Structuralism--or not
Oct. 31st, 2007 11:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porphyryHerodotus tells a myth about Herakles in Scythia, given here in an 18th century translation (William Beloe 1791) I happened to have keyed in for other purposes:
IV. viii. (vol. II, p. 186 Beloe ) Such is the manner in which the Scythians describe themselves and the country beyond them. The Greeks who inhabit Pontus speak of both as follows: Hercules, when he was driving away the heifers of Geryon, came to this region, (p. 187) now inhabited by the Scythians, but which was then a desert. This Geryon lived beyond Pontus in an Island the Greeks call Eythia, near Gades, which is situate in the ocean, and beyond the columns of Hercules. The ocean, they say, commencing at the east, flows round all the earth; this, however, they affirm without proving it. Hercules commencing thence, arrived at this country, now called Scythia, where, finding himself overtaken by a severe storm, and being exceedingly cold, he wrapped himself up in his lion’s skin, and went to sleep. They add, that his mares, which he had detached from his chariot to feed, by some divine interposition disappeared during his sleep.
ix. As soon as he awoke he wandered over all (p. 188) the country in search of his mares, till at length he came to the district which is called Hylæa; there in a cave he discovered a female of most unnatural appearance, resembling a woman as far as the thighs, but whose lower parts were like a serpent. Hercules beheld her with astonishment, but he was not deterred from asking her whether she had seen his mares? She made answer, they were in her custody; she refused, however, to restore them, but upon condition of his cohabiting with her. The terms proposed induced Hercules to consent; but she still deferred restoring his mares, from the wish of retaining him longer with her, whislt Hercules was equally anxious to depart. After a while she restored them with these words: “Your mares, which wandered here, I have preserved; you have paid what was due to my care, I conceived by you three sons; I wish you to say how I shall dispose of them hereafter; whether I shall detain them here, where I am the sovereign, or whether I shall send them to you.” The reply of Hercules was to this effect: “As soon as they shall be grown up to man’s estate, observe this, and you cannot err; whichever of them you shall see bend this bow, and wear this belt as I do, him detain in this (p. 189) country: the others, who shall not be able to do this, you may send away. By minding what I say you will have pleasure yourself, and will satisfy my wishes.”
x. Having said this, Hercules took one of his bows, for thus far he had carried two, and shewing her also his belt, at the end of which a golden cup was suspended, he gave her them and departed. As soon as the boys of who she was delivered grew up, she called the eldest Agathyrsus, the second Gelonus, and the youngest Scytha. She remembered also his injunctions she had received; and two of her sons Agathyrsus and Gelonus, who were incompetent to the trial which was proposed, were sent away by their mother from this country. Scytha the youngest was successful in his exertions, and remained. From this Scytha, the son of Hercules, the Scythian monarchs are descended, and from the golden cup the Scythians to this day have a cup at the end of their belts.
(note that this translation leaves out the name of the goddess which is in the Greek text: Echidna, which signifies ‘viper’)
Now this myth has been treated by two modern scholars using a more or less structuralist approach.
Joseph E. Fontenrose, Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and its Origins (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), wants to explain the origin myth of Delphi, given in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. According to this, the shrine used to be sacred to Gaia and was guarded by the Python. When Apollo wanted to take it over he killed the Python with his bow. The rotting of the snake gave rise through the usual punning folk etymology to the term Pythia (taken wrongly as though it were cognate with putrid). The approach F. takes is to assemble a vast satirical comparison of every myth in the ancient Mediterranean in which a God kills a monster (I think he gets as far as Scandinavia and India or China), and then adds further myths in which that doesn’t happen but which share certain common features with the main myths, among them the Scythian one quoted above. He naturally fits the Python story into this structure. But he vacillates uncomfortably between structuralism and diffusionalism when he posits that the combat myth is the Ugaritic combat between Baalu and Yammu, which defeats the whole point of structuralism.
Personally, I think F. fails to make his case because I think these myths are too easily explained from having arisen directly form the organization of the human mind, drawing on factors like the Oedipal conflict and transformations of instinctual fears about predation (the fear of being eaten by a leopard is transformed into the triumphant slaying of the leopard by a super-human figure). In particular, as far as the Ugaritic version goes, it is hard to imagine that one factor contributing to the origin of that myth was not ancient Semites standing on top of prominences like Mt. Cassius or Mt. Carmel watching thunderstorms beating the Mediterranean with lightning, as has often been suggested (not to revert to the old myth as nature-allegory theory as a general explanation of myth, though it does seem relevant in this case).
