Antiquitopia

We receive a great gift from storytellers like Boccaccio, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and many others: freedom from mythic rigidities, a vision of a life that fires the imagination, and truths about the civic world and about ourselves. In return, we must open ourselves to truths that often shock and frighten us. (Richard Kuhns, Decameron and the Philosophy of Storytelling: Author as Midwife and Pimp , 139)

I just stumbled onto this site: Encyclopedia Mythica . It looks like a quick and easy reference to various gods or figures of various myths and legends throughout world literature, ranging from Celtic, Greek, Roman, Mesopotamian, Persian, Indian, etc. Most of the "articles" are only a few lines long--enough to give you some bearings--while others are longer (the entry on Metatron is lengthier!). If anything, it might be useful if you are reading along in a text and do not know who or what a particular character is. Here is the entry on Metatron for a test-case: Metatron by Ilil Arbel, Ph.D. The myths of Metatron are extremely complicated, and at least two separate versions exist. The first version states he came into being when God created the world, and immediately assumed his many responsibilities. The second claims that he was first a human named Enoch, a pious, good man who had ascended to Heaven a few times, and eventually was transformed into a fiery angel. Some la...

I found the following in the Chronicle for Higher Education News Blogs --something I found scary. An intro to Western Civ instructor from an Iowa community college was fired for teaching that the story of Adam and Eve was a myth rather than something that was literally true. It seems this has been something followed for a while now, but this is the first I have heard about this incident. When you get down to it, how else can you really teach many of the predeluvian stories in Genesis? This is something we run up against all the time in religious studies and biblical studies. At my orientation meeting for Literature of the Humanities, in which we will be reading Genesis, some preceptors from other departments were a bit worried about how to approach biblical materials. It is always important to define your terms: myth, from the Greek, Mythos , means "story." In terms of religious studies, it does not mean what it has come to mean in modern society--something that is fal...