How Myths Began

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Man beheld nature and all that is in it, but he was ignorant of the meaning of everything; his ignorance led him to curiosity, which fused with fear of nature and of existence — above all of death and of spirits — and so he took refuge in magic. These negative impulses drew him on to take a positive stand, whose whole concern was to reassure his frightened soul and to quench his thirst for knowledge. So he began to explain things in a manner suited to his mentality and consonant with his inward inclinations.

And when the foregoing impulses had ripened and man set about explaining, he did not know (as we now know) that he was embarking on one of the most majestic of man's works in all the ages — on the creation of myths. We must understand some of the positive factors that united with the negative ones and gave the myths the form we know, the form in which the ancients believed, especially the Greeks and the Latins.

Giving the phenomena of nature their souls:

Man's understanding was limited and the range of his thought feeble, so he looked upon all the phenomena of nature as he looked upon the men and animals around him: he saw some as a man, some as a woman, some as an animal, and he fancied that everything in existence had a soul, as he himself did. Yet he acknowledged that the soul of these beings was immortal, that it did not wither as he withers when he dies — for he had observed their perpetual endurance while he perishes, their constancy while he fades away. Hence arose man's deification of the phenomena of nature and the various beings in existence: from giving them souls, regarding them as human, and bestowing on them the gift of immortality.

For this reason he saw the sun as a god, the moon as a goddess, and the stars as lords, and he believed that in every river there was a god and in every tree an immortal soul. And since the sun was the greatest of the heavenly bodies and the one with the most influence upon people, livestock, and crops, and since man's fear of it exceeded his fear of any other body, his veneration of it surpassed his veneration of all the rest: he sanctified it, worshipped it, and wove around it the greatest of the myths. We find the sun in most of the myths of the ancients; indeed, some scholars of mythology hold that all the myths are but different versions of one fundamental myth about the sun, and that the "Iliad" itself is nothing but a sun myth!

Exaggeration of facts and belief in marvels begot the myths of the heroes:

Just as giving the phenomena of nature human souls — gods — was a foundation in the process of creating the myths, another element was at work in it as well: the exaggeration of historical events and the belief in marvels.

A child sees a strange happening he is not accustomed to seeing, and it affects him; and when he recounts what he saw, we find he has added to it, enlarged its details, and given it a terrifying or astonishing or thrilling shape. Such was the case of ancient man: he magnified heroism and sanctified the hero who distinguished himself in battle, and he would speak of him, telling his tales and magnifying his valor, so that not many years passed before this hero was surrounded by a halo of tales differing plainly from the original and from the reality. Moreover, ancient man believed in fate and in miracles, and held that in one side's victory over another in battle there was a part played by fate and carried out by marvels. This belief in beings possessing more than human power led man to create new myths, different from the myths concerning the phenomena of nature: the myths of the heroes.

And since man believed that everything had a soul, he gave these heroes and these unseen powers souls of their own, and so they became persons, and consequently gods or demigods. And he elaborated further:

These heroes intervene unseen in the affairs of men; they are therefore midway between the gods and men, and — according to the thinking of naive man — they are the sons of the gods who married the daughters of men.

The "names" of the phenomena of the universe turn into "gods":

Man gave each of his many gods a name: he called the sun "sun" and the moon "moon" and the dawn "dawn," and all these became particular proper names pointing to beings that we know as inanimate and that he knew as possessed of divine souls. But the meanings and conceptions of these names evolved, and this evolution was an important factor in creating the myths and giving them the form they have now. It happened as follows:

Scholars differ in fixing the place where the Indo-Europeans lived, among whom mythology first dawned; yet they nearly all agree that they dwelt in India. In India, then, man began to think for the first time about the phenomena of the universe: he revered them, feared them, and needed to know them; so he gave them human souls, believed in them as his gods because he had glimpsed their power and their immortality, and called them by their names as they stood in his language. Just as we call the sun "sun," he called it "Phoebus," and so on. And as this heavenly body came to have a soul and became a god, it came to have a name — Phoebus, the very name it had borne before it was deified. But the Indian tribes began to disperse; they struck out across the horizons, each settling in some region, and some of them came and dwelt in the land of Greece. They preserved the beliefs they had held before, went on deifying nature, and the names of the gods remained as they had been, even though the language changed perceptibly from the original. With the passing of the days these names remained in use as proper names, and their meanings were lost. After a time they no longer knew that "Phoebus" was an ordinary word meaning "the sun," and so they thought it was the proper name of the sun as a god; and all the myths that had earlier been woven about the sun, and which they themselves reworked, became myths about a heavenly god named Phoebus, not about the sun as an astronomical body that gives life, rises, and sets.

Say the same of the names of the other gods: they were transformed from ordinary names used for the phenomena of nature into names belonging to gods embodied in the phenomena of nature. The names became gods (as the Latin saying has it: "the names, nomina, became gods, numina"), and the myths were created as we know them today. Thus we read that "Phoebus" was the son of "Leto" and that he was born in "Delos"; and we understand from this, as the Greeks understood, that this god was the son of that goddess and was born in that place. But these three words have meanings in the Indo-European tongue in which the story was first composed, and if we go back to them we find the myth means this: that "the giver of light" was the son of "darkness" and was born in "the land of illumination"!

The Greeks polish the myths with their sense of beauty and their borrowing:

Thus, then, the myths came to be. Man invented them spontaneously in ancient times in a remote corner of India, but the Greeks polished them and set their imagination and their sense of beauty to work upon them, bringing them out as we know them. Anyone acquainted with Greek culture — philosophy, poetry, mathematics, tragedies and comedies, art and science — can appreciate the element of beauty that people bestowed. Beauty had its influence in the creation of the myths: the Greeks transformed them from dry stories describing the universe and nature into tales full of beauty, love, imagination, meanings, magic, and splendor. And most of the myths we possess and call classical — it was the Greek genius that labored to beautify them and heighten their luster.

Elements from outside entered the Greek tradition, adding to the number of the myths and giving them new touches and beauties: some came from Crete, some from Egypt, and some sweet ones from these very shores, like the two myths of Adonis and Cadmus.

The myths began as religion and ended as art:

Man was now at ease; he had explained everything, persuaded himself that he knew and was not ignorant, that he was reassured and unafraid, and he had sated the full range of his love of knowledge. So he believed in gods and goddesses and heroes, in fate and in revelation — and all of that

by way of the story. Thus faith was blended with art, religion with poetry, the good with the beautiful.

The Greeks believed in these myths they had created and took them as a religion which priests rose to serve in the temples, and they were the foundations of the epic, the poem, and the play. Later they went astray, and all the religious, theological standing they had possessed was lost; they became literature and mere literature — literature in themselves and literature through the literature they created, art in themselves and art through the art they inspired, from the most ancient ages until now, and until the ages themselves fade away.