More recently, Carlo Ginzburg had made a more attractive suggestion, that Inquisitors sometimes turned up remnants of old myths and rituals concerning initiatory peasant bands joining the Wild Hunt of Odin leading the souls of the dead to the underworld, where they fight witches over the fertility of next year’s harvest, and assimilated this to their schema of witchcraft which actually originated from different sources. I think he goes off the rails, however when he goes on a structuralist tour of Eurasia, encompassing Siberian Shamanism and much else. One thing he picks up in his net is the same Scythian myth quoted above:
According to a myth reported by Herodotus (IV.8-10, Heracles, after having seized Geryon’s cattle, arrived in the then deserted Scythia, copulated with a local divinity, half-woman half-serpent, and begat the Scythians. His teacher, the archer Teuartos (Heracles was originally armed with a bow and not a club), is sometimes portrayed in Scythian garb. The presence in China of a mythical hero to whom feats analogous to those of Hercules are attributed, has been tentatively assigned to Scythian mediation.(Ginzburg, Ecstasies [1989; trans. 1991])
Although G. oddly does not mention the recovery of Herakles’ mares from Echidna’s cave, he nevertheless relates this text to his Wild Hunt prototype by describing it as a cattle raid to the world of the dead.
It is hard to see how the same story can be both part of the Combat Myth and the Wild Hunt Myth. Again, oddly, G. does not cite F., although he seems to have read every other book in existence. Odder considering that their purposes are so similar.
However we don’t have to choose between them.
For a start there are other versions of the myth that F. and G. overlooked:
At a later time, as the Scythians recount the myth, an earth-born maiden came into being among them; the upper parts of her body as far as her waist were those of a woman, but the lower parts were those of a viper (echidna). After she lay with Zeus, she bore a son whose name was Scythes. (Diodorus Siculus. 2.43)
...and Colaxes its chief, himself too of the seed of the gods, begotten by Jupiter in Scythian land by Green Myrace and the mouths of the Tibisis, enchanted, if the tale is worthy of belief, by a nymph’s half-human body not afraid of her twin snakes…Thereon had he himself joined serpents of gold, in likeness of Hora his mother; from either hand did the snakes’ tongues meet, darting round upon a shapely gem. (Valerius Flaccus 6.48.59)
And from an inscription:
“...having arrived in Scythia, [Hercules] defeated Araxes in a battle. By his daughter Echidna he begot sons, Agathysos and Scythes” (Inscriptiones Graecae XIV 1293A 93-96; trans. at Ustinova 1999, 89).
It appears from these versions that we have a Scythian myth of their own racial origins given in Greek dress. The whole presence of Herakles is tacked on as tradents searched for an equivalent of some Scythian God and Zeus was used in this role as well. The Theme of the cattle raid was entirely introduced from Greek myth and has nothing to with the story, and still less does combat become involved (that evaporates once Herakles the killer of monsters is removed).
Yulia Ustinova, The Supreme Gods of the Bosporan Kingdom: Celestial Aphrodite and the Most High God Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 135 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), points out that the same myth is common in Scythian art (sorry I don’t have the book to hand at the moment to scan from). The goddess with two snakes for legs is very common in Scythian art, although we don’t know her name. She is called Hora in one of the Greek versions because she was a protector of horses (the Horae or hours were responsible for caring for Apollo’s horses in the stable at night). She appears especially on horse armor. That is why she takes Herakles’ horses under her protection—nothing to with cattle raiding the underworld. The engendering of the Scythian race is depicted too. The father is the river Dnepr (Borythenes). This information was only available in Russian at the time F. and G. wrote.
I suppose the only point here is that the complex scholarly constructs of F. and G. evaporate once the actual form of the myth is known. They didn’t look closely enough. They both cite hundreds or thousands of other examples (Fontenrose, for instance takes the same story as in Herodotus, but applied as an origin of the race of the Gauls as an independent witness, not considering that it appears only in very late texts and is obviously borrowed wholesale from Herodotus as Gallic nobility in the Roman world looked around for an origin myth that could connect them to Greek mythology, just as the Romans themselves latched onto Aeneas). How many other holes could one find? Their whole structuralist project just seems overreaching. So much for having been impressed by structuralism when I was first introduced to it.
