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MYTHOLOGY
by Vui Han & Faith Polzel
There is a fear of the unknown and a need in every person to explain the things around them. The universe, our world, the explanation of why and where everything came from has been a universal question that many peoples and cultures have tried to answer. Myths and religions provide a way of answering these questions.
From the minute we are born, we begin learning about what is around us. Like children we might ask questions, such as why do birds sing, where does the echo come from, how does the sun get to the sky, or why does it get dark at night. Even though these questions sound childish, they continue with us throughout our lives. Right now we have advanced scientific discoveries to tell us some of these answers, but years ago not much was known about the universe and that made these questions seem much bigger. Without knowledge of things comes fear. To calm those fears people created myths, making up stories using familiar settings and activities to explain why things happen until they found out what really happened. The stories were mostly passed down from generation to generation by work of mouth, from adult to child. The Ancient Greeks were one of the cultures that did this.
The Greeks took the everyday things and feelings they had and made myths to explain them, such as, why the seasons change throughout the year, why the spider weaves such beautiful webs, or where the echo comes from. They took the feeling, object , or occurrence and game them a familiar form, usually the form of a human or human like character. If say, the feeling, seemed like a feminine feeling it would usually be a woman character, and if it felt like something that would be more manly it would most likely be portrayed by a male character. An example of this would be the story of Arachne and Athena, which was the Greek's explanation of why the spider spins such beautiful webs. In this story the Character of Athena, the goddess of weaving and handicraft, was most likely a female character because to people back then weaving was something a female would do. Another example of this is the story of Demeter and Persephone. This is the story of how the Greeks imagined the reason for the changing of the seasons. Again with this story, fertility to the Greeks was a feminine attribute, because women bear children, so the fertility goddess was a woman. The sun being mighty and watching over the earth may be why they chose a male god to represent the sun.
In other instances if the feeling felt rough and overly mean, or gentle and doe like, such as a beast of that tendency, it might be portrayed by a character half man/woman half beast as in the story of Pan the goat god or Chiron the Centaur. The myths might also have explained to the people of Greece why certain problems might be happening. Maybe a plague is ravaging a town, and because of a myth they recall, they might think it is due to the fact that someone forgot to thank a certain god or goddess for something good that happened in the past. Because of the person not thanking them now, the immortal is angry and takes it out on the people through a plague. Or another example of this is the story of Achilles who, because he killed Tenes, Apollo the sun god's son, was shot by an arrow in the heal and killed.
There are many different kinds of Greek myths, but all are similar in that the Ancient Greeks wanted to explain things that they didn't understand and one of the ways of doing this was through myths. Because they made these myths seem close to home, by using familiar objects like humans, animals and things that made them feel comfortable in their minds, their fears of the unknown were lessened, and they could continue to find out the real reason for them in peace. I hope you find the myths as interesting and fascinating as I did.
Click here for stories:
Chiron - Sagittarius, the Archer
Demeter and Persephone - seasons
Echo and Narcissus - "echo" & flower
Bonnefoy, Yves. Mythology. The University of Chicago Press:
1991. pg. 492-494.
Clayton, Peter. Great Figures of Mythology. Crescent Books:
1990. pg. 15, 58, 66, 77.
Grimal, Pierre. A Concise Dictionary of Classical Mythology.
Basil Blackwell: 1990. pg. 51-52.
Tripp, Edward. Crowell's Handbook of Classical Mythology. Thomas Crowell Company: 1970. pg. 6-9.
Rockwell, Anne. The Robber Baby, Stories From The Greek Myths. Greenwillow Books, New York: 1994. pg. 72-77.