Myths in our Life - стр. 3

A.A. Potebnya considered that "the creation of myth can"t be characterized by any time. Myth consists of transference of individual characteristics of an image that should explain the fact itself" [Potebnya 1976: 263].

It should be mentioned that this scientist regarded myth from the psycholinguistic point of view. He presumed that "mythical world view is determined purely by psychical processes (fable-thought), mythology is created by linguistic factors" [Ibid., 267]. He specified: "The creation of a new myth consists of the creation of a new world, not in the oblivion of the preceding meaning" [Ibid., 266]. Potebnya"s opinion is important for us because his thought that the process of the world mythologization is connected with language, with word which reflects the fact of the humanization of nature, in particular, in the anthropological metaphors. Dalj in his "The Explanatory Dictionary" gave the following interpretation for the word "myth": "a fabulous, all-time, fabled event or person; an allegory acted out, that came into legends" [Dalj 1994, V. 3: 862]. Here is marked one more – folklore – form of myth"s fixing. Creative nature of myth, development of the verbal image in it and the main reason of myths" appearance, their role in development of game culture – everything this is examined in the research of J. Huizinga "Homo Ludens, or The Playing Man". This author considers myth to be "an imaginative materialization of entity…, elaborated more particularly than a single word. With the help of myth people try to explain earthly, placing the basis of human deeds in the sphere of divine… In myth great motive powers of cultural life begin: law and order, communication and enterprise, craft and art, poetry, scholarship, science" [Huizinga 1997: 24, 121]. Developing such interpretation of myth "Mythological Dictionary" concretizes and enumerates images, personified in myth: "Myths are the sagas of gods, spirits, heroes deified or connected with gods by their birth, ancestors, who functioned at the beginning of time and participated, directly or indirectly, in creation of the world, its element, both natural and cultural" [Mythological Dictionary 1990: 634].

In a brief definition of a dictionary of aesthetics myth, as special form of social conscience, is ascribed to the early phases of the human development. Myth is defined here as "specific for primitive conscience syncretic reflection of the reality in the form of perceptibly concrete personifications and animated beings, which think quite materially…, the product of verbal folk arts, collective folk imagination" [Aesthetics 1989: 206].