Posts Tagged ‘mythology’
“The gods do not visit you to remind you what you know already”*…
Or do they? As the estimable Emily Watson explains, one woman– Edith Hamilton— had a great deal to do with our acquaintance with the mythology of ancient Greece and Rome, and in a way that had as much to do with the present as the past…
The discipline of “classical” literature has long been associated with social gatekeeping. The mastery of Latin and ancient Greek—or at least enough of an acquaintance to be able to trot out a well-worn tag from Horace and prompt knowing chuckles over the brandy—has often provided a useful qualification for passing as a gentleman and keeping out the plebs (Latin for “common people”) or hoi polloi (ancient Greek for “the many”). It is understandable that George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver eagerly whizzes through the Latin textbooks neglected by her idle brother Tom, or that Thomas Hardy’s Jude, hoping in vain to escape the obscurity of provincial poverty, slogs through his Greek dictionary until late into the night. For these fictional characters, like many of their real-life equivalents, ancient languages and literature provided the most visible bar against entry into a “higher” social class.
Even in the 20th and 21st centuries, the subject has maintained a close association with systems of exclusion based on income, education, race, and gender…
Over the past century, there have been numerous attempts to provide wider access to the supposed treasures of Greek and Roman antiquity to those once excluded from its riches. In the early 20th century, translations of ancient texts became more widely available, ranging from Gilbert Murray’s wonderfully ornate and virtuosic renditions of Euripides to Hilda Doolittle’s much starker modernist free verse. The Loeb Classical Library was founded in 1911 and featured fairly inexpensive editions of these ancient texts in their original languages, with an English translation on the facing page. These translations heralded a new age in which once-inaccessible works of classical literature became more accessible to a far wider range of people. As Virginia Woolf noted in 1917, it was the Loeb Library editions that helped make it “respectable” for the “amateur” (including female ones) to muddle through Aeschylus.
After the First World War, an ever-larger number of colleges and universities in the United States began to offer classes on ancient texts studied in translation, with no expectation that students would be able to read even a little of the originals. By the early 20th century, the study of ancient literature and history was often considered a prerequisite for understanding contemporary issues in Europe and the United States—regions that were now often lumped together under the term “the West.” The Columbia Core, the first such course in the United States, was developed in 1919 with the explicit goal of showing students the “unique features of the western world,” a world that apparently had begun in ancient Greece and that had now reached its apex in the American present.
The goal of connecting US citizens to a long, largely fabricated notion of “Western civilization” seemed increasingly urgent in the aftermath of a war that had torn the nations of Europe apart. The fantasy of a common “Western” heritage shared by white Europeans and North Americans appeared as a prophylactic against future wars, at least between those who could qualify as “Westerners.” But it also did something else. By excluding the numerous surviving ancient texts and cultural artifacts from the rest of the world, these new courses on “Western civilization” suggested that premodern “civilization” was the exclusive property of the “West”—enabling a kind of mythical/historical justification for continued domination of those peoples deemed to have come from outside this exclusive group, whether it was Black and Asian Americans in the United States or the millions still living under imperial and colonial rule in Asia and Africa.
By the 1920s, a sizable market for popular classics books and translations had emerged in the United States. A new publishing firm, W.W. Norton, decided to seize on it and signed up a recently retired Latin teacher and private school headmistress named Edith Hamilton to translate a trio of Greek tragedies and write two surveys of ancient literature, The Greek Way and The Roman Way. Published in quick succession in the 1930s, these volumes proved to be an immediate success. Along with Mythology, her retelling of the Greco-Roman legends, the books made Hamilton a household name. Mythology has never been out of print since then and has remained an extraordinary commercial success, enriching her heirs and publishers to this day. Probably no other single person has had such an impact in shaping the perceptions of classical literature and mythology in the United States for almost a century.
How did a retired Latin schoolteacher (Hamilton was 62 when The Greek Way was published), with limited formal education and almost no scholarly credentials, come to be one of the most influential “classicists” of the 20th century? Victoria Houseman’s annalistic new biography, American Classicist, does not quite see this question as the puzzle it is, in part because Houseman has so much admiration for her subject that Hamilton’s successes are largely taken for granted. But the book still makes for gripping reading, as we trace the trajectory of Hamilton’s life from her activist youth (she was a member of the Baltimore Equal Suffrage League), through her various travels in Europe and Asia, her health troubles (she was a breast cancer survivor), her fascinating romantic partnerships with other women, to her second career as a popularizer of the ancient world and as a public intellectual who became closely associated with wealthy and powerful conservative groups in the US…
Read on for more of Hamilton’s remarkable– and cautionary– story: “Ancient Worlds,” from @EmilyRCWilson (@emilyrcwilson.bsky.social) in @thenation.
