1 00:00:04,082 --> 00:00:08,573 Adding to our thoughts on myths, in our last lecture we looked at some ancient 2 00:00:08,573 --> 00:00:12,096 views on myth and found lots of complex and interesting ideas. 3 00:00:13,013 --> 00:00:16,034 Well that tradition carries forward into the modern era. 4 00:00:16,233 --> 00:00:20,794 And, and of course in antiquity, the modern era is actually defined a little 5 00:00:20,794 --> 00:00:25,626 bit differently than it is in common everyday speech anything in the modern era 6 00:00:25,626 --> 00:00:28,445 counts as Renaissance and forward for our course. 7 00:00:28,617 --> 00:00:33,753 Throughout the Middle Ages the ideas of Euhemerism and allegorism were especially 8 00:00:33,753 --> 00:00:38,423 important for those that read these ancient myths, and there they had the 9 00:00:38,423 --> 00:00:43,398 different kind of value during that time. We had Medieval churchmen who read them 10 00:00:43,398 --> 00:00:48,644 who were interested in these ancient tales as maybe a bit of erudition to carry 11 00:00:48,644 --> 00:00:52,599 around. They gave them the term Fabulae, that's 12 00:00:52,599 --> 00:00:56,878 the plural of the Greek fabu-, or sorry, the Latin of Fabula which is a story or a 13 00:00:56,878 --> 00:00:59,797 tale. The, the, the Roman word means something 14 00:00:59,797 --> 00:01:04,635 like a story, a tale, a tall tale. Not something that you would spend a lot 15 00:01:04,635 --> 00:01:09,868 of time trying to find deep truths in if it did have any hidden ideas it would be a 16 00:01:09,868 --> 00:01:13,712 little nugget of wisdom. The kind of thing you might hear in 17 00:01:13,712 --> 00:01:19,064 Aesop's fable and these Fabulae were something that they had some of these 18 00:01:19,064 --> 00:01:24,535 medieval churchmen had some interest in and they carried them around and they 19 00:01:24,535 --> 00:01:27,473 looked at them. But not a lot of theoretical ideas 20 00:01:27,473 --> 00:01:31,523 developed out of there. Much more they had a much stronger draw 21 00:01:31,523 --> 00:01:37,049 for the great minds of the day in their view was an authoritative Christian 22 00:01:37,049 --> 00:01:41,076 version of the Bible. They spent a lot of time thinking about 23 00:01:41,076 --> 00:01:44,073 that. But these were ancient Greek and Roman 24 00:01:44,073 --> 00:01:49,017 tales did survive and stick around under this name of Fabulae. 25 00:01:49,017 --> 00:01:54,049 Now things changed a good little bit when a figure named Bernard de Fontenelle, 26 00:01:54,049 --> 00:01:59,088 whose dates are 1657 to 1757 came along and had a look at some of these stories. 27 00:01:59,088 --> 00:02:02,667 He was interested like some of his contemporaries. 28 00:02:02,667 --> 00:02:08,223 He says they're kind of nice stories to have around that were fun to hear and 29 00:02:08,223 --> 00:02:13,068 maybe were a little racy at times but you know, good enough to have around. 30 00:02:13,068 --> 00:02:20,650 But Fontenelle had some further views too. He looked very closely at them and in his 31 00:02:20,650 --> 00:02:28,034 view, the myths actually grow up as a reaction of early, early humans to the 32 00:02:28,034 --> 00:02:34,803 natural environment that surrounds them. They are, in his view, an attempt to 33 00:02:34,803 --> 00:02:42,101 explain otherwise difficult to understand strange features of our natural world. 34 00:02:42,101 --> 00:02:48,000 So, some strange out-cropping of a mountain, a very dramatic valley perhaps a 35 00:02:48,000 --> 00:02:53,624 thunder or lightning, these things Fontenelle said require that ancient 36 00:02:53,624 --> 00:02:59,212 humans develop some explanation. And when they were in fear of the world 37 00:02:59,212 --> 00:03:05,160 around them or found strange the world around them they tried to develop these 38 00:03:05,160 --> 00:03:11,065 explanations in the language they knew how and that was the language of myth. 39 00:03:11,065 --> 00:03:15,087 So according to Fontenelle, myths are attempts to explain. 40 00:03:15,087 --> 00:03:20,053 And their attempts to explain strange features of the natural landscape. 