Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [16]
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 what was then a Greek colony on the island of Sicily), who lived during the late 300s and early 200s BCE. Like an ancient Greek Gulliver’s Travels, his Sacred History described a journey that Euhemerus said he had taken to three fantastic islands in the Indian Ocean. On one of these islands called Panchaea, Euhemerus claimed he had found old inscriptions written by the great god Zeus himself. Euhemerus insisted that he discovered these inscriptions on a pillar inside a golden temple on the island. The writings proved, according to Euhemerus, that Zeus and the other gods of Greece were all based upon an early king from the island of Crete. To Euhemerus, the gods of Olympus and other characters of Greek myths were all real heroes and conquerors who had been deified, and he claimed to be able to document the entire primitive history of the world from these inscriptions.
While the tale Euhemerus