Profane Mythology

Famed historian of religion Mircea Eliade observes that even moderns who proclaim themselves residents of a completely profane world are still unconsciously nourished by the memory of the sacred. Eliade traces manifestations of the sacred from primitive to modern times in terms of space, time, nature, and the cosmos. In doing so he shows how the total human experience of the religious man compares with that of the nonreligious. This book serves as an excellent introduction to the history of religion, but its perspective also emcompasses philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology. It will appeal to anyone seeking to discover the potential dimensions of human existence. -- P. [4] of cover.

Cave paintings at Lascaux, France and Altamira, Spain, fraught with expression thousands of years later; point to an early human desire to form a cultural identity. In the Oxford Companion to World Mythology, David Leeming explores the role of mythology, or myth-logic, in history and determines that the dreams of specific cultures add up to a larger collective story of humanity. Stopping short of attempting to be all-inclusive, this fascinating volume will nonetheless be comprehensive, opening with an introduction exploring the nature and dimensions of myth and proposing a definition as a universal language. Briefly dipping into the ways our understanding of myth has changed from Aristotle and Plato to modern scholars such as Joseph Campbell, the introduction loosely places the concept in its present context and precedes articles on influential mythologists and mythological approaches that appear later in the Companion. The main body of Leeming's work consists of A-Z entries covering all aspects of mythology, including substantial essays on the world's major mythological traditions (Greek, Native American, Indian, Japanese, Sumerian, Egyptian), mythological types and motifs (Descent to the Underworld, the Hero, the Trickster, Creation, the Quest), mythological figures (Odysseus, Zeus, Osiris, Spider Woman, and Inanna) as well as numerous interrelated subjects such as fairly tales and legends. The Companion also locates myth in our lives today, relating it to language patterns, psychology, religion, politics, art, and gender attitudes. Many of the better-known and more significant myths are vividly retold in this volume that will be illustrated with maps, more than 70 black and white images, and eight pages of color highlighting the central role art has often played in the transmission and perpetuation of myth. Following the entries, a rich section of appendices will include family trees of the major pantheons, equivalency charts for the gods of Greece and Rome, Babylon and Sumer, as well as other traditions, an extensive bibliography, and an index.

The book studies metaphor, myth and their imaginative aspects in the poetry of William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Relying on Kantian, Romantic, Neo-Kantian and modern ideas of imagination, metaphor and myth, the book proposes that imagination is an inherently metaphorizing and mythologizing faculty because the act of perception is an act of giving form to natural phenomena and seeing similitude in dissimilitude, which are basically metaphorical and mythological acts. Studying selected poems, the author explores how in its form-giving activity the imagination of the speaking subject 'mythologizes' and 'metaphorizes' by seeing objects of nature as spiritual, animate or divine beings and thus transforming them into the alien territory of myth. Myth and metaphor are analyzed in these poems mainly in two regards: first, myth and metaphor are handled as inborn aspects of imagination and perception, and the interaction between nature and imagination is presented as the origin of all mythology; second, to show how myth is re-created time and again by poetic imagination, Romantic mythography and re-creation of precursor mythologies are analyzed.