what does greek mythology say about the greek culture.What do they refect on the greek culture?

Answer 1

aka DarthDad hit on something when he was talking about monsters being women. Some historians think that this indicates that before there was a historical record, ancient Greek societies actually worshipped a matriarchal pantheon. When a patriarchal government came to power they naturally wanted patriarchal gods and needed to demonize the former goddesses in order to prevent the worship of a feminine power. However some vestiges of the older goddesses remained to be documented:

Snakes are often seen as messengers into the earth or Gaia. A bare-breasted woman holding a snake aloft was found dating to pre-literate Crete. This goddess may have become Medusa, a horrible snake-headed woman.

Amazons are warrior women, but in order to have that "honor", they had to lob off a breast, their femininity itself.

The original Olympic games were originally held in the Temple of Hera. Which is not a likely location for the Goddess of childbirth, unless she was relegated to a lower position, just like the women of that day.

Athena is the goddess of wisdom and war, which is also unlikely for women of that period. Adherents to her must have been so strong that a demotion was not possible. Her city was one of the most powerful, therefore she had to be created by a male god and sprang out of Zeus' head.

Answer 2

Greek culture developed over many hundreds of years. The pantheon of Gods which are described in the Myths were not all revered by everybody. What they show about Greek society was that it was superstitious and barbarous for most of the time that it was in the ascendant.

Answer 3

A disproportionate number of Greek mythical monsters were women.

Amazons, medusa, sphinx, hags, sirines, etc.

I think it suggests that Greek men did not value women properly and that they even feared the feminine mystical power to create life.

Probably why so many gay themes are prevalent.

Answer 4

I think they thought that no one was perfect. That's why their gods were always causing trouble, falling in love with people, and getting on the wrong side of other gods and goddesses. They had human emotions, from jealousy to lust, and had no qualms about taking sides on human issues. Remember how jealous Hera was about Hercules? She made him go mad and kill his family, so he had to perform the 12 labors.

Answer 5

their mythology shows, for one thing, their lack of understanding of natural forces we have explained through science. so, they got creative in trying to posit an explanation for everyday things.

eg. lighting comes from an angry god hurling bolts down from the sky.

Answer 6

Theories of origin
In antiquity, historians such as Herodotus theorized that the Greek gods had been stolen directly from the Egyptians. Later on, Christian writers tried to explain Hellenic paganism through degeneration of Biblical religion. Since then, the sciences of archaeology and linguistics have been applied to the origins of Greek mythology with some interesting results.

Historical linguistics indicates that particular aspects of the Greek pantheon were inherited from Indo-European society (or perhaps both cultures borrowed from another earlier source), as were the roots of the Greek language. Thus, for example, the name Zeus is cognate with Latin Jupiter, Sanskrit Dyaus and Germanic Tyr (see Dyeus), as is Ouranos with Sanskrit Varuna. In other cases, close parallels in character and function suggest a common heritage, yet lack of linguistic evidence makes it difficult to prove, as in the case of the Greek Moirae and the Norns of Norse mythology.

Archaeology and mythography, on the other hand, has revealed that the Greeks were inspired by some of the civilizations of Asia Minor and the Near East. Cybele is rooted in Anatolian culture, and much of Aphrodite's iconography springs from the Semitic goddesses Ishtar and Astarte.

Textual studies reveal multiple layers in tales, such as secondary asides bringing Theseus into tales of The Twelve Labours of Herakles. Such tales concerning tribal eponyms are thought to originate in attempts to absorb mythology of one tradition into another, in order to unite the cultures.

In addition to Indo-European and Near Eastern origins, some scholars have speculated on the debts of Greek mythology to the still poorly understood pre-Hellenic societies of Greece, such as the Minoans and so-called Pelasgians. This is especially true in the case of chthonic deities and mother goddesses. For some, the three main generations of gods in Hesiod's Theogony (Uranus, Gaia, etc.; the Titans and then the Olympians) suggest a distant echo of a struggle between social groups, mirroring the three major high cultures of Greek civilization: Minoan, Mycenaean and Hellenic.

The extensive parallels between Hesiod's narrative and the Hurrian myth of Anu, Kumarbi, and Teshub makes it very likely that the story is an adaptation of borrowed materials, rather than a distorted historical record. Parallels between the earliest divine generations (Chaos and its children) and Tiamat in the Enuma Elish are possible (Joseph Fontenrose, Python: A Study of Delphic Myth and Its Origins: NY, Biblo-Tannen, 1974).

Jungian scholars such as Karl Kerenyi have preferred to view the origin of myths in universal archetypes. Though not all readers are confident of interpretations of myth in terms of Carl Jung's psychology of dreams (by Kerenyi or Campbell for examples), most agree that myths are dreamlike in two aspects: they are not consistent, perhaps not wholly consistent even within a single myth-element, and they often reflect some epiphany which then must be assembled into a narrative thread, much as dreams are recreated as sequential happenings.

The origins of Greek mythology remain a fascinating and open question.

