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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Myths and Myth-Makers," John Fiske delves into the intricate relationship between myth and the human experience, exploring how myths not only shape cultural identity but also reflect societal values and aspirations. Fiske's keen analysis is underscored by a rich literary style that marries vibrant storytelling with rigorous intellectual inquiry. He situates his exploration within the broader context of 19th-century American thought, where burgeoning interest in anthropology and literature was transforming the understanding of civilization and its narratives. Through an examination of various mythologies, Fiske elucidates the process by which myths are crafted, perpetuated, and reinterpreted over time, providing valuable insights into the psychology of cultural creation. John Fiske (1842-1901) was a prominent American philosopher and historian, whose interdisciplinary approach fostered meaningful dialogue between literature, philosophy, and sociology. A contemporary of major thinkers like William James, Fiske's work is deeply influenced by his interest in the evolution of ideas and cultures. His immersion in the American transcendentalist movement and familiarity with European intellectual currents allowed him to critically assess the role of myth in human society, which undoubtedly informed his writing in this book. "Myths and Myth-Makers" is an essential read for scholars and enthusiasts of folklore, literature, and cultural studies. Fiske's compelling analysis engages the reader in a thoughtful exploration of how myths serve as windows into the values and beliefs of a society. This book not only enriches our understanding of cultural narratives but also invites readers to reflect on their own connection to mythology and its enduring relevance in contemporary life. 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. - 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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Myths and Myth-Makers
Table of Contents
Introduction
At the intersection of folklore, language study, and nineteenth-century science, Myths and Myth-Makers asks how human beings convert the felt facts of nature and society into memorable stories, why similar tales appear in distant places, and what a patient, comparative method can reveal about the making, travel, and tenacity of myth without stripping those narratives of their imaginative power, presenting myth not as mere error but as a patterned way of thinking that organized experience and still echoes through literature, custom, and belief from fireside legend to epic poetry and ritual practice.
Written by the American philosopher and historian John Fiske (1842–1901), Myths and Myth-Makers is a work of nonfiction in the tradition of comparative mythology, first published in the early 1870s amid a Victorian surge of interest in philology, anthropology, and the history of religions. The book belongs to a moment when scholars sought systematic explanations for cross-cultural similarities in traditional narratives. Fiske brings to this task a synthesizing, explanatory voice shaped by contemporary scientific debates, presenting readers with a study that is both historically situated and outward-looking. Its scope is broad, its aims explanatory rather than antiquarian, and its method comparative rather than narrowly textual.
As a reading experience, the book offers clear, deliberately structured chapters that examine how myths arise, cluster into familiar story-types, and persist through retellings. Fiske guides the reader through patterns rather than plot, inviting attention to recurrent motifs and the mental habits that produce them. The tone is confident yet explanatory, favoring lucid argument over technical jargon. Instead of staging close readings of single tales, it continually steps back to consider large-scale connections among traditions. The mood is investigative and rational, but it leaves space for the imaginative vitality that gives myths their staying power, making the analysis accessible to general readers and students of ideas.
Central to the book are questions about origin and resemblance: Do similar narratives point to shared ancestry, to widespread human experiences, or to both? Fiske considers how metaphors and personifications can harden into narrative characters; how language changes may foster new story interpretations; and how social memory preserves archaic ways of seeing the world. He examines the migration and adaptation of tales, the framing of natural phenomena in narrative form, and the survival of ancient patterns within later folklore. Throughout, he treats myth as a key to understanding collective thought, with attention to the interplay between universal psychological tendencies and historical transmission.
Readers today may find the book valuable as both an introduction to comparative mythology and a window onto the intellectual atmosphere of its era. It models a method for asking disciplined questions about traditional stories, while also revealing how nineteenth-century scholarship approached culture through analogy and system. Some assumptions and terms reflect the period in which it was written, inviting reflection on how methods evolve over time. Yet its core inquiries—about how stories travel, why motifs recur, and what narratives reveal about human cognition—retain a clear relevance for anyone interested in literature, cultural history, or the shaping of collective imagination.
