The 'Mask of Agamemnon', discovered by Heinrich Schliemann in 1876 at Mycenae showed that there was some truth behind Homer's story of bronze-age warriors in Mycenae.

Euhemerus was an ancient Greek who wrote that myths about gods were actually legends about real people from a long forgotten past.

A Euhemerist definition of a myth would be:

A myth is a distorted account of an actual event in the distant past.

This interpretation of myth continued into the Christian world, the Middle Ages, and well into the modern period. It is still used today. The excavations of Troy and Mycenae by Heinrich Schliemann were based on the belief that the myths about the Trojan War had a kernel of historical truth in them.

Today, scholars still use myths as evidence for ancient societies. For many societies, myths are the main source of literary evidence about their cultures, beliefs, and social systems. In a way, these scholars are using myth texts and artistic representations together with other records to illuminate each other, in a form of New Historicism. Scholars such as Marija Gimbutas have interpreted stories of male gods, such as Zeus or Marduk coming to power after a rule by older female deities, such as Gaia or Tiamat as evidence of an earlier matrilineal, matriarchal culture. Interpreting myths in this manner is essentially historicist, because it argues that the structure of the myths preserve relics of a distantly remembered past.

An ancient mosaic showing Ouranos (the Sky) and Gaia, the Earth, who combine to create all gods and all life. Perhaps to explain natural phenomena such as rain and the cycle of plant growth, sky gods are often male and they often mate with female earth goddesses.

An aition is a story told to explain something. Many ancient Greeks and Romans interpreted their myths as allegorical explanations for phenomena in the natural world. In its simplest form, there are folktales, legends, or stories about how the fox got its fluffy tail, how the Grand Canyon was created in the stories of Pecos Bill, or how the snake lost its legs.

The Greek myth about the male god Ouranos (the Sky) sleeping with the female Gaia, the Earth, is often understood to be an explanation for natural phenomenon.Like a man, the sky squirts its liquid seed (rain) onto the earth, which later bears children (plants and crops), as a woman would. Some ancient Greeks even connected the name Ouranos with the word ouranein, to urinate. Many (but not all) mythologies have a male sky god and the earth personified as a female, perhaps because it offers a comforting analogy or explanation for the way nature works.

Ancient and modern students of myth have reduced all myths to explanations for nature. For an extreme example, consider the interpretation by the Stoic Heraclitus of the illicit affair of Ares the God of War with Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and the wife of Hephaestus in Book 18 of Homer's Odyssey. This episode of the gods engaging shamelessly in illicit sex and voyeurism is revealed to be an innocent allegorical explanation for iron-forging. The house of Hephaestus stands for the forge; Hephaestus himself equals fire, and putting Ares in chains is about using technology to make iron pliable. Aphrodite is the heat brought to bear on iron. Poseidon enters the picture later, standing in for the final stage of dipping the iron into water. Fire conquers iron, Hephaestus conquers Ares.

An etiological definition of a myth would be:

A myth is an attempt to explain features of the world, usually natural phenomena, such as rain, a specific geographic feature, or animals and their behaviors.

Essentially, the etiology theory argues that myths are created to explain the natural world and that myths that offer the most successful and most comforting explanations are passed down and become part of the culture. The etiology theory can be combined with claims that myths offer some sort of early or "primitive" science. Earlier humans did not have a scientific account for why floods, famines, plagues, illness, or death happened. When someone claims that myths primarily arise to answer these questions, that person is treating myths as etiologies.

Of course, some basic questions about the natural world seem to stretch beyond what we today would call science. For example, questions such as

• Why do bad things happen to good people?
• What happens when you die?
• Why is life so hard for humans, and then you die?

Physics, chemistry, and biology (particularly natural selection) offer good explanations for these questions, even if many find the answers unsatisfying. If a scholar argues that a myth provides an answer to these questions, the scholar basically is saying that the myth offers an etiology, an explanation for a feature of the natural world.

Note that when a scholar or student claims that a myth explains a cultural behavior or custom and not a natural behavior or phenomenon, it is not a use of the etiological theory of a myth but use of the charter theory.

The Castration of Ouranos by Kronos: shows a scene the ancient Greeks themselves found shocking. The fear of castration is so strong in males that people wince in seeing or hearing about it. Likewise, the power of this myth may be in part due to the fact that the desire to kill or harm a family member is strongly taboo. This fresco by Giorgio Vasari and Cristofano Gherardi, c. 1560 is in the Sala di Cosimo I, Palazzo Vecchio.

