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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Custom and Myth," Andrew Lang embarks on a profound exploration of the intricate nexus between folklore, culture, and societal norms, utilizing a blend of anthropological insight and literary elegance. Lang's erudite prose unravels the complex interplay between mythic traditions and customary practices, examining how these narratives shape collective identities and moral frameworks within diverse societies. The book is not merely a compilation of folklore; rather, it is a rigorous academic inquiry into how customs are perpetuated and transformed through myth, reflecting the evolving nature of human experience and understanding. Andrew Lang, a pioneering figure in the field of anthropology and folklore studies, was inspired by his deep-seated interest in the cultural narratives that unite humanity. His extensive travels and academic inquiries illuminated the rich tapestry of traditions that inform social practices. Specifically, Lang's background in classical literature and his emphasis on comparative mythology provide the foundational framework for this work, allowing readers to appreciate the universal themes that transcend time and geography. "Custom and Myth" is indispensable for scholars, students, and enthusiasts of folklore and cultural studies. Its careful analysis and thoughtful interpretations invite the reader to not only reflect on the significance of myths in daily life but also to appreciate the underlying customs that shape societies. This book is essential for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the cultural forces that continue to resonate in the modern world. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Custom and Myth
Table of Contents
Introduction
At once curious and skeptical, Custom and Myth explores how the everyday practices of communities shape, and are in turn shaped by, the stories they tell about the world and themselves.
Andrew Lang’s Custom and Myth is a work of nonfiction written in the tradition of Victorian folklore and comparative mythology. First published in the late nineteenth century, it emerges from a period when scholars in Britain were debating how best to interpret myths and rituals. Lang, a Scottish man of letters and folklorist, positions his essays at the meeting point of literature, anthropology, and cultural history. The result is not a travelogue or a single narrative, but a set of inquiries that treat myths as meaningful human creations connected to social habits, ceremonial practices, and inherited customs.
Readers encounter a collection of essays that compare narratives and usages from classical antiquity with accounts of diverse oral traditions available to Victorian scholars. Lang writes in an accessible yet scholarly voice, moving briskly from example to interpretation with a taste for illustration and analogy. The mood is speculative in the best sense—testing explanations against evidence rather than settling for tidy formulas. The book invites a contemplative, wide-ranging experience: you browse, pause, and return, finding patterns in unexpected places while remaining aware that myths live within contexts that shape their form and function.
A central feature of the book is its participation in contemporary debates about method. Lang engages with philological approaches that read myths chiefly as products of language, while advocating for comparative study grounded in custom, belief, and practice. He treats folklore as data for understanding how communities explain origins, regulate behavior, and transmit memory. Without reducing all stories to a single cause, he tests competing explanations—ritual, morality, play, and mistaken inference—against the recorded traces of tradition. The essays model a way of reading that values plural causes, historical layering, and the stubborn persistence of usage alongside shifting narratives.
The themes are wide but coherent: the reciprocity of story and ceremony, the endurance of taboo and etiquette, the transformation of sacred into everyday habit, and the resemblance of distant traditions without erasing their differences. Lang is attentive to how practices travel, how analogies can illuminate as well as mislead, and how explanations must be tempered by the limits of available evidence. He is especially interested in what continuities suggest about human imagination—its tendency to personify forces, ritualize transitions, and make sense of uncertainty through patterned tale and repeated act.
For readers today, the book matters as both an introduction to and a critique of a formative scholarly moment. It demonstrates how comparative study can broaden perspective, while also reminding us that interpretations are historically conditioned. Lang writes with curiosity and restraint, but the materials he cites reflect the categories and terminology of his era. Approached with that context in mind, the essays remain a stimulus to think carefully about cross-cultural understanding, about how evidence is gathered and used, and about how myths—ancient or modern—organize experience, justify rules, and offer shared frameworks for explaining the unexpected.
Custom and Myth offers a reflective, energizing encounter with the ways human beings bind narrative to practice. Its essays do not promise a master key; they offer a disciplined, imaginative method for noticing connections, weighing arguments, and keeping multiple possibilities in view. Readers who enjoy intellectual travel—across periods, genres, and social forms—will find a companionable guide that rewards sustained attention. In a moment when inherited traditions are continually questioned and repurposed, Lang’s inquiries invite us to read customs and stories together, to ask what they do as well as what they say, and to consider how they endure.
Synopsis
Andrew Lang’s Custom and Myth is a collection of essays that applies comparative anthropology to the study of folklore, myth, and ritual. Written in the late nineteenth century, it examines how traditional customs illuminate the origins and meanings of stories. Lang outlines a method that places social practice, belief, and material culture alongside texts, arguing that myths often preserve traces of early mental habits. He emphasizes assembling parallel cases from diverse societies to identify recurring patterns. Throughout, he presents evidence with an aim to clarify how narrative motifs relate to customary behavior, without insisting on a single, universal key for interpretation.