41 00:03:20,053 --> 00:03:26,024 Early human beings according to this narrative that he was drawing are kind of 42 00:03:26,024 --> 00:03:29,080 like you and I. They try to do something like you and I 43 00:03:29,080 --> 00:03:32,109 are doing. They tried to do science to explain the 44 00:03:32,109 --> 00:03:36,639 world but they're working from a very limited data set and also their brains 45 00:03:36,639 --> 00:03:41,593 work in a particular kind of mythic way so they don't come up with the kind of 46 00:03:41,593 --> 00:03:46,144 scientific explanations that we have. Myth is an attempt at science and it's 47 00:03:46,144 --> 00:03:49,210 best seen as kind of proto science or a bad science. 48 00:03:49,210 --> 00:03:54,039 Doesn't quite work right but the impulse that it generates it is similar to the 49 00:03:54,039 --> 00:03:58,419 impulse that we modern human beings, we modern ones living in the seventeenth and 50 00:03:58,419 --> 00:04:03,595 eighteenth Century along with Fontenelle we modern human beings already exhibit in 51 00:04:03,595 --> 00:04:08,081 our scientific knowledge. Advancing from here some views of the high 52 00:04:08,081 --> 00:04:11,517 enlightenment. We'll take a figure called David Hume. 53 00:04:11,517 --> 00:04:15,598 You're done up in Greek garb I thought that might be appropriate. 54 00:04:15,598 --> 00:04:18,377 Hume's dates are 1711 to 1776 a faithful year. 55 00:04:18,377 --> 00:04:22,630 And Hume, Hume has some interesting ideas on a method he passed down. 56 00:04:22,630 --> 00:04:28,254 I'm just gonna highlight one aspect of it. Hume is charactaristic of an enlightenment 57 00:04:28,254 --> 00:04:30,871 let's say impatience with a mythic mentality. 58 00:04:30,871 --> 00:04:36,735 There is a sense in many figures in the enlightenment that what's happening around 59 00:04:36,735 --> 00:04:40,045 them during their time is something phenomenal. 60 00:04:40,045 --> 00:04:45,060 That there is a birth of rational thinking, and there's an expunging of old 61 00:04:45,060 --> 00:04:49,024 ways of thought, that don't measure up to rationalism. 62 00:04:49,024 --> 00:04:53,085 In this story, the concept of myth takes decidedly takes a backseat. 63 00:04:53,085 --> 00:04:58,086 It gets lumped in with these earlier mentalities that are rational minds we 64 00:04:58,086 --> 00:05:03,074 develop enlightenment human beings. Our rational minds are finally leaving 65 00:05:03,074 --> 00:05:06,098 behind. We're casting it aside and developing new 66 00:05:06,098 --> 00:05:11,053 scientific ways of thinking. So, for Hume, as well for others in the 67 00:05:11,053 --> 00:05:15,010 enlightenment, a myth was not a source of great interest. 68 00:05:15,010 --> 00:05:20,698 It was thought to be the result of fearful human beings making up stories in a way 69 00:05:20,698 --> 00:05:26,834 that was comforting to them but it was not exactly going to be worth a lot of time 70 00:05:26,834 --> 00:05:31,077 trying to study these things. Moving to another figure, Christian 71 00:05:31,077 --> 00:05:35,083 Gottlob Heyne whose dates are 1729 to 1812, things change a lot. 72 00:05:36,002 --> 00:05:41,043 Heyne moves in his characterization of myth quite a far piece from where from 73 00:05:41,043 --> 00:05:46,533 where the enlightenment figures had it and has an interest in these mythic stories 74 00:05:46,723 --> 00:05:51,035 from a different perspective. He's actually interested in this whole 75 00:05:51,035 --> 00:05:55,169 ancient world. Heyne is an early precursor to the kind of 76 00:05:55,169 --> 00:05:59,072 field that we study now in universities under the name of classics. 77 00:05:59,092 --> 00:06:04,292 Heyne was interested in this ancient world of the, the Greeks and the Romans. 78 00:06:04,292 --> 00:06:08,652 And he wanted to know more about it. He wanted to know everything about it he 79 00:06:08,652 --> 00:06:11,525 could. So, he would have on his desk shelf a kind 80 00:06:11,525 --> 00:06:16,466 of a book that would help him reference work talking about all the geography of 81 00:06:16,466 --> 00:06:19,289 antiquity. Another one that might refer to all the 82 00:06:19,289 --> 00:06:23,550 plants and animals of antiquity. River names, place names, proper names and 83 00:06:23,550 --> 00:06:26,660 how people were related to one another in antiquity. 