Friedrich Max Müller (German: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈmaks ˈmʏlɐ];[1][2] 6 December 1823 – 28 October 1900) was a British philologist and Orientalist of German origin. He was one of the founders of the Western academic disciplines of Indology and religious studies. Müller wrote both scholarly and popular works on the subject of Indology. He directed the preparation of the Sacred Books of the East, a 50-volume set of English translations.
Sacred Books of the East
The Sacred Books of the East is a monumental 50-volume set of English translations of Asian religious texts, edited by Max Müller and published by the Oxford University Press between 1879 and 1910. It incorporates the essential sacred texts of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, and Islam.
All of the books are in the public domain in the United States, and most or all are in the public domain in many other countries.[1] Electronic versions of all 50 volumes are widely available online.
The Project Gutenberg EBook of India: What can it teach us?, by F. Max Müller
Books by Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max) (sorted by popularity)
Lectures on the Science of Language by F. Max Müller
Author Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max), 1823-1900
Title Lectures on the Science of Language
Language English
LoC Class P: Language and Literatures
Subject Language and languages
Subject Comparative linguistics
Category Text
EBook-No. 32856
Release Date Jun 17, 2010
Most Recently Updated Jun 16, 2020
Copyright Status Public domain in the USA.
Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 1 by F. Max Müller
Author Müller, F. Max (Friedrich Max), 1823-1900
Title Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 1
Essays on the Science of Religion
Credits Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Geetu Melwani, Thierry
Alberto, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net
Language English
LoC Class PJ: Language and Literatures: Oriental languages and literatures
Subject Folklore
Subject Literature -- History and criticism
Subject Mythology
Subject Religions
Subject Comparative linguistics
Category Text
EBook-No. 24686
Release Date Feb 26, 2008
Copyright Status Public domain in the USA.
sun myth
myth is a disease of language
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Bernie Clark., From the Gita to the Grail : exploring yoga stories & western myths, 2014
3. "Mythology, which was the bane of the ancient world, is in truth a disease of language." Lectures on the Science of Language delivered at the Royal Institute of Great Britain in April, May and June, 1861 by Max Muller, (Charles Scribner and Company), 1886, page 21.
(From the Gita to the Grail : exploring yoga stories & western myths,
by Bernie Clark, Blue River press, Indianapolis, copyright © 2014, pp.xi-xiii)
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Nancy Hathaway, Friendly guide to mythology, [2000]
pp.126─128
Max Müller and the disease of Language
If you accept the theories of Max Müller, myth is basically one big misunderstanding. A German Sanskrit scholar who translated the Rig Veda and became a professor at Oxford, Müller based his theories on a widely accepted notion that stated that Sanskrit and most European languages were derived from a primitive language brought to India by prehistoric invaders called Aryans. Müller believed that the Aryans revered nature and were anxious to communicate their thoughts about it.
Their efforts were stymied by a paucity of vocabulary. Limited to concrete nouns and root verbs, they were unable to express many ideas directly. Instead, clubbing their listeners with words Müller called “heavy and unwieldy,” they personified physical processes and explained nature in ways that were largely metaphorical and focused on one topic: the sun. “Where we speak of the sun following the dawn, the ancient poets could only speak and think of the Sun loving and and embracing the Dawn. What is with us a sunset, was to them the Night giving birth to a beautiful child; and in the Spring they really saw the Sun or the sky embracing the earth with a warm embrace, and showering treasures into the lap of nature.” These metaphors, which obscured meaning as much as they communicated it, required explanation and elaboration; myth provided just that. Thus myth was in essence “a disease of language”.
When these primitive people swept out of Asia and into Europe, they brought their round about constructions with them, making the myths of the Greeks a devolution of the Aryan attempts to express their thoughts about the natural world. So no matter how “silly, savage, and senseless” a myth might seem (and Müller was appalled by the brutality and cannibalism of the Greeks, whose stories, he wrote, “would make the most savage of Red Indians creep and shudder”), the words, and the names in particular, if traced back to their etymological roots, would reveal the original meaning. Müller noted, for instance, that Athena is meaningless in Greek, but that in Sanskrit, ahana meant dawn; thus stories told about Athena must originally have been about sunrise. Using this method, all kinds of seemingly complex myths could be reduced to a solar analogy.
For perhaps half a century after the publication of his essay “Comparative mythology” in 1856, anyone studying mythology had to grapple with Müller theory, which saw every myth as an etymological screen behind which lurked a natural phenomenon. This idea stirred up enormous publicity and even stimulated variant theories, such as the idea that the thunderstorm, not the sun, is at the center of ancient myth. It also gained Müller a lifelong opponent in the form of Andrew Lang, a Scottish scholar best known today for his twelve (12) fairy tale collections. Lang got the last word in when, having outlived Müller, he dismissed solar mythology in the celebrated 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica as “destitute of evidence.” Other scholars have called it untenable, distasteful, racist, elephantine, and obsessive, reducing mythology into “spirited chatter about the weather.”
Müller was not unaware that many people thought his ideas ridiculous, and he struggled to defend himself. “What we call Noon, and Evening, and Night, what we call Spring and Winter, what we call year, and time, and Life, and Eternity ── all this the ancient Aryans call Sun,” he wrote. And yet wise people wonder and say, how curious that the ancient Aryans should have had so many solar myths. Why, every time we say ‘Good morning’, we commit a solar myth. Every poet who sings about ‘the May driving the Winter from the field again’ commits a solar myth. Every ‘Christmas number’ of our newspaper ── ringing out the old year and ringing in the new ── is brimful of solar myth. Be not afraid of solar myths. . . .”
Müller
‘’•─“”
(Friendly guide to mythology / Nancy Hathaway, 1. mythology., BL311 .H38 2000, 291.1'3──dc21, 00─034967, )
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