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As we contemplate classics, we might send aquatic birthday greetings to Squidward Tentacles; today is his (fictional) birthday. A main characters of the SpongeBob SquarePants franchise, he is SpongeBob’s and Patrick’s grumpy neighbor and the former’s coworker at the Krusty Krab who lives in an Easter Island head. He is a mostly unpleasant artist and musician, and his favorite hobbies are painting self-portraits and playing the clarinet.
Though Squidward’s name contains the word “squid,” he is an octopus.
“All ancient books which have once been called sacred by man will have their lasting place in the history of mankind”*…
In 1999, Santa Cruz, California software engineer John Bruno Hare founded what he hoped would become “a quiet place in cyberspace”…
Welcome to the largest freely available archive of online books about religion, mythology, folklore, and the esoteric on the Internet… Texts are presented in English translation and, where possible, in the original language…
This site has no particular agenda other than promoting religious tolerance and scholarship. Views expressed at this site are solely those of specific authors, and are not endorsed by sacred-texts. Sacred-texts is not sponsored by any religious group or organzation.
This site strives to produce the best possible transcriptions of public domain texts on the subject of religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric. The texts are posted for free access on the Internet. This site is like a public library: it is accessible to anyone, contains unfiltered information, and does not advocate any particular point of view. However, nobody is going to shush you if you make too much noise while using this site…
Sacred texts is one of the top 20,000 sites on the web based on site traffic, consistently one of the top 10,000 sites in Australia, the US and India, and is one of the top 5 most visited general religion sites (source: Alexa.com)…
Spirituality in all of its shapes: The Internet Scared Text Archive.
* “All ancient books which have once been called sacred by man will have their lasting place in the history of mankind; and those who possess the courage, the perseverance, and the self-denial of the true miner, and of the true scholar, will find even in the darkest and dustiest shafts what they are seeking for–real nuggets of thought, and precious jewels of faith and hope.” – Max Müller, Introduction to the Upanishads Vol. II
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As we delve into the devotional, we might recall that it was on this date in 1848 that a document that isn’t in the Sacred Text Archive, but that is arguably apposite, was published– a political pamphlet by the German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto. Commissioned by the Communist League and written in German, it appeared as the Revolutions of 1848 began to erupt. Subsequently, of course, Marx elaborated on his argument (with Engel’s help, after Marx’s death) in Das Kapital.
“See the turtle of enormous girth, on his shell he holds the earth”*…
On the roots of a surprisingly wide-spread– and durable– image…
Anyone who’s ever heard the expression “it’s turtles all the way down” is probably familiar with the image of the world being carried on the back of a giant turtle. While that philosophical one-liner is of relatively modern vintage, the cosmic turtle mytheme has appeared in disparate cultures across the globe for millennia. In honor of everyone’s favorite intellectual quandary, let’s take a moment to celebrate the tortoises that hold up the world.
In his book Researches Into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization, the turn-of-the-20th-century anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor writes that the world turtle concept likely first appeared in Hindu mythology. In one Vedic story, the form of the god Vishnu’s second avatar, Kurma, is a great turtle, which provides a celestial foundation upon which a mountain is balanced.
Over in China, part of the traditional creation mythology involves a giant turtle named Ao, although the image in this case is a bit different. According to the legend, the creator goddess cut off the legs of the cosmic turtle and used them to prop up the heavens, which had been damaged by another god. It’s not quite carrying the world on its back, but it still puts a terrapin at the center of the universe, making sure that the very sky doesn’t fall down.
The concept of a world turtle seems to have arisen independently within Native American myth and legend. In the creation stories of the Lenape and Iroquois people, the Earth is created as soil is piled on the back of a great sea turtle that continues to grow until it is carrying the entire world. Many indigenous tribes in North America refer to the continent as Turtle Island to this day.
The image of the world being carried through space by an ancient, impossibly massive tortoise is evocative, so it’s not hard to imagine why it has survived for so long in so many different cultures. But in the end, why turtles?
In a 1974 issue of the anthropological journal Man, the scholar Jay Miller provides some thoughts on what makes the turtle such a popular world bearer, writing, “I viewed the turtle as a logical choice for such an atlantean because its shape and appearance were suited to this role.” But he goes on to write, specifically of the Lenape belief in a world turtle, that the creature also mirrored aspects that they valued in their culture, such as perseverance and longevity. And that idea doesn’t just apply to the cosmic turtle in Lenape culture. “With intensive research, the above analysis should also apply for other societies that place the earth on the back of a turtle.” Most turtles and tortoises are also famously long-lived, giving them a wise, ancient quality that lends itself to mythologizing.
World turtles appear in more modern pop culture as well, from the Great A’Tuin of the late Terry Pratchett’s Discworld franchise, to the all-knowing Maturin of Stephen King’s metaverse. Clearly, it remains cool to imagine that our world is being led through space by a being that actually knows where we’re headed.
“Why Is the World Always on the Back of a Turtle?” As Eric Grundhauser (@OMGrundhauser) explains, it’s mythology all the way down.
