Family Myths · Phraseology and Inherited Indo-European Thematic Structures in Greek Myth

Family Myths: Phraseology and Inherited Indo-European Thematic Structures in Greek Myth

My project, Family Myths, consists in a comparative study of mythological narratives belonging to the largest and most widespread linguistic family in the world, Indo-European (IE). In the same way as the single Indo-European languages are genetically related to one another, so their religions, mythologies and literatures are cognate. Indeed, entire stories belonging to diverse IE traditions may display macroscopic similarities. However, comparativists have long struggled with methodological issues, as for the individuation of matches among two or more narratives, documented in diverse but related traditions. This project addresses these very problems from a linguistic point of view. Historical linguistics offers powerful methodological tools for the study of (1) lexicon and onomastics; (2) phraseology—combinations of words in specific contexts; (3) themes—core-events of a story. By focusing on these dimensions of the texts, my project tried to recompose the scattered limbs of inherited myths, which survived in Greek narratives from the Archaic and Classical Ages (5th–8th century B.C.E.). The project has three main objectives: (i) to classify Greek thematic structures in terms of primary motifs and narrative proliferations; (ii) to locate correspondences between Greek narratives and rituals/worship praxis associated with a certain cult/character or event; (iii) to identify possible parallels for a given mythological narrative in other IE traditions. After analyzing and classifying a variety of mythological accounts, my study succeeded in reaching all three objectives in connection with different groups of narratives, namely: those concerning the ‘Sun-myth’ and those concerning the ‘Fire-myth’. The results of my project not only contributed to cast grasp single aspects of narratives, which looked inconsistent if considered in a single cultural context, but it also worked on the core of ancestral structures, namely: myths, mythological dynamics and the ‘mythological’ thinking. Structures of this description had a pervasive impact on aesthetic and intellectual products of the Western civilization. As stated in previous literary criticism, classics “hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual’s or the collective unconscious” and “persist as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway” (I. Calvino). Thus, a deeper insight into these constitutive components is an asset for a more balanced perception of our cultural identity, a primary need in the complicated patchwork of the modern society.

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