In The Masks of God, Joseph Campbell recounts a curious phenomenon of animal behavior. Newly hatched chickens, bits of eggshells still clinging to their tails, will dart for cover when a hawk flies overhead; yet they remain unaffected by other birds. Furthermore, a wooden model of a hawk, drawn forward along a wire above their coop, will send them scurrying (if the model is pulled backward, how...

As in statistical physics, the concept of universality plays an important, albeit qualitative, role in the field of comparative mythology. Here we apply statistical mechanical tools to analyse the networks underlying three iconic mythological narratives with a view to identifying common and distinguishing quantitative features. Of the three narratives, an Anglo-Saxon and a Greek text are mostly...

This study takes teaching and learning English as a foreign language (EFL) into a gaming environment. Students fundamentally engaged in a mythological context in a 3D online virtual space called Quest Atlantis. Such an environment was in sharp contrast with how English is taught in a typical Chinese classroom in Mainland China. Preliminary findings reveal that co-questing is promising for impro...

archaeologically, the hybrid and mythological motif of people-scorpion, as presented in both forms of man-scorpion and woman-scorpion, in the horizon of bronze age cultures in the plateau of iran, merely, is reported from the archaeological sites of jiroft in the halil rood basin, southwest iran. in mesopotamia, the people-scorpion is presented as the guardian monster for the gates of dead peop...

Plato, as a poet, employs muthos extensively to express his philosophical dialectical development, so the majority of his dialogues are comprised of muthoi. We cannot separate his muthos from his philosophical thought, since the former has great influence in the latter. So the methodology of this paper is first to discuss the dialogue Theaetetus to find out why he compares Socrates to the Greek...

shahnameh, composed in the 10th century by ferdowsi, is one of the most significant classics of the world. it is about heroic tales of ancient persia. the contents and the poet's style in describing events takes the reader back to ancient times and makes him/her feel the events. ferdowsi worked for thirty years to complete this crown jewel of persian literature. publius vergilius maro know...

in his collection north, heaney mythologizes the contemporary history of the people of northern ireland through conflating the mythological history of the people of ireland, with the 1960s troubles in northern ireland. used by the modernist poets, the method of representing the contemporary history through recourse to mythology have been also favored by poets who have experienced colonial and p...

This article contains the basic structural features of a same-named Ph.D. research thesis. The main tasks are to identify three focal fields with mythological elements, whether they phenomena, objects, people, or creatures that some believe and others doubt exist. These found in various collections folk stories, contemporary literary texts as well interviews storytellers. However, focus this is...