost irrelevant. A classical example of this process is the Trojan War, a topic firmly within the scope of Greek mythology. The extent of a historical basis in the Trojan cycle is disputed, see historicity of the Iliad.[citation needed]

This method or technique of interpreting myths as accounts of actual events, euhemerist exegesis, dates from antiquity and can be traced back (from Spencer) to Evhémère's Histoire sacrée (300 BCE) which describes the inhabitants of the island of Panchaia, Everything-Good, in the Indian Ocean as normal people deified by popular naivety. As Roland Barthes affirms, "Myth is a word chosen by history. It could not come from the nature of things". [23]

This process occurs in part because the events described become detached from their original context and new context is substituted, often through analogy with current or recent events. Some Greek myths originated in Classical times to provide explanations for inexplicable features of local cult practices, to account for the local epithet of one of the Olympian gods, to interpret depictions of half-remembered figures, events, or to account for the deities' attributes or entheogens, even to make sense of ancient icons, much as myths are invented to "explain" heraldic charges, the origins of which has become arcane with the passing of time. Conversely, descriptions of recent events are re-emphasised to make them seem to be analogous with the commonly known story. This technique has been used by some religious conservatives in America with text from the Bible, notably referencing the many prophecies in the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation especially. It was also used during the Russian Communist-era in propaganda about political situations with misleading references to class struggles. Until World War II the fitness of the Emperor of Japan was linked to his mythical descent from the Shinto sun goddess, Amaterasu.[citation needed]

Mâche argues that euhemerist exegesis, "was applied to capture and seize by force of reason qualities of thought, which eluded it on every side."[24] This process, he argues, often leads to interpretation of myths as "disguised propaganda in the service of powerful individuals," and that the purpose of myths in this view is to allow the "social order" to establish "its permanence on the illusion of a natural order." He argues against this interpretation, saying that "what puts an end to this caricature of certain speeches from May 1968 is, among other things, precisely the fact that roles are not distributed once and for all in myths, as would be the case if they were a variant of the idea of an 'opium of the people.'"

Contra Barthes Mâche argues that, "myth therefore seems to choose history, rather than be chosen by it" [25], "beyond words and stories, myth seems more like a psychic content from which words, gestures, and musics radiate. History only chooses for it more or less becoming clothes. And these contents surge forth all the more vigorously from the nature of things when reason tries to repress them. Whatever the roles and commentaries with which such and such a socio-historic movement decks out the mythic image, the latter lives a largely autonomous life which continually fascinates humanity. To denounce archaism only makes sense as a function of a 'progressive' ideology, which itself begins to show a certain archaism and an obvious naivety."[26]

Catastrophists [27] such as Immanuel Velikovsky believe that myths are derived from the oral histories of ancient cultures that witnessed "cosmic catastrophes". The catastrophic interpretation of myth, forms only a small minority within the field of mythology and often qualifies as pseudohistory. Similarly, in their book Hamlet's Mill, Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend suggest that myth is a "technical language" describing "cosmic events", [28]


[edit] Modern mythology
Film and book series like Star Wars and Tarzan have strong mythological aspects that sometimes develop into deep and intricate philosophical systems. These items are not mythology, but contain mythic themes that, for some people, meet the same psychological needs. An example is that developed by J. R. R. Tolkien in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.

Fiction, however, does not reach the level of actual mythology until people believe that it really happened. For example, some people believe that fiction author Clive Barker's Candyman was based upon an actual event, and new stories have grown up around the figure. The same can be said for the Blair Witch and many other works of fiction.

Mythology is alive and well in the modern age through urban legends, New Age beliefs, certain aspects of religion and so forth. In the 1950s Roland Barthes published a series of essays examining modern myths and the process of their creation in his book Mythologies. Swiss psychologist Carl Jung (1873-1961) and his followers also tried to understand the psychology behind world myths.


[edit] Notes
^ In extended use, the word can also refer to collective or personal ideological or socially constructed received wisdon, as in "At least since Tocqueville compared American society to 'a vast lottery', our mythology of business has celebrated risk-taking." (2000 The New Republic, 29 May 2000)
^ Doyle
^ Earlier editions of the OED also present this quote as the earliest attestation of myth, but consider it an example of the definition corresponding to definition 2.
^ Glenn
^ Segal, p. 5
^ Zong, p. xxi
^ Segal, p. 5
^ Kirk, p. 37-41
^ Kirk, p. 22
^ Kirk, p. 11
^ Segal, p. 5
^ Guy Lanoue, Foreword to Meletinsky, p.viii
^ Simpson & Roud (2000). Dictionary of English Folklore, 254.  
^ Mâche (1992). Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion, 8.  
^ Middleton (1990). Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion, 222.  
^ Kirk, p. 11
^ Kirk, p. 11
^ Dundes, p. 45
^ Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 77
^ Reed, p. 33-36
^ Tolkien (1997). The Monsters and the Critics. HarperCollins; New Ed edition.  
^ Mâche (1992). Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion, 20.  
^ Mâche (1992). Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion, 20.  
^ Mâche (1992). Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion, 10.  
^ Mâche (1992). Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion, 21.  
^ Mâche (1992). Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion, 20.  
^ Researchers include Dwardu Cardona (author of God Star ISBN 1-4120-8308-7), Ev Cochrane (The Many Faces of Venus ISBN 0-9656229-0-9), Alfred de Grazia (Quantavolution series), David Talbott and (Saturn Myth ISBN 0-385-11376-5), and authors at Catastrophism! Man, Myth and Mayhem in Ancient History and the Sciences
^ Santillana & Dechend (1990). Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth, 222.  