IV. viii. (vol. II, p. 186 Beloe ) Such is the manner in which the Scythians describe themselves and the country beyond them. The Greeks who inhabit Pontus speak of both as follows: Hercules, when he was driving away the heifers of Geryon, came to this region, (p. 187) now inhabited by the Scythians, but which was then a desert. This Geryon lived beyond Pontus in an Island the Greeks call Eythia, near Gades, which is situate in the ocean, and beyond the columns of Hercules. The ocean, they say, commencing at the east, flows round all the earth; this, however, they affirm without proving it. Hercules commencing thence, arrived at this country, now called Scythia, where, finding himself overtaken by a severe storm, and being exceedingly cold, he wrapped himself up in his lion’s skin, and went to sleep. They add, that his mares, which he had detached from his chariot to feed, by some divine interposition disappeared during his sleep.
ix. As soon as he awoke he wandered over all (p. 188) the country in search of his mares, till at length he came to the district which is called Hylæa; there in a cave he discovered a female of most unnatural appearance, resembling a woman as far as the thighs, but whose lower parts were like a serpent. Hercules beheld her with astonishment, but he was not deterred from asking her whether she had seen his mares? She made answer, they were in her custody; she refused, however, to restore them, but upon condition of his cohabiting with her. The terms proposed induced Hercules to consent; but she still deferred restoring his mares, from the wish of retaining him longer with her, whislt Hercules was equally anxious to depart. After a while she restored them with these words: “Your mares, which wandered here, I have preserved; you have paid what was due to my care, I conceived by you three sons; I wish you to say how I shall dispose of them hereafter; whether I shall detain them here, where I am the sovereign, or whether I shall send them to you.” The reply of Hercules was to this effect: “As soon as they shall be grown up to man’s estate, observe this, and you cannot err; whichever of them you shall see bend this bow, and wear this belt as I do, him detain in this (p. 189) country: the others, who shall not be able to do this, you may send away. By minding what I say you will have pleasure yourself, and will satisfy my wishes.”
x. Having said this, Hercules took one of his bows, for thus far he had carried two, and shewing her also his belt, at the end of which a golden cup was suspended, he gave her them and departed. As soon as the boys of who she was delivered grew up, she called the eldest Agathyrsus, the second Gelonus, and the youngest Scytha. She remembered also his injunctions she had received; and two of her sons Agathyrsus and Gelonus, who were incompetent to the trial which was proposed, were sent away by their mother from this country. Scytha the youngest was successful in his exertions, and remained. From this Scytha, the son of Hercules, the Scythian monarchs are descended, and from the golden cup the Scythians to this day have a cup at the end of their belts.
(note that this translation leaves out the name of the goddess which is in the Greek text: Echidna, which signifies ‘viper’)
Now this myth has been treated by two modern scholars using a more or less structuralist approach.
Joseph E. Fontenrose, Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and its Origins (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), wants to explain the origin myth of Delphi, given in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. According to this, the shrine used to be sacred to Gaia and was guarded by the Python. When Apollo wanted to take it over he killed the Python with his bow. The rotting of the snake gave rise through the usual punning folk etymology to the term Pythia (taken wrongly as though it were cognate with putrid). The approach F. takes is to assemble a vast satirical comparison of every myth in the ancient Mediterranean in which a God kills a monster (I think he gets as far as Scandinavia and India or China), and then adds further myths in which that doesn’t happen but which share certain common features with the main myths, among them the Scythian one quoted above. He naturally fits the Python story into this structure. But he vacillates uncomfortably between structuralism and diffusionalism when he posits that the combat myth is the Ugaritic combat between Baalu and Yammu, which defeats the whole point of structuralism.
Personally, I think F. fails to make his case because I think these myths are too easily explained from having arisen directly form the organization of the human mind, drawing on factors like the Oedipal conflict and transformations of instinctual fears about predation (the fear of being eaten by a leopard is transformed into the triumphant slaying of the leopard by a super-human figure). In particular, as far as the Ugaritic version goes, it is hard to imagine that one factor contributing to the origin of that myth was not ancient Semites standing on top of prominences like Mt. Cassius or Mt. Carmel watching thunderstorms beating the Mediterranean with lightning, as has often been suggested (not to revert to the old myth as nature-allegory theory as a general explanation of myth, though it does seem relevant in this case).