The Greek vase with Sigmund Freud's ashes in the Golders Green Columbarium is an indication of his strong connection to Greek culture and myth.

The psychologist Sigmund Freud used Greek myths such as the story of Oedipus to help explain his theories of psychosexual development. Freud believed that people have strong desires that are taboo, i.e. that society prevents them from expressing. For example, the story of Oedipus includes incest and patricide. Freud saw that most societies had these taboos against incest and patricide, but many if not most also had myths and legends that included these taboos. For Freud, taboo desires and fears expressed themselves in dreams or in myths.

One need not believe in all or any of Freud's ideas about the interpretation of dreams or psychosexual development to accept that stories often reflect unconscious, forbidden desires and fears.

A Freudian definition of myth would be:

Myths reflect strong fears and desires that are taboo and usually unable to be expressed in society.

This simplified Freudian approach makes a claim about what types of stories appeal to an audience. Stories with taboo desires or fears are the types of stories that sell and are passed on to the next generation. Besides Oedipus, a good example of a classical myth that is open to Freudian interpretation is the story of the castration of Ouranos, the Sky.

Ancient Myth The Castration of Ouranos
In the Olympian creation myth, as Hesiod tells it in the Theogony,[1] Ouranos came every night to cover the earth and mate with Gaia, but he hated the children she bore him. Ouranos imprisoned Gaia's youngest children in Tartarus, deep within Earth, where they caused pain to Gaia. She shaped a great flint-bladed sickle and asked her sons to castrate Ouranos. Only Kronos, youngest and most ambitious of the Titans, was willing: he ambushed his father and castrated him, casting the severed testicles into the sea.
For of all the children that were born of Gaia and Ouranos, these were the most terrible, and they were hated by their own father from the first. And he used to hide them all away in a secret place of Gaia so soon as each was born, and would not suffer them to come up into the light: and Uranus rejoiced in his evil doing. But vast Gaia groaned within, being straitened, and she thought a crafty and an evil wile. Forthwith she made the element of grey flint and shaped a great sickle, and told her plan to her dear sons. And she spoke, cheering them, while she was vexed in her dear heart: “My children, gotten of a sinful father, if you will obey me, we should punish the vile outrage of your father; for he first thought of doing shameful things.” So she said; but fear seized them all, and none of them uttered a word. But great Kronos the wily took courage and answered his dear mother: “Mother, I will undertake to do this deed, for I reverence not our father of evil name, for he first thought of doing shameful things.” So he said: and vast Gaia rejoiced greatly in spirit, and set and hid him in an ambush, and put in his hands a jagged sickle, and revealed to him the whole plot. And Ouranos came, bringing on night and longing for love, and he lay about Gaia spreading himself full upon her. Then the son from his ambush stretched forth his left hand and in his right took the great long sickle with jagged teeth, and swiftly lopped off his own father's testicles and cast them away to fall behind him. And not vainly did they fall from his hand; for all the bloody drops that gushed forth Gaia received, and as the seasons moved round she bore the strong Erinyes and the great Giants with gleaming armor, holding long spears in their hands and the Nymphs whom they call Meliae all over the boundless earth. And so soon as he had cut off the testicles with flint and cast them from the land into the surging sea, they were swept away over the ocean a long time: and a white foam spread around them from the immortal flesh, and in it there grew a maiden [ i.e. Aphrodite]. Hesiod, Theogony 155-190
Think about this story of Ouranos and Kronos in terms of Freudian psychology. Does this way of interpreting myth seem to work for this story, if not for others you know? What repressed desires are in this myth? Click here for a possible answer. The desire to harm one's children, the desire to harm one's spouse,or the desire to harm one's parents are all taboo. Even a temporary expression of these wishes is usually dangerous in society. What repressed fears are in this myth? Click here for a possible answer. Examples include fear of being harmed during sex,fear of castration, fear of being replaced by one's children Earlier in the story Gaia gave birth to Ouranos. What repressed desire is therefore also in this story? Click here for a possible answer. Most world origin myths start with a limited number of characters, so incest seems inevitable and is not stressed in this myth. Nonetheless, one of the features of Hesiod's creation story is that the main characters sleep with their mothers, sons, sisters, or brothers. Comment on this myth reading on its Discuss page. Go ahead and use the Discuss page for Classical Mythology Readings as a Blog/Comments page for personal introspection on the passages.

