Place Of Myth Research Articles

Миф и религиозность современного человека в феноменологии религии Мирчи Элиаде

The philosophical and religious views of M. Eliade are considered, the following questions are analyzed: about the presence of religiosity in the thinking of modern man through the basic concepts of the phenomenology of the scientist's religion, about the hidden presence of the mythological and sacred, the connection between the concepts of “sacredˮ and “mythˮ is discussed. The approach of M. Eliade in the question of the functionality of the myth is compared with the approaches of J. Fraser and E. Tylor. The question is raised about the interdisciplinarity of M. Eliade's concepts in the context of the study of myth and cross-cultural analysis, about the place of myth in modernity through the representation of cultural phenomena, philosophical concepts and social practices, as well as possible forms of initiation in the daily practice of modern man. The problem of the possible ontological premise of M. Eliade in the issue of the difference between traditional cultures and modern culture is actualized. The issue of replacing the mythological picture of the world with a scientific one in the context of M. Eliade's theory of myth is considered.

Imágenes y memoria: el pasado futuro, el futuro pasado y el presente futuro en La tumba del relámpago


 En este artículo se propone analizar el motivo clásico de la memoria; desentrañaremos las ékfrasis de las imágenes contenidas en los tejidos más importantes que funcionan como testimonios de memoria; para conseguirlo, consideraremos la visión andina del tiempo y su concepción mítica: en el texto —así como en los ponchos— encontramos un fin que marca un comienzo, y un comienzo que a su vez marca un fin. Proponemos el análisis del proceso de construcción de ékfrasis por parte de la voz narrativa que utiliza algunos submotivos relacionados con el motivo central de la memoria: el conocimiento, el mundo al revés, el eterno retorno, el olvido y las dimensiones complejas del tiempo donde se conjugan el pasado, el presente y el futuro, consideraremos la propuesta del comparativismo, específicamente los elementos básicos de la imagología y la tematología. El papel que cumple la memoria como motivo fundamental en la conformación de nuestra humanidad se relaciona con la visión mítica andina que hace posible los saltos temporales y los resignifica en la trama de la novela que marca el fin de la lucha de los comuneros —la tumba del relámpago— para conseguir la recuperación de sus tierras y sus posibilidades de vida digna.

The Howling Muse: Chasing Coyote Tales in Northwestern California

Coyote is a popular figure in the oral literature of North America, with a sweeping distribution in the stories, songs, and folktales devoted to this beloved character. Coyote, the familiar canine species, has inspired a huge body of oral narratives, with striking similarities in the tales that circulate from the Great Plains to the Southwest and the Pacific Coast (which is the focus of this article). For some groups, such as the Karuk, Coyote occupies a central place in myth, playing a key role even in the creation of the cosmos; for other groups, such as the neighboring Hupa and Yurok, Coyote is displaced by other myth figures, even where similar episodes circulate, instead becoming the secondary focus of everyday folklore. However, wherever Coyote appears, as the subject of oral literature, this beloved muse tends to occupy a liminal position between the sacred and the profane; between the ancient past and the present; and between nature and culture.

