Mythical Thinking Research Articles

Myths and the political use of religion in Christian Democratic culture

In this essay, the author will attempt to analyze the overall relationship established between the party of Christian Democracy (so named for its affiliation with a traditional religion) and the phenomena of the sacralization of politics that have so profoundly shaped the character of mass parties in the twentieth century. The quest for consensus led the Catholic party to adopt a new language, based on mythical thinking and profoundly indebted – in content and mode of communication – to the experiences of totalitarianism. The active rivalry with political religions marked, both in the phase of development and in the process of communication, the forms of mass political expression of Christian Democracy. De Gasperi's proposal concerning the definition of new identities and political affiliations, both on the national level and on the broader Western level (both in European and Atlantic terms) was the product of a unique ideological development in keeping with the requirements of modern mass politics.

Interrogando as teorias sobre o arco-íris

Tentar entender as teorias do arco-íris é uma maneira de pensar sobre as argumentações entre a lógica científica e o pensamento mítico na história da ciência. Este trabalho segue três percursos relacionados: primeiramente, expõe um resumo das descontinuidades e recorrências históricas na explanação do arco-íris; em segundo lugar, examina registros de etnógrafos estrangeiros na Amazônia, na primeira metade do século XX; por último, aborda a 'teoria nativa' sobre o fenômeno nas terras baixas da América do Sul, visando compreender a lógica das classificações nativas, que opera como um pensamento mítico. A simetria das disciplinas permite uma complementaridade entre as teorias científicas e as humanidades, bem como analogias entre diferentes leituras dos códigos biológicos e sociais.

The Big Problem with History: Christianity and the Crisis of Meaning

March/April 2006 Historically Speaking 25 The Big Problem with History: Christianity and the Crisis of Meaning Kenneth E. Hendrickson For the last decade and more I have made it my business to watch the "culture wars." Though at times I have internally battled this conclusion, I am convinced that the polarization ofAmerican intellectual and political life is real, significant, and perhaps even dangerous. I have also come to the conclusion that these "wars" seem so intractable because, the multiplicity ofparticipants aside, the conditions fueling them are not well understood. On the one hand, social conservatives tend to miss the point about the nature ofthe social challenges facing us today. They like to argue that Americans suffer principally from an unwarranted abandonment of the transcendent vision afforded by general acceptance of Christian theism. Such people hope to remedy social ills by finding ways to restore the public understanding of and respect for religion. I prefer to argue that there never was such a golden age of faith and that we are merely experiencing something less than the apocalypse: life as it usually is, only better (and more sensationally) reported, and a culture which through experience and technology is readily and voluntarily leaving behind older certainties for seemingly more fruitful options. Conservatives seem to propose a "stab-in-the-back" thesis in which "bad ideas" like philosophical materialism and scientific Darwinism play the leading roles in an unjust and unjustified coup against reigning Christian theism. Though they don't frequently use the word, in fact they like to write about apostasy. On the other hand, political and social liberals seem to doubt the very idea of a crisis, excepting ofcourse hysterical visions of some "victory of reaction," currently personified in the administration of George Bush. Though I disagree with the conservative apostasy model, I believe that we do indeed face a crisis , of which politics is a symptom but not a cause. We face rather a crisis of meaning. In the West, Christianity has collapsed: intellectually , theologically, institutionally, if not numerically. It has certainly collapsed in its former role of metanarrative, or "super story," organizing knowledge and the other day-today stories constantly afoot among Western cultures. While this collapse obviously concerns social conservatives, it should also trouble secular liberals. The collapse of the Christian metanarrative is not just a crisis of religion. It is also a crisis ofhistorical meaning. History is literary and thus inextricably tied to the tools of literThe collapse of the Christian metanarrative is notjust a crisis ofreligion. It is also a crisis ofhistorical meaning. ary thought. In the West the dominant literary source has been the Bible and the Christian idiom derived from it. Historians and philosophers have tended to underplay this fact and for that reason have underappreciated the power of the Christian metanarrative in Western intellectual life. The abandonment of that metanarrative, which has occurred recently , rapidly, and violently, represents an incapacity of history to produce a product meaningful to the Western public at large. It constitutes the first time a culture has attempted a post-mythic outlook. I suspect that it is impossible to supersede mythical thinking and that therefore the present moment represents a crisis or a limit of Western historical consciousness . Some attribute the collapse of the Christian metanarrative to naughty intellectuals and their apostate theories: Darwin, Marx, and Freud among others. But intellectual theory , even science, has never been very good at convincing large numbers of people to abandon religious faith. Lived cultural experience does that. Until the post-1945 realities and entirely new intellectual possibilities came into focus, Western intellectual discourse remained locked in Christian idiomror at least anti-idiom. It seemed the options were to attack or to come to some terms with Christianity, but not to get past its categories of concern completely. Only since the period 1945-1970 has the West entered an era of Christian metanarrative aliteracy, a functional consensus that Christian ideas just do not matter anymore. The West has accepted a condition of competitive, multiple narratives, the seeming only link between them being that we agree there is no metanarrative. Because I believe this transformation resulted from lived cultural experience, I believe that...

