Origin myth

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An origin myth is a myth that purports to describe the origin of some feature of
the natural or social world. One type of origin myth is the cosmogonic myth, which
describes the creation of the world. However, many cultures have stories set after
the cosmogonic myth, which describe the origin of natural phenomena and human
institutions within a preexisting universe.

In Western classical scholarship, the terms etiological myth and aition (from the
Ancient Greek ??????, "cause") are sometimes used for a myth that explains an
origin, particularly how an object or custom came into existence.

Contents [hide]
1 Nature of origin myths
2 Social function
3 Founding myth
4 Foundation stories
5 See also
6 References
7 Further reading
Nature of origin myths[edit]
Every origin myth is a tale of creation: origin myths describe how some new reality
came into existence.[1] In many cases, origin myths also justify the established
order by explaining that it was established by sacred forces[1] (see section on
"Social function" below). The distinction between cosmogonic myths and origin myths
is not clear-cut. A myth about the origin of some part of the world necessarily
presupposes the existence of the world�which, for many cultures, presupposes a
cosmogonic myth. In this sense, one can think of origin myths as building upon and
extending their cultures' cosmogonic myths.[1] In fact, in traditional cultures,
the recitation of an origin myth is often prefaced with the recitation of the
cosmogonic myth.[2]

In some academic circles, the term "myth" properly refers only to origin and
cosmogonic myths. For example, many folklorists reserve the label "myth" for
stories about creation. Traditional stories that do not focus on origins fall into
the categories of "legend" and "folk tale", which folklorists distinguish from
myth.[3]

According to historian Mircea Eliade, for many traditional cultures, nearly every
sacred story qualifies as an origin myth. Traditional humans tend to model their
behavior after sacred events, seeing their life as an "eternal return" to the
mythical age. Because of this conception, nearly every sacred story describes
events that established a new paradigm for human behavior, and thus nearly every
sacred story is a story about a creation.[4]

Social function[edit]
See also: Myth and ritual and Eternal return (Eliade)
An origin myth often functions to justify the current state of affairs. In
traditional cultures, the entities and forces described in origin myths are often
considered sacred. Thus, by attributing the state of the universe to the actions of
these entities and forces, origin myths give the current order an aura of
sacredness: "Myths reveal that the World, man, and life have a supernatural origin
and history, and that this history is significant, precious, and exemplary."[5]
Many cultures instil the expectation that people take mythical gods and heroes as
their role models, imitating their deeds and upholding the customs they
established:

When the missionary and ethnologist C. Strehlow asked the Australian Arunta why
they performed certain ceremonies, the answer was always: "Because the ancestors so
commanded it." The Kai of New Guinea refused to change their way of living and
working, and they explained: "It was thus that the Nemu (the Mythical Ancestors)
did, and we do likewise." Asked the reason for a particular detail in a ceremony, a
Navaho chanter answered: "Because the Holy People did it that way in the first
place." We find exactly the same justification in the prayer that accompanies a
primitive Tibetan ritual: "As it has been handed down from the beginning of the
earth�s creation, so must we sacrifice. � As our ancestors in ancient times did�so
do we now."[6]

Founding myths unite people and tend to include mystical events along the way to
make "founders" seem more desirable and heroic. Ruling monarchs or aristocracies
may allege descent from mythical founders/gods/heroes in order to legitimate their
control. For example: Julius Caesar and his relatives claimed Aeneas as an
ancestor.

Founding myth[edit]
A "founding myth" or etiological myth (Greek aition) explains either:

the origins of a ritual or of the founding of a city

the ethnogenesis of a group presented as a genealogy[7] with a founding father and
thus of a nation (natio, "birth")
the spiritual origins of a belief, philosophy, discipline, or idea - presented as a
narrative
A founding myth may serve as the primary exemplum, as the myth of Ixion was the
original Greek example of a murderer rendered unclean by his crime, who needed
cleansing (catharsis) of his impurity.