From A Space Apart to Oradell at Sea

FEATURED AUTHOR—MEREDITH SUE WILLIS From A Space Apart to Oradell at Sea Meredith Sue Willis I am writing these lines in my mother's house in Shinnston, West Virginia, a small town on a river, set among hills and bituminous coal mines. At one time the B&O Railroad came through, and there was a street car line to two county seats. During the years I was growing up, the main street of town was Route 19, a major two-lane highway that cut through West Virginia and went south. Today, the mines are still working, with fewer miners; Interstate 79 bypassed the town back in the nineteen-seventies; the high school consolidated; the Baptist church split in two. I come back to Shinnston for family and friends, of course, but also for the smell of dense greenery and—if you walk in the damp foggy morning—bacon. Someone out in East Shinnston still cooks bacon for breakfast. I mark the changes and what stays the same. Where I live now, people have meetings and parties, but in Shinnston, they still visit. People drop in of an afternoon and sit around the living room and talk, and this visiting is entertainment just as surely as a baseball game. In spite of air conditioning, the unspoken model is porch sitting on a summer evening and waiting for people to come over. This way of apprehending people is one of the mental attitudes I've carried into my life and writing. In Shinnston, if you see someone walking toward you, you usually have time to go over in your mind who they are, who their family is, where they came from. By the time the person is close enough to greet, you've already spent half a minute holding them in your mind. This, it seems to me, supports a deeply democratic attitude—not theoretical democracy but the practical experience of living in a place where people assume they'll be recognized and greeted. Whole human beings in context are, I suppose, the positive flip side of small town gossip and community pressure to conform. I left Shinnston at least partly to get away from that smallness, but I also took it with me. Even now, as I cross, say, Hudson Street in New York's Greenwich Village, I find myself regretting that I'll never know that interesting looking young person whose ethnic background and race 33 I can't guess. Part of what I do when I write is to make my own small town where I know the people and their pasts and even their secrets. Whenyouaresmall, ofcourse,homeis alwayssmall. Onlygradually do we separate the others from ourselves, and it is even longer before we realize that there are many places, too; there are other houses in East Shinnston, and there is East Shinnston and also the West Side and Clarksburg, and Fairmont is in Marion County and far off are Wise County, Virginia, and Mississippi and Pittsburgh. It is still longer before we have a sense ofhistory among our mental furniture. We hear the stories of the past, of course, but those stories are like myths: when Aunt Ninnie was a little girl, she always ran around with no shoes, and she jumped off a low wall in back of the house and landed barefoot on a little baby peeper chicken and squashed it to death! When Daddy and the otherboys took a goat up to the third floor of the Hardesty house for their circus. Satisfying stories, emotionally dense, but stories from the Age of Giants. This was what I discovered in my first published novel, A Space Apart, whenI reread it in preparation for a reprint edition. Its shape and imagery and characterizations pleased me, but I was struck by how the small town in the book seems to be a place of myth. There is very little cultural or historical background to West Virginia and the Appalachian region. I was in my late twenties when I wrote it, I'd been to college and graduate school, and I'd been active in anti- poverty social action and in political action against the war in Vietnam. I...

Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Shadow of a New Empire: John Bull's Other Island

Colonialism, Postcolonialism, and the Shadow of a New Empire: John Bull's Other Island Kathleen Ochshorn Seen from a twenty-first-century perspective, Bernard Shaw's 1904 play John Bull's Other Island is remarkably resonant. The Englishman Broadbent and the Irishman Larry Doyle, partners in a Westminster civil engineering firm, travel to rural Rosscullen and come up with a land development scheme. Broadbent's plans are grand in scale: "We'll take Ireland in hand. . . . I shall found public institutions: a library, a polytechnic (undenominational, of course), a gymnasium, a cricket club, perhaps an art school. . . . The round tower shall be thoroughly repaired and restored." 1 Local characters will be tourist attractions. He envisions a Disney-like Ireland, an Irish Epcot. The hilarious battle between the forces of modernization and tradition depicted in Shaw's play is being enacted rather seriously in contemporary Ireland, particularly in the republic. In 2004, a hundred years after John Bull's Other Island was written, six and a half million tourists visited Ireland; it was listed as the number one golf destination in the world. 2 A cultural battle erupted in 2005 over the government breaking ground for a highway near the historic site of Tara, the seat of the high kings. As several Irish scholars wrote in a letter to the Sunday Independent, "Ireland's premier landscape, an icon of our nationhood, is about to suffer an act of vandalism that will see a four lane motorway, a large intersection and undoubted secondary developments obliterate its landscape. All in the name of progress." 3 Colm Toibin noted in the New York Times op-ed section that "[a] place of myth and mystery will look like anywhere. It is called modernization." 4 John Bull's Other Island is a play full of irony, with stereotypes established and undermined, most points of view ridiculed, and little hope offered of a realistic solution to the puzzles of poverty and development. Shaw seems to be the puppet master, hanging over the stage, getting a dark laugh from his absurdist piece. The very occasion for the play, William Butler Yeats's [End Page 180] invitation to Shaw to write a piece for the Irish Literary Theatre, may be the underlying source of much of the irony. As Shaw famously wrote in his 1906 "Preface for Politicians," his play "was uncongenial to the whole spirit of the neo-gaelic movement, which is bent on creating a new Ireland after its own ideal, whereas my play is a very uncompromising presentiment of the real old Ireland" (443). From the outset, this play was built on these contradictory impulses. Asked to commemorate the Irish Revival, which he abhorred, Shaw ended up satirizing the Irish and the English. Tracy C. Davis has contended that Shaw's plays are "a prolonged meditation on the dilemma of colonization, never achieving postcolonialism because institutions of power are not dismantled. . . ." 5 But in John Bull's Other Island, Shaw manages to define and ridicule colonialism; anticipate the nature of a postcolonial Ireland; and imply the difficulties of a free trade, neocolonial economy, where individual and national interests are subverted by the all-powerful forces of development and transnational commerce. Shaw satirizes a particular vision of economic development, largely presented by Broadbent, who also plans to stand for Parliament. The critique prefigures the writings of other colonial and postcolonial writers such as Jamaica Kincaid, whose scathing book A Small Place presents a similar view of a postcolonial economy based on tourism in another former British colony, her native Antigua. 6 Just as Kincaid describes a Hotel Training School built to provide labor for the tourist industry, Broadbent envisions a nondenominational polytechnic to teach efficient development and sort out the best ways to make money. Keegan observes of Broadbent that "[h]e is efficient in the service of Mammon, mighty in mischief, skillful in ruin, heroic in destruction" (606–07). Shaw...

