Myth of Origins

Myth Of Origins

A founding myth is the etiological myth (Greek aition) that explains the origins of a ritual or the founding of a city, the ethnogenesis of a group presented as a genealogy, with a founding father and thus of a nation (natio, "birth") or a narrative recounting the spiritual origins of a belief, philosophy, discipline, or idea. A founding myth may serve as the primary exemplum, as the myth of Ixion was the original example of a murderer rendered unclean by his crime, who needed cleansing (catharsis) of his impurity.

Founding myths are prominent features of Greek mythology. "Ancient Greek rituals were bound to prominent local groups and hence to specific localities," Walter Burkert has observed. "i.e. the sanctuaries and altars that had been set up for all time." Thus Greek and Hebrew founding myths established the special relationship between a deity and local people, who traced their origins from a hero and authenticated their ancestral rights through the founding myth. Greek founding myths often embody a justification for the ancient overturning of an older, archaic order, reformulating a historical event anchored in the social and natural world to valorize current community practices, creating symbolic narratives of "collective importance" enriched with metaphor in order to account for traditional chronologies and constructing an etiology considered to be plausible among those with a cultural investment.

In the Greek view, the mythic past was deeply rooted in historic time, its legends treated as facts, Carlo Brillante has noted, its heroic protagonists seen as links between the 'age of origins' and the mortal, everyday world that succeeded it. A modern translator of Apollonius' Argonautica has noted, of the many aitia embedded as digressions in that Hellenistic epic, that "crucial to social stability had to be the function of myths in providing explanations, authorization or empowerment for the present in terms of origins: this could apply, not only to foundations or charter myths and genealogical trees (thus supporting family or territorial claims) but also to personal moral choices." In the period after Alexander the Great expanded the Hellenistic world, Greek poetry— Callimachus wrote a whole work simply titled Aitia— is replete with founding myths. Simon Goldhill employs the metaphor of sedimentation in describing Apollonius' laying down of layers "where each object, cult, ritual, name, may be opened... into a narrative of origination, and where each narrative, each event, may lead to a cult, ritual, name, monument."

A notable example being the foundation of Rome myth - Romulus and Remus, which is broadened by Virgil in his Aeneid with the odyssey of Aeneus and his raising of Lavinium, and his son Iulus's later relocation and ruling of the famous twin's birthplace Alba Longa and their descendence from his royal line, and thus fitting perfectly into the already then established canon of events.

During the Middle Ages, founding myths of the medieval communes of northern Italy, manifested the increasing self-confidence of the urban population, and the will to find a Roman origin, however tenuous and legendary. In 13th-century Padua, when each commune looked for a Roman founder, and if one was not available invented one, a legend had been current in the city, attributing its foundation to the Trojan Antenor.