The opening essays define the scope of comparative inquiry and critique dominant scholarly approaches of the era. Lang challenges purely philological explanations, notably “solar” interpretations that derive myths from misunderstood nature-phrases, and he questions Euhemerism, which reads myths as distorted history. He proposes that myths frequently arise from the same mental processes visible in contemporary or documented traditional societies. This approach shifts attention from etymology to custom, ritual, and belief. By assembling cross-cultural examples, he aims to show that similar narrative features can emerge from shared institutions and practices, rather than from linguistic accidents or conjectural historical events.
Lang introduces the concept of “survivals” to explain how archaic practices linger within more complex cultures. He treats myths as narrative reflections of customs such as taboo, marriage rules, name-avoidance, and restrictions on food or contact. Where a practice has become obscure, the accompanying tale may remain, supplying a rationale adapted to changed circumstances. He illustrates how rites linked to fertility, initiation, or mourning can leave narrative residues—explanations framed as adventures of gods, beasts, or ancestors. In this account, custom serves as the persistent underpinning, and myth is frequently the post hoc rationale, shaped to make inherited behavior intelligible.
Examining kinship and social organization, Lang discusses totemism and associated taboos. He considers how animal or plant emblems, clan names, and exogamous rules generate stories of descent, transformation, or alliance between human groups and nonhuman species. Such beliefs can give rise to myths explaining the origin of prohibitions, the sanctity of certain foods, or the special status of creatures regarded as kindred. Lang underscores that these narratives are not arbitrary inventions but reflect institutions that structure marriage, inheritance, and identity. By viewing tales within this social framework, he links recurring motifs—metamorphosis, kinship with animals, sacred names—to concrete communal practices.
Turning to ritual and magic, Lang surveys beliefs in animism, witchcraft, and sacred instruments, arguing that these shape both ceremony and story. A notable example is the bull-roarer, an instrument found in initiation rites across distant regions; he compares it to ancient Mediterranean devices like the Greek rhombos. Such parallels suggest either diffusion or similar responses to shared social needs. Lang shows how ritual secrecy, sacred sounds, and ceremonial objects become narrative elements—tokens of divine power or tests for heroes. Magic and rite thus provide a vocabulary for mythic episodes, embedding social experience in dramatic forms recognizable across cultures.
Lang applies this anthropological lens to classical mythology, reinterpreting well-known Greek tales by referencing documented custom. He considers myths such as Cronus devouring his children not merely as astronomical allegory but as expressions of early beliefs about kinship, succession, and taboo. He explores vegetation and seasonal cults to clarify stories of dying and rising figures, and he examines beliefs about amulets and herbs—topics like “moly” and the mandrake—to show how magical botany moves from practice into legend. Throughout, he argues that classical narratives gain coherence when read in light of institutions and beliefs shared, in variant forms, worldwide.
Folk-tales receive similar treatment. Lang surveys international variants—among them stories akin to Cupid and Psyche, Cinderella, and animal-bride or beast-marriage cycles—to illustrate how domestic life, marriage exchanges, tasks, and prohibitions translate into narrative trials. He demonstrates that motifs recur where family structures, tests of obedience, or ritual passages are comparable. The tales often preserve archaic logic—spirit spouses, tabooed acts, name power—even when the original practice has faded. By comparing European literary versions with oral traditions from other continents, he shows that widely dispersed plots can be understood through shared social themes rather than through a single textual source.
Addressing transmission, Lang weighs diffusion against independent invention. He notes the role of trade, migration, and contact in spreading stories and rites, but he also argues that similar social conditions can produce similar narrative solutions. Classification, motif comparison, and attention to context are presented as tools to sort genuine resemblances from chance echoes. He stresses careful use of evidence, warning against universalizing any one cause. The method relies on converging indications: when custom, rite, and tale align across cultures, the inference strengthens. This balanced stance frames the book’s case studies, which demonstrate multiple pathways to parallel myths.
The concluding perspective emphasizes that myth is intelligible when read through the lens of custom, early belief, and social organization. Lang’s central message is that stories conserve the logic of institutions—totems, taboos, initiations, magical practices—even after those institutions diminish or change. By prioritizing comparative anthropology over purely linguistic or historical conjecture, he offers a program for interpreting both classical and folk traditions. The book closes by advocating a cautious, evidence-based synthesis: align narrative with documented practice, respect local contexts, and avoid single-explanation theories. In this way, Custom and Myth proposes a durable framework for understanding traditional narrative.
Historical Context
Custom and Myth (1884) emerged from late Victorian Britain, principally London and Oxford, where Andrew Lang worked within a dense network of museums, libraries, and learned societies. The British Museum, well stocked with Assyrian, Egyptian, and Greek antiquities by the 1870s, and the expanding University of Oxford provided unparalleled comparative materials. Industrialization and empire connected Britain to global sources via steamships and the telegraph, making travel narratives, missionary reports, and colonial blue books readily available. The book is thus set, intellectually, in a metropolitan center of information exchange at the high tide of the British Empire, when comparative inquiry into custom, religion, and myth was a public and scholarly preoccupation.
