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Help Me Get Over the Mythology Hump
- This topic has 20 replies, 14 voices, and was last updated 11 years, 2 months ago by
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Point well taken, Bookworm. For some reason, I know most of those sayings and their meanings even though I don’t know anything about Mythology…well Midas Touch and flying to close to the sun I do know.
That is the beauty of homeschooling. You get to choose when to teach and how to teach. And you choose what you would like to study and what to just leave out!
Thank you everyone… You have all made great points!
After reading Rebekah’s reply last night I started thinking about it, and realized, it’s not all mythology. But there are some stories, and more specifically, some translations of the stories, that feel… hinky… to me. My spirit is just not okay with that person’s retelling of the story. For example, I had picked up a copy of The Epic of Gilgamesh (for a penny at a library sale! Yippee!!!) some years ago, and was perusing it a few weeks back. I had no problem with the story, but did feel like the language may go over my kids’ heads quite a bit, and decided to look for a translation that would not require quite as much explanation. Well, that bombed on me, because the translation I found made the story a bit weird and perverse. So, after all that, when we do read Gilgamesh, I think I’ll just stick to the original book, and we’ll probably have a lot of discussions.
And Bookworm… I literally couldn’t stop laughing when I imagined your boys presenting you with that paper! How funny 🙂
Well, all of the responses have helped me realize a couple of things…
1) We’re still going to be founding and referencing everything we read off of the Bible, so there will be the constant contrast between God’s word and what Judges 17 talks about – “every man did that which was right in his own eyes”.
2) I had forgotten how much mythology is referenced in literature, and even in daily life. And while you don’t have to have a deep understanding of the stories, it is good to have at least a general knowledge of them.
So, all that to say, thank you! We will cover mythology. I will prayerfully consider the stories, averting the hinky feeling ones, and looking for better translations when necessary. I will aslo pick up a good mythology reference, and look into the Nathanial Hawthorne book.
Yay, onward and upward!
Bookworm, The list of sayings in your post is exactly what my dh and I were talking about when we decided that we did not want to exclude all mythology. We want our dd to understand that the culture we have today still has roots from ancient times just as our English language has root words from other languages. There are many fairy tales and folk tales of today that had their beginning in Greek mythology and people aren’t even aware of it.
The Epic of Gilgamesh has a sexual element to it. Ishtar wants Gilgamesh for herself. The female goddesses usually used (or tried to use) their sexual power over men.
I’d suggest, for young children:
Ludmila Zeman’s The Gilgamesh Trilogy
For 6th-9th gr.:
Geraldine MacCaughrean’s Gilgamesh the Hero. YOu can get a study guide from a BIblical worldview from Beautiful Feet books.
It would be helpful in your Bible study to know about the Mesopotamian and Canaanite gods and goddesses. It’s funny to my children now to read about the various gods and goddesses as time progressed after the Flood; they are all recycled from the ones in the dominant culture before it.
I’d like to add that I was having trouble weeding through all of it myself. When reading…what is mythology (if it wasn’t obvious) and what was actual history. I started using The Story of The Greeks by HA Guerber and Christine Miller published by Nothing New Press and it spelled it out for me right there in the text. My kids were saying “Ohhhh, I get it, that was a myth!” and “Hey I remember this from the other book…that really happened?”
It helped to straighten it out for us.
Hope this helps!
@Heather – that was exactly why we started using The Story of Greece (very similar to The Story of the Greeks)! No guessing there – and A Wonder Book covered some of the myths nicely! =)
I’ll be honest – I had to read several comprehensive histories to understand where to place the myths, the heroes, and then all the Famous Men. LOL But now I have a decent basic understanding of Ancient Greece and it is much easier to deal with (mind you, there is still MUCH I don’t know!). In fact, Heritage History recommends that a student read two spines (or comprehensive histories) in order to be able to place people/events in the right places. Even with narration, I can see why this would be helpful. As I read The Story of Greece I found myself saying “Oh, I get it” when they mentioned the Famous Men characters. Then when I read The Story of the Greeks, I was thinking. “I remember that – it was then that this happened, or he also did such and such”. I was having all kinds of connections since I was already familiar with the basic story.
The myths are not my favorite part, but they do play an important part in the actual history of Greece, so a person has to have at least a basic knowledge of them to understand some of the events of the history.
Also, it helped to point out to my kids that these people – not having the gospel – used to make up stories about how they came to be and other important historical events. The Ancient Greeks have a myth to explain the great flood and how they descended from the survivors. Once I got that idea in my head, it made it easier to explain to the kids and re-inforce the Biblical truths. 😉
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