Description
Book SynopsisThis posthumously published work by Lawrence Krader surveys the study of myths from ancient times (in classical Greece and Rome, Egypt, Babylon, Akkad, Sumer, China), in the Biblical traditions, of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia, and from Northeastern and Central Asia. It also covers the various approaches to the study of myth in Europe in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and the Romantic movement in the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth century; it discusses evolutionist, structuralist, hermeneutic, and linguistic approaches. The book covers on the one hand the treatment of myth from the inside, that is from the experience of those committed to the myth, and on the other the perspective of those ethnologists, philosophers and other students of myth who are outsiders. Krader takes up the theme of esoteric and exoteric myths as he rejects some of the assumptions and approaches to the study of myth from the past while singling out oth
Table of Contents
Foreword by Mayán Cervantes – Editors’ Preface by Cyril Levitt and Sabine Sander – Editors’ Introduction by Cyril Levitt and Sabine Sander – Preface – Introduction: Rebels as Demons in Ancient Chinese Myths – Myth in Classical Antiquity – Myth in the Renaissance and Enlightenment – Myth in the Nineteenth Century – Bachofen, Tylor, Müller, Frazer: Introduction to Part II. Modern Studies of Myth – Durkheim and His School. Alcheringa, or Dreamtime – Myth as the Myth of Others – The Force of Myth in Our Own Time – Myth of Another Time and Space – Myths of the North Pacific Peoples – Winnebago Trickster Myths. Radin, Malinowski, Kluckhohn – What Is True Myth? Pawnee Creation and Coyote Myths. Dorsey and Grinnell – Structuralists, Lévi- Strauss, Leach – Myths and Universals – The Treatment of Myth as a Code – Myth of the Law in the Book of Daniel – Esoteric and Exoteric Myth – The State as Myth and Myths of the State – Sacred and Secular Myth – Myth in the Making – Myth, the Known and the Unknown – Myth and Ideology – References – Index.