* Stephen King
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As we contemplate cosmological chordates, we might recall that it was on this date in 762 that Baghdad was founded. After the fall of the Umayyads, the first Muslim dynasty, the victorious Abbasid rulers wanted their own capital from which to rule. They chose a site north of the Sassanid capital of Ctesiphon— a site especially blessed as it had control over strategic and trading routes along the Tigris, and it had an abundance of water in a dry climate. The caliph Al-Mansur commissioned the construction of the city– in the round, a deliberate reminder of an expression in the Qur’an, when it refers to Paradise.
Within a short time, Baghdad evolved into a significant cultural, commercial, and intellectual center of the Muslim world. This, in addition to housing several key academic institutions, including the House of Wisdom (see also here), as well as hosting a multi-ethnic and multi-religious environment, earned the city a worldwide reputation as the “Center of Learning.”
Baghdad was the largest city in the world for much of the Abbasid era during the Islamic Golden Age, peaking at a population of more than a million. But the city was largely destroyed at the hands of the Mongol Empire in 1258, resulting in a decline– fueled by frequent plagues and the turmoil of multiple successive empires– that lingered through many centuries.
“Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what’s right”*…
People disagree about morality. They disagree about what morality prohibits, permits and requires. And they disagree about why morality prohibits, permits and requires these things. Moreover, at least some of the disagreement on these matters is reasonable. It is not readily attributable to woolly thinking or ignorance or inattention to relevant considerations. Sensible and sincere people armed with similar life experiences and acquainted with roughly the same facts come to strikingly different conclusions about the content and justification of morality.
For examples of disagreement about content, think of the standards ‘vote in democratic elections’, ‘do not smack your children’, and ‘do not eat meat’. Some reasonable people recognise a moral duty to vote, or a moral prohibition on smacking or meat-eating; others do not. To see the depth of disagreement about justification, consider the variety of reasons advanced for the widely accepted moral standard ‘do not lie’. Should we refrain from lying because God commands it, because it promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number, because in deceiving others we treat them as mere means to our ends, or because the virtue of honesty is a necessary condition of our own flourishing? Each of these reasons is persuasive to some and quite unpersuasive to others.
Reasonable disagreement about morality presents educators with a problem. It is hard to see how we can bring it about that children subscribe to moral standards, and believe them to be justified, except by giving them some form of moral education. But it is also hard to see how moral educators can legitimately cultivate these attitudes in the face of reasonable disagreement about the content and justification of morality. It looks as though any attempt to persuade children of the authority of a particular moral code will be tantamount to indoctrination…
Michael Hand asks– and suggests an answer to– a desperately-important question: “If we disagree about morality, how can we teach it?”
* Isaac Asimov
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As we struggle to teach our children well, we might send fabulous birthday greetings to Publius Ovidius Naso; he was born on this date in 43 BCE. Known in the English-speaking world as Ovid, he was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the three canonical poets of Latin literature. Ovid is today best known for the Metamorphoses, a 15-book continuous mythological narrative written in the meter of epic, and for works in elegiac couplets such as Ars Amatoria (“The Art of Love”) and Fasti. His poetry was much imitated during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and greatly influenced Western art and literature; he was, for instance a favorite– and favorite source– of Shakespeare. And the Metamorphoses remains one of the most important sources of classical mythology.
Ovid enjoyed enormous popularity in his time; but, in one of the great mysteries of literary history, was sent by Augustus into exile in a remote province on the Black Sea, where he remained until his death. Ovid himself attributes his exile to carmen et error, “a poem and a mistake”; but his discretion in discussing the causes has resulted in much speculation among scholars.
“If I had to choose a superhero to be, I would pick Superman. He’s everything that I’m not.*…
The images that pop up in most people’s heads when they think about superheroes can be traced back to the 1938 debut of Superman and the genre evolution that followed. But it’s possible to go back even further, connecting the Hulk to the ancient epic poem of Gilgamesh, and Batman to 17th Century cross-dressing crimefighter Moll Cutpurse…
Heroic history at: “How Ancient Legends Gave Birth to Modern Superheroes.”
* Stephen Hawking
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As we investigate our icons, we might recall that it was on this date in 1885 that Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in the U.S. Considered by many to be the Great American Novel, Huckleberry Finn has been controversial from it birth (e.g., here and here)– indeed, the controversy began before its birth: The UK and Canadian edition came out two months earlier; the U.S. version was delayed because one of the engravers added an obscenity to one of the illustrations: on p. 283, an illustration of Aunt Sally and Silas Phelps was augmented by the addition of a penis. Thirty thousand copies of the book had been printed before the unwanted addition was discovered. A new plate was made to correct the illustration and repair the existing copies; still, copies with the so-called “curved fly” plate remain valuable collectors items.
Huck, as drawn by E. W. Kemble for the original edition of the book
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