Week 12 Story Lab: Crash Course Myth Videos

Crash Course Myth videos. Watch these videos and record your thoughts in a blog post: Overview of Mythology (3 videos, 40 minutes total). These are most useful for the Myth-Folklore class, but I think they can be useful for the Indian Epics class too.

What Is Myth? Crash Course World Mythology #1

This video talked about how due to the age of myths, there is a lot of interpretation. Beyond the multiple versions of myths found, we do not know exactly how a myth was created. Does a myth originate from a twist of truth, are they made up fictional stories for entertainment or to teach a lesson, or were they simply a way to explain natural phenomena? I thought the part of the video that started on the theory of myth was fascinating, and I better understood why our Mythology and Folklore class contains story-telling, as myth from "mythos" means "story." In this class, we are making up our own interpretations of myths as many have done for thousands of years. And myths aren't only old, they are integrated into our societies, such as the "Rags and Riches" example the video provided. The way we use myths in society further explains how we think and how we experience life.

Theories of Myth: Crash Course World Mythology #12

This video talked about how myths have been and are studied. Myths are powerful because of their ability to survive centuries by people believing that their stories are worth passing down. However, not everyone was in agreement. One example this video used was how the criticism of myths has happened for thousands of years, even back in 500 B.C.E. Before I saw this video, I thought everyone in ancient Greece worshipped the Greek pantheon, so I was very surprised to hear that figures such as Plato and Euhemerous disregarded the myths as having any factual truth. Plato called myths another type of lie, which is a connotation that still exists today. Strangely enough, people pretend that they are the most evolved being and that humans in the past were lesser, such as Euhemerous who said people made up myths because they did not have science. However, I thought the field studies (as problematic as its view of a 'primitive' society) told the most about how myths function in society. They teach morals, rules, and beliefs for people to live by. It is really in the context of where the myths are told that tell us more about how they influence us. I thought this was fairly obvious but it didn't occur to me how mythology was affecting history. The connections found between languages created modern mythology of the Aryan people, who, despite having no evidence of existence, created a gateway for superiority thought that fueled Nazi propaganda. This made me think of the modern mythologies we take for granted in our own lives. The internet is a tool that doesn't discriminate with information allowed on it. Such as the following:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34568674

The above is a link to a story of a model who did work for a plastic surgery advertisement. However, people made up a false story behind the photos the model was a part of, and soon the model, Ms. Yeh, had a lot of trouble finding work because of the rumors surrounding her. The moral of the story: Think carefully and critically about what you read before you hit "Post."

The Hero's Journey and the Monomyth: Crash Course World Mythology #25

The main idea this video focused on was that a hero is someone that answers the call to journey from home and undergoes many deadly trials. During this process, the hero surpasses their mentor or gains the approval of their mentor. Once all their challenges are complete, the hero returns home or continues to ascend from humanity. In either case, the hero gained hard-earned peace. Throughout this description of "The Hero's Journey," the hero is put in parallel to ourselves. We all want to find our place in the world, and the hero's trials can act as analogies to the struggles in our everyday lives.

Then "The Hero's Journey" continued past just going home because they need to be accepted again into the community. It reminded me of"The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien. One of the lines was about how people who go on adventures may not come back and if they do they will not be the same. This was seen in Bilbo Baggins as he became a social outcast of the shire because of his adventure. I thought about how my own adventure was going, and I remembered coming home for the first time as a college student. Everything was both familiar and strange because I had grown as a person and the people back home had done some growing without me.

That's it for my Story Lab. Here is a personal photo of a sunrise.