The style is measured and explanatory, designed to lead readers from familiar anecdotes toward broader conceptual frameworks. Rather than demanding specialized training, it builds understanding step by step, illustrating how comparative observation can illuminate connections that might otherwise remain unnoticed. Those curious about folklore, the history of ideas, or the foundations of literary motifs will find a guide intent on synthesis. The book’s comparative sweep encourages cross-cultural attentiveness without requiring exhaustive background knowledge, and its historical framing helps readers locate myths within the broader conversation about science, language, and belief characteristic of its publication era.
Approached in this spirit, Myths and Myth-Makers becomes an invitation to think with, rather than merely about, the narratives that communities create and preserve. It points toward a way of reading traditional stories that honors their imaginative richness while probing their underlying structures and pathways of transmission. Without depending on specialized apparatus, it offers a disciplined curiosity that can inform further exploration of folklore, literature, religion, and cultural history. For contemporary readers, it remains a lucid starting point for understanding how myths emerge, why they matter, and how thoughtful comparison can connect distant traditions without flattening their distinctive voices.
Synopsis (Selection)
Myths and Myth-Makers (1872) by John Fiske examines old tales and superstitions through comparative mythology. Fiske surveys narratives from Sanskrit, Greek, Roman, Teutonic, Celtic, and Norse sources to show recurring forms and shared origins. He proposes that myths arise from early attempts to describe nature and experience, later shaped by language and tradition into stories about gods and heroes. The book outlines a method that compares names, motifs, and plot structures across cultures, arguing that parallel patterns reflect common mental habits and linguistic heritage. Fiske aims to explain how poetic expressions became literal histories, setting the stage for analyses that link folklore with ancient religious imagination.
He begins by discussing language as a primary instrument of myth-making. Early speech relied on vivid metaphor, calling the dawn a maiden, the night a devourer, or the clouds cattle driven by a storm-god. Over time, such epithets hardened into proper names, and their figurative meanings were forgotten. Fiske adopts the era’s philological tools to trace how words shifted sense, creating characters and episodes from descriptive phrases. Misinterpreted predicates, he argues, produced kinship between names across Indo-European tongues. This linguistic process underlies many narratives, providing a consistent explanation for the emergence of gods, demons, and heroes as personifications of natural phenomena and daily cycles.
Fiske then explores beliefs about the soul and the unseen, reconstructing what he calls the primeval ghost-world. Dreams, shadows, reflections, and breath suggested a duplicate self that could wander or survive death. From these impressions arose ideas of spirits, ancestral shades, and the need for offerings or rites to placate them. He compiles examples of funeral customs and taboos that exhibit continuity across regions. These notions helped populate mythology with elves, goblins, and household beings, as well as practices attributed to witchcraft. The chapter positions animistic assumptions as foundations of mythic thinking, preceding more elaborate systems of deity and cosmology.
Building on this background, Fiske surveys legends of transformation, including werewolves, seal-people, and swan-maidens. He notes legal and saga references to lycanthropy and the “berserker” temper, alongside folktales of spouses bound by a hidden skin or garment. The recurring plot—marriage secured by seizing a covering and broken when it is returned—appears with birds, seals, and other animal forms. Comparative patterns suggest a wide distribution among Aryan peoples, with analogues beyond Europe. Fiske connects such stories to early conceptions of the boundary between human and otherworldly life, showing how shapeshifting dramatizes transitions between night and day, land and sea, or mortal and spirit realms.
Turning to myths of light and darkness, Fiske analyzes Vedic hymns about Indra’s victory over the serpent that withholds the waters. The released cows or rivers become clouds and rain in one idiom, while the dawn appears as a maiden rescued from night. He aligns these themes with Greek and Teutonic materials: Apollo against Python, Herakles against Cacus, Thor against giants, and Sigurd against the dragon. Names and roles vary, but the structure repeats the storm or sun overcoming obstruction. Through such comparisons, he argues that many heroic combats encode physical processes, translated into narratives that traveled with Indo-European migrations and persisted in later literature.
