This document provides a review of various mythological concepts and characters from Greek, Near Eastern, and Biblical traditions. It includes definitions and brief descriptions of over 50 terms related to mythology, cosmogony, anthropogony, and psychological interpretations of myths. Key points covered include the basic patterns found in creation myths like those in Hesiod's Theogony and the Babylonian Enuma Elish, as well as themes around succession and the origins of humanity found in Greek and Near Eastern myths.

1. Test Review
Reminder:
TUESDAY EVENING EXAM
6.30-7.30
A-L : PHYS 112
M-Z : PHYS 114

2. Review
• Adam
• Ainos (folktale) Opening: Once upon a time. Ending: with wedding.
Occasion: low secular. Belief value: fiction. Time and place: any.
Characters: humans/animal same or inferior in degree. World:
highly flexible. Casuality: chance and luck in extreme. Fairytale,
wish-fulfilment. Stance: optimism and opportunism. Morality:
relevant: moral character+ quality of experience.
• Anthropogony: the story of the origin of human beings. Myths of
human creation.
• Aphrodite: is born after the castration of Uranus. When Cronus
throws Uranus’s genitals in the sea behind Paphos rocks. Mixture of
blood and sperm and water causes her creation.
• Apsu: Fresh Water in Enuma Elish. Apsu and Tiamat form the
beginning of being.

3. Review
• Archetype: latent patterns are genetically transmitted.
• Athena: is born out of Zeus’ skull. Virgin and stays with
her father because she never has sex and so not a
threat.
• Autochthony: the Greek narrative of humans’ coming
into being. Auto: self and chthon: earth. Humans come
from a hole in the ground.
• binarism: Polarity is a basic structuring principle in
ancient Greek culture. male/female. Good/bad.
Human/animal.
• Chaos: one of the Primal Beings in Hesiod’s Theogony.
(Chaos: void. Gaea: matter and Eros: motion). It means
emptiness and void unlike its contemporary meaning in
English.

4. Review
• Collective unconscious: Jung
• Combat myth: The Combat Myth allows communities to project
back into mythic time the basic categories in whose terms they
understand the relation between human and animal, culture and
nature, male and female, us and them. These categories are
opposites, and the relation between them is often considered a
hostile one. This hostility can be used to justify the treatment of
non-humans, the natural world, females, and strangers. See Week 3
Self-test.
• Cosmogony: narrative account of coming into being.
• Created world cosmogony: in cosmogony types of worlds: inert
nature, transcendent deity, examples Genesis.
• Cronus: the youngest son of Gaea and Uranus. He castrates his
father. And He is imprisoned later in the underworld “Tartarus” by
Zeus
• Daphne: is a nymph. Cupid makes Apollo fall in love with her. Apollo
tries to rape her. She prays to the gods and she is turned to Laurel
bush. Apollo takes the leaves and uses them as a crown.

5. Review
• Ea: Descendent of Apsu, the primal father in Enuma Elish, and he
castrates his father because he discovers that Apsu is about to flood
the world. Also, he is the father of Marduk, storm god.
• Ego: the rational part of self; conscious in Freudian Psychology.
• Eden:
• elpis ("hope"): is the only spirit that stays in Pandora’s Pithos. As a
result, in Greek Mythology, there is a a perpetual hunger that
cannot be statisfied.
• Enkidu: story of his creation is narrated in the Epic of Gilgamesh. He
is created by goddess of creation and put out in the wilderness. He
becomes wild and savage and lives in harmony with animals and
nature. His story parallels the story of Adam and Eve with some
minor variance.
• Enuma Elish: the earliest western cosmogony. It is the text that
narrates the coming into being of evolved world. It is a Babylonian
account of creation as it takes place in the Mesopotamia.

6. Review
• Epimetheus: the twin of Prometheus. While Prometheus is smart and a trickster,
Epimetheus is a fool. He is the one who accepts the gift of Pandora, Pithos, a big
jar that is beautiful from outside and has the seeds of evil in the inside.
• Epos (legend): opening: sing, muse. Ending: death. Occasion: high secular. Belief
value: fact/fiction. Time: historical. Place: battlefield. Characters: divine human
(hero), superior in degree. World; somewhat flexible, generally hostile. Casualty:
rigid laws, fatal determinism, some room for human choice. Stance: acquiescence
and endurance. Morality: irrelevant, moral character not: quality of experience.
• Eros: Sexual impulse. The third primal being in Hesiod’s.
• Etiological myth: myths represent primitive or pre-scientific attempts to explain a-natural
processes or b- natural features like rain, lightning and thunder are
ascribed to Zeus, and Poseidon or c- regular features or events in human society.
• Euhemerism: is the claim that myths are the distorted forms of actual, historical
events and characters, that behind each myth lies something that once actually
happened. Named after Euhemerus, a student of Aristotle.