84 00:06:26,660 --> 00:06:30,023 There was a lot of data. Background data that Heyne and his 85 00:06:30,023 --> 00:06:34,767 colleagues needed in order to try to understand this ancient world that they 86 00:06:34,767 --> 00:06:38,246 were so devoted to. Among those sets of background data, in 87 00:06:38,246 --> 00:06:42,508 Heyne's view of things was myth. An educated person that was trying to 88 00:06:42,508 --> 00:06:47,355 understand the ancient world needed to understand these ancient mythic stories. 89 00:06:47,355 --> 00:06:52,457 So for him it provided a form of eradition to get a background set of understandings 90 00:06:52,457 --> 00:06:57,127 that helped him understand better the Greeks and Romans he was interested in 91 00:06:57,127 --> 00:07:00,068 understanding. Like geography or linguistics or 92 00:07:00,068 --> 00:07:02,813 biography, it gave us contextual information. 93 00:07:02,813 --> 00:07:07,811 Now, in addition to paying a little bit closer attention to these stories, Heyne 94 00:07:07,811 --> 00:07:11,031 developed some different ideas than had gone before him. 95 00:07:11,031 --> 00:07:15,097 Just as, or in contrast to the way that Fontenelle and Hume both thought that 96 00:07:15,097 --> 00:07:20,039 myths grew up out of just fear at the natural surroundings and a kind of 97 00:07:20,039 --> 00:07:24,894 twitching attempt to come up with lame explanations for things Heyne said, well 98 00:07:24,894 --> 00:07:29,320 it's not just fear that's driving this it's actually a slightly more complex kind 99 00:07:29,320 --> 00:07:34,001 of human reaction to the natural landscape the reaction of awe. 100 00:07:34,001 --> 00:07:38,655 Now awe is fear mixed with wonder. And Heyne saw both of those things as 101 00:07:38,655 --> 00:07:43,057 being guiding and driving impulses in the creation of ancient myth. 102 00:07:43,057 --> 00:07:48,051 So, human beings now are put in a position, when they create myth are being 103 00:07:48,051 --> 00:07:52,092 in a state of both fear but also wonder at the world around them. 104 00:07:52,092 --> 00:07:58,020 So for him, myth is not just fear-based irrationality or misguided attempts to 105 00:07:58,020 --> 00:08:03,778 explain, it also grows up from an innate sense of wonder that all of us presumably 106 00:08:03,778 --> 00:08:09,226 are gonna feel when we when we look at great sublime kinds of features of our 107 00:08:09,226 --> 00:08:12,091 natural landscape. Standing at the top of a mountain, 108 00:08:12,091 --> 00:08:18,081 surveying a beautiful stretch of the ocean or a wonderful river, there's a sense of 109 00:08:18,081 --> 00:08:22,052 wonder that's a common human reaction to such a thing. 110 00:08:22,052 --> 00:08:25,034 Sure maybe some fear, but also wonder, too. 111 00:08:25,034 --> 00:08:31,052 Now, when this sense of awe arose Heyne thought that there was some new dimension 112 00:08:31,052 --> 00:08:36,081 of human expression that had to get developed in order to express that sense 113 00:08:36,081 --> 00:08:41,985 of awe at the natural world. And this is something that Heyne said was 114 00:08:41,985 --> 00:08:47,012 identic-, identical to myth. Myth is the particular genre that human 115 00:08:47,012 --> 00:08:51,045 beings used to express a sense of awe at their natural surroundings. 116 00:08:51,045 --> 00:08:55,724 Now for him, the category that his other Latin speaking, and Latinate speaking 117 00:08:58,094 --> 00:09:01,722 colleagues nearby would've put another category of Fabula or fabulae. 118 00:09:01,722 --> 00:09:07,479 For him Heyne, the Fabula Fabulae that, that was just not rich enough to describe 119 00:09:07,479 --> 00:09:11,099 what he was talking about. He didn't mean tall tales that might have 120 00:09:11,099 --> 00:09:16,051 a little nugget of wisdom in them or not. He wasn't talking about that. 121 00:09:16,051 --> 00:09:21,198 He was talking about a, something else a spontaneous kind of human expression of 122 00:09:21,198 --> 00:09:25,373 amazement at the world around us. And for that, he needed a new term. 123 00:09:25,373 --> 00:09:30,203 Fabulae was not gonna label the kind of stories he was interested in. 124 00:09:30,203 --> 00:09:35,369 So what he did is reach down into the Greek and pull back out that term he saw 125 00:09:35,369 --> 00:09:38,093 in the first of our lectures. Greek term, muthos. 