[edit] References
Dundes, Alan. "Binary Opposition in Myth: The Propp/Levi-Strauss Debate in Retrospect". Western Folklore 56 (Winter, 1997): pp. 39-50.
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (1957)
Kees W. Bolle, The Freedom of Man in Myth. Vanderbilt University Press, 1968.
Reed, A. W. Aboriginal Myths, Legends and Fables. Chatswood: Reed, 1982.
Thomas Bulfinch, Bulfinch's Mythology (1880s).
Caillois, Roger (1972). Le mythe et l'homme. Gallimard.
Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press, 1949.
Mircea Eliade
Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return. Princeton University Press, 1954.
The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans. Willard R. Trask. NY: Harper & Row, 1961.
James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (1890).
Louis Herbert Gray [ed.], The Mythology of All Races, in 12 vols., 1916.
Edith Hamilton, Mythology (1998)
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl
Mental Functions in Primitive Societies (1910)
Primitive Mentality (1922)
The Soul of the Primitive (1928)
The Supernatural and the Nature of the Primitive Mind (1931)
Primitive Mythology (1935)
The Mystic Experience and Primitive Symbolism (1938)
Charles H. Long, Alpha: The Myths of Creation. George Braziller, 1963.
Meletinsky, Eleazar Moiseevich The Poetics of Myth (Translated by Guy Lanoue and Alexandre Sadetsky, foreword by Guy Lanoue) 2000 Routledge ISBN 0415928982
Barry B. Powell, "Classical Myth," 5th edition, Prentice-Hall.
Santillana and Von Dechend (1969, 1992 re-issue). "Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge And Its Transmission Through Myth", Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-87923-215-3.
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling
Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, 1856.
Philosophy of Mythology, 1857.
Philosophy of Revelation, 1858.
Segal, Robert A. Myth: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004
Welker, Glenn. "Stories/Myths/Legends". Indigenous Peoples Literature. 14 August 2004 <http://www.indigenouspeople.net/stories.htm>.
Zǒng In-Sǒb. Folk Tales from Korea. Elizabeth: Hollym International, 1982
Kirk, G. S. Myth: Its Meaning and Functions in Ancient and Other Cultures. Berkeley: Cambridge UP, 1973

[edit] See also
Look up myth, mythology in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.General
Archetypal literary criticism, Comparative mythology, Folklore, National myth, Artificial mythology, Legendary creature, Mytheme, Monomyth, Mythical place, Origin belief
Mythological archetypes
Culture hero, Death deity, Earth Mother, First man or woman, Hero, Life-death-rebirth deity, Lunar deity, Psychopomp, Sky father, Solar deity, Trickster, Underworld, Panic,
Myth and religion
Religion and mythology, Christian mythology (Mythological and eschatological Biblical interpretation and Jesus as myth), Jewish mythology, Islamic mythology
Lists
List of mythologies, List of deities, List of mythical objects, List of species in folklore and mythology, List of species in folklore and mythology by type

[edit] External links
At Wikiversity, you can learn about:
School:Comparative MythologyMyths and Myth-Makers Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by comparative mythology by John Fiske.
Godchecker Easy-to-use searchable encyclopedia of gods and goddesses from around the world; currently has over 2,500 gods listed, including many obscure deities.
www.mythologyweb.com Information about myths, legends and folklore, as well as a message board.
Timeless Myths.
Winged Sandals An interactive learning website.
The New Student's Reference Work/Mythology
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythology"
Categories: All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements since April 2007 | Mythology | Anthropology of religion

[ 本帖由 戈兰 于 2007-8-22 23:45 最后编辑 ]

戈兰

Religion and mythology
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
Religion and mythology differ, but have overlapping aspects. Both terms by definition refer to systems of concepts that are of high importance to a certain community, making statements concerning the supernatural or sacred. Generally, mythology is considered one component or aspect of religion. Religion is the more diverse term, besides mythological aspects it includes aspects of ritual, morality, theology, personal faith and mystic experience. A given mythology is almost always associated with a certain religion, such as Greek mythology with Ancient Greek religion, but religious faith is not a precondition for the mythology to remain alive. A myth disconnected from its religious system may lose its immediate relevance to the community and evolve - away from sacred importance - into a legend or folktale.

