MYTHS are stories that have some characteristic traits:

They are

• neither true nor false
• neither realistic nor logic:  compare with dreams
• symbolic
• traditional
• communal
• paradoxical, (opposites do not cancel each other)

CRISES  Myths often describe, and rituals enact,  catastrophic events, violent actions, rules broken, spaces transgressed.  Yet it can be shown that their cultural function is to promote just the opposite of those events and actions: the permanence of social structures, the observance of rules, respect for boundaries, etc.

Methodic principles in this course:

• we will not apply the same method to all myths;
• we will consider the structure of myths as well as their history
• cautious comparative mythology
• myths in their cultural context;
• decoding of symbolic systems of myth;
• we will relate myths and rituals when the evidence is known.

• repeated
• sacred
• formalized
• traditional
• intentional

Similar and frequent rituals carried out in the worship of gods, goddesses, and heroes, were in ancient Greece and Rome the following (any of these were often accompanied by prayers.)
 

• sacrifice,
• offerings,
• libation,
• processions,
• rites of cleansing or purification,
• prayers
• a Roman ritual in 217 BCE

A  definition of myth proposed by Lowell Edmonds, Approaches to Greek Myth, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press 1990:

A Greek myth is a set of multiforms or variants of the same story, which exist either as written texts, prose or verse, or in oral form, or in both written and oral form, or in vase painting or plastic art as well or independently.  The story concerns the divine or the supernatural or the heroic or animals or paradigmatic humans living in a time undefinable by human chronology.  Each retelling or application produces a new variant, which stands in some degree of antagonistic relation to other variants or other myths and thus takes its place in a system constituted by the proliferation of such relations.  This definition can incorporate the now current definition of myth as "traditional tale," provided that the difficult word "traditional" means "without an identifiable author."  A variant can thus be more precisely defined as the encounter of traditional tale and unique, individual, motivated retelling or artistic reuse of that tale.
 

Muthos in the Iliad (from Richard Martin, The Language of Heroes).
 

There are only three genres of speech called muthos in the Iliad: command, boast or insult, and recitation of remembered events, and the third underlies the first two.  The god or hero who commands or boasts or insults will rely on a narrative of what has been, or could be, or should be or not be, done. Sometimes he will use genealogy to make his case.  Every muthosis a living, powerful speech-performance.

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