Of Gods and Men

Book excerpt: With this volume, Greimas gives voice to the cultural memory of his people. He is both storyteller and explicator, deciphering the symbolic world of Lithuanian mythology. This first English translation of Apie Dievus ir zmones is a brilliant convergence of Greimas's historical and folkloric studies. Greimas examines the origins of ancient deities; discusses the concepts of life and death, fate and fortune; looks at codes used by farmers to organize systems of mutual obligations and implicit contracts; examines pranks and games associated with agrarian seasonal changes; and discusses the semantic reconstruction of the names and functions of several deities. Emphasizing the historic dimension of myth analysis, Greimas assembles concepts and deities from scattered texts, integrating them into their Lithuanian cultural context. This study of mythology is his archeology of culture.