126 00:09:38,093 --> 00:09:43,073 And when he did, he bequeathed the category of myth to modern human beings. 127 00:09:43,073 --> 00:09:49,070 That's where myth comes from, when Heyne decides to revive a Greek term and bring 128 00:09:49,070 --> 00:09:54,291 it into contemporary German in the term muthos and from there it moves into 129 00:09:54,291 --> 00:10:00,148 English and Latin and French and all the other terms that have this similar term 130 00:10:00,370 --> 00:10:03,703 for myth. Heyne was doing this because the Latin 131 00:10:03,703 --> 00:10:09,268 term that he had nearby him was just he thought unhelpful to describe a different 132 00:10:09,268 --> 00:10:14,126 kind of picture he thought these stories were fulfilling than the once that his 133 00:10:14,126 --> 00:10:18,995 earlier colleagues had thought. He said sure it's true that early people 134 00:10:18,995 --> 00:10:24,829 were a little bit more irrational than you and I and they were prone to a grandiose 135 00:10:24,829 --> 00:10:28,940 reaction of stuff. They were twitchy in that way that may be 136 00:10:28,940 --> 00:10:31,892 little kids are. So he saw that was kind of a 137 00:10:31,892 --> 00:10:36,695 characteristic of earlier mentality. Their language also Heyne said was very 138 00:10:36,695 --> 00:10:40,356 concrete. They did not have abstract words for 139 00:10:40,356 --> 00:10:46,016 complex things around them so they just pointed to concrete things to represent 140 00:10:46,016 --> 00:10:50,775 these more abstract ideas. So myth is a concretization of abstract 141 00:10:50,775 --> 00:10:55,037 ideas he thought he would find abstractions underneath the concrete 142 00:10:55,037 --> 00:10:57,913 language. They are especially related to the natural 143 00:10:57,913 --> 00:11:02,933 landscape so rather than talking about fear or some scary thing that happened 144 00:11:02,933 --> 00:11:06,730 Heyne talks about the human connection to a landscape. 145 00:11:06,730 --> 00:11:11,445 So when a human is in, in the face of a certain kind of a landscape, one kind of 146 00:11:11,445 --> 00:11:16,032 reaction is going to happen when the human is in the different kind of a landscape 147 00:11:16,032 --> 00:11:18,885 perhaps a different kind of reaction is going to happen. 148 00:11:18,885 --> 00:11:21,709 So myths now gets connected to the world around them. 149 00:11:21,709 --> 00:11:26,131 This is an idea that carries forward into the world around the people and make them 150 00:11:26,131 --> 00:11:30,699 up and this is an idea that's going to carry forward in an important way into the 151 00:11:30,699 --> 00:11:34,493 thinking of our next figure coming up Johann Gottfried Herder. 152 00:11:34,493 --> 00:11:40,399 Herder's dates are 1744 to 1803 and Herder as an early precursor to Romanticism 153 00:11:40,592 --> 00:11:44,735 carried forward this kind of reaction against the enlightenment. 154 00:11:44,735 --> 00:11:50,078 Reacted so strongly that in fact he develops this other view that says that no 155 00:11:50,078 --> 00:11:55,751 it's not the case that myths are just lies or wrong or mistakes such as maybe my 156 00:11:55,751 --> 00:12:01,580 enlightenment colleagues thought. But instead they're actually true and not 157 00:12:01,580 --> 00:12:06,000 only are they true and truths, they are deeply profound truths. 158 00:12:06,000 --> 00:12:11,059 The most profound truths humans have to express, heard or thought, they expressed 159 00:12:11,059 --> 00:12:15,200 through myth. So we have come a good long piece from the 160 00:12:15,200 --> 00:12:19,704 earlier views and now we have now embraced the idea that myths are the most profound 161 00:12:19,704 --> 00:12:24,421 manifestations of the human spirit that are possible to be found. 162 00:12:24,421 --> 00:12:29,499 Myths in, in Herder's view of things and he, his views are inherited later by the 163 00:12:29,499 --> 00:12:32,878 Romantics thought that myths were innate to human beings. 164 00:12:32,878 --> 00:12:37,574 It was a kind, innate behavioristic thing that human beings did when faced with 165 00:12:37,574 --> 00:12:43,033 their natural surroundings and having these feelings of awe that came over them. 166 00:12:43,033 --> 00:12:47,720 Myths just came out of them. It just kind of bubbled up automatically, 167 00:12:47,720 --> 00:12:51,682 out of human beings. It was further not just myth that we 168 00:12:51,682 --> 00:12:58,587 talked about under this category of myth Herder thought it was instead a larger 169 00:12:58,587 --> 00:13:03,024 capacity for human expression that was coming out. 170 00:13:03,024 --> 00:13:06,582 So myth was actually identical with poetry. 