Don’t Know Much About® Mythology by Kenneth C. Davis Read Free Book Online

are Grimm’s Fairy Tales , the famous German stories collected by the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm between 1807 and 1814. These include “Hansel and Gretel,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Snow-White,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Cinderella,” and “Rapunzel,” many of which were drawn from much older, mythic sources.
    Where does the urge to make myths come from?
     
    Like the witness to the car accident at the beginning of this chapter, people everywhere love—or perhaps need—to create a good story. And if the details change a bit in the retelling, what’s the difference? Who hasn’t slightly embellished their biography or stretched the truth with a touch of dramatic flair to add some color and spice to an encounter at the supermarket or an argument with the boss? Often, these stories—just like everyday rumors and tabloid-newspaper reports—change with each retelling. It has always been that way, and in the broadest sense, the myths of every culture include all of these types of “stories”—legends, fables, folktales, and fairy tales—to form a broad worldview.
    But the larger question remains: where do these stories come from? Are they all inspired—as is most likely the case of King Arthur and possibly St. George—by some actual person or events? Or are all of these mythical stories simply the work of human imagination? People have been arguing about that for more than 2,500 years.
    As early as 525 BCE, a Greek named Theagenes, who lived in southern Italy, identified myths as scientific analogies or allegories—an attempt to explain natural occurrences that people could not understand. To him, for instance, the mythical stories of gods fighting among themselves were allegories representing the forces of nature that oppose each other, such as fire and water. This is clearly the source of a great many explanatory or “causal” myths, beginning with the accounts found in every society or civilization that explain the creation of the universe, the world, and humanity. These “scientific” myths attempted to explain the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun, the course of the stars. Myths like these were, in some ways, the forerunners of science. Old mythical explanations for the workings of nature began to be replaced by a rational attempt to understand the world, especially in the remarkable era of Greek science and philosophy that began about 500 BCE.
    The most fundamental and universal “explanatory” myths are Creation myths, found in every culture. Quite often, there is more than one Creation myth for a particular group, whether a tribe or civilization. Sometimes these are variations on a theme; other times they represent different traditions that arose in different periods. Or some can reflect different regions or cities that generated their own Creation myths. In Egypt, for instance, there were at least four major Creation accounts, each one from a different major religious center. These are myths that set out to explain the ordering of the universe and are very often associated with myths that explain the appearance of humans. (The major Creation myths of each civilization will be discussed in each of the following chapters.)
    Are all myths historical?
     
    Whether searching for the historical Jesus, King Arthur, Atlantis, or Troy, people for centuries have had a deep fascination with the possibility that all of these stories and mythic characters are based on identifiable historical events. This concept, called “historical allegory,” is not a recent one, but goes back to a very old explanation for the source of myths—the notion that they all began with real people and actual events. With the passage of time, and the retelling of the stories, the events and the people involved became distorted and layered with legend.
    One of the first people to suggest that all myths are based on real people and events was a Greek scholar named Euhemerus (a native of