Contents [hide]
1 Religion and mythology
1.1 Definitions
1.2 The relationship between religion and myth
1.3 Truth and falsity
1.4 Similarities between different religious mythologies
1.5 Contrasts between different religious mythologies
2 Academic views
3 Religious views
3.1 Opposition to categorizing all sacred stories as myths
3.1.1 The roots of the popular meaning of "myth"
3.2 Non-opposition to categorizing sacred stories as myths
3.2.1 Christianity
3.2.2 Judaism
3.2.3 Neopaganism
4 Miscellaneous
5 See also
6 References
7 Sources
8 Recommended reading
8.1 Books
8.2 Websites



[edit] Religion and mythology

[edit] Definitions
Religion is commonly defined as belief concerning the supernatural, sacred, or divine, and the moral codes, practices, values, and institutions associated with such belief.[1] Religious beliefs and practices generally include the following:

a human soul or spirit
a deity or higher being
self after the death of one's body
a system of worship
Some religions do not include all these features. For instance, belief in a deity is not essential to Buddhism.

The term mythology usually refers either to a system of myths or to the study of myths.[2] However, the word "myth" itself has multiple (and some contradictory) definitions:

2007: According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, "Myth: "1 a: a usually traditional story of ostensibly historical events that serves to unfold part of the world view of a people or explain a practice, belief, or natural phenomenon. b: Parable, Allegory. 2 a: a popular belief or tradition that has grown up around something or someone; especially: one embodying the ideals and institutions of a society or segment of society. 2b: an unfounded or false notion. 3: a person or thing having only an imaginary or unverifiable existence. 4: the whole body of myths.[3]
In regards to the study of culture and religion, these are some of the definitions scholars have used:

1968: the classicist Robert Graves defines myths as "whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student's experience that he cannot believe them to be true."[4]
1973: another classicist G. S. Kirk rejects the notion that all myths are religious or sacred. In the category of "myth", he includes many legendary accounts that are "secular" for all practical purposes.[5]
1997: Folklorists define a myth as "a sacred narrative explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form".[6]
2004: In religious studies, the word "myth" is usually reserved for stories whose main characters are gods or demigods.[7]
2004: Robert A. Segal, professor of theories of religion at the University of Lancaster, defines "myth" broadly as any story whose "main figures [are] personalities -- divine, human, or even animal. Excluded would be impersonal forces such as Plato's Good."[8]
See also: Mythology

[edit] The relationship between religion and myth
The relationship between religion and myth depends on what definition of "myth" one uses. By Robert Graves's definition, a religion's traditional stories are "myths" if and only if one does not belong to the religion in question. By Segal's definition, all religious stories are myths -- but simply because nearly all stories are myths. By the folklorists' definition, all myths are religious (or "sacred") stories, but not all religious stories are myths: religious stories that involve the creation of the world (e.g., the stories in Genesis) are myths; however, religious stories that don't explain how things came to be in their present form (e.g., hagiographies of famous saints) are not myths.

It should be noted that most definitions of "myth" limit myths to stories.[9] Thus, non-narrative elements of religion, such as ritual and theology, are not myths.


[edit] Truth and falsity
In a scholarly setting, the word "myth" may mean "sacred story", "traditional story", or "story involving gods", but it does not mean "false story". Therefore, many scholars refer to a religion's stories as "myths" without intending to offend members of that religion. For instance, a scholar may call the narratives in the Bible "mythology" without meaning to imply that the Bible is false or unhistorical. Nevertheless, this scholarly use of the word "myth" may cause misunderstanding and offense to people who cherish the Bible. This is because the word "myth" is popularly used to mean "falsehood", so people who hold this view may think that a scholar who calls scripture "mythology" is calling it false.


[edit] Similarities between different religious mythologies
Given any of the above definitions of "myth", the myths of many religions, both ancient and modern, share common elements. Widespread similarities between religious mythologies include the following:

Many religions involve an initial Paradise preceding ordinary historical time.[10]
Many religions involve the story of a god who becomes incarnate as a mortal being (see incarnation).[citation needed]
Many religions involve the story of a god who undergoes death and resurrection (see life-death-rebirth deity).[1][2]
The mythical geography of many religions involves an axis mundi, or Cosmic Center.[11]
Many myths feature a global flood.[12]
The similarities between cultures and time periods can be useful, but it is usually not easy to combine beliefs and histories from different groups. Simplification of cultures and time periods by eliminating detailed data remain vulnerable or flimsy in this area of research.


[edit] Contrasts between different religious mythologies
Though there are similarities among most religious mythologies, there are also contrasts. Many mythologies focus on explanations of the universe, natural phenomena, or other themes of human existence, often ascribing agency to one or more deities or other supernatural forces. However, some religions have very few of this kind of story of cosmic explanation. For instance, the Buddhist parable of the arrow warns against such speculations as "[Is] the world eternal or not eternal? [Is] the soul different from the body? [Does] the enlightened exist after death or not?", viewing them as irrelevant to the goal of escaping suffering.[13]


[edit] Academic views
The academic meaning of the word mythology refers to the nature of an account as being perceived as sacred or "deep" by its audience (as opposed to texts viewed pragmatically or sceptically by their audience).[citation needed] Characterization of a body of texts as "mythology" does thus not negate or deny any of the beliefs involved, it is unrelated to concepts of objective "truth", while it presupposes spiritual or emotional attachement of a community to the texts in question. Mythology is used in this sense to understand the body of stories, addressing issues of core belief, that explains or symbolizes a religion.[citation needed]

Sociologists and historians of religion are not primarily interested in these stories for their historical value. They analyze religions in terms of the role which their stories and histories play, within the religious system. Histories and imaginative stories alike are treated as a body of myths, when they are regarded by a people as expressing profound truths. Describing the essential and traditional stories accepted as mysteries and historical narratives considered true is consequently just a tool for theological studies and study of the systems of common experience in general. Without necessarily speaking to the veracity of the faith's tenets or claims about its history, these mythological elements are studied for their mythic value.