From here the book generalizes a sun-hero cycle, tracking the hero’s birth, early peril, quest, slaying of a monster, winning of a bride, descent to the underworld, and return. Fiske reads elements of Perseus, Theseus, Herakles, and Odysseus alongside Norse and Germanic figures such as Siegfried and Beowulf. He emphasizes recurrent tokens—magic sandals, swords, and helpers—understood as the equipment of light or storm. Even the hero’s vulnerability or fatal wound receives interpretation within the cycle of day and year. The analysis aims to show how a limited set of natural allegories can explain abundant, otherwise disparate, episodes in classical epics and northern sagas.
Fiske then turns to survivals in household tales and rustic practice. Stories like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Jack and the Beanstalk are treated as late forms of dawn, sleep, and sky-climbing motifs, stripped of explicit deity but retaining structure. He examines the divining rod and allied beliefs as examples of sympathetic magic persisting under new rationales, linking them to ancient ideas about hidden water, treasure, and the lightning-wielder’s staff. The theft and gift of fire, with Prometheus as a chief instance, receives a naturalistic reading. In each case, he traces continuities that connect nursery lore and superstition to early mythic explanations of environment and weather.
In later chapters Fiske considers the transition from nature-myth to religion, distinguishing poetic personification from ethical theology. He outlines how tribal deities acquire moral attributes, how priestly systems reinterpret older figures, and how rival powers are recast as demons. The emergence of more abstract conceptions of divinity is presented as a historical development rather than a sudden break. He surveys examples showing how mythological language is preserved within scriptures and liturgies, even as philosophical reflection alters belief. The section situates demonology, witchcraft accusations, and saintly legend within the same continuum, emphasizing the gradual rationalization of images first born from physical allegory.
The volume concludes by reaffirming the comparative method and its chief results. Across Indo-European cultures, Fiske argues, myths largely originate in the personification of natural facts, shaped by early psychology and the ambiguities of language. Repetition of plots and names signals common inheritance rather than direct borrowing, though exchange also occurs. Recognizing these patterns clarifies the relation between folklore, literature, and religion, and explains the persistence of certain narrative forms. While not claiming to solve every case, the book contends that a few principles account for much mythic material. Its overall message presents myth as humanity’s earliest, poetic science of the world.
Historical Context
John Fiske’s Myths and Myth-Makers (Boston, 1872) emerged from the intellectual milieu of post–Civil War New England, centered on Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts. The region’s lecture platforms, notably the Lowell Institute (founded 1836), and Harvard University’s expanding scientific culture under President Charles W. Eliot (from 1869), formed the immediate setting. Fiske (1842–1901), working amid the Reconstruction-era push for public education and scientific literacy, drew on library access at Harvard, where he served as assistant librarian beginning in 1872. The book’s temporal context was marked by rapid institutionalization of the sciences, intense debates over evolution and religion, and a cosmopolitan traffic in philology, Oriental studies, and comparative ethnography across the Atlantic world.
The most decisive historical current shaping the book was the 19th-century rise of comparative philology and mythology. Sir William Jones’s 1786 address to the Asiatic Society in Calcutta identified the Indo-European language family, prompting systematic comparison by Franz Bopp’s Vergleichende Grammatik (1833–1852) and Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie (1835). In Britain, Friedrich Max Müller consolidated the field: his essay “Comparative Mythology” (Oxford Essays, 1856) and The Science of Language (1861–1864) advanced the thesis that many myths grew from metaphorical descriptions of natural phenomena fossilized by linguistic change—a “disease of language.” Müller’s editions and lectures, paired with burgeoning Sanskrit studies in Oxford and Berlin, normalized cross-cultural comparison of Greek, Vedic, Norse, and Germanic materials. Concrete philological correspondences—such as Dyaus pitar, Zeus pater, and Jupiter—supplied chronological depth and geographic breadth for reconstructing shared mythic structures across millennia. Fiske’s book adopts this comparative method, repeatedly testing Müller’s framework on topics like solar and dawn legends, fire-theft narratives, and metamorphosis tales. He illustrates how Aryan root-words and poetic epithets hardened into personal names and episodes, mapping linguistic shifts onto narrative motifs. While not uncritical of reductionism, Fiske uses Müller’s tools to interpret figures from Sanskrit Ushas and Agni to Norse Fenrir and Greek Helios, arguing that recognizably similar stories persisted from prehistoric Indo-European communities into classical and medieval literatures. Thus, the institutional and textual achievements of 1800–1865 philology, matured by the late 1860s, directly supplied Fiske the data, terminology, and confidence to read myth historically through language.