171 00:13:06,582 --> 00:13:11,666 Myth was identical with religion. It was identical with language. 172 00:13:11,666 --> 00:13:18,460 All of these things were human attempts at coming up and expressing deep ideas that 173 00:13:18,679 --> 00:13:23,620 resulted from human beings feeling of being alive. 174 00:13:23,620 --> 00:13:30,017 What it is to be a living, breathing creature is what we capture in our myths. 175 00:13:30,017 --> 00:13:37,017 So we have now an autonomous response, that is very different in Herder's view 176 00:13:37,017 --> 00:13:43,094 from this attempt to explain that we had show up in some of the earlier figures. 177 00:13:43,094 --> 00:13:47,799 So, as we move forward we're gonna see that there are lots of different ideas on 178 00:13:47,799 --> 00:13:53,083 myth that developed we've given a brief overview of some of the ancient ones and 179 00:13:53,083 --> 00:13:58,077 now those from the modern era at least from the renaissance up to the 180 00:13:58,077 --> 00:14:03,041 enlightenment in to the romantics. We're gonna carry forward with some more 181 00:14:03,041 --> 00:14:08,072 contemporary views specifically in this course and when do we'll take a little bit 182 00:14:08,072 --> 00:14:13,079 of time out of our course, step back and introduce some, some ideas in some more 183 00:14:13,079 --> 00:14:16,095 detail. Before we do that I wanted to close with 184 00:14:16,095 --> 00:14:21,460 some an idea About myth, a definition of myth that we'll be using as our, as our 185 00:14:21,460 --> 00:14:26,025 standard way of talking about what we're working on in the course. 186 00:14:26,025 --> 00:14:30,044 Walter Burkert, a still living, classicist from Switzerland. 187 00:14:30,044 --> 00:14:34,308 A wonderful man, very generous man has taught, has taught, has taught many of us 188 00:14:34,308 --> 00:14:38,002 in the field a great deal. Walter was born in 1931. 189 00:14:38,002 --> 00:14:40,092 Still alive, still active as a scholarly figure. 190 00:14:41,010 --> 00:14:44,025 Writes books and articles and keeps all of us busy. 191 00:14:44,062 --> 00:14:48,695 The definition of myth that Burkert comes up with is one that we'll use as a 192 00:14:48,695 --> 00:14:52,075 standard tried and true definition in this class. 193 00:14:52,075 --> 00:14:58,037 According to Burkert, myth is a traditional tale told with secondary 194 00:14:58,037 --> 00:15:03,000 partial reference to something of collective importance. 195 00:15:03,000 --> 00:15:07,838 I'll just repeat that. Myth is a traditional tale told with, with 196 00:15:08,079 --> 00:15:12,759 secondary partial reference to something of collective importance. 197 00:15:12,759 --> 00:15:17,680 I want to add a coda to that so put a comma after Burkert's definition and this 198 00:15:17,680 --> 00:15:20,948 is the struck coda told by someone for some reason. 199 00:15:20,948 --> 00:15:24,857 Myths don't float around in space remember our first slide. 200 00:15:24,857 --> 00:15:30,288 They are told in language by people of our species and they are told by particular 201 00:15:30,288 --> 00:15:33,078 examples of us and they are always told for a reason. 202 00:15:33,078 --> 00:15:37,083 People don't do things pointlessly they do things for a reason. 203 00:15:37,083 --> 00:15:42,056 So, we will use this as our rough and ready, tried and true definition when we 204 00:15:42,056 --> 00:15:46,640 need one in this class and at the same time we will remember that all the other 205 00:15:46,640 --> 00:15:50,470 ideas about myth that we've been developing these first few lectures are 206 00:15:50,470 --> 00:15:53,056 gonna be still going to be still at the table as well. 207 00:15:53,070 --> 00:15:56,037 We'll keep all of them as best we can in our sights. 208 00:15:56,037 --> 00:16:02,099 So with these ideas in mind soon enough we're going to start turning to some real 209 00:16:02,099 --> 00:16:06,020 mythic material. We're just about ready.