[edit] Religious views
Most religions contain a body of traditional sacred stories that are believed to express profound truth. Some religious organizations and practitioners believe that some or all of their traditional stories are not only sacred and "true", but also historically accurate and divinely revealed, and that calling such stories "myths" disrespects their special status. Other religious organizations and practitioners have no problem with categorizing their sacred stories as myths.


[edit] Opposition to categorizing all sacred stories as myths
Some religious believers take offense when what they consider to be historical aspects of their faith are labeled as "myth". Such believers distinguish between religious fables or myths, on one hand, and those narratives of Scripture which Scripture itself, or their tradition, describe as history or revelation, on the other. For instance, the Catholic priest Father John A. Hardon insists that "Christianity is not mythology. What we believe in is not religious fantasies, no matter how pious."[3] The evangelical Christian theologian Carl F. H. Henry insisted that "Judeo-Christian revelation has nothing in common with the category of myth".[4]

Some apply the term fundamentalism to this view[citation needed] (although fundamentalism, more properly defined, has nothing in particular to do with opposition to the word "myth"). They often assume that this "fundamentalism" overlooks the variety of literary genres in Scripture and the hyperbole, allegory, and other non-literal meanings in Scripture. This assumption is generally unfounded, although some literalists do think that all stories in scripture should be accepted as literally true.


[edit] The roots of the popular meaning of "myth"
Especially within Christianity, objection to the word "myth" rests on a historical basis. By the time of Christ, the Greco-Roman world had started to use the term "myth" (Greek muthos) to mean "fable, fiction, lie"; as a result, the early Christian theologians used "myth" in this sense.[14] Thus, the derogatory meaning of the word "myth" is the traditional Christian meaning, and the expression "Christian mythology" may offend Christians for this reason.

In addition, this early Christian use of the term "myth" passed into popular usage.[15] Thus, when essential mysteries and teachings are described as myth, in modern English, the word often still implies that it is a fable and false invention. This description could be taken as a direct attack on religious belief, quite contrary to the meaning ostensibly intended by the academic use of the term. (For an example of typically academic writing where 'myth' clearly denotes 'falsehood', being used unequivocally in opposition to 'historical', see the article Historicity of Jesus.)


[edit] Non-opposition to categorizing sacred stories as myths
Modern day clergy and practitioners within some religious movements have no problem classifying the religion's sacred stories as "myths". They see the sacred texts as indeed containing religious truths, divinely inspired but delivered in the language of mankind. Some examples follow.


[edit] Christianity
J.R.R. Tolkien's love of myths and devout Catholic faith came together in his assertion that mythology is the divine echo of "the Truth".[16] Tolkien wrote that myths held "fundamental things".[17] He expressed these beliefs in his poem Mythopoeia circa 1931, which describes myth-making as an act of "sub-creation" within God's primary creation.[18] The poem in part says creation is "myth-woven and elf-patterned":

"...There is no firmament,
only a void, unless a jewelled tent
myth-woven and elf-patterned; and no earth,
unless the mother's womb whence all have birth." - J.R.R. Tolkien
Tolkien's opinion was adopted by another Christian writer, C.S. Lewis, in their conversations: "Tolkien explained to Lewis that the story of Christ was the true myth at the very heart of history and at the very root of reality."[5] C. S. Lewis freely called the Christ story a "true myth", and he believed that even pagan myths express spiritual truths. In his opinion, the difference between the Christ story and pagan myths is that the Christ story is historically as well as spiritually true. "The story of Christ," writes Lewis,

"is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God's myth where the others are men's myths: i. e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call real things." - C.S. Lewis[6]

Another Christian writer, the Catholic priest Father Andrew Greeley, freely applies the term "myth" to Christianity. In his book Myths of Religion, he defends this terminology:

"Many Christians have objected to my use of this word [myth] even when I define it specifically. They are terrified by a word which may even have a slight suggestion of fantasy. However, my usage is the one that is common among historians of religion, literary critics, and social scientists. It is a valuable and helpful usage; there is no other word which conveys what these scholarly traditions mean when they refer to myth. The Christian would be well advised to get over his fear of the word and appreciate how important a tool it can be for understanding the content of his faith."[19]


[edit] Judaism
Some Jewish scholars, including Dov Noy, a professor of folklore at Hebrew University and founder of the Israel Folktale Archives, and Howard Schwartz, Jewish anthologist, folklorist and English professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, have discussed traditional Jewish stories as "mythology"; Schwartz defines myths as "a people’s sacred stories about origins, deities, ancestors, and heroes.".[7] Schwarz authored the book Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism.[8]


