Mythology : Lies or Truth?

Reading a myth story has always been my favourite thing to do. It is like entering a new world from a new perspectives. As we know, myth is a story that passes from generation to generation and act as a base for certain place’s culture. Although some myth seems too out-of-reality, where might and magic govern men’s life, the others still can be traced for the truth behind it. It never cease my interest to see how a myth can affect the people around it. It shaped their personality and sometimes define their action.

 A myth always comes from nothingness. The trigger could be a real past event, or a story created by a single men that hold the wisest meaning behind its word. However, urban legend is not the same as myth (in my opinion), although urban legend is also a story created by someone, it holds no truth and usually made just for fun or to spread anxiety among the people. In other words urban legend is not too different from rumour at the very beginning.

Whether mythology about creation of the world, God/Goddess stories, or magical being which can be found on almost every ancient culture e.g. Greek, Egypt, and China are real or not is very tricky to explain. All I can say is, there is a reason why our predecessor all around the earth, even though they live on different era, separated by wide sea and vast land, talk in different tongue able to leave myths, and when you analyze it all the myths seem to have a relation.

Modern people find myth just as a fairy tale, it is very understandable since the stories are not comprehensible and very contradicting with modern science. However, all the reasons above cannot be accepted to reject the truth behind the myths. There is a big possibility that myth becomes too out-of-reality because the lack capabilities of human memories. Even scientist acknowledged that human cannot rely on their long term memories too much. Some part will be missing and replaced by their own made reality. For myth which has been passed generation to generation for at least 1000 years, there is sure a big alteration from its original story.

Another factor that shapes myth into today story is human character to see only what they want to see, to hear only what they want to hear. People who hear about myth stories might unconsciously alter some part of it to accommodate their own needs. A myth about superhuman who is able to fight 1000 man and win might be a way to keep the pride of their people as a strong man. In modern world it is called Propaganda.