More recently, Carlo Ginzburg had made a more attractive suggestion, that Inquisitors sometimes turned up remnants of old myths and rituals concerning initiatory peasant bands joining the Wild Hunt of Odin leading the souls of the dead to the underworld, where they fight witches over the fertility of next year’s harvest, and assimilated this to their schema of witchcraft which actually originated from different sources. I think he goes off the rails, however when he goes on a structuralist tour of Eurasia, encompassing Siberian Shamanism and much else. One thing he picks up in his net is the same Scythian myth quoted above:
According to a myth reported by Herodotus (IV.8-10, Heracles, after having seized Geryon’s cattle, arrived in the then deserted Scythia, copulated with a local divinity, half-woman half-serpent, and begat the Scythians. His teacher, the archer Teuartos (Heracles was originally armed with a bow and not a club), is sometimes portrayed in Scythian garb. The presence in China of a mythical hero to whom feats analogous to those of Hercules are attributed, has been tentatively assigned to Scythian mediation.(Ginzburg, Ecstasies [1989; trans. 1991])
Although G. oddly does not mention the recovery of Herakles’ mares from Echidna’s cave, he nevertheless relates this text to his Wild Hunt prototype by describing it as a cattle raid to the world of the dead.
It is hard to see how the same story can be both part of the Combat Myth and the Wild Hunt Myth. Again, oddly, G. does not cite F., although he seems to have read every other book in existence. Odder considering that their purposes are so similar.
However we don’t have to choose between them.
For a start there are other versions of the myth that F. and G. overlooked:
At a later time, as the Scythians recount the myth, an earth-born maiden came into being among them; the upper parts of her body as far as her waist were those of a woman, but the lower parts were those of a viper (echidna). After she lay with Zeus, she bore a son whose name was Scythes. (Diodorus Siculus. 2.43)
...and Colaxes its chief, himself too of the seed of the gods, begotten by Jupiter in Scythian land by Green Myrace and the mouths of the Tibisis, enchanted, if the tale is worthy of belief, by a nymph’s half-human body not afraid of her twin snakes…Thereon had he himself joined serpents of gold, in likeness of Hora his mother; from either hand did the snakes’ tongues meet, darting round upon a shapely gem. (Valerius Flaccus 6.48.59)
And from an inscription:
“...having arrived in Scythia, [Hercules] defeated Araxes in a battle. By his daughter Echidna he begot sons, Agathysos and Scythes” (Inscriptiones Graecae XIV 1293A 93-96; trans. at Ustinova 1999, 89).
It appears from these versions that we have a Scythian myth of their own racial origins given in Greek dress. The whole presence of Herakles is tacked on as tradents searched for an equivalent of some Scythian God and Zeus was used in this role as well. The Theme of the cattle raid was entirely introduced from Greek myth and has nothing to with the story, and still less does combat become involved (that evaporates once Herakles the killer of monsters is removed).
Yulia Ustinova, The Supreme Gods of the Bosporan Kingdom: Celestial Aphrodite and the Most High God Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 135 (Leiden: Brill, 1999), points out that the same myth is common in Scythian art (sorry I don’t have the book to hand at the moment to scan from). The goddess with two snakes for legs is very common in Scythian art, although we don’t know her name. She is called Hora in one of the Greek versions because she was a protector of horses (the Horae or hours were responsible for caring for Apollo’s horses in the stable at night). She appears especially on horse armor. That is why she takes Herakles’ horses under her protection—nothing to with cattle raiding the underworld. The engendering of the Scythian race is depicted too. The father is the river Dnepr (Borythenes). This information was only available in Russian at the time F. and G. wrote.
I suppose the only point here is that the complex scholarly constructs of F. and G. evaporate once the actual form of the myth is known. They didn’t look closely enough. They both cite hundreds or thousands of other examples (Fontenrose, for instance takes the same story as in Herodotus, but applied as an origin of the race of the Gauls as an independent witness, not considering that it appears only in very late texts and is obviously borrowed wholesale from Herodotus as Gallic nobility in the Roman world looked around for an origin myth that could connect them to Greek mythology, just as the Romans themselves latched onto Aeneas). How many other holes could one find? Their whole structuralist project just seems overreaching. So much for having been impressed by structuralism when I was first introduced to it.