[edit] Neopaganism
Neopagans frequently refer to their sacred stories as "myths". Asatru, a modern-day revival of Germanic Paganism, holds "that the Eddas, Myths and Norse Sagas are the divinely inspired wisdom of [its] religion".[9] Wicca, another Neopagan movement, also applies the term "mythology" to its stories.[10][11][12]


[edit] Miscellaneous
The Dewey decimal system covers religion in the 200 range, with books on "Religious mythology & social theology" a tiny subset listed under 201. [20]


[edit] See also
Look up religion, mythology in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.Magic and religion
Myth and ritual
Comparative mythology
Theosophical Society
Esotericism
Mythology of world religions:

Christian mythology
Islamic mythology
Jewish mythology
Hindu mythology
Buddhist mythology

[edit] References
^ "Religion", Encyclopedia Britannica 2007.
^ "Mythology", OED, 2007.
^ "Myth", Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, 2007.
^ Graves 1968, p. v.
^ Kirk 1973, p. 11.
^ Dundes 1997, p. 45.
^ Segal 2004, p. 5.
^ Segal 2004, p. 5.
^ Segal 2004, p. 5.
^ Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, 1967 p. 59.
^ Eliade, Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader, 1976, pp. 372-75.
^ For some examples, see Bierlein 2004, pp. 121-27.
^ "The Parable of the Arrow"
^ Eliade, Myth and Reality, 1968, p. 162.
^ Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, 1967, p. 23.
^ Wood, Ralph C., Biography of J. R. R. Tolkien.
^ Menion, 2003/2004 citing essays by Tolkien using the words "fundamental things".
^ Tolkien, Mythopoeia, circa 1931.
^ Greeley, Myths of Religion; quoted in Bierlein 1994, pp. 304-5.
^ "Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system". Online Computer Library Center, 2005. (PDF)

[edit] Sources
"Religion". Encyclopedia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopedia Britannica Online. File retrieved 8 June 2007 [13].
"Myth", Oxford English Dictionary ("OED"). File retrieved 2 June 2007. []
Bierlein, J.F. Parallel Myths. New York: Ballantine, 1994.
"Myth", Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. File retrieved June 18, 2007.
Eliade, Mircea:
Myth and Reality. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.
Myths, Dreams and Mysteries. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.
Myths, Rites, Symbols: A Mircea Eliade Reader. Ed. Wendell C. Beane and William G. Doty. Vol 2. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.
Dundes, Alan. "Binary Opposition in Myth: The Propp/Levi-Strauss Debate in Retrospect". Western Folklore 56 (Winter, 1997): pp. 39-50.
Kirk, G. S. Myth: Its Meaning and Function in Ancient and Other Cultures. Berkeley: Cambridge UP, 1973.
Graves, Robert, "Introduction," New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (trans. Richard Aldington and Delano Ames), London: Hamlyn, 1968, pp. v-viii.
Menion, Michael. Tolkien Elves and Art, in J.R.R. Tolkien's Aesthetics. 2003/2004 (commentary on Mythopoeia the poem).
Segal, Robert A. Myth: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.
"The Parable of the Arrow" (adapted from the Majjhima-nikaya). Staffordshire Learning Net. File retrieved 2 June 2007.[14]

[edit] Recommended reading

[edit] Books
Campbell, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Princeton University Press, 1949. ISBN 978-0691017846
Girard, René, Jean-Michel Oughourlian, and Guy Lefort, "Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World". Stanford University Press, 1987
Goodwin, J., "Mystery Religions of the Ancient World". Thames & Hudson, 1981.
Heidel, Alexander, "The Epic of Gilgamesh and Old Testament parallels". University of Chicago Press, 1963.
Redford, Donald, "Similarity Between Egyptian and Biblical Texts—Indirect Influence?" Biblical Archaeology Review, 1987. (13[3]:18-32, May/June)
Wright L.M. Christianity, Astrology and Myth. USA: Oak Hill Free Press, 2002. ISBN 0-9518796-1-8
Brantley, Garry K., "agan Mythology and the Bible". Apologetics Press, 1993. (Originally published in Reason & Revelation, July 1993, 13[7]:49-53.)
Robinson, B. A.,"arallels between Christianity and ancient Pagan religions". Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, 2004.

[edit] Websites
"Mythology". The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition, 2005.
Baskin-Jones, Michele, "Death, Dying and the Afterlife in Religion and Mythology". dying.about.com (ed., Now at Deathanddyingonline.com.)
"Religion and mythology : Selected resources". University of Wisconsin Library, 2004.
Occultopedia: The Occult and Unexplained Encyclopedia.
Internet Sacred Text Archive
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_and_mythology"
Categories: All articles with unsourced statements | Articles with unsourced statements since June 2007 | Mythography | Mythology | Religion | Anthropology of religion

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Myth and ritual
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In traditional societies, myth and ritual are two central components of religious practice. Although myth and ritual are commonly united as parts of religion, the exact relationship between them has been a matter of controversy among scholars. One of the approaches to this problem is "the myth and ritual, or myth-ritualist, theory", which holds that "myth does not stand by itself but is tied to ritual".[1] This theory has never been demonstrated, and the current view among scholar is that the link between myth and ritual is that they share common paradigms.[2]

