Guilt and civilization: a reading of the Orphic Dionyssu’s myth and the Adam's Fall myth

Abstract

Guilt, one of the pillars around which our society has been established, has not always been as it is conceived today. To understand it must be necessary to look back and find in other emblematic west cultures the first foundations of this moral aspect. For that, myth provides the right tools. In the present paper, two foundational myths are compared, their similarities, distances and current permanence. The Myths analyzed are the orphic myth of Dionysus Zagreus and the jewish myth of the fall of Adam, whose study is given from the brief explanation of guilt’s notion in ancient Greece and it’s key concepts, to the notion of guilt as contamination shared in both myths, with their respective differences.