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What Is Mythology?

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• What Is Mythology?

• What Is Mythology?

  Michael > January 30th, 2016, 01:55 PM

  I have become quite convinced after many years of people writing "that's a myth" and "this is just a myth" that we never stop to think about what the words "myth" and "mythology" were supposed to mean. I'm okay with people using these terms to mean something like "a fictional tale that cannot be true" but that was never the original intention and I still often write about myths and mythology as what they were supposed to be.
  
  Technically, all scientific explanations are mythology. We derived the word from ancient Greek mythos, which the Online Etymology Dictionary says originally meant "speech, thought, story, myth, anything delivered by word of mouth". The dictionary says the modern use of "an untrue story" dates to the 1840s.
  
  Psychologists use "myth" and "mythology" as labels for our perceptions of the world and the things around us. You construct a personal mythology that helps you interpret and understand everything, and you use this mythology to communicate your ideas to others.
  
  By merging personal mythologies together we create social mythologies, shared mythologies. They are simply attempts to explain the world around us.
  
  The evolution of the word "myth" has led it to three modern places:
  

  • A collection of stories about gods and legendary beings or creatures
    
  • An untrue story or legend
    
  • A personal lens for understanding the world and events around us
    

  
  We construct myths all the time and pass them on. They may be true stories or they may be complete fabrications. A true story may evolve away from its original literal meanings and references. Or a true story may only be told in terms that are limited by the understanding of the story-teller.
  
  Take thunder, for example. Primitive people, having no idea of how sound and electricity work, or even of what an atmosphere is, experienced thunder all the time. They were aware enough to understand that everything seems to have a cause in nature. They could see trees fall, rocks slide, flowing water cut into the landscape, and a million other natural phenomena. But they did not have a body of science to help them understand the mechanics of all these things.
  
  So when the sky thundered people assumed something was making the thunder. They may have guessed that it was a great being. Or maybe the stories started out as imaginary tales told to amuse children but over time the generations of people began to believe the stories meant literally there was someone up in the sky creating a huge fuss.
  
  The myths were attempts to explain how the world worked but they lacked the sophistication of thousands of years of literature, philosophy, and scientific debate.
  
  We still create these kinds of plausible explanations today for just about everything. Average, everyday common people explain all sorts of mundane events with plausible explanations, and accurate explanations. These are all myths in the sense that they are stories we use to explain things. But in some cases the myths take on lives of their own, they change over time in details and maybe even purpose.
  
  Take Donald Trump's claim that he saw thousands of Muslims in America celebrating the fall of the Twin Towers on television in 2001. The verifiable truth has been obscured by the points and counterpoints raised by media researchers and by Trump's supporters and critics. His version of events is a coherent story that has been passed on and shared. That is how we make social myths. They are not necessarily false, untrue stories. They may be untrue or they may be distorted versions of the verifiable truth. But they can also be very accurate in detail.
  
  We rarely have sufficient objective ability to dispute every story people share. Society tends to absorb all these stories and live with them. In time it becomes less important to a majority of people to debate the truth of the facts. The stories live on and may change in unexpected ways.
  
  We keep trying to separate fact from myth but in reality you cannot do that. All you can do is construct more rigid, coherent, and verifiable myths. This is the path that science takes. But science leaves itself open to doubt. A scientist must always follow the facts no matter where they have been before. And so our scientific understanding of the universe also evolves day-by-day, just as the ancient religious myths almost certainly evolved.

• What Is Mythology?

  rkomar > January 31st, 2016, 01:22 AM

  The generations of ancient Greek gods seemed to track the social evolution of man. The old being pushed out by the young which better fit the ethos of the times. To me, the ancient myths are stories which provide essential details about who we are. They don't have to be factual to be good descriptions. In that way, I see them as being different from science.

• What Is Mythology?

  august > January 31st, 2016, 06:07 PM

  Yeah, I think the key is that people relaying folk wisdom and folklore didn't realize that they were retelling and expanding on myths at the time - they were just passing along
  knowledge that they had learned or heard, or as you point out, trying to explain something like the thunder in the sky.
  
  It wasn't until many millennia later when people began to organize actual wisdom and what evolved into science, that they could grasp the concept of the study of old
  stories, and try to make some sense of what was imaginary, what was metaphor, what was speculation that turned out not to be accurate, and what was speculation
  that hadn't been explained yet.
  