Contents [hide]
1 Overview
2 Ritual from myth
2.1 E. B. Tylor
3 Myth from ritual (primacy of ritual)
3.1 William Robertson Smith
3.2 Stanley Edgar Hyman
3.3 James Frazer
3.4 Jane Ellen Harrison and S. H. Hooke
4 Myth and ritual as non-coextensive
4.1 Walter Burkert
4.2 Bronislaw Malinowski
4.3 Mircea Eliade
5 See also
6 External articles and references
7 References
8 Further reading



[edit] Overview
The "Myth and ritual school" is the name given to a series of authors that have focused their philological studies on the "ritual purposes of myths."[3] They include the supporters of the "priority of ritual over myth" hypothesis, W. Robertson-Smith, James Frazer, Jane Ellen Harrison, S. H. Hooke, that claimed that "every myth is derived from a particular ritual and that the syntagmatic quality of myth is a reproduction of the succession of ritual act".[2]

Historically, the important approaches to the study of mythological thinking have been those of Vico, Schelling, Schiller, Jung, Freud, Lávy-Bruhl, Levi-Strauss, Frye, the Soviet school, and the Myth and Ritual School.[4]

In the 1930s, Soviet researchers such as Jakov E. Golosovker, Frank-Kamenecky, Olga Freidenberg, Mikhail Bakhtin, "grounded the study of myth and ritual in folklore and in the world view of popular culture."[5]

The semantic unity of myth and ritual has been demonstrated by anthropology research works made in the period following the World War II, particularly by Bill Stanner and Victor Turner; however, hypotheses of a relation of descent, as the "priority of ritual over myth," have not. The major view held currently in the field is that the link between myth and ritual is that they share common paradigms.[2]


[edit] Ritual from myth
One possibility immediately presents itself: perhaps ritual arose from myth. Many religious rituals--notably Passover among Jews, Christmas and Easter among Christians, and the Hajj among Muslims--commemorate, or involve commemoration of, events in religious literature.


[edit] E. B. Tylor
Leaving the sphere of historical religions, the ritual-from-myth approach often sees the relationship between myth and ritual as analogous to the relationship between science and technology. The pioneering anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor is the classic exponent of this view.[6] He saw myth as an attempt to explain the world: for him, myth was a sort of proto-science.[7] Ritual is secondary: just as technology is an application of science, so ritual is an application of myth--an attempt to produce certain effects, given the supposed nature of the world: "For Tylor, myth functions to explain the world as an end in itself. Ritual applies that explanation to control the world."[6] A ritual always presupposes a preexisting myth: in short, myth gives rise to ritual.


[edit] Myth from ritual (primacy of ritual)
Against the intuitive idea that ritual reenacts myth or tries to persuade mythical beings, many 19th century anthropologists argued the opposite position: that myth and religious doctrine result from ritual. This is known as the "primacy of ritual" hypothesis.


[edit] William Robertson Smith
This view was asserted for the first time by the bible scholar William Robertson Smith.[8] Scholar Meletinsky notes that Smith introduced the concept "dogmatically".[8] In his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, Smith draws a distinction between ancient and modern religion: in modern religion, doctrine is central; in ancient religion, ritual is central.[1] On the whole, Smith argues, ancients tended to be relatively conservative with regard to rituals, making sure to pass them down faithfully; in contrast, the myths that justified those rituals could change. In fact, Smith claims that the myths that have come down to us are usually those that arose "after the original, nonmythic reason [...] for the ritual had somehow been forgotten".[9]

As an example, Smith gives the worship of Adonis. Worshipers mourned Adonis's mythical death in a ritual that coincided with the annual withering of the vegetation. According to Smith, the ritual mourning had originally had a nonmythical explanation: with the annual withering of plants, "the worshippers lament out of natural sympathy [...] just as modern man is touched with melancholy at the falling of autumn leaves."[10] Once worshipers forgot the original, nonmythical reason for the mourning ritual, they created "the myth of Adonis as the dying and rising god of vegetation [...] to account for the ritual".[6]


[edit] Stanley Edgar Hyman
In his essay "The Ritual View of Myth and the Mythic," Stanley Edgar Hyman makes an argument similar to Smith's:

"In Fiji [...] the physical peculiarities of an island with only one small patch of fertile soil are explained by a myth telling how Mberewalaki, a culture hero, flew into a passion at the misbehavior of the people of the island and hurled all the soil he was bringing them in a heap, instead of laying it out properly. Hocart points out that the myth is used aetiologically to explain the nature of the island, but did not originate in that attempt. The adventures of Mberewalaki originated, like all mythology, in ritual performance, and most of the lore of Hocart's Fijian informants consisted of such ritual myths. When they get interested in the topology of the island or are asked about it, Hocart argues, they do precisely what we would do, which is ransack their lore for an answer."[11]

Here Hyman argues against the aetiological interpretation of myth, which says that myths began as explanations for the origins of natural phenomena. If true, the aetiological interpretation would make myth older than, or at least independent of, ritual--as E.B. Tylor believes it is. But Hyman argues that traditional man only uses myth for aetiological purposes after myth is already in place. For scholars like Smith and Hyman, myth appears only as a justification for ritual after people forget ritual's original purpose.