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The Greeks' relationship to the myths
"Our own myths we call reality" is one of the axioms with which Carl A.P. Ruck and Danny Staples commence The World of Classical Myth; to the Greeks, mythology was a part of their history; few ever doubted that there was truth behind the account of the Trojan War in the Iliad and Odyssey. The Greeks used myth to explain natural phenomena, cultural variations, traditional enmities and friendships. It was a source of pride to be able to trace one's leaders' descent from a mythological hero or a god.

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Evolution of the myths
At the same time, the Greeks' construction of the gods changed over time to accommodate the evolution of their own culture. For example, while myths about love relationships between male gods and male heroes do not appear before the middle of the Archaic period, starting around the last third of the seventh century such stories become more and more frequent. All the gods with the exception of Ares eventually acquire pederastic beloveds, and so do many of the heroes, such as Heracles. Previously existing myths of love between men, such as that of Achilles and Patroclus, are now cast in a pederastic light, giving rise to significant confusion over whom to make the erastes and whom the eromenos. These developments were meant to legitimate the parallel development of pedagogic pederasty, thought to have been introduced around 630 BCE.

Sophisticated Greeks experienced a cultural crisis in the 5th century BC, when increased literacy and the development of logic forced a more comparative skeptical turn of mind, a crisis of which Socrates was the most famous victim.

On the other hand, a few radical philosophers like Xenophanes were already beginning to label the poets' tales as blasphemous lies in the 6th century BC; this line of thought found its most sweeping expression in Plato's Republic and Laws. More sportingly, the 5th century BC tragedian Euripides often played with the old traditions, mocking them, and through the voice of his characters injecting notes of doubt. In other cases Euripides seems to be directing pointed criticism at the behavior of his gods.

Alexandrian poets at first, then more generally literary mythographers in the early Roman Empire, often adapted stories of characters in Greek myth in ways that did not reflect earlier actual beliefs. Many of the most popular versions of these myths that we have today were actually from these fictional retellings, which may blur the archaic beliefs.

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Hellenistic rationalism
The skeptical turn of the Classical age became even more pronounced in the Hellenistic era. Most daringly, the mythographer Euhemerus claimed that stories about the gods were only confused memories of the cruelty of ancient kings. Although Euhemerus's works are lost, interpretations in his style are frequently found in Diodorus Siculus.

Rationalizing hermeneutics of myth became even more popular under the Roman Empire, thanks to the physicalist theories of Stoic and Epicurean philosophy, as well as the pragmatic bent of the Roman mind. The antiquarian Varro, summarizing centuries' worth of philosophic tradition, distinguished three kinds of gods:

The gods of nature: personifications of phenomena like rain and fire.
The gods of the poets: invented by unscrupulous bards to stir the passions.
The gods of the city: invented by wise legislators to soothe and enlighten the populace.
Cicero's De Natura Deorum is the most comprehensive summary of this line of thought.

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Syncretizing trends
One unexpected side-effect of the rationalist view was a popular trend to syncretize multiple Greek and foreign gods in strange, nearly unrecognizable new cults. If Apollo and Serapis and Sabazios and Dionysus and Mithras were all really Helios, why not combine them all together into one Sol Invictus, with conglomerated rites and compound attributes? The surviving 2nd century collection of Orphic Hymns and Macrobius's Saturnalia are products of this mind-set.

Apollo might be increasingly identified in religion with Helios or even Dionysus, texts retelling his myths seldom reflected such developments. The traditional literary mythology was increasingly dissociated from actual religious practice.

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Modern interpretations
The genesis of modern understanding of Greek mythology lies in a double reaction at the end of the eighteenth century against "the traditional attitude of Christian animosity mixed with disdain, which had prevailed for centuries",[1] in which the Christian reinterpretation of myth as a "lie" or fable had been retained. In Germany, a generation of Romantic artists and poets idealized the myths created, they were convinced, by a specially-gifted nation in a time of pristine cultural nobility, unsullied as yet by Rome. This literary aspect of the Greek Revival was an expression of the Philhellenism of the Romantic generation. On the other hand, British classicists continued to see the Greek myths as examples demonstrating how far the modern mind had progressed from its childhood simplicity and superstition. The genteel Christian tradition of Thomas Bulfinch, narrated a synthesized view of myths entirely drawn from literary sources.

In 1856 the Anglo-German Max Müller invented comparative mythology, applying the new science of philology to the study of myth, in which he detected the distorted remains of Aryan nature worship. A hint at the conclusion of Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) sugested that evolutionary principles might be applied to the study of mankind. Edward Burnett Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871) surveyed the field of a universally similar "primitive" religion, a form of failed science. Tyler's procedure of drawing together material culture, ritual and myth of widely separated cultures was followed by Carl Jung and later, by Joseph Campbell, to offer archetypes of mythic themes.

William Robertson Smith's The Religion of the Semites (1890) provided the earliest attempt to study Semitic religion from the point-of-view of comparative religion and anthropology. Smith's assertion that "in almost every case the myth was derived from the ritual and not the ritual from the myth" informed the works of James George Frazer (The Golden Bough) and of Jane Ellen Harrison and the Cambridge Ritualists. J.F. del Giorgio has added a new turn to that approach, insisting in The Oldest Europeans about Greek myths being generated by the clash between a Paleolithic European population and the incoming Indo-European tribes.