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Backside of a clay tablet from Pylos bearing the motif of the Labyrinth, an allusion to the mythological fight of Theseus and the Minotaur. In the most traditional sense, allusion is a literary term, though the word has also come to encompass indirect references to any source, including allusions in film or the visual arts. [8]
The view that the "origin" of the Grail legend should be seen as deriving from Celtic mythology was championed by Roger Sherman Loomis (The Grail: From Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol), Alfred Nutt (Studies on the Legend of the Holy Grail, available at Wikisource), and Jessie Weston (From Ritual to Romance and The Quest of the Holy Grail).
Unlike popular fable, genuine mythology has few completely arbitrary elements. This myth taken as a whole seems designed to confer legitimacy to dynastic change in this central Anatolian kingdom: thus Alexander's "brutal cutting of the knot ... ended an ancient dispensation." [7]
Greek mythology has changed over time to accommodate the evolution of their culture, of which mythology, both overtly and in its unspoken assumptions, is an index of the changes. In Greek mythology's surviving literary forms, as found mostly at the end of the progressive changes, it is inherently political, as Gilbert Cuthbertson (1975) has argued.
Classical mythology, also known as Greco-Roman mythology or Greek and Roman mythology, is the collective body and study of myths from the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans. Mythology, along with philosophy and political thought , is one of the major survivals of classical antiquity throughout later, including modern, Western culture . [ 1 ]
The relationship between religion and myth depends on what definition of "myth" one uses. By Robert Graves's definition, a religion's traditional stories are "myths" if and only if one does not belong to the religion in question. By Segal's definition, all religious stories are myths—but simply because nearly all stories are myths.
Chaos (Ancient Greek: χάος, romanized: Kháos) is the mythological void state preceding the creation of the universe (the cosmos) in ancient near eastern cosmology and early Greek cosmology. It can also refer to an early state of the cosmos constituted of nothing but undifferentiated and indistinguishable matter .
Today, allegory is often said to be a sustained sequence of metaphors within a literary work, but this was not the ancient definition; at the time, a single passage, or even a name, could be considered allegorical. Generally, the changing meanings of such terms must be studied within each historical context. [6]