This essay is an analysis of mythologies in the Swedish women´s magazine VeckoRevyn. The magazine’s own explicit purpose is to break down the unhealthy opinion of what beauty is in their industry today. By content and linguistic analysis the results of this study are interconnected to the beauty myth as it was established by Naomi Wolf in 1991. The goal is to pinpoint how VeckoRevyn’s question and answer columns construct relationships to their readers, and the mythologies that they maintain. The columns mostly focus on the readers’ physical appearance, and the beauty myth is clearly an inevitable influence. The main conclusion that can be drawn from this is that the beauty myth is hard-wired into our society’s subconscious. VeckoRevyn is working to prevent this, and even though they have not fully succeeded, they are a part of bringing the phenomenon to the surface of society.

I will address the issue of Plato’s use of myths concerning the afterlife in the context of the ethical arguments of the Gorgias, Phaedo and Republic, and I will contend that while the arguments in each dialogue are aimed at convincing the rational part of the self, the myths are aimed at persuading the non-rational part of the self. In support of this interpretation, I will examine Plato’s views on the relation between the different parts of the soul and the relationship that poetry and myth have to philosophy. I will argue that Plato’s use of myth is a legitimate tactic in his project of moral education, given his views concerning the role that the non-rational parts of the self play in one’s moral life.

This essay studies how advertisements in various anti-smoking campaigns can influence and persuade by using anti-logos as counter-arguments to the tobacco industry's logos. In contrast to tobacco advertising arguments such as freedom (logos), pleasure (pathos) and trademark (ethos) the anti-smoking campaigns create anti-logos arguments with various connotations such as repulsive pictures and sexual implications to influence groups of people not to start smoking or to quit smoking. Advertisement of tobacco does not exist nowadays due to legal restrictions in the western world; however several decades of myths created in the consumer consciousness still exist. Thus one can speak of a tobacco advertising ideology that exists and the various anti-smoking campaigns trying to change that ideology. The purpose of anti-smoking campaigns is to conduct a kategoria of myth that tobacco advertisement has created over the years. Anti smoking organizations do this by creating a new ideology to affect consumer’s attitude toward smoking and the tobacco myth with an anti-myth. This becomes a counter-myth to the myth created by tobacco advertising and their logos and pathos arguments. The anti-smoke commercial logos become anti-logos and pathos to anti-pathos (antipathy) for the cigarette whose arguments are created from the viewer's connotations of anti-smoke commercials. The cigarette, as a product of connotations in commercials, shows how rhetorical persua-sion becomes public relations and vice versa.

The land of deep water lies in Ontario’s north, atop the boundless rock of the Shield. It holds the secret of an island once blossoming with copper ore. Here primordial elements dance in the ancient landscape and invite us to join them in their awakening. Liquid portals, layered ancient rock and plunging mine shafts unearth a cosmic order born of chaos. Myth, geology and alchemy all fuse together in defining this place. This thesis is a journey to centre of the Shield, through the deep water, rock and voids that encircle it. It is an expedition into the multiplicities of time through the poetic imagination. Here on the bridge to preconsciousness, we are invited in. At the heart lies Copperfields, a mine isolated on an island in Temagami. Once bearing some of the purest copper on Earth, it now sits abandoned amidst fragments of its former glory. The design proposed reclaims these elements and animates them as gateways to the dynamic Shield. In the folds of time, quivering between thought and the preconscious, a fiction rich in meaning and experience is offered up. Let us now embark on our journey to the centre of the Shield.

In this essay I want to investigate how the Viking aristocratic warrior elite in Scandinavia used religious mythology for the construction of their identity. The essay also takes up the concept of honor, which was important for the warriors. Honor was central to all people during Viking age and for the warriors it was absolute. In the religious myths, the aristocratic warriors justify their position in society and legitimate their acts of war. Religion continues to have importance to the warrior elite even after the arrival of Christianity. The myths and the concept of honor made it impossible to question war and violence.

Denna studie undersöker gudinnan Hathors funktion i forna Egypten med utgångspunkt från metallurgiverksamheten som Hathor var beskyddare över. Studien undersöker vad för behov som uppstår i metallurgikontexten och hur denna kan ha påverkat och speglats i förställningar kring gudinnan Hathors funktion i forna Egypten. Studien stödjer sig på William Padens teori om religiösa Världar för att därigenom belysa hur behov i en specifik kontext kan spelgas i den Religiösa Världen. Undersökningen baseras på tolkningar av en rad olika forskningsrapporter. Dels etnografiska dokumentationer om metallurgikontexter ifrån Afrika söder om Sahara, arkeologiska utgrävningar från gruvområdet i Timna i Sinai och forskares interpretationer kring gudinnan Hathors funktion i forna Egypten. Ifrån metallurgiverksamheten studerades dels hur den äldre teknologin fungerade och hur den inverkade på religiösa föreställningar och den auktoritära strukturen i Afrika. Därtill vad för sorts belägg som finns för metallurgiverksamhet i Timna i Sinai och hur gudinnan Hathors kults närvaro i gruvområdet kom till uttryck. Dessutom studeras forskares interpretationer som rör gudinnan Hathors kults funktion, auktoritära struktur och kultens förhållande till konungen i forna Egypten. Dessa uppgifter analyserades därefter och studien visar starka indikationer på att gudinnan Hathor skapades och användes i syfte att gagna en begränsad grupps intresse i forna Egypten. Att gudinnan Hathors funktion och de offentliga festivalerna var till för att upprätthålla en auktoritär struktur och vidmakthålla smidessläktets och prästerskapets makt.