Jewish Myths between Text and Ethnography: On Michael Fishbane's Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking

The Concept of Myth has been discussed in Jewish studies almost since its beginning. While in those initial steps discussions about myth adhered solely to the Hebrew Bible, during the next stages of the development of Jewish studies the discussion expanded to other periods of Jewish culture, raising new questions and issues, so much so that it became almost an independent discipline. Still, when a seminal study on Jewish myths is published, one that covers three successive periods—the Hebrew Bible, rabbinic literature, and medieval Kabbalah—and opens major theoretical and historical questions for a new discussion, this is undoubtedly a scholarly event. Such a book has been written by Michael Fishbane. While the long-term impact of this important study cannot be foreseen, we should not refrain from an attempt to assess the contribution of such a central publication. The outstanding contribution of this study is its range. Fishbane delves into three complex historical periods that, in spite of great differences, are connected to each other in overt and covert relationships. One obvious link is tradition; each period builds on the motifs, thought structures, and models of the prior generations. It is impossible to understand the mythical creativity of the Kabbalah without the mythical derashah (sermon) in the Talmud and midrash; or, in turn, the mythical thinking in rabbinic literature without the foundations built in the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible is another link binding all three eras. Fishbane also looks at the sustained and evolving apperception of the one God—an image that is the basis of the mythic worldview—as well as particular themes such as the struggle of God with the primaeval creatures, and the participation of God in the nation's sufferings. Despite its scope, the book does not neglect the details. We could say [End Page 250] that here, no doubt, God is found in the details. The author did not rely for his arguments on this or that representative text but brings another text and another one, each one with detailed explication founded on the severest philological principles: the manuscripts, the language, the sources, the variants, the background. One of the truly impressive characteristics of this book is the fact that its author never surrenders to any temptation toward popularization. The book is difficult and rigorous, demanding maximum concentration and professionalism. The best example for that is appendix 2, "The Term Kivyakhol and its Uses." In this appendix, Fishbane collects all the instances of the term from every existing source in manuscript or printed book and examines the context and place of each among the other instances of the term. He also categorizes all the instances according to their themes and forms and assesses their function and meaning in Jewish culture. This is exemplary philological research, and only very few like it have been published in recent years. In conclusion, this read is not easy going, and is not intended to be. One of the main interests of the study is its reassessment of the concept of "the monotheistic myth." This concept changes, in many aspects, the way we understand myths in Jewish culture, and not only in the Hebrew Bible, where Fishbane uses it the most. The general scholarly understanding of biblical myths (and in many cases of those in rabbinic literature as well) is that they are either "fragments" or "remnants" of pagan myths, or "metaphors" through which creators of Jewish myths tried to express other ideas. This sort of reading has dominated Jewish studies for decades, and I myself used this approach in my studies of biblical myths.1 According to this paradigm, biblical myths were not living expressions of biblical religiousity but either were inserted there incidentally, as remnants of older, primitive religions, or should be grasped as rhetorical models, used as vehicles to express other religious truths. With the help of dozens of examples taken from these...