[edit] James Frazer
The famous anthropologist Sir James George Frazer claimed that myth emerges out of ritual during the natural process of religious evolution. Many of his ideas were inspired by those of Robertson Smith.[8]. In The Golden Bough, Frazer famously argues that man progresses from belief in magic (and rituals based on magic), through belief in religion, to science.[12] His argument is as follows.

Man starts out with a reflexive belief in a natural law, and he assumes that he can influence nature by the correct application this law: "In magic man depends on his own strength to meet the difficulties and dangers that beset him on every side. He believes in a certain established order of nature on which he can surely count, and which he can manipulate for his own ends."[12]

However, the natural law man imagines--namely, magic--does not work. When he sees that his pretended natural law is false, man gives up the idea of a knowable natural law and “throws himself humbly on the mercy of certain great invisible beings behind the veil of nature, to whom he now ascribes all those far-reaching powers which he once arrogated to himself.”[12] In other words, when man loses his belief in magic, he justifies his formerly magical rituals by saying that they reenact myths or honor mythical beings. Frazer argues that

"myth changes while custom remains constant; men continue to do what their fathers did before them, though the reasons on which their fathers acted have been long forgotten. The history of religion is a long attempt to reconcile old custom with new reason, to find a sound theory for an absurd practice."[13]


[edit] Jane Ellen Harrison and S. H. Hooke
The classicist Jane Ellen Harrison and the biblical scholar S. H. Hooke regarded myth as intimately connected to ritual. However, "against Smith," they "vigorously deny" that myth's main purpose is to justify a ritual by giving an account of how it first arose (e.g., justifying the Adonis worshipers' ritual mourning by attributing it to Adonis's mythical death)[14]. Instead, these scholars think a myth is largely just a narrative description of a corresponding ritual: according to Harrison, "the primary meaning of myth ... is the spoken correlative of the acted rite, the thing done".[15]

Harrison and Hooke given an explanation for why ancients would feel the need to describe the ritual in a narrative form. They suggest that the spoken word, like the acted ritual, was considered to have magical potency: "The spoken word had the efficacy of an act."[16]

Like Frazer, Harrison believed that myths could arise as the initial reason for a ritual was forgotten or became diluted. As an example, she cited rituals that center on the annual renewal of vegetation. Such rituals often involve a participant who undergoes a staged death and resurrection. Harrison argues that the ritual, although "performed annually, was exclusively initiatory";[14] it was performed on people to initiate them into their roles as full-standing members of society. At this early point, the "god" was simply "the projection of the euphoria produced by the ritual."[14] Later, however, this euphoria became personified as a distinct god, and this god later became the god of vegetation, for "just as the initiates symbolically died and were reborn as fully fledged members of society, so the god of vegetation and in turn crops literally died and were reborn".[14] In time, people forgot the ritual's initiatory function and only remembered its status as a commemoration of the Adonis myth.[14]


[edit] Myth and ritual as non-coextensive
Not all students of mythology think ritual emerged from myth or myth emerged from ritual: some allow myths and rituals a greater degree of freedom from one another. Although myths and rituals often appear together, these scholars do not think every myth has or had a corresponding ritual or vice versa.


[edit] Walter Burkert
The classicist Walter Burkert states that myths and rituals were originally independent.[17] When myths and rituals do come together, he argues, they do so to reinforce each other. A myth that tells how the gods established a ritual reinforces that ritual by giving it divine status: "Do this because the gods did or do it."[17] A ritual based on a mythical event makes the story of that event more than a mere myth: the myth becomes more important because it narrates an event whose imitation is considered sacred.[17]

Furthermore, Burkert argues that myth and ritual together serve a "socializing function."[18] As an example, Burkert gives the example of hunting rituals. Hunting, Burkert argues, took on a sacred, ritualistic aura once it ceased to be necessary for survival: "Hunting lost its basic function with the emergence of agriculture some ten thousand years ago. But hunting ritual had become so important that it could not be given up."[19] By performing the ritual of hunting together, an ancient society bonded itself together as a group, and also provided a way for its members to vent their anxieties over their own aggressiveness and mortality.[20]


[edit] Bronislaw Malinowski
Like William Smith, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski argued that myths function as fictitious accounts of the origin of rituals, thereby providing a justification for those rituals: myth "gives rituals a hoary past and thereby sanctions them."[21] However, Malinowski also points out that many cultural practices besides ritual have related myths: for Malinowski, "myth and ritual are therefore not coextensive".[21] In other words, not all myths are outgrowths of ritual, and not all rituals are outgrowths of myth.