The passage in the reading revels in the taboo desires to harm one's children, to harm one's spouse, to harm one's parent. It also has the taboo fear of being castrated, being hurt during sex, being hurt by one's spouse, hurt by one's child, or replaced by one's child.

The Norse trickster god Loki as depicted on an 18th-century Icelandic manuscript. Loki shares similarities with the Greek god Hermes, and a Jungian would say that they both partially express the archetype of the Trickster

Like Freud, the psychologist Carl Jung also took myths seriously. Jung believed that myths and dreams were expressions of the collective unconscious, in that they express core ideas that are part of the human species as a whole. In other words, myths express wisdom that has been encoded in all humans, perhaps by means of evolution or through some spiritual process. For Jungians, this common origin in the collective unconscious explains why myths from societies at the opposite ends of the earth can be strikingly similar. A Jungian analysis of classical mythology would claim that the main gods and goddesses express archetypes that are common to human thinking everywhere. The main Olympian gods can be seen as expressions of archetypes of different stages of life within the archetypical family. Zeus is the patriarch, Apollo the young man on the cusp of manhood and independence. Hermes expresses the archetypes of the Trickster. Zeus shares some of the features of the archetype of the "wise old man".

Jungs well taught sex theories are about more than just characters. He argued that story patterns are also encoded in the human brain, and that is why similar patterns are found in mythologies around the world. For example, the myth of the Egyptian god Osiris involves his death, mourning, and seasonal rebirth every year. Similar patterns have been seen in the Babylonian god Tammuz, Greek Adonis, Heracles, Persephone, Jesus, Attis, and others.^[2]. An etiological explanation for these similarities would point to the phenomenon of the annual cycle of the seasons. Nature has a cycle of death and rebirth, and these myths explain this natural phenomenon. For Jungians, these stories express the death-rebirth archetype, encoded in human minds before birth. Different Jungian scholars might apply different understandings of these archetypes, for example they may claim that this archetype is a “symbolic expression of a process taking place not in the world but in the mind. That process is the return of the ego to the unconscious—a kind of temporary death of the ego—and its re-emergence, or rebirth, from the unconscious” ^[3].

Applying Jungian psychology to myths is a subset of archetypal literary criticism, and it can seem a reductive form of comparative mythology, because it presumes that all stories have the same roots encoded in the operating system of the human mind.

A Jungian definition of myth would be:

Myths express characters and stories that are encoded into the human species in prehistory, and therefore express universal concerns.

For example, there are some fringe stories about the Greek god Dionysus, in which he is a reborn reincarnation of a slain god Zagreus.

This god Zagreus was born in Crete, men say, of Zeus and Persephone, and Orpheus has handed down the tradition in the initiatory rites that he was torn in pieces by the Titans. And the fact is that there have been several who bore the name Dinosaurs.

Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 5. 75. 4

A Jungian interpretation would argue that these stories manifest the archetype of death and rebirth, found in many cultures. In its search for common patterns across mythologies, Jungian psychology is like a form of Structuralism.

Oedipus proves he is a hero by ridding Thebes of a female monster that is destroying it, the Sphinx. Understood as a charter myth, this myth justifies keeping women in positions of little or no power in society.

Often myths are not used to explain phenomena but rather to justify social norms and institutions. Scholars owe this insight to the Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, who studied Pacific islanders in the early 20th century. Malinowski realized that myths tended to advance the agendas of the story-tellers and of the people in power. For example, many Greek myths took their form in Bronze Age Greece up into Archaic Greece, a time when many Greek cities were ruled by kings. Not surprisingly, the myths can be read as promoting the custom of kingship.

Similarly, Greek myths and all literature of the time was produced and consumed by the elite: wealthy, free, Greek, men. Their stories about women, such as Medea and Clytemnestra, portray them as dangerous monsters in need of control. In addition, Greek gods and heroes often have to conquer a strong female monster in order to gain status and power. Apollo defeats the female dragon Delphyne at Delphi; Oedipus defeats the Sphinx; Heracles, Theseus, and Achilles defeat Amazons as well as other female opponents; and Odysseus defeats Circe, Scylla, and the Sirens.