Ilse Langner's Amazonen and the Reception of J. J. Bachofen's Das Mutterrecht

AbstractIlse Langner's play Amazonen: Komödie was due to receive its première in April 1933, but became one of the early victims of Nazi theatrical censorship, attracting condemnation for its satirical feminist polemic and its radical reworking of the myth of the Greek victory over the Amazons. This paper explores Langner's play as a response to a highly‐charged debate over the legacy of Johann Jakob Bachofen's theory of ancient matriarchy, in which theorists and writers from all political camps fought over the uses of myth in the modern world. Langner's approach to Bachofen's theory and to this debate demonstrates that the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’, which are often applied to the debate on myth in the Weimar Republic, do not necessarily do justice to the complexity of pre‐1933 thinking on the place of myth in modernity.

Alliums: the ornamental onions

With the wide range of colour and attractive flowers, Alliums (ornamental onions) are ideal for growing in the modern garden, whether in the border or under alpine conditions. This book considers 200 species of ornamental onions, providing simple botanical descriptions, cultivation guides, attributes and geographical distribution plus associated hardiness zones. Sections on the importance of Alliums in agriculture, their place in myth and folk medicine, and their culinary usage are also included.

Children Go West: Fact and Fiction

Children Go West:Fact and Fiction Marilyn Fain Apseloff (bio) The West has always drawn people seeking a new life or adventure; between 1854 and 1929, it was attractive to many New York City residents for a special reason. It was a place of myth and opportunity, a chance for a better life away from the degradation and poverty of the city slums, both in reality and in the fiction of writers like Mark Twain and Bret Harte. Rumors and fiction created a dream of Eden in many minds, and the real accomplishments of some perpetuated that dream. The West, from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean, offered the prospect of betterment, of another chance for happiness, not only for adults but for children. Although Missouri and the Kansas prairie may not seem West to everyone, to an Easterner around the turn of the twentieth century (and even today), St. Joseph, Missouri, and the prairie country were definitely part of the real West. Even Pennsylvania and Ohio were considered the West to native New Yorkers. An astute New Yorker, Charles Loring Brace, concerned about the growing number of homeless, destitute, and orphaned children in his city, founded the Children's Aid Society in 1853 to do something about the problem. The Society offered a solution: the removal of children to foster homes out west. According to Henry Thurston in The Dependent Child, "The one road, as [Brace] saw it, for the homeless child, and even for the children of poor parents, was that of emigration to foster homes in the villages and on the prosperous farms of the West" (96). There was another practical reason for this solution, as noted by Miriam Langsam in Children West: "it cost only a tenth as much to send a child west as it did to maintain him in a jail or asylum" (25). Little notice of the phenomenon of this emigration of children was taken until decades after the last orphan train made its run in 1929. In 1983 a substantial article with numerous photographs appeared in American History Illustrated. It was "The Orphan Trains" by Leslie Wheeler, and it described the plight of destitute nineteenth-century children and their growing impact on the crime rate. Wheeler cites the chief of police of New York City, who estimated that "there were ten thousand homeless children at large in the city, and . . . that four-fifths of the felony complaints for one year, 1852, were against minors" (14). Although Brace hoped to reach the children in the city through Sunday school meetings, education, and employment and "to establish lodging houses for homeless children, and industrial schools where boys and girls could learn a useful trade" (15), the main goal was to get the children out of the city and into good homes in the country. That aim was called "placing-out." According to Wheeler, as stated in annual reports, "the society's goal was 'to help the children help themselves'" (16). The proper environment was crucial, and that is why placing-out in a kind, industrious, religious family became central to the society. There was a screening process, not always successful, both of families applying for children and of the children themselves. The orphan [End Page 24] trains began in 1854 and ended in 1929. During that time "nearly a hundred thousand orphaned, destitute, and unwanted children from New York City slums made the journey westward to new homes in the country" (10). Decades later, the impact of the placing-out of the children as described by Wheeler attracted the attention of others and became the impetus for five novels. Four of them, called The Orphan Train Quartet, were written by Joan Lowery Nixon when a friend of hers brought Wheeler's article to her attention and suggested that she would be a good person to write about the situation. The first book, A Family Apart (1987), reveals why the Kelly children are separated from their mother and put on the orphan train for St. Joseph, Missouri. The novel then portrays the children's experiences on the train and at their destination when they are taken by various families, with special focus on some of...