Art as Symbolic Form: Cassirer on the Educational Value of Art

Among the papers that Ernst Cassirer left at his death in 1945 is a fully written out lecture labeled Seminar of Education, March 10th, 1943, which also bears the title Educational Value of Art. It may have been prepared for a session of Cassirer's seminar at Yale for that spring on Aesthetics: Symbolic Forms, the second half of a yearlong course.1 The text begins with discussion of the Platonic quarrel with the poets and moves through views of various thinkers, especially Croce and Collingwood. Cassirer had planned to have a volume on art included in The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, in addition to those on Language, Mythical Thought, and The Phenomenology of Knowledge.2 In these three volumes he often mentions the triad of language, myth, and art, but he says little of art as such. In May 1942 in a letter to Paul Schilpp, the American philosopher and editor of the volume of critical essays on Cassirer's work in the Library of Living Philosophers series, Cassirer wrote that he had intended to produce a volume on art but the disfavor (Ungunst) of the times caused him to put it off again and again.3 The principal sources of Cassirer's aesthetics are his chapter on art in An Essay on Man4 and two lectures on the educational val-

A Researcher's Personal Narrative: Positive Emotions, Mythical Thinking and Posttraumatic Growth.

Despite much empirical effort, and the development of the posttraumatic growth model, we still know little about the processes of growth from trauma and the conditions that enhance or inhibit the transformation. To further explore these topics I used a journal in which, for a period of about 18 months, I recorded my struggle with a highly traumatic event. I offer a personal narrative that depicts my predicament, my efforts to recover, the thoughts and feelings I experienced and the social context in which I developed posttraumatic growth. I discuss the shifts in my grief-saturated thinking as I responded with positive emotions to my surroundings and encountered model stories of growth. I illustrate the role of mythical thinking in the cognitive processing of trauma toward growth and conclude with clinical implications.

A Researcher's Personal Narrative: Positive Emotions, Mythical Thinking and Posttraumatic Growth

A Researcher's Personal Narrative: Positive Emotions, Mythical Thinking and Posttraumatic Growth

