Posted: Mar 22, 2016 4:44 pm
What does not meet with these criteria, is not a myth:
- A story, possible to narrate with words, containing events leading to some distinguishable change of circumstances.
- A setting in a distant past*, from which no first-hand report remains in a source from that time, nor is any witness of it still alive, nor is any person alive who has met such a witness in life.
- An out-of-the-ordinary significance to the story, where the events of it are proclaimed either to have importance in the way life is lived thereafter, or being of such rare, splendid nature that the memory of them should be kept and cherished by some - or all - people.
- A claim of having taken place, of not being fictional, no matter how unlikely. The claim [does] not [have] to be supported by all, but there cannot be any clear indication of it having been invented, neither by a more or less obvious statement in the story itself, nor in what sense it is traditionally told.
- A strong sense of unlikeliness in all but those whose culture it stems from, that the events described could actually have taken place. It is not necessary that people of that culture are convinced of its authenticity, but other people should clearly be inclined to the opposite view.
- There is no known author, regarded as being the very first to present it.
Undoubtedly, some of these conditions are vague, demanding an interpretation of general attitudes and such, but I believe them to be easier to apply to most cases ...
* ..time is not the only distance making this possible, a geographical distance or a cultural one would serve just as well. A tale can be believable to one ethnic group and completely rejected by another, both of them living in the same city. But if the tale in question has a contemporary setting, it makes much more sense to all but the believers in it to call it superstition.
This article was originally written in 1999 for a seminar at the Department of History of Ideas, Lund University, as a part of my dissertation in progress on Creation Myths and their patterns of thought.
Published on the web on September 6, 2001.
http://www.creationmyths.org/mythlogics-1.htm -- © Stefan Stenudd 1999