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WD_295/ 2007
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 3 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25.6 x 17.7 | | Size (mm): | 650 x 450 | | Catalog #: | WD_0295 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
What is a Myth?
When you look up at the sky, you can see the sun, moon, clouds, meteors, comets, planets, and stars. You may recognize certain star patterns, called constellations, such as the Big Dipper and the Little Dipper (also called the Big Bear and the Little Bear). You might know the names of the nine planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Did you know that many of the names of these heavenly bodies come from myths?
What are myths?
A simple definition of a myth is 'a story handed down through history, often through oral tradition, that explains or gives value to the unknown'.
Myths are often stories told by a particular people such as Indians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and others. They are especially linked to religious beliefs and rituals. Rituals were believed to invoke a type of magic that would aid the growth of crops, insure success in war, help achieve prosperity or make choices and promote stability in the land. If nothing else, when people thought that the gods favored a venture, they approached it with a positive attitude that in itself sometimes insured success. Songs, poems, and stories help to explain how people acquired basic things like simple speech, fire, grain, wine, oil, honey, agriculture, metalwork, and other skills and arts.
A myth is an attempt to explain other things as well, such as a certain custom or practice of a human society (for example, a religious rite), or a natural process, like the apparent daily motion of the sun across the skies. In their imaginations the Greeks of ancient times saw a god (Apollo) driving a golden chariot drawn by fiery horses and dragging the sun across the sky. Deserts and snow capped mountains were created when his son Phaeton took the chariot for a ride and could not control the strong horses. While we know today why the sun and moon are in various places in the sky during varied times of a day yet we nonetheless say the sun or moon rises or sets.
Myths were used to teach humans behavior that helped people live in concert with one another. Mythical gods certainly had some strange and not acceptable behavior yet stories often demonstrated such topics as the need for hospitality (tale of Philemon and Baucis) or the need to keep pride in check (Narcissus). In the eyes of the gods, excessive pride, or hubris, was the worst offense and deserved the worst punishment. (Niobe story)
Myths, then, are stories about certain characters -- gods, goddesses, men, women, and, especially, heroes. The stories of their adventures, whether triumphs or tragedies, tales of honor or tales of vengeance, were passed down by storytellers from generation to generation. In this oral tradition, stories often became distorted so that,in reading mythologies today, there are often variations in the same story. The moral however remains the same.
Myths continue to be told today. George Washington was mythologized by Parson Weems in the story of the cherry tree, an event that never actually happened but was used to illustrate a moral truth about young George's character. Stories are told about other famous Americans, such as Ben Franklin and Abraham Lincoln, making them larger than life and heroes in our minds. Other American myths include the stories of Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and "The Little Engine That Could," which demonstrate that great things can be accomplished through self-confidence.
In the ancient myths the gods are immortal -- they never die. The gods reach out and touch the lives of mortal humans, sometimes threatening them, punishing them or helping them. The stories are topics for great art, literature and music. One finds them used in advertisements, in political cartoons, even names of organizations or businesses. Look in the phone book to find Pegasus as a company name sometime. Knowing the ancient myths makes a study of art and literature more interesting ---and FUN!
-www.dl.ket.org/latin1/mythology/whatisa.htm
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