Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [265]
ALSO BY KENNETH C. DAVIS
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Copyright
DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT® MYTHOLOGY. Copyright © 2005 by Kenneth C. Davis. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition October 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-192575-7
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*This might be a good place to distinguish more precisely between myths and mythology. Many people use the words interchangeably—as the title of this book does. But to be specific, myths are the stories themselves, while mythology is actually the study of those myths. Even though the words have come to mean the same thing in common usage, there is a distinction. This book discusses the myths in great detail and, in chapter 1, offers a brief history of mythology—what people have thought about myths over the course of thousands of years.
*When Achilles was born, his mother was told that he would be impervious to harm if bathed in a sacred pool. His mother dipped him in the water, but held him by the heel, which was the only place a wound would kill him. So, an Achilles’ heel has come to mean a person’s most vulnerable spot.
*Easter’s place on the calendar is itself probably a vestige of mythic beliefs related to the moon. It’s one of the movable feasts of the Christian religion, and the date of Easter varies each year, but for most Christians it usually falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after March 21.
*The word “kamikaze” means “divine wind” and referred to a typhoon that saved Japan by preventing a Mongol invasion in 1281. In 1945, the young Japanese pilots were supposedly going to be the equivalent of that divine wind and turn away the American invading forces. While they killed many American sailors and destroyed numerous American ships, the kamikaze attacks ultimately did not affect the war’s outcome.
*It is important to remember that we “discover” new things all the time. As this book was being written, researchers announced the discovery of a previously unknown group of three-foot-tall “dwarf” humans who lived in a remote section of Indonesia within the time span of “modern” humans. Interestingly, the existence of such “little people” was part of the local mythology.
*The word “pagan,” which has come to broadly mean anyone who is not Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, was originally coined by early Christians in Rome and meant “country dweller” and “civilian,” in the sense that pagans were not members of the so-called army of God.
*In recent years, some scholars have interpreted that phrase as evidence that the