Plato's dialectic at play: argument, structure, and myth in the Symposium

Contents Introduction 1. Apollodorus's Prologue: An Imitation of an Imitation 1.1 Historical Frame 1.2 Apollodorus and Mimetic Narrative 1.3 Force of Hybris 1.4 Malakos versus Manikos: Soft or Mad? 1.5 Anachronisms? 2. Aristodemus's Prologue: Destruction and Transformation of the Factual Frame of Reference 2.1 Story 2.2 Sufficiency and Beauty: Emerging Criteria for Judgment 2.3 Spatial Order? 2.4 Mimetic versus Hubristic: Destruction of the Factual Narrative 2.5 Sophistic Education in the Context of Other Dialogues: Protagoras, Phaedo, Republic 2.6 Between Religious Observance and the Cycle of Opposites 2.7 The Father of the 3. Order of the Speeches: Formulating the Problem 3.1 Eros 3.2 Encomium 3.3 Problem of the Significance of the Early Speeches 4. From Character to Speech: Early Speeches and Their Significance 4.1 Phaedrus: Ardent Apprentice, but Confused Mythologue 4.2 Pausanias: Sophistic Sociologue 4.3 Hiccups and Eryximachus, the Homogenic Doctor-Scientist 4.4 Aristophanes: Poet as Educator 4.4.1 Aristophanes' Speech and Socrates' Criticism of Mimetic Art in the Republic 4.4.2 Possibility of Anachronism and Plato's Vanishing Signature 4.4.3 Aristophanes' Speech as a Parody of Philosophical Dialectic 4.4.4 Aristophanes' Speech and Individual Identity 4.4.5 Aristophanes' Hiccups Revisited 4.5 Agathon: Sophistic Theologue as the Climax of an Unselfcritical Tradition 4.5.1 Advance over the Previous Speakers? 4.5.2 Agathon as Theologue Without Need 4.5.3 Shadow of the Good: Agathon's Portrait in the Context of the Republic 4.6 Conclusion 5. Diotima-Socrates: Mythical Thought in the Making 5.1 Introduction: Problem 5.2 Elenchus of Agathon and the Question of Truth 5.3 Role of Diotima 5.4 Eros-Daimon 5.5 Diotima and the Art of Mythmaking Revisited: Birth of Eros 5.6 Relation or Substance? 5.7 Rhetoric and Dialectic 5.8 Criticism of Aristophanes and Agathon 5.9 Curious Case of Procreation in the Beautiful 5.10 Concluding Sections of the Lesser Mysteries 5.11 Preliminary Conclusion 6. Greater Mysteries and the Structure of the Symposium So Far 6.1 Movement of Ascent: Structure 6.2 Movement of Ascent and the Earlier Speeches 6.3 Immortality and God-Belovedness 6.4 Overall Conclusion 6.4.1 Platonic Love: View So Far 7. Alcibiades and the Conclusion of the Symposium: Test and Trial of Praise 7.1 Figure of Dionysus and the Face of Socrates 7.2 Role of Alcibiades 7.3 Test of Praise 7.4 Trial of Praise 7.5 Eros, the Tyrant, and His Revelers 7.6 Identity and Diversity: Uniqueness of Socrates 7.7 Logoi Opened Up: An Image for the Symposium? 7.8 Concluding Scenes: Rest and the Self-Motion of Thought-Socrates Standing Seeking 8. Conclusion: Plato's Dialectic at Play 8.1 Character, Voice, and Genre 8.2 Bakhtin and the Dialogical Character of Novelistic Discourse 8.3 Symposium as the First Novel of Its Kind in History 8.4 Plato's Dialectic at Play: Art, Reason, and Understanding 8.5 Plato's Positive View of Art 8.6 Structure, Myth, and Argument 8.7 Soul-Body and Human Identity 8.8 Platonic Love and Plato Select Bibliography Index

Myth and Philosophy: From a Problem in Phaedo

This article investigates the relation between myth and philosophy in Greek philosophy in general and in Plato in particular. Although philosophical thinking and mythical thinking are in general mutually opposed, Greek reason is yet to be separated from its fantastic temperament. The mythic atmosphere of Phaedo is striking, given the well known hostility on the part of Plato against mythopoeic poets such as Homer. By putting the relation between myth and philosophy in a proper perspective, this article argues that myth is not only the source of wisdom for philosophy but also the sole guide for a philosophical person when his or her reason fails. There is an apparent tension between mythologein (mythology, telling stories) and apology (for philosophy) in Phaedo. The two themes stand side by side throughout the dialogue but contradict each other because of the well-known rivalry between myth and philosophy in Socratic philosophy. In order to solve the puzzle, this article will conduct a general inquiry into the nature of myth and philosophy and argue that their true rivalry is not on the issue of wisdom but on that of temperance. Although philosophical thinking and mythical thinking represent, as Cassier writes, the exact opposite of each other, Greek reason is yet to be separated from its fantastic temperament (section 3). In Greek arts of discourse, poetry (myth), philosophy, and rhetoric form a triangular opposition.' In order to gain a clear sight of the dynamics between philosophy and poetry, we will use the opposition of philosophy and rhetoric as a contrasting mirror image and claim that wisdom is the area where poetry and philosophy find their common ground (section 4) because philosophical wisdom abounds in Greek objective poetry (section 5). We will use Phaedo's text as a lead, establish the contradiction between mythologein and apology by dismissing in the first two sections the alternative readings of Phaedo, and conclude our inquiry by offering a solution to the riddle in the last four sections (6-9) along the line of opposition between philo-sophia and eroto-sophia.

