You may have just read the title and be thinking ‘Jesus Christ what the hell is going on?’ and no this is not the title of an amateur pornographic flick. Today I am going to be explaining my historical to present-day parallel, which is the relationship between Greek mythology and the mythology of Disney and how it relates to the lessons of society we impart on our children. Now to get started, there are three general kinds of myths all of which are featured in both Ancient Greek and Disney’s ever-expanding mythologies. First are your divine myths (aka “true myths or “myths proper”),[i] these are your stories were your supernatural being such as the gods [The word God (capital G) should be limited to the single all-powerful being of a religion (Jewish, Christian, Muslim or others) a small g is when you are talking about one of many divine powers, similar to someone’s name versus their occupation][ii] are the main characters, these are the stories explaining why the world is the way it is, such as the Greeks believing that Zeus caused rain to fall. The second type of myths are legends (aka sagas) in which the story is one of a great deed(s) done by a human hero/ine, such as those of religious saints. Finally, are your folktales, which are the stories of your ordinary people that are meant to justify certain behaviours. Myths reflect the society from where they are produced, they also determine the nature of that same society. The myths and stories that a society uses to teach their children reflect that society and those values change over time, and in their response so do their stories.
Before we get started, I would like to thank the Greek god Zeus because, without Zeus’ inability to keep it in his pants messing around with a total of 57 beings (and yes I did research that, I am being put on a watchlist for this so I think I should receive some marking slack),[iii] both supernatural and mortal, I would not have half the material to draw on (there you go, now you get the title). It is important to note that Mythology are your traditional stories where religion is the belief, that relationship can often become messy as myths can tell of a divine being, but it remains a myth as long as it does enter religious behaviour, for example, the tale of Zeus defeating the Titans is a divine myth whereas the Greeks believing that Zeus was the reason why the rain came and sacrificed animals to bring rain. They are never set in the recent past or present often in the distant past of a time outside of human chronology, Greek myths are often those of divine myths and explaining how those things came to be, both in a divine and legend sense. During the time Hesiod is writing his books Hellenistic Society is beginning to question why things are the way they are, and in response is Theogony, before when Greeks needed a history of who they were Homer (however fictional parts may be) gave us the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Now you might be thinking ‘Well that is cool (or not), but how exactly does that and Disney intersect?’ hold on, I am getting there. First, we got to flashback to early to mid-1800’s AD Prussia (Until their unification, Germany was very similar to Ancient Greece, there was no ‘Germany, it was a collection of states of Germanic-speaking peoples, who saw themselves as individuals),[iv] here we find Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who over a period of 50 years collected and wrote down a bunch of folktales from in and around those states. These become the foundations of our modern-day Disney fairy tales, though Cinderella’s stepsisters are no longer cutting off toes to fit in the shoe.[v] Jumping forward to not quite present-day but 1922, where Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks began producing cartoons on these folktales, though less gruesome and more anti-Semitic (sorry for that, but not really).[vi] That original Cinderella fairytale is actually Greek, the story goes that a Greek prostitute has one of her shoes stolen by an eagle who brings it across the Mediterranean to an Egyptian king.[vii] A lot of these myths are older than they appear, we know the tale of Oedipus form a play by the Greek Sophocles, but his story is much older, with Homer even making a passing reference about Oedipus.[viii]
Now, I could list of each and every example possible as there's really a lot of stories in both Greek mythology and the Disney universe, either of which also has many different variations that you can find parallels to and I'm not going to go through them all because I don't have 40,000 words worth of space, but that is the exact point I am trying to make, the stories change as society needs them to change. Every Disney story is told through the heroes tale which is kind of like cut the hero comes from a simple background they have like a missing or dead parent say learn of something special about them they received training from a mentor and then they decide to go on this journey of self-fulfillment or adventure or like revenge depends on the story but all kind of fits and then they meet this big evil they get defeated the first time then they rise up and beat evil and then everything goes back to normal or normal in a sense as they are now elevated in their knowledge of who they are so the way we rely on Disney itself to play this role in our children, just the same way the Greeks wanted their stories to be passed down to their youth and teach future generations. These stories allow us to see someone posses the traits we wish that we possessed or that we wish the next generation too, the story of Aeneas comes to mind (sorry for the wrong time period), to give the foundation of who a Roman should be brave and determined, he adapts the character Aeneas from the Iliad, he reworks the character from the Greeks and makes him a hero. This is how a lot of Disney stories work, the fact that they changed the name tells you just how much they’ve changed this character from the original story of Heracles to suit the needs of the society the story is being told for. Heck, there are 12 worldwide theme parks[ix] dedicated to helping you pay homage to these characters, with you getting to experience more of their world, much like the plays do for the Ancient Greeks. These stories impark us on a path to teach us how to become better versions of ourselves and to always strive for more from ourselves and from life itself. When people look back in 1000 years, they are going to see a glimpse of society, in the same way, they will look at the Ancient Greeks, through our warts and all they are going to see the society that we hoped and dreamed for ourselves.
John (Jack) Milne
1006454873
HISB10
11/26/2020
Professor Jody Cundy
[i] Powell, Barry B, and Herbert M Howe. 2015. Classical Myth. 8th ed. Boston: Pearson. p. 4
[ii] Powell, Barry B, and Herbert M Howe. 2015. Classical Myth. 8th ed. Boston: Pearson. p. 5
[iii] xer0a.. “The Sexual Relations of Zeus.” Flyga Natten. flyga natten. October 16, 2011. https://zyxyvy.wordpress.com/2011/10/16/the-sexual-relations-of-zeus/#:~:text=Thus%2C%20Zeus%20had%20sexual%20relations,most%20righteous%20of%20the%20god.
[iv] Wikipedia Contributors. 2020. “Names of Germany.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. November 17, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Germany#Pre-modern_Germany_(pre-1800).
[v] “Grimm 021: Cinderella.” 2011. Pitt.Edu. 2011. https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm021.html.
[vi] “Disney Company | Overview, History, & Films | Britannica.” 2020. In Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Disney-Company.
[vii] McKinney, Kelsey. 2015. “Disney Didn’t Invent Cinderella. Her Story Is at Least 2,000 Years Old.” Vox. Vox. March 15, 2015. https://www.vox.com/2015/3/15/8214405/cinderella-fairy-tale-history.
[viii] Powell, Barry B, and Herbert M Howe. 2015. Classical Myth. 8th ed. Boston: Pearson. p. 4
[ix] The, In. 2019. “Mouse Hacking.” Mouse Hacking. December 6, 2019. https://www.mousehacking.com/blog/ranking-every-disney-park.
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