Analysis of Theoretical Foundations of Mythology in Ancient Civilizations Using Ernst Cassirer's Mythical Knowledge Approach (Case Study: Mesopotamia)

When investigating the historical roots of many cultures and beliefs that accompany phenomena such as performing rituals (festivals and mourning) and creating artworks, there are narratives with a deep scope of effect on the lives of the ancient people; to the extent that these narratives presented an explanation and reason for every natural and supernatural phenomenon. These narratives that are introduced to us as "myths", play a key role in shaping the visual culture of ancient peoples and civilizations, since illustration and visual forming of these narratives can be seen as the earliest artistic attempts of these cultures. Considering the importance of myths, there have been and still are various, and sometimes contradictory, approaches toward this phenomenon, according to which, myth is sometimes introduced as linguistic disease and distress of peoples. Ernst Cassirer is among those who have struggled to upgrade myth into a human cognitive form. Unlike Kant, Cassirer believed that human cognitive forms are not limited to rational patterns, rather irrational patterns also have a part to play in the human cognition and knowledge processes. Therefore, he introduced myth as one of the major irrational cognition forms of human life. According to Cassirer, the perceptions and the world created in mythology have certain features and contents that are not easy to grasp and accept based on the current standards of theoretical and rational knowledge. Therefore, these principles must be investigated within the framework of an irrational cognitive mechanism of the myths under study. In other words, rationality, as the dominant cognitive tool in the contemporary world, is not capable of properly explaining phenomena whose origin and nature flow from irrational foundations. Rationalism and its cognitive tools, therefore, cannot be used as similar models for analyzing the artworks of different civilizations. The problems are doubled when judging and reviewing non-Europeans artworks, particularly those created before the rise of Western civilization. The contemporary humans who live within the framework of knowledge and rational form of cognition assess the worlds existing before them and other than themselves using the same present-day rationality. They seek their entire world in rational cognition, even though rationality and ways of rational perception are only one of the paths of cognition and one of the types of human knowledge. This negligence is the root cause of cognitive misunderstanding of ancient culture and civilizations. On the other hand, similar to other narrative forms, the myth has presented visual imagination with an undeniable role. As such, a mythical narrative consists of a combination of mental, and of course imaginary, images that are consolidated based on a specific model and objective. In these narratives, the human knowledge and cognition of its self and its surroundings are expressed as special and mental (and also substantive) images. These mythical narratives and the visual world created in them have special features and contents which themselves are created based on the foundations of mythical knowledge. It seems that recovering these principles can bring us to an understanding of why and how the type of images shaped in mythology was created. The main focus of this study is to discover the relationship between the main features and contents of mythical knowledge (from the perspectives of Cassirer) and their type of visual representations in an example of ancient mythology, aiming to take effective steps toward a theoretical model for formal (visual) and content analysis and explanation of mythologies based on the fundamental features and content that shape mythical knowledge. The main research questions are: What are the fundamental features and contents of myth (as a cognitive form) from the perspective of Cassirer? What are the effects of the features and contents of mythical cognitive form on visual representations in a Mesopotamian mythical narrative from the perspective of Cassirer? The research method was descriptive-analytical, including the introduction of the features and contents of myth as a cognitive form and analysis of an example of mythical illustration and art based on these contents. The research data was collected through secondary research and analyzed qualitatively. The sample under study was a protective tablet for the sick, attributed to Pazuzu from the Neo-Babylon era (in the Mesopotamian civilization).  According to the results, the main distinctions in features and content of mythical knowledge compared to rational cognition and knowledge were identified in differentiation and unification of phenomena and affairs, the quality orientation of phenomena, the concept of causality, perceptual mediators (space, time, and number) and representation of phenomena and affairs. In the analysis of the Mesopotamian case study, features such as spatial differentiation in mythical knowledge, the qualitative nature of mythical numbers, the substantive realization of mental and abstract phenomena and affairs, and semiotic representation of phenomena were analyzed.