[edit] Mircea Eliade
Like Malinowski, the religious scholar Mircea Eliade thinks one important function of myth is to provide an explanation for ritual. Eliade notes that, in many societies, rituals are considered important precisely because they were established by the mythical gods or heroes.[22] Eliade approvingly quotes Malinowski's claim that a myth is "a narrative resurrection of a primeval reality."[23] Eliade adds: "Because myth relates the gesta [deeds] of Supernatural Beings [...] it becomes the exemplary model for all significant human actions".[24] Traditional man sees mythical figures as models to be imitated. Therefore, societies claim that many of their rituals were established by mythical figures, thereby making the rituals seem all the more important. However, also like Malinowski, Eliade notes that societies use myths to sanction all sorts of activities, not just rituals: "For him, too, then, myth and ritual are not coextensive"[21]

Eliade goes beyond Malinowski by giving an explanation for why myth can confer such an importance upon ritual: according to Eliade, "when [ritually] enacted myth acts as a time machine, carrying one back to the time of the myth and thereby bringing one closer to god."[21] But, again, for Eliade myth and ritual are not coextensive: the same return to the mythical age can be achieved through myth alone, without ritual. According to Eliade, traditional man sees both myths and rituals as vehicles for "eternal return" to the mythical age (see Eternal return (Eliade)):

"In imitating the exemplary acts of a god or of a mythic hero, or simply by recounting their adventures, the man of an archaic society detaches himself from profane time and magically re-enters the Great Time, the sacred time."[25]

Recital of myths and enactment of rituals serve a common purpose: they are two different means to remain in sacred time.

[edit] See also
Articles about Mythology:
In its broadest academic sense, the word "myth" simply means a traditional story, whether true or false. (—OED, Princeton Wordnet) Unless otherwise noted, the words "mythology" and "myth" are here used for sacred and traditional narratives, with no implication that any belief so embodied is itself either true or false.
General
Mythography,

Religion and mythology,

Aitiology

People:

Walter Burkert


[edit] External articles and references
Citations and notes
^ a b Segal 2004, p. 61
^ a b c Meletinsky, p.117
^ Encyclopaedia Britannica entries on Myth and Ritual School (religion)
^ Guy Lanoue, Foreword to Meletinsky, p.viii
^ Meletinsky, p.109-110
^ a b c Segal 2004, p. 63
^ Segal, p. 14
^ a b c Meletinsky pp.19-20
^ Segal, p. 62
^ Smith, p. 392
^ Myth: A Symposium, pg. 91
^ a b c Frazer, p. 711
^ Frazer, pg. 477
^ a b c d e Segal 2004, p. 71
^ Harrison; quoted in Segal (no specific text cited), p. 72
^ Hooke; quoted in Segal (no specific text cited), p. 72
^ a b c Segal 2004, p. 76
^ Segal, p. 77
^ Burkert (1979), p. 55
^ Segal, p. 78
^ a b c d Segal 2004, p. 73
^ Eliade, "Myth and Reality," p. 7
^ Malinowski, "Myth in Primitive Psychology" (1926; reprinted in "Magic, Science and Religion" [New York: 1955], pp. 101, 108), quoted in Eliade, "Myth and Reality," p. 20
^ Eliade, "Myth and Reality," p. 6
^ Eliade, "Myths, Dreams and Mysteries," p. 23

[edit] References
Burkert, W. (1979). Structure and history in Greek mythology and ritual. Sather classical lectures, v. 47. Berkeley: University of California Press
Eliade, Mircea:
Myth and Reality. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper & Row, 1963.
Myths, Dreams and Mysteries. Trans. Philip Mairet. New York: Harper & Row, 1967.
Frazer, James G. The Golden Bough. New York: Macmillan, 1922.
Meletinsky, Eleazar Moiseevich The Poetics of Myth (Translated by Guy Lanoue and Alexandre Sadetsky, foreword by Guy Lanoue) 2000 Routledge ISBN 0415928982
Sebeok, Thomas A. (Editor). Myth: A Symposium. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958.
Segal, Robert A. Myth: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004.
Smith, William Robertson. Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. First Series, 1st edition. Edinburgh: Black, 1889. Lecture 1.

[edit] Further reading
Kwang-chih Chang, Art, Myth, and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in Ancient China. 1983.
Burkert, W. (1983) Homo necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth, trans. Peter Bing, Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-03650-6.
Burkert, W. (2001). Savage energies: lessons of myth and ritual in ancient Greece. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Segal, Robert A. (1998). The myth and ritual theory: an anthology. Malden, Mass: Blackwell.
Watts, A. (1968). Myth and ritual in Christianity. Boston: Beacon Press.
Clyde Kluckhohn, Myths and Rituals: A General Theory. The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Jan., 1942), pp. 45-79
Lord Raglan, Myth and Ritual. The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 68, No. 270, Myth: A Symposium (Oct. - Dec., 1955), pp. 454-461 doi 10.2307/536770
WG Doty, Mythography: The Study of Myths and Rituals. University of Alabama Press, 1986.
Stephanie W Jamison, The Ravenous Hyenas and the Wounded Sun: Myth and Ritual in Ancient India. 1991.
Christopher A Faraone, Talismans and Trojan Horses: Guardian Statues in Ancient Greek Myth and Ritual. 1992.
R Stivers, Evil in modern myth and ritual. University of Georgia Press Athens, Ga., 1982
SH Hooke, The Myth and Ritual Pattern of the Ancient East. Myth and Ritual, 1933.
HS Versnel, Transition and Reversal in Myth and Ritual. Brill, 1993.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_and_ritual"
Categories: Anthropology of religion | Ritual | Mythology | Mythography
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