The Darwinian revolution decisively shaped the intellectual climate in which Lang wrote. Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871) reframed questions about human origins, culture, and mental faculties. In the 1860s–1870s, evolutionary social thought (for example, Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology, 1876–96) and Edward B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) popularized the idea of survivals—customs that persist after their original function has faded. Facts: these works established a developmental framework for explaining ritual, taboo, totemism, and myth as products of early human reasoning. Connection: Custom and Myth adopts this comparative-evolutionary outlook, treating myths as explanatory narratives born of early conjecture, while testing, accepting, or qualifying evolutionary claims with cross-cultural data rather than metaphysical speculation.
A public controversy over the origins of myth pitted philology against anthropology. Friedrich Max Müller’s Comparative Mythology (1856) and his Oxford Lectures on the Science of Language (1861–64) advanced the solar and meteorological reading of myths, attributing them to a disease of language in Indo-European roots. Facts: Müller became Oxford’s first Professor of Comparative Philology in 1868 and dominated British myth study for decades. Connection: Custom and Myth directly contests this paradigm by showing, with examples from Greek lore and non-European traditions, that ritual and social custom often precede and shape narrative. Lang’s essays attack solar reductionism, arguing that myths reflect institutions, taboos, and magical thinking observable among historically documented societies.
The institutional consolidation of anthropology and folklore in Britain provided Lang with forums and frameworks. Facts: the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland was formed in 1871 (receiving the Royal charter in 1907), the Folk-Lore Society was founded in London in 1878, and the Folk-Lore Record (1878–82) and Folk-Lore Journal (1883–89) began serial publication. In 1884, Tylor was appointed Oxford’s first Reader in Anthropology. Connection: Lang published, debated, and corresponded within these circles, drawing on society papers, questionnaires, and museum typologies. Custom and Myth reflects this institutional moment by systematizing scattered reports into arguments about totemism, taboo, and kinship, and by addressing an audience trained to weigh comparative evidence.
Imperial expansion furnished the ethnographic record that undergirds Lang’s comparisons. Facts: the Indian Rebellion (1857) led to Crown rule in 1858; the Suez Canal opened in 1869, shortening imperial routes; and the Berlin Conference (1884–85) formalized the Scramble for Africa. Missionaries, administrators, and travelers produced key sources: Sir George Grey published Polynesian Mythology (Auckland, 1855) and earlier Australian expedition journals; Henry Callaway’s The Religious System of the Amazulu (Natal, 1868–70) documented Zulu belief; Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd recorded Bushman folklore in the 1870s; Henry R. Schoolcraft compiled Native American materials (1839–57). Connection: Custom and Myth mines precisely these imperial conduits, juxtaposing Greek and Norse tales with Australian, African, and American practices to argue that similar customs—marriage by capture, totemic names, scapegoat rites—recur under comparable social conditions, not merely within Indo-European languages.
Archaeology and museum display reoriented myth toward material history. Facts: Heinrich Schliemann excavated Hisarlik (Troy) in 1871–73 and Mycenae in 1876, suggesting historical strata beneath epic legend; Austen Henry Layard’s Assyrian finds (1840s–50s) and the 1857 decipherment of cuneiform (Rawlinson, Hincks, Oppert) broadened the ancient Near Eastern record. In 1884, General Pitt-Rivers’s typological collection founded Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, arranging artifacts to illustrate evolutionary sequences. Connection: Lang’s method in Custom and Myth mirrors this material, stratigraphic thinking, using artifacts, rites, and law-like custom to test stories, and to propose that narrative motifs crystallize around enduring social practices.
Victorian debates over scripture and ritual shaped the anthropology of religion that Lang engages. Facts: W. Robertson Smith’s heresy proceedings in the Free Church of Scotland (1877–81) and Julius Wellhausen’s Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels (1878; rev. 1883) advanced historical criticism of sacrifice, taboo, and priestly law. Public lectures and trials made ritual origins a civic issue in Britain. Connection: Custom and Myth, while focused broadly on myth and custom, absorbs this climate by treating sacred stories as outgrowths of communal rites and prohibitions. Lang’s discussions of taboo, manes worship, and fetish-like practices situate biblical and classical materials alongside ethnographic cases to illuminate shared institutional logics.
Custom and Myth functions as a critique of late-Victorian complacency about European uniqueness and academic authority. By demonstrating that British and classical customs preserve survivals akin to those reported in colonized societies, the book unsettles imperial hierarchies and class pretensions that equated modernity with moral or intellectual superiority. Its sustained rebuttal of philological dogma exposes how elite methodologies can naturalize exclusionary assumptions. Politically, the work implies a check on empire’s self-justifying narratives by insisting on a common human repertoire of rites and explanatory tales. Socially, it highlights how communal norms, taboos, and sanctions—at home and abroad—govern behavior, urging a humbler, evidence-based view of culture.