7. Review
• Eve:
• Evolved world cosmogony: dynamic nature, immanent deity,
examples: Enuma Elish and Theogony.
• Freud: the founder of psychology.
• Gaea: (female) is earth, which is the primordial in Hesiod’s.
• Genesis:
• Hesiod: a Greek Poet and the author of Theogony.
• hieros mythos (sacred myth): In the beginning. Ends; confirmation
of the way things are. Occasion: sacred. Belief value; fact. Time;
remote. Place: primeval world. Characters: divine (gods), superior
in kind. World; inflexible. Casualty; hard determinism. Stance;
absolute resignation. Morality: irrelevant: good= divine will.
• Homeostatic: it matches the expectations of the audience.
• Id: the irrational part of self. repressed desires, taboos. Freud.

8. Review
• immanent deity: exists in the evolved world in
the cosmogonic types of world.
• Jung: A student of Freud but he founds his
psychology school. Collective unconscious.
• Kumarbi: son of Anush in the Hittite Myth. Song
of Ullikummi. Abused by his father, he fights his
father and bites his genitals off.
• Lévi-Strauss: Founder of structuralism.
• logos ("rational account"): before the 5th century
BCE, it means: word, story, fictive statement.
• Marduk: storm god, who defeats Tiamat, and he
becomes the ruler of the universe.

9. Review
• Metis: Zeus’s aunt and he mates with her. Then,
he swallows her.
• Monolingual: Each telling of a myth claims to be
the only true and authoritative telling.
• Moral allegory: characters represent moral
qualities and values. Encoded lessons to elevate
humanity morally.
• Multiform: Myths change constantly each time
they are told. There is no "orthodox" version of a
myth. dynamic.
• Muses: Daughter of Zeus.

10. Review
• mythos ("traditional account"): before the 5th century BCE, it
means traditional story, account, explanation, important statement,
true statement
• Nedys (belly/womb): it is ambiguous in Greek as it means both.
Cronus swallows his children in his belly to prevent his children
from dethroning him.
• Night (Nyx): Offspring of Chaos and parthenogenetically gives birth
to strife.
• Oedipus Complex: In Freudian psychology: the sexual desire a child
feels towards his mother.
• Olympian: offspring of Titans. Older Olympians like Hera and Zeus.
• Omphalos (navel, center): the rock Cronus swallows instead of
Zeus; vomits up first, it falls to the earth at Delphi, center of the
universe.
• Pandora: Zeus’ creation to punish humans. Means all-giving. She
looks beautiful from the outside and inside is full of lies and
cheatings, deceptions, etc.

11. Review
• Parthenogenesis: Partheno: virgin/ genesis: coming
into being. To give birth without prior sexual activity.
• Physical allegory: assumes that the gods and other
characters in myths actually refer to natural things and
processes. So, fire is Apollo, air is Hera, Athena is good
sense, Ares is insanity and Aphrodite is desire.
• Prometheus: a titan and an offspring of Gaea and
Uranus. He is the source of culture as he teaches to
make a fire and horsemanship. Also, he is a trickster.
He is both good and bad. He tricks Zeus and Zeus
punishes him by making his Eagle eats his lever every
day.
• Rahab: A serpentine-like creature crushed by Yahweh
in Genesis.

12. Review
• Rhea: Mate of Cronus and mother of Zeus and
the older Olympians.
• Shamhat: the female that seduces Enkidu in
Gilgamesh.
• Strife (Eris): offspring of Night. Produces
parthenogenetically distress, distraction, famine.
• Structuralism: a school of interpretation founded
by Levi-Strauss. the inner structure of myths is an
attempt to categorize the world.
• Taboo:
• Tartarus: under the universe and it is the worst
punishment in Greek myth as it has no spatial
boundaries.

