|
THE CREATION OF MYTH
What kind of Truth?
|
What kind of Truth?
|
|
What the people had always known and believed about their past, and found necessary to preserve as essential for their sense of social identity and the continued existence of the community was precisely their personal local “truths.” And what a group of people knew and believed to be true about the past channeled expectations and affected the decisions on which their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor were all deeply dependent.
These included both ‘scientific’ truths as well as ‘religious’ truths; for there was no distinction back then between the discoveries of the nascent sciences and supernatural beliefs. — To observe the movements of the planets during that era was no more or less than to behold the machinations of the gods. Interpretations of natural events as supernatural episodes — most often found in descriptive narratives of planets and elemental forces as conscious and volitional entities wielding the powers of creation and destruction, life and death, ... [etc.] — were commonplace, and widely accepted as historical truth. |
|
But the peoples’ mythos was never a poor or distorted substitute for science, logic or religious faith. Myth-making traditions were not only explanations in narrative form, they were expressive representations of how the people perceived and interpreted the world they lived in — their overall cosmovision, or total world-view. Because grandiose cosmological beliefs were just as concretely real to these peoples as the material conditions in which they daily lived, myth-making involved an associative, or sympathetic use of language, that drew upon images and descriptions of commonplace objects and events, in order to effectively communicate suggestive analogies regarding objects and events that were otherwise otherworldly, alien and totally unknown.
— Creation Myths were poetic models that applied allegorical meanings to the otherwise incomprehensible patterns of Nature. They were noble attempts to make sense of the world analogously, by using the same words and imagery by which the people also made sense out of our own daily lives. — In order to understand this coherently, we have to accept that certain stories that might otherwise be considered scientifically "incorrect" could also be deemed to be "true enough" nevertheless — that is, “effectively true,” insofar as they were capable of successfully communicating vital information that had pressing need of being shared with the entire community. |
|
However, we must also continue to bear in mind that — despite the fact that the making of myth explicitly referred to “telling the truth” — it was also on account of this same “associative” or “effectively true” use of language that the traditional mythos of Bronze age peoples later came to be widely misunderstood as superstitious fictions, and discarded from society as non-scientific nonsense and/or sacrilegious lies. The practice of interpreting natural events as supernatural episodes became socially unacceptable as soon the myth-making era was over and the scientifically-minded arguments of the first philosophers began.
|