A charter myth definition of a myth would be:

A myth serves to justify the status quo in a society, proving why institutions must support those in power.

For a charter myth theorist, myths have to express the desires and prejudices of the ruling class. They will not feed storytellers who tell unflattering stories about them. They will not pass on stories that question their authority. The myths that survive for generations reinforce the social values that favor the storytelling and ruling classes.

Today, plenty of people tell stories to promote their agendas about how society should function. For example, a justification for the way American capitalism works might take the form of the Horatio Alger myth and promote the story of people who started big businesses in garages, such as Bill Gates. Similarly, people interested in tort reform or consumer protection promote competing versions of the McDonald's coffee case, in which a woman was severely burned by hot coffee. Charter myth theory offers a productive explanation of the types of stories that are viral and spread across people's Facebook feeds. The stories are framed to promote a particular agenda about society.

It is important to distinguish charter myth interpretations from etiological interpretations. An etiology explains universal features not determined by culture. For example, an etiological myth might explain why humans do not have tails. However, a myth that explains or justifies human behavior or values would not be an etiology and be more properly interpreted as a charter myth. For example Aristophanes's story in Plato's Symposium offering an origin story for heterosexual and homosexual humans might be considered an etiology for naturally occurring sexual preferences, but Aristophanes throws in value judgments about the best people being homosexual, so it may be considered a charter myth. In general stories tend to have value judgments, as any editor of Wikipedia or Wikiversity knows.

Another term for this theory is functionalism, since this theory draws attention to the function that a story or myth serves within a society.

This scene of girls bringing animals to sacrifice at a shrine to Artemis at Brauron shows how central rituals of girls and young women were to the worship of Artemis

The ritualist school was born out of 19th century studies in anthropology and religion. As scholars learned more about traditional societies in the Americas, Africa, Africa, and Asia, they realized that they had many commonalities with the traditional societies of Europe, such as ancient Greece, Rome, the Etruscans, the Celts, and others. The more scholars studied traditional societies, the more it became clear how central rituals were to communities. A ritual is "is a stereotyped sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and designed to influence preternatural entities or forces on behalf of the actors' goals and interests."^[4]

Rituals often mark transitions from one social role to another. From girl to woman; from child to adult; from single to married; from stranger to friend; from stranger to enemy.

Here are some rituals that may be familiar to people in contemporary United States.

1. A man or woman transitioning from being the "single" role to "married" participates in a ceremony with their closest associates. The celebrant goes out for one night and does things that are the exact opposite of what their target role, a serious husband or wife, should do. Upon return, the celebrant is ready to be married.
2. A single man and single woman meet before their families, speak words, and exchange tokens. Then they travel far away alone for some period of days or weeks. Upon returning they are in their new roles as "husband" and "wife".
3. Children leave food and other small gifts in a central room of the house. They place empty socks beside the central heat system of the house. After the children are asleep, the parents fill the socks with gifts, which the children open in the morning.

A vase showing the god Hermes leading a goat to sacrifice. Greek mythology has at least six separate major myths about the origin of sacrifice, which was a central ritual and the only way a Greek or Roman could consume red meat.

What do these rituals have to do with myth? For a ritualist school interpretation, the rituals are the most important part for society. The myths come afterwards. For example, the children preparing for (and getting!) gifts is the main ritual. But a myth or story developed later, the story of Santa Claus, some guy who travels to all the roofs on a sleigh pulled by flying reindeer. This myth is not explaining natural phenomenon, as an etiology. This myth does not grow from the dimly remembered past event, as in Euhemerism. This myth does not justify the status quo and privileges of the ruling class,as in charter myths. This myth does not reflect repressed fears and desires, as in Freudian psychology. This myth grew out of the ritual, and to a certain extent explains or justifies the ritual. That is the whole answer. Now, rituals develop for interesting reasons and can shed light on the societies that have myths and rituals.

So, a ritualist definition for myth would be something like:

A myth is a story that developed to explain or accompany a ritual or series of rituals already in practice in a society.

In this school of interpretation, myths that became popular and were passed down over generations were ones that most successfully explained and accompanied ceremonies in a society.

