References are presented in the order in which they appear in each chapter.
Introduction
On the antiquity of theories of myth, see, for example, Richard Chase, Quest for Myth (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1949), chapter 1; Jan de Vries, Forschungsgeschichte der Mythologie (Freiburg: Alber, 1961), chapter 1.
On parallels between earlier theories and social scientific ones, see Burton Feldman and Robert D. Richardson, The Rise of Modern Mythology, 1680–1860 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), pp. xxii–xxiii.
John Beattie, Other Cultures (New York: Free Press, 1964).
For a standard folkloristic classification of stories, see William Bascom, ‘The Forms of Folklore: Prose Narratives’, Journal of American Folklore, 78 (1965): 3–20. On the blurriness of these distinctions, see Stith Thompson, The Folktale (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977 [1946]), p. 303.
William D. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (London and New York: Routledge, 1987).
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Apollodorus, Gods and Heroes of the Greeks: The ‘Library’ of Apollodorus, tr. Michael Simpson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976); Ovid, Metamorphoses, tr. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955).
For scepticism over the universality of theories, see Stith Thompson, ‘Myths and Folktales’, Journal of American Folklore, 68 (1955): 482–8; G. S. Kirk, Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), p. 7.
Myth
Chapter 1
On the history of creationism, see Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
On scientific reinterpretation of the Noah myth, see, for example, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, Noah’s Flood (London: Simon and Schuster, 1999). For a superb collection of the array of ways that flood stories worldwide have been approached, see Alan Dundes (ed.), The Flood Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
In the passage on the plagues of Egypt, the reference is to Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (eds.), The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977 [1962]). Quotations are taken from p. 75. For a comparable attempt to ‘naturalize’ myth from outside of the Bible, see Samuel Noah Kramer, Sumerian Mythology, rev. edn. (New York: Harper & Row, 1961 [1st edn. 1944]).
The classic attempt not to replace but to reconcile a theological account of the plagues with a scientific account is that of the Jewish existentialist philosopher Martin Buber, for whom the believer, on the basis of faith, attributes to divine intervention what the believer acknowledges can be fully accounted for scientifically. See Buber, Moses (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958 [1946]), especially pp. 60–8, 74–9. Buber is the Jewish counterpart to Rudolf Bultmann, considered in Chapter 2.
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The classic work on finding science in myth is Giorgi de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill (Boston: Gambit, 1969).
The work cited is Andrew Dixon White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1986), abridged by Bruce Mazlish (New York: Free Press, 1965). For a balanced corrective, see John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
The classic work by Edward Burnett Tylor is Primitive Culture, 2 vols, 1st edn. (London: Murray, 1871). Citations are from the reprint of the 5th (1913) edition (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958). The work by Stephen Jay Gould quoted is Rocks of Ages (London: Vintage, 2002 [1999]). On possible ways of distinguishing myth from science, see my Theorizing about Myth (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), pp. 7–9.
For a refreshingly sensible postmodern approach to myth, see Laurence Coupe, Myth (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).
For a modern Tylorian perspective, see David Bidney, Theoretical Anthropology, 2nd edn. (New York: Schocken, 1967 [1st edn. 1953]), chapter 10; ‘Myth, Symbolism, and Truth’, Journal of American Folklore, 68 (1955): 379–92.
On the term ‘euhemerist’, see Joseph Fontenrose, The Ritual Theory of Myth (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 20–3.
Friedrich Max Müller, ‘Comparative Mythology’ (1856), in his Chips from a German Workshop (London: Longmans, Green, 1867),
pp. 1–141.
A theologian who assumes that Genesis 1 is anything but an account of creation is Langdon Gilkey. See his Maker of Heaven and Earth (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985 [1959]), especially pp. 25–9, 148–55.
References
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J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 1st edn., 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1890); 2nd edn., 3 vols (London: Macmillan, 1900); 3rd edn.,
12 vols (London: Macmillan, 1911–15); one-vol. abridgment (London: Macmillan, 1922).
Myth
Hans Blumenberg, Work on Myth, tr. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985).
Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, How Natives Think, tr. Lilian A. Clare (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966 [1926]).
Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘Magic, Science and Religion’ [1925] and ‘Myth in Primitive Psychology’ [1926], in his Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays, ed. Robert Redfield (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1954 [1948]), pp. 17–92 and 93–148.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, tr. not given (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966); Myth and Meaning (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978); André Akoun et al., ‘A Conversation with Claude Lévi-Strauss’, Psychology Today, 5 (May 1972): 36–9, 74–82.
Robin Horton, ‘African Traditional Thought and Western Science’, Africa, 37 (1967): 50–71 (part I), 155–87 (part II).
Stewart Guthrie, Faces in the Clouds (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations, 5th edn. (London: Routledge
&Kegan Paul, 1974 [1st edn. 1962]); The World of Parmenides, ed. Arne F. Peterson and Jorgen Mejer (London: Routledge, 1998).
F. M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy (London: Arnold, 1912); Principium Sapientiae, ed. W. K. C. Guthrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), chapters 1–11.
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Chapter 2
Paul Radin, Primitive Man as Philosopher, 2nd edn. (New York: Dover, 1957 [1st edn. 1927]); The World of Primitive Man (New York: Dutton, 1971), chapter 3.
Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, tr. Ralph Manheim, II (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1955); The Myth of the State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1946). On political myths, see also Cassirer, Symbol, Myth, and Culture, ed. Donald Phillip Verene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 219–67.
Henri Frankfort and H. A. Frankfort, John A. Wilson, Thorkild Jacobsen, and William A. Irwin, The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946 [reprinted Phoenix Books, 1997]); paperback retitled Before Philosophy: The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man: An Essay on Speculative Thought in the Ancient Near East (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1949).
Rudolf Bultmann, ‘New Testament and Mythology’ (1941), in Kerygma and Myth, ed. Hans-Werner Bartsch, tr. Reginald H. Fuller, I (London: SPCK, 1953), pp. 1–44; Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York:
Scribner’s, 1958); Hans Jonas, Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, 2 vols, 1st edn. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1934 [vol. I] and 1954 [vol. II, part 1]); The Gnostic Religion, 2nd edn. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963 [1958]), Epilogue.
For the myth of Sisyphus, see Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, tr. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage Books, 1960 [1955]), pp. 88–91; Homer, The Odyssey, tr. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968 [1965]), p. 183.
References
Chapter 3
Bultmann, ‘New Testament and Mythology’ and Jesus Christ and
Mythology.
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