Why myth

The pines were once used as a food supplement. Nevertheless, they were of the upmost importance in the building of Norway as a nation. Here from the altar at Nidaros Cathedral in Trondheim. Linn Sollied Madsen. August - Do you want to be a national hero? Then you should time your accomplishment to coincide with a time of ideological turmoil and the reconstruction of your nation. Roald Amundsen did everything right when he reached the South Pole as the first man ever, six years after Norway gained its independence from Sweden.

The film about war hero Max Manus is an example of modern myth construction. When all are aligned, it is a wonderful thing. When not ….! The Mythic Method is about this journey to fitness. Bardic wisdom is the enabler. The result is that we become culturally smarter and faster. Facebook Instagram YouTube. Unlike fairy tales, myths are not always optimistic. True to the nature of life, the essence of myths is such that they are as often warnings as promises; as often laments as celebrations.

Many myths are instructive and act as a guide to social norms, taking on cultural taboos such as incest, fratricide, and greed. Myths are also pervasive in the arts and advertising, for a very simple reason. From film to cars to perfume, advertising uses visual metaphors to speak to us. While artists of every generation reinterpret myths, the same basic patterns have shown up in mythology for thousands of years.

To the scientific man a myth is a curious but valueless cultural artifact from a superstitious age. The worthlessness of myth is rooted in the work of several academics from the turn of the twentieth century. The Englishman E. Myths, in his opinion, were the theories that primitive people devised to explain the world. Now that we have science we know better, and we should discard myth.

Religion, Tylor thought, was a holdover from those primitive mythological times, the root and fruit of a backward, superstitious mindset. From the words they developed stories, and the abstract concepts were soon personified into mythical beings. Around the same time, the Scottish social anthropologist James Frazer was studying magic and ritual in primitive societies. In his classic work, The Golden Bough, Frazer traced similarities among various cultures, whose development he saw as organic and natural.

He posited three stages of development for human culture: primitive magic, religion and science. Myth was all-encompassing in the first stage, archaic but still powerful in the second stage and unnecessary in the scientific stage. These three thinkers were hugely influential in the first part of the twentieth century and German theologian Rudolph Bultmann applied their ideas to Biblical criticism. Bultmann wanted to weed out what seemed to him to be the mythological, supernatural elements of the Biblical stories and the Christian religion so that Christianity might be more acceptable to modern man.