Temps passé et temps ressenti : les graffiti de l'ancienne prison de Brignoles

Past times, passage of time : graffiti in the former prison of Brignoles. This paper intends to evidence first the different representations of the wolf in the debates aroused by its arrival in the Alpes-Maritimes. In front of the heavy pressure undergone by the catde breeders, ethologists are trying to explain that the wolf s slaughters can be viewed as resulting of two types of distinct behaviours : the one that is adopted during predation on wild fauna, and the one that concerns domestic live-stock. They suggest it is the behaviour of panicking flocks that induces carnages. Following an anthropomorphising process, some publications show the wolf as a victim in the sense that, being deprived of its natural preys, it is in a way compelled to fall back on flocks. Besides, its dangerousness for man is smoothed out, or admitted only in case of rabies. What is really at stake in this debate, is the will, for ecologists, to save eradicated species in order to rebuild an ecological balance. The myth of the attacking wolf, as conveyed by oral and written traditions, is thus replaced by an ideology that is in fact another kind of mythic thinking. We then trace the history of stands and argumentations as they appeared in the press from 1982 to 2001, as well as measures proposed by officiai institutions. Evidences of damages caused by stray dogs added complexity to the debate and fed the controversy. Therefore, the wolf as an animal is progressively disappea-ring, and eventually becoming a standard raised by each part to defend their cause. It is used as an argument to denounce environmental measures on the one hand, and unsuited pastoral practices on the other hand.

Semiotics of culture and New Polish Ethnology

The paper deals with the contemporary state of semiotic ethnology in Poland (connected with New Polish Ethnology group), its internal and external influences, its specifics, subjects and its reaction to the other theoretical propositions. The “neotribe” of New Polish Ethnology was established by few younger scholars, ethnologists in the early 1980s, in an opposition to the dominant stream of positivistic ethnology. Today they have become classics of Polish anthropology, masters that have educated a new generation of their students, and lead some anthropological institutes. The most inspiring set of theories that influenced the group and its heirs was taken from Soviet semiotics of culture (Lotman, Uspensky, Toporov, Ivanov), and French structural-semiotics (Levi-Strauss, Barthes), but there are some individual differences also. On that basis they have developed a specific scope, aim and methods of interpretation with as its key terms myth and mythical thinking. They have explained many cultural events (relation we-others, body image, commercials, and anthropology itself) within the framework of mythical thinking, making it the most productive and attractive frame of interpretation within Polish humanities and social sciences. In the 1990s they had to face critical ethnography, deconstruction and postmodern anthropology and they did it with perfect flexibility that even strengthened their project, because the potential of reflexivity and self-consciousness lied within semiotics from its beginning.

The Place and Power of Myth in Geoscience: An Associate Editor's Perspective

Distinguishing between myth and science is subtle, for both seek to understand the things around us. The characteristic style of mythic thinking is to place special emphasis on a selective conjecture, based typically on the initial observation or recognition of a phenomenon, which is thereafter given privileged status over alternate interpretations. Concepts in geoscience are quite commonly mythic in that sense. The outdated notion of geosynclines as deterministic precursors of orogeny is an apt example, as are central current ideas about suspect terranes, mantle plumes, and global sequence stratigraphy. Geomyths stimulate investigation, but also may retard further progress by dismissing contrary views. Improved understanding of geologic history could be attained more efficaciously by appreciating the mythic quality of many nascent ideas in geoscience, and resisting the temptation to accord geomyths favored status over competing hypotheses.

Dangerous Gifts: Ideologies of Marriage and Exchange in Ancient Greece

A familiar theme in Greek myth is that of the deadly gift that passes between a man and a woman. Analysis of exchanges between men and women reveals the gendered nature of exchange in ancient Greek mythic thinking. Using the anthropological categories of male and female wealth (with examples drawn from many cultures), it is possible to arrive at an understanding of the protocols of exchange as they relate to men and especially to women. These protocols, which are based in part on the distinction between metals and other durable goods as "male" and textiles as "female," are closely related to the gendered division of labor. Anxiety about women as exchangers derives in part from their status as objects exchanged in marriage (as exemplified by Helen in the Iliad), and partly from a misogynist and pessimistic strand of Greek thought (embodied by Hesiod's Pandora) that discounts any female economic contribution to the oikos. Indeed, the majority of destructive exchanges take place within the context of marital crisis. While some texts, beginning with the Odyssey, show the positive side of women's economic role, tragedy tends to follow the Hesiodic distrust of women as exchange partners. Passages from the Agamemnon and the Trachiniai are analyzed to show how in situations of perverted reciprocity brought about by marital discord, even women's traditional gifts of textiles may become deadly.

