mythology

Carved wooden statues at the National Historic Park, Hawaii. Hawaii's rich cultural heritage includes a belief system involving many gods and goddesses, from major deities which feature in Hawaiian creation mythology, to gods of the elements and the natural world.

Genre of traditional stories symbolically underlying a given culture. These stories describe gods and other supernatural beings with whom humans may have relationships, and are often intended to explain the workings of the universe, nature, or human history. Mythology is sometimes distinguished from legend as being entirely fictitious and imaginary, legend being woven around an historical figure or nucleus such as the tale of Troy, but such division is difficult as myth and legend are often closely interwoven.

Mythology has provided the starting point for many writers. English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's lyric drama Prometheus Unbound (1820) is an example of the rewriting of myth (in this case, an attack on God as the oppressor of mankind). Norse and Germanic mythology provided the basis for German composer Richard Wagner's operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen/The Ring of the Nibelung (1876).

Ancient mythologies and their chief gods include those of Egypt (Osiris), Greece (Zeus), Rome (Jupiter), India (Brahma), and the Scandinavian and Germanic peoples (Odin or Woden). Mythology embraces the examination of these stories and how they relate to similar tales told in other cultures.

Development of mythology The great myths are poetic expressions of early people's profoundest intuitions about the universe and life; it has been suggested that to some extent a mythology is an essential background to the development of a culture. Anthropological studies made among primitive peoples have revealed that myths have an important social function in providing an explanation for the society and its institutions, such as the distinction between chiefs and commoners, or the possession of land or magical powers by certain families. Mythology is not, however, confined to an early stage of society, and remains visible in advanced civilizations in the form of folklore.

Early interpretation The study of mythological belief was initially sceptical and critical, although Plato, while demolishing the ancient Hellenic mythology, declared that the philosopher would have to invent other truer myths to take its place, and tried to provide these himself in Timaeus, Phaedo, and the Symposium. Euhemerus, a Sicilian philosopher living around 316 BC, argued that all myths were founded in historical events, the gods being deified warriors and heroes from remote history. As late as 1825, K O Müller in Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie explained mythology as a disease of language, the names of the gods merely expressing natural phenomena.

Modern study The late 19th century saw the development of the comparison and elucidation of world mythologies. Scottish historian and folklore scholar Andrew Lang, author of Myth, Ritual, and Religion (1887), and James Frazer in his pioneering study of the origins of religion and sociology The Golden Bough (1890), interpreted mythology in terms of savage life and experience.

In 1931 the German ethnologist Wilhelm Schmidt reviewed the various theories advanced to account for the origin of religion and its mythology in his Ursprung der Gottesidee/Origin and Growth of Religion.

A characteristic 20th-century interest has been to view mythology within a philosophy of symbolic forms, or as exemplifying a structured system of values and significations.

Classification of deities The chief figures of various mythologies fall into well-defined groups. All systems include war-gods, water-gods, wind-gods, gods of agriculture, gods of the hunt, gods of death, and many other deities attributed to aspects of common human concern. Many deities have more than one function; such as war-gods who are also gods of agriculture. Deities of death frequently preside over agriculture as the seed grows from their subterranean domain.

Cosmogony An important aspect of mythology deals with the primitive notion of the world, its creation, and the origin of man. There is a remarkable likeness between cosmological myths in all parts of the world.