Culture and history
Local Life
Human body in the Greek Mythology by Marco Scarangella
The human body has always been a source In classical and Greek culture in particular, the
of inspiration for myth and human storytelling human body represented beauty and perfecsince it’s the first point of reference, the original tion, so any kind of deformation was considsource of sensations and emotions that gives ered a kind of malediction. rise to all questions and attempts at answers. Following this type of imagery, those who repThis applies in particular to Greek mythology: resent evil and darkness, mythical opponents dozens of stories and legends from ancient are often represented with an unusual number Hellenic culture focus on the aesthetics of the of body parts, as in the case of the Cyclops who protagonists. Young and beautiful characters, only have one eye, or are even hybrids between monstrous beings, incredible metamorphoses human and animal anatomy, as in the case of and hybrid creatures have animated the myth- the Sirens, the Centaurs and the Minotaur.
ical sagas of Greece and elsewhere for centuOn the contrary all the great heroes of the ries and have subsequently entered the collecmyths, from the blond Achilles to the muscular tive imagination of modern culture. Hercules, and the young protagonists such as
The ancients lived in a world where the un-
known ruled and were terribly afraid of all that they couldn’t explain.
In this sense the body in Greek mythology was
mainly used to create antitheses, a kind of confrontation between opposite worlds, the known and the unknown.
For this reason in most cases, Greek myths
deal with the categories of the natural and the supernatural, and employ a corporeal vocabulary of missing or extra body parts, and of creatures whose identity is poised between human and animal, mortal and immortal, physical and spiritual.
Minotaur
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