13. Review
• Teshub: son of Kumarbi. Born out of his father’s
genitals because Kumarbi swallows his father’s
genitals, Anush. Teshub overthrows his father by
splitting Ullikummi from Ubelluri borrowing the
knife that Ea used to castrate Apsu.
• Theogony: Is Hesiod’s narrative of the coming
into being of gods, which is the coming into being
of the world.
• Tiamat: Salt water in Enuma Elish and the primal
monster
• Titan: Offspring of Gaea and Uranus, like Cronus.
• Transcendent deity: exists in the created world
cosmogony.

14. Review
• Typhoeus: is a monster produced by Gaea to fight Zeus.
Zeus is helped to retain his sinews and then he crushes
Typhoeus under a mountain called Aetna.
• Ubelluri:
• Ullikummi: in the Hittite Myth narrated in the Song of
Ullikummi. Is a monster, offspring of Kumarbi and a boulder.
Then, he unites with a sea-giant, called Ubelluri.
• Uranus: is sky, who is produced by Gaea and Gaea mates
with him and they produce the titans.
• Verisimilar: Myths reflect what given community considers
to be true.
• Yahweh: Creator of the world in Genesis
• Zeus: Older Olympian. Son of Cronus and Rhea. He solves
the problem of succession by destabilizing the threat of
son/father conflict by incorporating the female inside his
body.

15. Review
• Characteristics of "myth"
• Narrative, oral, traditional, anonymous, multiform, homeostatic,
monolingual, verisimilar.
• Comparison among "sacred myth," "legend," and "folktale":
• See Week 1, Self-test.
• Basic assumptions in psychological interpretation of myths: Both
Freud and Jung assume that
• (a) myths express inner, psychological realities (emotions,
impulses).
• (b) myths have the same basic structure as dreams, and differ only
in that myths are the "dreams" of entire communities.
• (c) the proper way to interpret myths is to apply to them the same
tools used to interpret the dreams of individual patients.
• See, Week 2 Self-test for the differences between Freud and Jung.

16. Review
• Basic assumptions in Structuralist interpretation of myths:
• a) There is a human need to classify in order to understand.
• b) Classification tends to be binary: up/down, right/left,
light/dark, etc
• c) Whatever resists classification causes anxiety:
homosexual (male or female?), fetus (person or not?),
comatose (living or dead?)...
• d) Binary pairs form sequences connected by analogy: up,
right, light, day implicitly belong together, as do down, left,
dark, night.
• e) "Natural" pairs used to justify "arbitrary" ones: up/down
= superior/inferior = male/female.
• f) Myths (1) encode classifications, and (2) attempt to solve
problems those classifications cause.

17. Review
• Differences between created and evolved
world cosmogonies:
Type Nature Deity Myth
Created
World
Inert Matter Transcendent Genesis
Evolved World Dynamic
Matter
Immanent Enuma Elish,
Theogony

18. Review
• Basic pattern for cosmogonic myths:
• 1- Primal Unity. 2- Separation. 3- Proliferation of
beings. 4- Destabilization. 5- Plot. 6- Confrontation. 7-
Resolution. 8- Stability. See Week 2 Self-test for further
details.
• Comparison between Greek and Near Eastern
(Babylonian, Hittite) cosmogonies.
• all are similar in structure.
• Primal fathers: Apsu/Anush/Uranus.
• Castrators: Ea/Kumarbi/Cronus.
• Storm god: Marduk/Teshub/ Zeus.
• Primal Monster: Tiamat/ Ullikummi-Ubelluri/
Typhoeus.

19. Review
• Problems and resolutions in Hesiod's
cosmogony:
• the conflicts over male control of female
reproductivity across the three generations
from Uranus to Cronus, along with the
solutions (unsuccessful until Zeus) attempted
to protect male gods from being overthrown
by their offspring.
• Themes in Hesiod's myth of succession: Week
3, lecture 7, see the notes for further details.
• Basic pattern for anthropogonic myths: 1-
Unity. 2-separation. 3-disharmony/rupture.

20. Review
• Comparison between Greek and Near Eastern
anthropogonies: 1-Primal Unity/Initial union, harmony.
2-Separation/rupture by accident or transgression. 3-
Destabilization/1-disharmony from (a) separation of
human and divine or (b) punishment. 2- rupture as
origin of evils: work, pain, injustice, etc.
• Basic themes in myth of Prometheus and Pandora:
Prometheus tricks Zeus into choosing bones wrapped
with fat while he hides meat inside a cow’s stomach.
Then, Zeus withholds fire from humans. Again,
Prometheus steals fire from Zeus. As a result, Zeus
creates Pandora to punish humans. Pandora and
women by extension are the source of evil.