A second shaping force was the transatlantic ascendancy of evolutionary science. Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859 and The Descent of Man in 1871, igniting controversies in Britain and the United States. At Harvard, Asa Gray defended Darwin, while Louis Agassiz resisted it, making Cambridge a focal point of debate. Popular science networks featuring T. H. Huxley and Herbert Spencer circulated evolutionary ideas into public discourse. Fiske, a prominent American popularizer of Spencerian and Darwinian thought, applied evolutionary reasoning to mental life, using development, selection, and adaptation as explanatory heuristics for the persistence and transformation of myths across societies.
The institutional birth of anthropology and folklore studies in the 1870s furnished additional frameworks. Edward B. Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) articulated animism and “survivals,” theorizing how archaic practices and beliefs endure within modern societies. The Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland was founded in 1871, and the Folk-Lore Society in 1878, reflecting a coordinated effort to catalog traditions globally. Fiske draws upon this comparative-ethnographic momentum, invoking cross-cultural data on shapeshifting, household spirits, and etiological tales to argue that mythic patterns arise from common cognitive processes and environmental observations rather than from unique national revelations.
Access to Vedic and Sanskrit texts through imperial and scholarly infrastructures enabled Fiske’s Indo-European comparisons. The East India Company and later the British Raj (after 1858) supported Indological research; the Asiatic Society of Bengal (founded 1784) and European universities made texts and grammars widely available. Max Müller’s monumental edition of the Rig-Veda with Sāyaṇa’s commentary (1849–1874) exemplified this pipeline of sources. Such publications, alongside grammars and lexicons, provided the linguistic forms and mythic materials (e.g., Agni, Indra, Ushas) necessary for reconstructing proto-motifs. Fiske exploits these resources to correlate Vedic dawn and fire imagery with Greek, Norse, and Germanic narratives, thus grounding his arguments in dated, named textual corpora.
Archaeological revelations of the 1860s–1870s sharpened the question of myth’s historical kernels. Heinrich Schliemann began excavations at Hisarlik (Troy) in 1870 and announced “Priam’s Treasure” in 1873, energizing debates on Homer’s historicity. Earlier, Austen Henry Layard’s work at Nineveh (1845–1851) and subsequent cuneiform decipherments yielded Mesopotamian myths. In 1872, George Smith famously read the Babylonian Flood narrative from the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Society of Biblical Archaeology in London, demonstrating a Near Eastern deluge story predating the Hebrew account. Fiske’s treatment of parallel motifs—cataclysms, divine fire, culture-heroes—aligns with this climate, using convergence across dated sites and texts to argue that mythic themes reflect shared human experience rather than isolated scriptural uniqueness.
Within the United States, Reconstruction (1865–1877) and rapid industrialization expanded a public lecture culture and research infrastructure that fed comparative inquiry. The transcontinental railroad’s completion in 1869 and the Smithsonian Institution (1846) accelerated circulation of artifacts and ideas. Ethnographic compilations such as Henry R. Schoolcraft’s Algic Researches (1839) and The Indian Tribes of the United States (1851–1857) supplied Native American narratives—e.g., the Algonquin Michabo (the Great Hare)—that Fiske juxtaposed with Old World dawn or trickster cycles. The Bureau of American Ethnology (founded 1879 under John W. Powell) soon systematized such work. In Boston, the Free Religious Association (1867) nurtured liberal audiences receptive to Fiske’s naturalistic explanations of superstition and miracle.
The book functions as a social critique by undermining scriptural literalism and parochial nationalism through a historically grounded, comparative method. By demonstrating that similar fire-theft, deluge, and metamorphosis stories recur from the Vedas and Greece to Algonquin and Norse materials, Fiske challenges claims of exclusive revelation and exposes the cultural work of myth in authorizing power. His reliance on evolutionary science and anthropology critiques clerical authority and inherited superstition, while his global data set counters racial hierarchies by emphasizing the mental unity of humankind. In Reconstruction-era America, this offered a rational, secular framework for rethinking tradition, authority, and the uses of the past.