Founding myths feature prominently in Greek mythology. "Ancient Greek rituals were
bound to prominent local groups and hence to specific localities", Walter Burkert
has observed.[8] "i.e. the sanctuaries and altars that had been set up for all
time". Thus Greek and Hebrew founding myths established the special relationship
between a deity and local people, who traced their origins from a hero and
authenticated their ancestral rights through the founding myth. Greek founding
myths often embody a justification for the ancient overturning of an older, archaic
order, reformulating a historical event anchored in the social and natural world to
valorize current community practices, creating symbolic narratives of "collective
importance"[9] enriched with metaphor in order to account for traditional
chronologies, and constructing an etiology considered to be plausible among those
with a cultural investment.[10]

In the Greek view, the mythic past had deep roots in historic time, its legends
treated as facts, as Carlo Brillante has noted,[11] its heroic protagonists seen as
links between the "age of origins" and the mortal, everyday world that succeeded
it. A modern translator of Apollonius' Argonautica has noted, of the many aitia
embedded as digressions in that Hellenistic epic, that "crucial to social stability
had to be the function of myths in providing explanations, authorization or
empowerment for the present in terms of origins: this could apply, not only to
foundations or charter myths and genealogical trees (thus supporting family or
territorial claims) but also to personal moral choices."[12] In the period after
Alexander the Great expanded the Hellenistic world, Greek poetry�Callimachus wrote
a whole work simply titled Aitia�is replete with founding myths. Simon Goldhill
employs the metaphor of sedimentation in describing Apollonius' laying down of
layers "where each object, cult, ritual, name, may be opened... into a narrative of
origination, and where each narrative, each event, may lead to a cult, ritual,
name, monument."[13]

A notable example is the myth of the foundation of Rome � the tale of Romulus and
Remus, which Virgil in turn broadens in his Aeneid with the odyssey of Aeneas and
his razing of Lavinium, and his son Iulus's later relocation and rule of the famous
twins' birthplace Alba Longa, and their descent from his royal line, thus fitting
perfectly into the already established canon of events. Similarly, the Old
Testament's story of the Exodus serves as the founding myth for the community of
Israel, telling how God delivered the Israelites from slavery and how they
therefore belonged to him through the Covenant of Mount Sinai.[14]

During the Middle Ages, founding myths of the medieval communes of northern Italy
manifested the increasing self-confidence of the urban population and the will to
find a Roman origin, however tenuous and legendary. In 13th-century Padua, when
each commune looked for a Roman founder - and if one was not available, invented
one � a legend had been current in the city, attributing its foundation to the
Trojan Antenor.[15]

Larger-than-life heroes continue to bolster the origin-myths of many newer nations

and societies. In modern-era colonial contexts, waves of individuals and groups
come to the fore in popular history as shaping and exemplifying the ideals of a
group: explorers followed by conquerors followed by developers/exploiters. Note for
example the conquistadors of the Iberian empires, the bandeirantes in Brazil, the
coureurs des bois in Canada, the Cossacks and the promyshlenniki in Siberia and in
Alaska, the bands of pioneers in the central and western United States, and the
voortrekkers in Southern Africa.

Foundation stories[edit]
Foundational stories are accounts of the development of cities and nations. A
foundational story represents the view that the creation of the city is a human
achievement. Human control and the removal of wild, uncontrolled nature is
underlined. There are two versions of foundational stories: civilization story and
degradation story.[16]

Civilization stories take a view of nature as dangerous and wild. The development
of the city is seen as a successful distancing of humans from nature. Nature is
locked out, and humans take pride in doing so successfully. In 1984 the geographer
Yi-Fu Tuan suggested ranking cities according to their distance to natural rhythms
and cycles.

Degradation stories (also called pollution stories) take a different stance. The
city is seen as spoiling the landscape of the ecological relations that existed
before the city was established. There is a sense of guilt for degrading the intact
system of nature. In degradation stories true nature only exists outside the city.

