Representatives of different science branches reveal interest in the ancient mythology, but in spite of this fact, the ancient mythhas never been definied an explicite way. The etymology of the term is ambiguous, too. „Myth” comes from the Greek word „mythos”, which is believed to have different meanings, varying from „story”, „legend”, or "tale of gods' origin" to "word", "poetic word", or even "plot of a story". Such a diversity of meanings influenced concepts and theories connected with myth.
In the ancient times two interpretations of the phenomenon of myth word known, namely an alegorie one and a historical one. The former was popular not only in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but remained dominant also in the theories of myth dating from the 18th c.
The Enlightenment brought along several new outlooks on the ancient myth French rationalists used to rojoct it, considering it to be the product of uneducated minds; Herder drew a parallel between myth and philosophy and poetry, while Creuzer took notice of its possible symbolic interpretations. This last view prevailed until the 19th c.
The discovery of Sanskrit and the ancient civilizations of Near East mada natural, astral, and astronornical interpretations of myth possible. Numerous schools concerned with the concepł of myth came into being at that time as well. The 20th c. myth interpretations fall into four categories, according to four theories, namely, sociological, psychological, structuralistic, and phenomenological. Each of these theories tried to prezent different functions performer by myth, especially ontological, soteriological, and semantic ones. None of them, however, explains the full complexity of the phenomenon.
I sit also worth nothing that myth enter sinto structural relations with literature, thanks to chich the letter regains its lost, "existencial reality".
Download files
Citation rules
Cited by / Share
Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
English
Język Polski
Русский
Français (France)
Deutsch
Español (España)
Italiano