希腊神话的性质
最新书摘：
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zyrgogo2019-12-29将神话视为社会的梦想碎片的看法之所以深受弗洛伊德及其追随者的喜爱，大概是因为这个说法与其认为儿童性欲决定其人格以及幼年的欲望、压抑和经历的残留造就其成年心理的观点配合得天衣无缝。当然，这种说法是荒谬的，因为人类、或者说一般人类社会，是完全不能与一个从幼儿成长为成年人的个体相比的。我们通常的思想深受这种拟人化隐喻的影响，但完全没有必要将之引入诸如神话研究这种学术课题。真正意义上的传统神话，乃是源于人类文化的口头时期，很多神话中保存了在其被首次用文字记录下来时好多世代之前的材料。尽管如此，也不能因此就将这些神话视为相当于人类物种“幼年”发展初级阶段的产物，因此，即使我们认可上述隐喻，这种观点也容易引起误解。神话所关注的问题，许多是关乎诸如自然与文化或者生与死之类永恒话题，而它们所给出的解决方式丝毫不显“幼稚”，所谓天真无邪，就更谈不上了。这些解决方式与现在仍被宗教或大众道德所提倡的方式惊人地相似，只是稍微改换了包装而已。最后，将神话视为某种人类集体无意识之衍生物的观点，也大大歪曲了可以被合乎情理地归于传统叙事的集体权威的程度。
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zyrgogo2019-12-29马林诺夫斯基极力主张唯一有资格对神话研究发表意见的不是古典学者（他特指的是弗雷泽爵士）也不是象牙塔中的哲学家，而是那些“跟神话的创作者并肩而坐”的进行实地考察的人类学家，这番话在当时比在今天更有意义。今天，人们也许更会情不自禁地要求人类学家少谈些理论多做点实地观察。即使如此，我仍然承认，马林诺夫斯基强调对神话的实际使用进行观察，是正确的的，可以肯定地说，即使抛开他的“许可证”理论正确与否不谈，仅他自己的观察本身就导致了神话研究的很大改观。事情的真相在于对神话的正确研究方式，需要认真地全面关注包括比较语言学、心理学、人类学在内的所有相关学科。古典学家进入这些学科几乎是出于不得已，至少，人们都认识到，流传下来的希腊神话并不是典型形态的神话。
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Oneiros.2021-10-23Folktale motifs are always important, and some of the main heroic actions, tests and quests most conspicuously, are of strongly folktale character. History provides a separate constituent, even in myths that are not so obviously historicizing as to deserve the special title of legends. (213)
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Oneiros.2021-10-23A curious connection, this, between the gentle singer and the victim of human prejudice and savagery, and one that seems less than startling only to those familiar with the tale of Jesus Christ. (170)
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Oneiros.2021-10-23When he (Orpheus) enters literature it is mainly because of his wonderful power of drawing to him birds, beasts, fishes, even stones, by his singing and lyre-playing. (170)
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Oneiros.2021-10-23Indeed the entire sequence of myths in Hesiod -- Prometheus, the sacrifice, the theft of fire, the creation of women, the punishment of Prometheus, the five races of men -- might be said to leave one with a feeling that things are not quite so unfair as they were, that evil is more equable than it seemed, that old age and disease are in some ways our own fault, even that things might improve if only we learned to behave better. (143)
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Oneiros.2021-10-23It could easily fail to remove the guilt men felt over keeping the best parts of the animal for themselves. Guilt is a cardinal feeling, and much of the lifetime of ordinary mortals is consumed in suppressing it by one means or another. (139)
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Oneiros.2021-10-23The deceptive choice offered by a god to a mortal or vice versa is a widespread folktale motif often used to account for the fact of death: man was offered a choice between death and life, as in the Akkadian tale of Adapa, and through trickery of misinformation he made the wrong choice. (138)
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Oneiros.2021-10-23Rather it was to consolidate and where necessary recreate the nobility and vitality of the heroic past, the epoch when aretā, heroic excellence, flourished, when great adventures filled the earth, when men were true descendants of the gods, when their prayers evoked divine voices or direct theophanies, when the result of error was splendid ruin. (102)
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Oneiros.2021-10-23The whole Lévi-Strauss concept, like so many other anthropological theories, has become absurd in its stringency. Society is not a machine, although it has its machine-like aspects; the human mind is not utterly rigid in its analytical functions; myths are not all alike in their structure and purpose, even at the most abstract level. (84)
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Oneiros.2021-10-23The particular application is not a Greek one, for the Greeks seem to have accepted that men are mortal and in this respect quite different from the gods. They hated death, but did not find it helpful to make up tales explaining it away or showing it as somehow inevitable.