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THE CREATION OF MYTHS
Caveat
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Caveat: On Things Left Unsaid and Lost to History
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So long as the myths preserved the people, to too did the people preserve their myths. They remained perennially popular precisely on account of being perennially renewed, or remade. — However, what everyone in the community was expected to know already was not usually explained in so many words. What the members of that culture would already have commonly known, simply by being brought up within the community, was often not said aloud at all.
When a later phase set in, characterized by the writing down of the epics and other mythological documents, the first men and women to write them down had no documents or archives to draw on, but rather had to capture something in written form that previously had only been transmitted orally, or by way of carved or painted illustrations. ... The language of myth assumed the truth of what was being recounted in the myth. — Unfortunately: What was never said aloud during the recital of the myths was never written down later either, and as such seems to have been long forgotten entirely. In addition — as time went on, some of the original meanings may not have been fully understood by later generations of story-tellers. — Imaginative speculations made to fill such gaps may have contributed to even more convoluted attempts at explanations later on. ... — Because the myth-makers’ unspoken assumptions are now lost, we cannot hope to reconstruct everything about every myth. |