  Of course, this isn't anything new - there are several thousand books that expand on all these ideas, and just about every 4-year college in the US has at least one course devoted to the topic.

• What Is Mythology?

  Michael > February 7th, 2016, 12:48 PM

  I sometimes wonder, though, if there were not attempts by ancient storytellers to mine the folklore and legends for good stories, which subsequently became mixed up in the common imagination with history. Take the Epic Poets of Greece, for example, who (re)told the story of the Trojan War across a period of about 200 years. Homer is the best-known of these poets and his "Illiad" was often cited by Greek philosophers and historians of later centuries as if it preserved historic knowledge.
  
  Herodotus, the "father of modern history", often included dubious accounts of people and events in his books (noting their suspect nature and often expressing doubt about their historicality) that shed light on just how detailed many local mythologies had become.
  
  The Greeks treated events in "The Illiad" as if they were established fact. And there was an entire "war with the Amazons" that was often referred, including many precise details about who was killed where, where some Amazons were supposedly buried, and so forth. These preserved facts have hardly been confirmed, although Herodotus' description of the Sauromatae (a tribe he claimed was descended from Amazons who married Scythian warriors) very closely matches what archaeologists have been able to discover of them (not including where they came from).
  
  Even today there is a city in northern Turkey (along the shore of the Black Sea) that celebrates its legendary connection to the ancient Amazon nation as if that is an established fact. Western history, archaeology, and science simply haven't confirmed these traditions.
  
  So do people, especially in the ancient world, forget the nature of the great epics (maybe only created for entertainment) and start to believe the stories? It happened a number of times during the Middle Ages of Europe, but historians still argue about the historical kernels of fact that may have inspired the stories (such as legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood in Britain).
  
  In modern US history some literary ideas have taken hold in the popular imagination. For example, when I was in elementary school we were taught that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and he refused to lie about that to his father. The story is now disputed by historians who say there is no evidence that it was ever reported by Washington or anyone in his lifetime. There are pseudohistorical anecdotes about many figures from American history from George Washington Irving (who early biographers claimed had been shown to President Washington as a baby) to semi-legendary (but real) people like Johnny Appleseed, Davy Crockett, and others.
  
  People hear stories and pass them on and they take on the semblance of truth. So ancient mythologies may have been unintentionally enrichened in that way because those cultures did not have critical review processes in place, the way we do today. Challenges to the accepted beliefs may have been rare and would not have been as well supported by records, science, and archaeology as some critical reviews of legendary claims today.

• What Is Mythology?

  august > February 7th, 2016, 05:30 PM

  Michael Wrote:I sometimes wonder, though, if there were not attempts by ancient storytellers to mine the folklore and legends for good stories, which
  subsequently became mixed up in the common imagination with history. Take the Epic Poets of Greece, for example, who (re)told the story of the Trojan
  War across a period of about 200 years. Homer is the best-known of these poets and his "Illiad" was often cited by Greek philosophers and
  historians of later centuries as if it preserved historic knowledge.

  
  Yep, I think that's just about universally accepted as true. Even at the time of Homer and his predecessors, just about anyone would realize
  that the person telling the story/singing the song had to put things into metrical verse even though people didn't actually speak that
  way, and that stories where no human being was around to witness what happened would have had details added
  by whoever tells the story. Even illiterate people would be familiar with how they told bedtime stories to their children, for
  example, and would be aware of their own tendencies to change details to suit their purposes.
  
  But yes, people a hundred or a thousand years later might take something as the "official" account without knowing that someone
  added some detail just for an effect for a particular audience, or because it was a better twist than the version he had heard originally.

• What Is Mythology?

  badlands > August 27th, 2016, 01:34 AM

  I don't like the term mythology since it makes religious beliefs untrue and yet it is often in science to disapprove religion. It is also used by other religions as well.

• What Is Mythology?

  Michael > August 28th, 2016, 02:35 AM

  Science is not really about disproving religion. Science is rather mute on the topic of whether god or gods exist, what souls may be, and such esoteric topics. Some people who don't believe in those things do try to make it sound as though science has pronounced judgment on the facts but that is as nonsensical as the positions of people of religious views who denounce science.
  
  There are myths and mythologies in science. It cannot be otherwise. But it would be confusing to speak of a "scientific myth" because too many people would mistake that for an outright dismissal of whatever idea that phrase was directed toward.
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