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This 4 page paper discusses some of the theories of mythology and then applies them to 2 creation myths. Bibliography lists 3 sources.
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4 pages (~225 words per page)
File: KV32_HVmytthr.rtf
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two creation myths. Discussion Scholars have developed a number of theories of myth over many years; some have been linguistic, some have been structural, and still others have been psychological.
Twentieth-century theories include those of Jung, Freud and Levi-Strauss, and well look at these three as they apply to creation myths. Creation myths are common to all cultures; again they
attempt to explain how the world came to be. Jungs theories are familiar to almost everyone: he says that myths are "essentially culturally elaborated representations of the contents of the
deepest recesses of the human psyche: the world of the archetypes" (Walker, 2002, p. 4). Archetypes are universally recognized types that represent certain familiar types of human behavior: the hero,
the monster, the wise man, even death itself is an archetype. These types cut across all cultures and all ages. Freuds contribution to the theory of myth is psychological, and
it is "probably the single most important contribution to the interpretation of myth: the first serious exploration of the unconscious life of the mind and the earliest articulation of its
importance to consciousness" (Csapo, 2005, p. 80) Claude Levi-Strauss is a structuralist who says that "myth is language" and can be understood by studying it in the same way we
study language (Csapo, 2005, p. 220). His theory puts more emphasis on the meaning of myth rather than its expression; Levi-Strauss suggests that the meaning is not isolated in various
parts of a myth, but is found in the composition of the entire myth; i.e., the way it is put together as a whole (Csapo, 2005). Now turning to two
creation myths well see how these theories apply. Creation myths occupy a special niche in mythology; this type of myth is part of cosmogony, literally myths that consider "the birth
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