Greek Religion and the Tradition of Myth Religion
Greek Religion and The Tradition of Myth Religion • Religion • An institutionalized system of rituals. • An institution is a “system of ideas whose object is to explain the world” (Durkheim, 1965: 476). • Spiritualism • A belief in forces that exist outside of space and time but that can act within those domains Culture and Belief • “Religion is sociologically interesting not because, as vulgar positivism would have it, it describes the social order...but because... it shapes it” (Geertz 1973, 119). • “The social function of myth is to bind together social groups as wholes or, in other words, to establish a social consensus” (Halpern 1961, 137). Mythos • Archaic Greek: a story, speech, utterance. • Essentially declarative in nature • Classical Greek: An unsubstantiated claim • Mythographos • Logographos • Logopoios Modern Definitions • “…Myth is defined as a complex of traditional tales in which significant human situations are united in fantastic combinations to form a polyvalent semiotic system which is used in multifarious ways to illuminate reality…” • (Burkert 1985: 120). • “A traditional story with collective importance” • (Powell, 2009: 2) Logos • An argument • A statement or story based on comparative evaluation or collection of data • The result of a process • A study • Bio-logy, Socio-logy, mytho-logy • Powell: • logos is defined by authorship, it has a known origin, • mythos is anonymous, it exists in a social milieu undefined by its origin Truth and Falsehood • “The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose… The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. Poetry, therefore, is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular.” • (Aristotle Poetics 1451a.
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