Migration

The Seba library treats Migration in 5 passages, across 5 authors (including Rank, Otto, Sullivan, Shirley Darcus, Otto, Walter F).

In the library 5 passages

The modern theory of migration, or borrowing, according to which the individual myths originate from definite peoples [especially the Babylonians], and are accepted by other peoples through oral tradition [commerce and traffic], or through literary influences.

Rank identifies and critiques the diffusionist ‘migration and borrowing’ theory of myth distribution, arguing it is merely a modification of earlier source-theorizing inadequate to the universality of mythic structures.

Rank, Otto, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, 1909thesis

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psychai in their migration may exhibit specific traits, it appears that in the purified state they are all the same.

Sullivan reconstructs the early Pythagorean doctrine in which the soul’s migration through successive life-forms constitutes the central soteriological drama, with purification as the condition that terminates the cycle.

Sullivan, Shirley Darcus, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995thesis

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the often repeated assertion that certain myths and cults give evidence of such a remembrance rests, as we shall still see, on a confusion of cult migration with epiphany.

Otto argues that the historical-diffusionist interpretation of Dionysiac origins commits a categorical error by substituting the movement of cult forms for the intrinsically epiphanic nature of divine appearance.

Otto, Walter F, Dionysus Myth and Cult (1965), 1965thesis

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Current science sets the date of the first migration of humans across the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska (not on the land bridge) circa 13,000 b. c. The majority of Native Americans are believed to descend from this migration.

Campbell grounds his comparative mythology in the literal historical migration of peoples, treating prehistoric human movement as the ethnographic substrate for understanding the distribution of mythological motifs in the Americas.

Campbell, Joseph, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God, Volume I), 1959supporting

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