(Melody Brucks) Myths as part of our Reality

"Again, magic be wrought on a man sympathetically not only thgough his clothes and severed parts of himselg, but also through the impressions left by his body in sand or earth. In particular, it is a worldwide superstition that by injuring footprints you injure the feet that made them. Thus the natives of south-eastern Australia think that they can lame a man by placing sharp pieces of quartz, glass, bone, or charcoal in his footprints. Rheumatic pains are often attributed by them to this cause." --The New Golden Bough pg. 68


I like this incerpt because it goes along withe the voodoo dolls we were talking about in class last Thursday; the fact that you can take something of someone else's and by disrespecting that item you can cause harm to the human being.


It also shows how "myths" respect a person's history because they attribute that everything in life is present due to a myth itself. So as the old saying goes "Don't step on a crack or you'll break your mother's back"....some cultures might actualy believe this because like a footprint, maybe that crack was left by their mother, and you should respect your mother and be careful not to alter the piece of history that she left. Or if you hate your mother, you can add quartz. glass, bone, etc. and slam that down into the crack by jumping repeatedly over and over again...depends on the family dynamic. But either way, you can show respect or disrespect by how you treat the little things.


Even little things such as a footprint or a crack can represent some origin of myth...and this is why cultures still strive to remember these myths because to forget is to lose parts of yourself. I liked a quote in Myth and Reality saying "Myth is a vital ingredient of human civilization; it is not an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force." Myths are the origin of the World and this is why when we remember these myths we can control the certain elements based on the stories of their origin.


This goes along with what the professor said about not being able to go 24 hours without witnessing a mythological event. Everything has origin and so everything relates to myth. an example of my own is when I was sitting in church yesterday morning. The sermon was on Job and how God was telling Job that he knew nothing of supernatural power and as an example of astronomy he asks "Can you bind the beautiful Pleiades? Can you loose the cords of Orion?" Mythology in the Bible....I was blown away!


Anyways I am probably rambling here so I will stop now and just say humbly that I think we were supposed to read chapter 1 in Myth and Reality and then post something about it; so here is my first offical mythology post!