Ernst Cassirer's theory of myth

Ernst Cassirer viewed mythical thinking as a first step in our mental representation of the real world, but only a first step. What myth leaves out are the differentiations that lead eventually to science. To the primitive, mythically inclined mind, the world is an undifferentiated whole, the elements of which—including the mind itself—are thought to be concrete and interconnected. This means that there is no distinction between observer and observed, and that the observer sees the representations with which she constructs her picture of reality as direct apprehensions of reality, untnediated by any sensory or cognitive categories. Far as that way of thinking may seem from the modern mindset, we have only to examine commonplace political ideas to find evidence of the implicit assumption of an unmediated connection between the wishes of poltical agents and the results they intend to achieve.

Juri Lotman on proper name

The article treats the concept of proper name in Juri Lotman’s semiotics, taking into account also studies in the same field by other authors of the Tartu-Moscow school (V. Ivanov, B. Ogibenin, V. Toporov, B. Uspenski). Focus is laid at three sub-topics: name and myth, name and text, name and artistic creation. One of the sources of treating proper name for both the program article by J. Lotman and B. Uspenski (“Myth — Name — Culture”), and works by several other semioticians of the Tartu–Moscow school is confidence in the connection between proper name and mythical (a-semiotic) thought: semiosis equals here with nomination. Proper name plurality, different re-namings affirm the continuing importance of mythical thinking in later culture. Proper names (such as personal names, place names) belong, in addition to natural language, also into a certain individual system, forming thus an interlinguistic layer located on the boundary of language. J. Lotman stresses that art has a specific power of uniting general and proper name (proper name characterized here by individuality, explosiveness). An artistic work is even doubly of proper name character: both the act of creation and its reception are by nature individual and unrepeated. In the opinion of the authors the treatment of proper name by the Tartu-Moscow school contains fruitful and promising standpoints for the analysis of contemporary culture that, however, have been applied unjustifiably little.

Anna Seghers: The Mythic Dimension

Fehervary Helen. Anna Seghers: The Dimension. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2001. 275 pp. $52.50 hardcover. Helen Fehervary's monograph substantially complicates future readings and interpretations of writings of Anna Seghers. That is not least of its merits. For while Seghers's work continues to be explored in lively Argonautenschiff (The Anna Seghers Yearbook) and elsewhere, a number of simplistic assumptions about her survive. Foremost among these is notion of Seghers's faith, both political and religious. Seghers's adherence to communism, according to decades' old cliches, is supposed to have been an act of (rather than reason). Seghers's attitude toward her Judaism, according to more recent debates, was one of rejection and denial. Rather than arguing for one side or other of these polarizing assumptions, Fehervary chooses to investigate. Her investigation reveals Seghers's faith as constituted by complex notions of messianism, chiliasm, and mysticism dating back to first century Jewish-Christian community in Palestine and language of its chronicles. These concepts often form well disguised subtext in genres of fable, legend, folk and fairy tales favored by Seghers. All of which marks Mythic Dimension in Seghers's work that is subject of Fehervary's monograph. Fehervary's investigation starts in Heidelberg where Seghers studied art history, spending much time on old Dutch masters and receiving a doctorate for her thesis on Jews and Judaism in works of Rembrandt. Fehervary's detailed analysis, in first three chapters of her book, reveals extent to which Seghers was influenced by the iconography and scenic composition characteristic of landscapes (42) in these paintings. Fehervary's main point here is that these were paintings of crucifixion landscapes and other biblical scenes. Her close reading of a scene from Grubetsch, for example, shows that it reenacts Christ's Dinner at Emmaus not as rendered in Bible, but rather in paintings and etchings by Rembrandt. The messianic aspects of figures such as Grubetsch (or Hull, in The Revolt of Fishermen) are shown to be constructed from visual codes created long after biblical events to which they refer. Seghers's messianism is mediated through Rembrandt's (a devout Christian's) vision of early first-century Christian communities (formed by Jews). Fehervary's layered deciphering of Rembrandt's influence reveals central role Jews play in Seghers's mythical thinking, though, in complex world of Anna Seghers these are Christianized Jews. While this will not end debate over Seghers's attitude toward (her) Judaism, it will add to its complexity. The other main influence on young Seghers in Heidelberg came from her fellow student and future husband Laszlo Radvanyi who at time was writing his dissertation on Understanding of Chiliastic Idea and Chiliastic Action (73). Fehervary's exploration of Radvanyi's background-about which little was known until now-leads her to focus, in chapters 4 through 6, on Hungarian connection in Seghers's life and work. …

