A Journey into Indian Epics: Week 10 Lab: Crash Course Mythology

All the areas of study and knowledge coming together to make mythology is very interesting and it will be cool to see how they are represented in mythology. When the man talked about one reason why it is hard to talk about mythology which is that there are multiple versions of a story, that hit home. All these different versions and retellings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata make it difficult to keep up. Some names become different in the same story and can be confusing.

The line between myth and religion is also very interesting because I might be reading these stories under the pretense that they are just that, stories. However, to a different person these may be their religious texts and sometimes I have thought about that. Staying power of a story is definitely one the main characteristics that I would prescribe for a myth.

Interesting that the Persephone myth explains how we got the seasons while the traditional folklore theorists explained that folklore describe how the world came to be. This causes a mix between traditional folklore and mythology. Euhemerism makes me think of Star Wars with the “a long long time ago,” where the Force and all the lightsabers may have actually occurred or were retold incorrectly as distorted by time. The thought that myths were used to explain the impossible sounds very reasonable and appears many times.

These theories on the hero story subparts are cool because I can see them occurring with Rama and other mythological heroes. Other heroes will have different mixes of these subparts and it is very interesting to find the subparts when you know what to look for.