A Guide to Mythology

by Helen A. Clarke

Again, whole myths would be transported, and as they reached different countries they would be changed somewhat so that they would reflect the manners or the knowledge of that particular country. A strange thing, however, about many myths is that those in one part of the world are so much like those in another part of the world that it would seem as if they must have been invented by the same people. Not only are there myths in India and Greece which are very much alike, but there are myths in Scandinavia and North America and South America that strongly resemble each other and those of Greece and India.

Why this should be the case is another point about which learned men have had many opinions. Some of them have thought that the whole human race must once have lived in one particular spot on the globe, and that from there large numbers wandered forth to seek new homes in all the other countries on the globe, taking with them the myths which they had in common when they all lived together. It has never been settled just where that particular spot was, and probably it never will be. Perhaps it was in Central Asia, perhaps it was in the southern part of Spain, perhaps in Norway and Sweden, perhaps in the island of Atlantis, in the Southern Seas, which a legend says was submerged ages and ages ago. All of these places have been suggested as the original home of the whole human race, and very good arguments have been brought forward to prove the truth of every one of these suggestions.

Since it does not seem possible to find out the truth about this, there are other people who dismiss the idea altogether. They think that man and nature being a good deal alike in whatever part of the world you find them, it is highly probable that myths might resemble each other very strikingly and yet be invented independently by people living in lands far apart, while the differences would be due largely to climate.

Now if we try to think of centuries of time going by until in many countries primitive man is no longer primitive but begins to be more civilized, we shall find that certain groups of myths became crystallized into complete religious systems, such as existed in Egypt, Assyria, India, Greece, Persia, and many other countries. By this time the human race had attained to a much greater degree of self-consciousness. Men were beginning to understand both themselves and nature better, and they often could see the true causes for the events of nature going on about them. The next step was for them to begin to observe very carefully the systems of religious myths which had been handed down to them by their forefathers. Upon these they used their imaginative faculty, as man had earlier used it upon nature itself, with the result that they attached new meanings and gave fresh explanations of myths which had originally started as simple personifications of nature. In Greece, for example, Apollo, who was originally a personification of the sun, came to be regarded as the God of Music and Poetry; Athēne, who was originally the Dawn, became the Goddess of Wisdom; Hermes, originally the Wind, became the God of Eloquence and the leader of spirits. This is the way myths gradually grew to have philosophical or metaphysical meanings—that is, to stand as symbols of the deepest and most far-reaching thoughts of which the mind of man at that time was capable. Many of those thoughts are so profound and so wonderful that one needs to have a great deal of knowledge to understand them. All that interests you now is to know that there are such thoughts and that some day you will want to know more about them.

While some myths were thus raised to religious systems, there were many which remained in the form of legends and stories. In the course of many generations, these stories were told over again and again so that many changes crept into them and many additions were made. Sometimes the effect of these changes was to make a story cruder, sometimes the complexity of a story was increased, and sometimes it became more interesting and beautiful. Stories which have been changed or added to by the people in this way are called variants of the same story.

Owing to these facts mythology has been divided into two great sections. That which has risen to the dignity of a religion is called culture-lore, and that which has remained always in the form of stories and legends is called folk-lore. The first reflects the learning, wisdom and manners of the more intelligent portions of humanity, who developed in advance of the others; and the second the beliefs and customs of the less intelligent.

You are probably wondering by this time how all this vast array of myths has come down to us from the long ago past. Much of it has been preserved in ancient books like the “Rig Veda” in India, which is thought to be about four thousand years old, the “Iliad” and “Odyssey” of Homer in Greece, about three thousand years old and many others. These books existed in manuscript for many hundreds of years. Since the invention of printing, large numbers of them have been printed and translated into modern languages. Knowledge of ancient myths has also been obtained from monuments and the inscriptions upon them, from paintings on vases and from statues.

The folk-lore has for the most part been preserved orally in the stories of the common people, and has been handed down from generation to generation and finally taken down in writing by some one especially interested in collecting the stories, while the myths of the most primitive men are preserved in the survivals of them among the races still remaining uncivilized in various parts of the globe. These have been for several centuries taken down from the mouths of the people, or observed in their customs and recorded by students. Among these less civilized races there are besides crude monuments, and even crude forms of writing by means of which primitive men have recorded their own myths.

You will realize by this time what an extensive and wonderful forest this forest of myths is which we imagine ourselves looking down upon from our hilltop, and after having taken this bird’s-eye view of the whole forest, you will be the better able to enjoy going down into the forest and making little journeys in different directions and becoming better acquainted with some of the most beautiful of the myths as you will in the following chapters. And now, moreover, you will have no difficulty in understanding me when I answer the question, “What is a myth?” by saying:

A myth is any imaginative explanation or interpretation by man of himself or of the objects and events in nature outside of himself, including their appearance, their effects and the still greater mystery of their causes. It may exist in many forms from the simple myth of explanation to the complicated systems of religious myths in which the objects of nature are regarded as gods in human form. The chief thing to be remembered about myths is that they are not true, though they may contain some elements of truth; another, that though not actually true they seemed to be true to the people who made them.