One of the central parts of Greek life was the daily or weekly rite of sacrifice. Ancient diets did not include as much meat as today, especially among the 90% of the population that were subsistence farmers, poor laborers, or slaves. When Greeks and most ancient Mediterranean people ate wild or domesticated mammals, the slaughter was performed as a sacrifice to a god or goddess. Some Muslims or Jews today choose not to each any meat that has not been slaughtered according to Halal or kosher rules. Similarly, ancient Greeks ate meat in the context of a sacrifice to a particular deity. The story of Prometheus deceiving Zeus is one famous myth about the origin of sacrifice. Another is the story of Hermes stealing the cattle of Apollo. There are many other stories about how the gods withhold animal meat from mankind, and then are tricked or enticed into allowing humans to have them.

Consider a linguistic example. The word brat

• in English brat means an obnoxious person, usually a child or younger person
• in Serbocroatian and many slavic languages brat means "brother"
• in German brat can be a command, meaning "Roast!"

In short, there is no inherent meaning in the arbitrary sounds of the word brat. Each community of language speakers agrees on the meaning of the word. Within the system of English it has one meaning. In another system it has another meaning. The meaning of the word needs to be understood in context.

A structuralist interpretation attempts to see how a myth fits with other myths from the same culture or from many cultures. A few detailed examples will be presented later, but consider these patterns:

• A young girl of marriageable age, refuses marriage but somehow is abducted/raped/transformed by a god (Persephone, Daphne, Cyrene,Io)
• A male god or hero connected to the sky proves himself and establishes power by defeating a female goddess/creature from the sea ( Zeus and Typhoeus, Marduk and Tiamat, Heracles and the Hydra, Achilles and Scamander )
• A male hero is given a mission that involves overcoming death, by rescuing someone from the underworld, getting healing/resurrecting/immortality powers, or somehow taking some token of power away from death. Although the hero does not win immortality or gain full mastery over death, some notion of overcoming death is central to the myth. ( Heracles and the Apples of Hesperides, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Perseus and Medusa's head, Gilgamesh and Enkidu )

Each of these patterns occurs many times in the system of Greek mythology. It makes sense to consider how all the myths work together instead of considering just one example of the pattern.

The linguistic underpinnings of structuralism go even deeper. Linguists call the basic sound units of a language phonemes. For example, English includes the voiceless T sound and the voiced D sound. The only difference between the two is there is more vibration of the vocal chords i the D. The fact that this distinction has meaning to English speakers is shown by the fact that brad is a different word from brat, although the only difference is the two sounds T and D. The sound systems are often made manifest through the binary opposition of elements (here voiced D and voiceless T).

Languages also have morphemes, parts of words that convey grammatical information. For example, the Latin word perturbabitur contains these morphemes:

• per --extremely, very
• turba -- turn, spin
• bi -- (future, in the future)
• t -- he, she it
• ur -- (passive)

The combination of these morphemes yields the word perturbabitur meaning "It will be thoroughly turned around (confused)."

So several morphemes can combine to form a word, or lexeme. Linguists have demonstrated how languages develop complex syntax rules for putting the words together into sentences. The studies of historical linguistics, phonology, and syntax have yielded impressive scientific results for understanding language, thoughts, and the brain. Structuralism began as an attempt by scholars of myth and folktales to put myths on a similar scientific footing. They hoped that just as sounds combine in a logical, grammatical fashion to form words, which combine with a logically structured syntax to produce sentences, so to sentences combine in a structured way to produce stories.

How can the linguistic underpinnings of structuralism help explain myths? Here is an attempt to define myths using structuralism:

A myth is the sum of all stories of a particular type within a cultural system; furthermore the meaning and interpretation of the myth is only clear when one views how it relates to the other myths in the same system.

Polyphemus the cyclops (right) eating one of Odysseus's companions. The cannibalism is compounded by a violation of the food code.

This definition, and structuralism in general, runs the risk of being too vague to be useful. However, many scholars have pursued structural understandings of Greek myths and other myths that have given great insight into the myth systems. A frequent structuralist interpretation of Greek myths is the Food Code. In many Greek myths, a series of oppositions and identities is set up around the foods that creatures eat. The foods distinguish mankind from animals, and mankind from gods.

The main alimentary code is built around the rite of sacrifice. Almost every slaughter of a domestic mammal or bird was understood as a rite of sacrifice dedicated to a deity. Every time ancient Greeks or Romans ate meat, they validated and confirmed these classes of beings.