Myth in the lives of leaders of social movements: the case of the family planning movement.

The biography of heroic figures depends on the nature of the heroic role as well as on actual life events; even biographies of current heroes and heroines are subject to this process. A typology of life stories according to content and purpose delineates the place of myth, biography and life course analysis. The life stories of the founding figures of the family planning movement are examined to show the modeling of the main life events of the biographies into the heroic model.

Advertising and psychotropic drugs: the place of myth in ideological reproduction.

Abstract Advertising, as a form of mass communication emanating from established capitalist enterprise, reproduces ideology conducive to the preservation of the social order that sustains that enterprise. Using selected advertising of psychotropic drugs from Australian medical journals as case studies, three main areas in which ideological statements are made are examined. These are: octors and doctoring, patients and notions of mental illness, and the psychotropic drugs often used in mediation between the two. The supportive argument used is that imagery used in advertising is essentially mythical. A framework for decoding meaning in advertising is provided.

The Hare in Myth and Reality: A Review Article

GEORGE Ewart Evans and David Thomson in their recent bookx have presented us with a full-length study of an animal about which even today surprisingly little is known. Unlike John Layard,2 who concerned himself only with the hare in myth and legend, they concentrate in the main upon the zoological facts, some of which are even stranger than the myth and legend. Not that they in any way neglect the rich mythology of the hare; on the contrary, the whole purpose of their concern with the natural history of the animal is to seek an answer to the puzzling question: 'Why is it that the hare has such a place in myth and story all over the world ?' That the hare does figure largely in the popular beliefs of many peoples was brought home to me some years ago when collecting material for an article that has not yet seen the light of day. I should like to draw on that material for some marginal comments on a book which I have read with both pleasure and profit. The writers of both Greece and Rome had some curious ideas about the zoology of the hare, as indeed of the animal world in general. Not all of these ideas are as absurd as at first sight they appear; and in one instance the Ancients have actually anticipated modern science. Evans and Thomson quote the statement of Aelian that the hare 'carries some of its young half formed in its womb, some it is in the process of bearing, others it has already borne'. They add that Aristotle, Hippocrates, and Pliny are often ridiculed for making similar statements about the process of superfetation, which, as has been recently demonstrated, does actually take place in the female hare.4 Aelian also mentions the hare's ability to sleep with its eyes open.5 The authors refer else-

The place of myth in the Bible

The place of myth in the Bible

The Place of Myth in Philosophy

My subject is the place of myth in philosophy, not in religion. If I were dealing with the philosophy of religion, I should, of course, have much to say on the place of myth in theology; and what I have to say may have some bearing on this subject; but I am not dealing with particular dogmas of Christianity or of any other religion. My thesis is that when the mind communes with the world of values its natural and inevitable language is the language of poetry, symbol, and myth. And, further, that philosophy has to deal with a number of irreducible surds which cannot be rationalized. They must be accepted as given material for reason to work upon. For example, we do not know why there is a world; we cannot unify the world of what we call facts and the world of values; there are antinomies in space and time which do not seem to disappear when we put a hyphen between them. Our reason–some would say reason itself— has reached its limits. We are driven to mythologize, confessing that we have left the realm of scientific fact. We give rein to the imagination, not exactly claiming with Wordsworth that it is reason in her most exalted mood, but hoping that the creative imagination may reveal to us some of the real meaning of questions which we cannot answer.