Week 10 Lab: Crash Course Myth videos
What is Myth?
I loved the Slurpee simile to start off the series, as it is important to acknowledge that there are so many concepts that go into myths that the subject has to be looked at holistically. Myths are also not just important because of the stories themselves. Arguably, the interpretation is just as, if not more, important, and can be affected by societal and cultural factors. As myths are often older stories, there is also the aspect of translation and language barriers which may cause interpretations of the same story to differ depending on the language. Myths which we are concerned with are significant, in that they explain something important in the natural world or carry a moral message, and have staying power, which is evident by the fact that we are even studying those stories thousands of years in the future!
The most interesting part of this video, for me, was the explanation of similarities between myths in different cultures. I have found that many fo the myths I have read in this class are similar, but can be from completely different cultures. Part of this is because translation to English may westernize the stories themselves. However, the common ancestor idea explanation of why many India, Arab, and European myths share similarities seems to be pretty likely, in my opinion. But how do we explain similarities between cultures on completely separate continents, such as African mythology and Native American mythology. I found Freud's explanation that myths come from the subconscious to be as good an explanation as any for this phenomena, and I had never really thought about it like that before.
It is interesting to see the structure of most of the stories we all know and love be broken down into the same concrete steps. These steps are ubiquitous between cultures, which definitely hints at some kind of subconscious or psychological reasoning behind it. It is also interesting how the hero always has to journey back home. The hero must take their newfound lessons and bring them back to perhaps inspire others to go on the same journey, or to just live peacefully as they have earned.
Map of the Hero's Journey. Source: Wikimedia
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