Myth about myths – creation.com

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Up to the mid-19th century, a myth was just that—a myth. The Greek stories of gods and African spirit folk tales were regarded as untrue, whereas the findings of historians who compared documentary records were generally regarded as true. So was Genesis 1 to 11.

But during the 19th century, ideas about what constituted a myth underwent rapid evolution. Myths were no longer regarded as stories devoid of truth, while truth was regarded as acceptable even if intertwined with myth. In the 20th century, Freud,1 a number of other writers, and people such as Velikovsky,2 came to regard myth as any category of information which could be called ‘true’ in some sense. They argued that since there could not be any smoke without fire, so there could not be fictional stories or myths without some factual experience to precede them.

But what is a myth? If we take, for example, the Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish, found in a 600 BC library, we find the following elements:

The gods were created from water and earth.

Water and chaos were at the origin of everything.

The gods rebelled against their leaders.

The gods fought each other as equals.

A man-like god carved up a goddess to form part of the universe from her dead body.

Man was created from the blood of another god.

Unknown to most people, history has to happen before myth can arise.

This summary shows some of the typical ingredients of myths: multiple heroes, no one in supreme control, unpunished violence and illicit sex amongst gods and between gods and men, inanimate and created beings as gods, and the stories or myths themselves were the invention of both men and gods rather than revelation from one God to mankind.

History, on the other hand, or to be more specific, the language of history is matter of fact and uses a recognisable style. It is unified. You can’t invent real history. You can create a myth based on history. Unknown to most people, history has to happen before myth can arise. Even children learn to take things seriously before they invent stories in the true sense of invention.

Early use of fantasy by children doesn’t contradict this, simply because fantasy happens to be the real expression of how the child does understand the world. Telling lies and inventing stories are quite a different category from fantasy and appear later.

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