Myths in Transformation Processes

Transformation processes are historical times that differ considerably from the normal course of events. As societal and group identities crumble or break down, it becomes difficult for the individual actor to retain a reference structure on which to base rational action. In consequence, actions in transformation phases often seem irrational and confused. The article argues that this perception is incorrect and should be substituted by the concept of mythical thinking as developed by Claude Levi-Strauss. Mythical thinking is a different, but not inferior, mode of thinking which moves to the fore when rational thinking is not an adequate or even possible reaction. Using empirical materials from East German enterprises, the article shows how the concept can improve the researcher’s understanding of managerial action in transformation times and explain hitherto “irrational” elements in people’s accounts.

Ecology in policymaking: Water and the restoration of America's Snake River Plain

Myth presented as science complicates green engineering attempts to restore the natural condition of degraded ecosystems. Ecologists have yet to provide a widely accepted theory of how rivers and wetlands functioned before human disturbance, and engineers cannot restore what science cannot describe. In the American West, where the powerful Snake River feeds the Columbia en route to the Pacific Ocean, water developers and their opponents both use the language of science to defend or attack one of the world's most sprawling network of dams and hydropower projects. The case of the Snake River shows how thoroughly mythic thinking and grandiose expectations for nature have saddled the policy process with ambiguous language and goals.

From Mythic Motifs to Sustained Myth: The Revision of Rabbinic Traditions in Medieval Midrashim

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the mythic dimension of rabbinic thought. Much of this work emerged from debates between scholars of Jewish mysticism over the origins of kabbalistic myth. Should these origins be sought in external traditions that influenced medieval Judaism or within the rabbinic tradition? As is well known, Gershom Scholem claimed that the rabbis rejected myth in order to forge a Judaism based on rationality and law. Moshe Idel, on the other hand, argues that mythic conceptions and specifically the mythicization of Torah appear in rabbinic literature. While the medieval kabbalists elaborated and developed these ideas, they inherited a mythic worldview from the rabbis. Scholars are now increasingly likely to characterize many classical rabbinic sources as mythic. Medieval myth need not have been due to external influence, but should be seen as an internal development within Judaism. Despite the appearance of mythic thought in rabbinic literature, however, a tremendous gulf remains between rabbinic and kabbalistic myth. The full-blown theogonic and cosmogonic myths of the kabbalists, the complex divine structure of theSefirot, and the detailed expressions of the theurgic effect of ritual (that is, the effect that specific rituals have upon God or theSefirot) represent a mode of mythic thinking far more comprehensive than that of the rabbis. In rabbinic literature one finds mythic motifs—succinct, independent, and self–contained expressions—not fully developed myths. How exactly did rabbinic myth develop into medieval mystical myth?

From Modern Roots to Postmodern Rhizomes

It has been commonplace to maintain of the phenomenon that occurred during classical times, the change from relying on myth to trusting in reason: (1) that the emergence of philosophy from myth was marked by an abrupt discontinuity; (2) that mythical thinking was left behind once philosophy was invented or discovered; and (3) that the ancient Greeks were the agents of this miracle. This paper suggests that the so-called “Greek miracle” was, in fact, a miracle manqué and, more importantly, that close examination of this failed miracle offers valuable insight into the philosophical crisis facing the world today.