And so we reached the end. You've made it, congratulations, all the
way through, I'll only detain you a couple more minutes, I wanted to have
a couple of concluding thoughts. Human beings like to tell stories,
that's obviously true. And the stories that they tell,
it's a also true, don't just float around in space, remember
the slide from our very first lecture. It's not as though there are demons and spirits out there that are going to
whoosh down the particular fully meaningful narrative that
we need to understand our lives. Instead, what we have is constructions
made by people for other people, and particular times as emblematized
here in our scene depicting our course. There are moments in history when people
make up great stories and those stick. And when they stick it's worth something. Hang onto these things and looking for deeper meanings
that are buried inside of them. Something that the ancients
themselves did and that we've been working on in our course. We've used our toolbox with our
functionalism, our structuralism, psychoanalysis, and myth in ritual trying
to dig at what makes these myths tick. Trying to get an understanding of
what happens in the stories and then also, some of the deeper senses
of what they're trying to convey. But our stories are indeed stories. They're great to hear. And my goal in teaching this course to
you has been to give you an excuse and give you a chance. Give you an encouragement as best I can to hang out with people at the beginning
of the course, much smarter than I am. You've spend some time with Homer, Hesiod,
Virgil, Vigil, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Ovid. [COUGH]
These are amazing figures with tremendous amounts of things to teach us. We've only scratched the surface here. I hope that that surface
scratching has made you itch and I hope that you itch for more. There is much more out there for you. So thanks very much for
spending the time with me and the teaching team here at Penn. We've had a great time with you and we look forward to further
communications with you in the future. Thanks again and best of luck
with your myths in the future.