See also[edit]
Creation myth
Dindsenchas
Etiology
Human timeline
Life timeline
List of national founders
Metaphysics
National myth
Thanksgiving (United States)
References[edit]
^ Jump up to: a b c Eliade, p. 21
Jump up ^ Eliade, pp. 21-24
Jump up ^ Segal, p. 5
Jump up ^ See, for example, Eliade, pp. 17-19
Jump up ^ Eliade, p. 19
Jump up ^ Eliade, pp. 6�7
Jump up ^ Herwig Wolfram, The History of the Goths, Thomas J. Dunlap, tr.,
especially "Gothic history as historical ethnography", 1988:1-18.
Jump up ^ Burkert, Homo Necans (1972) 1983:83.
Jump up ^ Myth as "narratives of collective importance" is often part of the
definition of myth, both Greek and other; see Walter Burkert, Structure and history
in Greek mythology and ritual, 1982:23; Jan N. Bremmer, Interpretations of Greek
mythology, "What is a Greek myth?" 1987:1; Mark P. O. Morford and Robert J.
Lenardon, Classical Mythology 1999:12.
Jump up ^ These structures of Greek foundation myths within their historical and
cultural contexts, and the particular example of the founding of Cyrene, are
analysed, in terms first laid out by Georges Dum�zil, by Claude Calame, Myth and
History in Ancient Greece: the symbolic creation of a colony rev. tr. of Mythe et
histoire dans l'antiquit� grecque, 2003.
Jump up ^ Brillante, "Myth and history: the historical interpretation of myth" in
L. Edmunds, Approaches to Greek Myth (1991, pp. 91�140.
Jump up ^ Peter Green, Introduction to Argonautika, expanded ed. 2007, p. 15.
Jump up ^ Goldhill, "The paradigms of epic: Apollonius Rhodius and the examples of
the past", in The Poet's Voice: Essays on Poetics and Greek Literature (1991), ch.
5, pp. 284�333, noted in Peter Green 2007, note on Argonautica I.1070�77, p. 226.
Jump up ^ Kenton L. Sparkes, Genre Criticism, in Thomas Dozeman (ed), :Methods for
Exodus", CUP, 2010, p.73
Jump up ^ Roberto Weiss, The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford:
Blackwell) 1973:18.
Jump up ^ Allen, John; Doreen B. Massey, Michael Pryke, Unsettling Cities Routledge
1999 ISBN 978-0-415-20072-1 p. 141
Further reading[edit]
Belayche, Nicole. "Foundation myths in Roman Palestine. Traditions and reworking",
in Ton Derks, Nico Roymans (ed.), Ethnic Constructs in Antiquity: The Role of Power
and Tradition (Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2009) (Amsterdam
Archaeological Studies, 13), 167-188.
Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology. New York: Penguin Books,
1976.
Campbell, Joseph. Transformations of Myth through Time. New York: Harper and Row,
1990.
Darshan, Guy "The Origins of the Foundation Stories Genre in the Hebrew Bible and
Ancient Eastern Mediterranean", JBL, 133,4 (2014), 689�709.
Eliade, Mircea. A History of Religious Ideas: Volume 1: From the Stone Age to the
Eleusinian Mysteries. 1976. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Chicago: The U of Chicago P,
1981.
Eliade, Mircea. Myth and Reality. Trans. Willard Trask. New York: Harper & Row,
1963.
Encyclopedia of Ancient Myths and Culture. London: Quantum, 2004.
Lincoln, Bruce. Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of
Myth, Ritual, and Classification. 1989. Repr. New York: Oxford U P, 1992.
Long, Charles H. Alpha: The Myths of Creation. New York: George Braziller, 1963.
Paden, William E. Interpreting the Sacred: Ways of Viewing Religion. 1992. Boston:
Beacon P, 2003.
Ricoeur, Paul. �Introduction: The Symbolic Function of Myths.� Theories of Myth:
From Ancient Israel and Greece to Freud, Jung, Campbell, and Levi-Strauss. Ed.
Robert A. Segal. New York & London: Garland, 1996. 327�340.
Schilbrack, Kevin. Ed. Thinking Through Myths: Philosophical Perspectives. London &
New York: Routledge, 2002.
Segal, Robert A. Joseph Campbell: An Introduction. 1987. Repr. New York: Penguin
1997.
Segal, Robert A. Myth: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004.
Segal, Robert A. Theories of Myth: From Ancient Israel and Greece to Freud, Jung,
Campbell, and Levi-Strauss: Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Myth. Vol. 3. New
York & London: Garland, 1996.
Segal, Robert A. Theorizing about Myth. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999.
Spence, Lewis. The Outlines of Mythology: The Thinker�s Library�No. 99. 1944.
Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2007.
von Franz, Marie-Louise. Creation Myths: Revised Edition. Boston: Shambhala, 1995.
Wright, M.R. �Models, Myths, and Metaphors.� Cosmology in Antiquity. 1995.
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