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Since 1993, the Taiwanese society has reached the WHO standard of an aging society in which over 7% of the whole population are older than 65. This research aims to find out the images of older people, those cultural and societal factors involved in the representations of older people, and what roles the media plays to connect the related signs? This research takes perspectives from the critical theories and applies the methodology of semiotics to analysis of Changchun and Kangjiang magazines in Taiwan. The researcher collects 85 different ads containing images of older people and uses the viewpoints of mythology to analyze in semiotic terms in order to make known the cultural myths and ideologies hidden in those images and signs. The result shows, images of older people in the ads are deeply influenced by culture, regarding older people as inevitable declining because of aging. However, owing to modernization of Taiwan and more contact with the western culture, the images of older people in magazine ads start to incorporate new concepts. Fore example, active and energetic ¡§successful¡¨ older people have gradually become the new paradigm. This course of development is similar to that in the American society discussed in the reviewed literature. This change in images is related to the trend that the baby boomers that hold most political and economic resources are starting to retire. In the context of Chinese culture, older people represented in those ads are rarely without their families and values of an idealized family are highly embellished. Although the realities have greatly changed, the traditional image of ¡§three generations in a family¡¨ is constructed as the ideal form of the happy family. Older people are suggested by ads to have the utmost happiness and gratification. In these ads, commodities are presented as the resolution of problems. Conventionally, advertisement ¡§creates¡¨ an anxiety out of short comparison with the ¡§ideal¡¨ and then introduces products as the panacea to cure all the problems. Health-related ads make good use of the existing Chinese medicine belief in pureness and harmlessness of nature and the concept of effectiveness and efficiency of new technology to grant the bio-tech products a combination of benevolence and familiarity of nature and preciseness and effectiveness of technology. By doing so, the ads smooth over the possible conflicts between nature and technology and make up a collage of associated myths. The dominant ideology in ads about older people is the binary extremes of being young or old. By means of emphasizing older people as ugly, unable and powerless, the ideology promotes the values of being young. Advertisements set some high standards for older people to catch up with and assimilate those who are deemed as ¡§insufficient.¡¨ Mythology arbitrarily selects conventional concepts and popular myths to make up seemingly reasonable explanations, successfully transforms the public issues about older people to insufficient anxieties to be coped with by individual efforts, and implies that products are the only resort to ease the anxieties, cleverly de-politicizing the societal awareness of well-being about older people. In a paternal social system, the dominant mainstream ideology tends to separate the dominant and subordinate sides into two contradictory extremes and then establish a few roles models in accord with social expectations to stabilize the structure of the social system. Discriminating levels such as race, sex, class and age are practiced in similar ways. Besides, these discriminating categories will add up and interplay due to the overlapping of a person¡¦s multiple positions and intensity inequality. For instance, in this research the standards and roles for older people, apart form being taken care of in the family, a new kind of images for older people is burgeoning. The new images of Caucasian older people, energetic expressions and lifestyles are modeled as the new paradigm for the elderly. In addition, collaborating with sex discrimination, this study shows, the standards for older males are different form those for older females. The new research domain is worth our further trying to exam the different standards for the male and female elderly from a perspective of sex.

This thesis focuses on the impact of the notion of holiness of nature in ancient Greek thought and its reflection on urbanism and architecture with respect to the transformations that took place during the archaic period. The archaic period represented most fundamentally a shift from an era where everything was on the move to an era of territorialism which culminated in the establishment of the polis and the Greek temple. This shift was prominent in the sense that it pointed not only to a basic modification in the lifestyle of Greeks / but also to the formation of Greek identity as opposed to that of foreigners. In this respect, the thesis first concentrates on the foundation of the polis, followed by the emergence of the temple and lastly the orders of the columns. Doing so, it is aimed to analyze the transformation concerning the understanding of nature which was engendered by the Greek territorialist expansion and its effect on Greek urbanism and architecture.

<p>In this essay I want to investigate how the Viking aristocratic warrior elite in Scandinavia used religious mythology for the construction of their identity. The essay also takes up the concept of honor, which was important for the warriors. Honor was central to all people during Viking age and for the warriors it was absolute. In the religious myths, the aristocratic warriors justify their position in society and legitimate their acts of war. Religion continues to have importance to the warrior elite even after the arrival of Christianity. The myths and the concept of honor made it impossible to question war and violence.</p>