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--- 2012:vico-historical-mythology [2012/08/05 15:16] – frank
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 ====== Vico: Historical Mythology ======
+<html><p xmlns:dct="http://purl.org/dc/terms/"><a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/"><img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" style="border-style: none;" alt="Public Domain Mark" /></a><br />This work (by <a href="https://lucianofsamosata.info/wiki" rel="dct:creator">https://lucianofsamosata.info/wiki</a>), identified by <a href="http://meninpublishing.org" rel="dct:publisher"><span property="dct:title">Frank Redmond</span></a>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</p></html>
+==== Authored by Frank Redmond, 2012 ====
 One of the principal aspects of Vico's __New Science__ is the idea that mythology is sprung from actual historical events and the mythologies become debased over time only to arrive to us interwoven with allegory and metaphor. Vico frequently comes back to this idea when he needs to correct mistaken interpretations of myths by scholars of a later age, the so-called "conceit of scholars". Since myths are created by people, they must be based in historical reality,
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 For Vico, myths like history itself were created by humans. The myths and fables of the earliest ages were precursors to the more rational histories of later ages. What Vico means by rational is not that our current discourse is more sophisticated just that it is more "logical" with an emphasis on the aspect of logos. It is a different kind of logic. Today we have scientific logic; the earliest people had poetic logic in the sense of poetic meaning creative.
-In a nutshell, Vichean myths can be traced back to concrete historical events. For example, the god Neptune is born from the need for early people to explain the new found seas, the tempestuousness and vastness of the seas, after living in isolated inner-country cities. Neptune is an imaginative universal or divine archetype that was used to consolidate and deify the experience of the earliest people, an all-encompassing umbrella of all sea related experiences.
+Vichean myths can be traced back to concrete historical events. For example, the god Neptune is born from the need for early people to explain the new found seas, the tempestuousness and vastness of the seas, after living in isolated inner-country cities. Neptune is an imaginative universal or divine archetype that was used to consolidate and deify the experience of the earliest people, an all-encompassing umbrella of all sea related experiences.
 For the earliest age, these myths that were developed were severe in nature. By this I mean, they were a crude record of historical events driven by the creative impulse. These myths were given their content from whatever was familiar and at-hand. The content was the peoples' "own natures and the passions and habits" (220), and the material for myths comes from a very basic society with basic laws, if any laws, and simple attitudes. This is why it is so hard for the modern mind to penetrate these severe societies and their myths. We think much differently than they do. It's even doubtful if we can even understand their positions at all. However, it is essential to understand these people as the inhabit a world of creativity and vitality.