(6) Characteristics and the Origination of the Myths of the World

8/3/2019 (6) Characteristics and the Origination of the Myths of the World

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Characteristics and the origination of the myths of

the world?

We should now understand what a myth is. Myth is the

imaginative fiction of the minds of the ancient natives of a country

who believed that there were some kind of nature gods who were

involved in the creation, maintenance and destruction of the world,

and in some way they also influenced the social life of the people.

Thus, they formulated imaginative stories about them and startedworshipping them in their own style by offering sacrifices of such

animals which they themselves used to eat.

There are thousands of mythologies. Every country in the world has a

number of mythologies. Their imaginations about the shape of god also

differ from country to country. For example, Greek gods are portrayed

in human form, whereas the Egyptian gods are portrayed as having a

human body with a human or an animal head and with a peculiar dress.There are all kinds of mythologies: cosmogony or creation myth, myth

about the last judgement and death, myth of the destruction of the

world, myth of human generation like of Adam and Eve, myth about the

period of creation, just like the Zoroastrians of ancient Persia believed

in four periods of 3,000 years (12,000 years) only, myth about the soul

leaving the body after death, just like the Egyptians believed that the

soul flies out from the body like a bird after death, and many more.

Characteristics: There are eight main characteristics of the myths. (1)

They have no philosophy of any kind. (2) They have no exact time of the

births of gods. It means they have no real history of their imagined

gods. (3) They have no scientific description of any kind regarding the

creation and destruction of the world, or birth of souls and their


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karmas etc. (4) The number of their gods and goddesses is flexible. It

means that during various periods of time new gods and goddesses

have been created and added to the mythology. (5) There is no definite

place or dimension for their gods to live in. Just some vague

imaginations like the Greek gods are supposed to live on Mount

Olympus in Greece. (6) There is absolutely no description of the

Divineness of gods. (7) Their gods and goddesses are filled with human

weaknesses like lust, greed, jealously and anger etc., and (8) their gods

and goddesses have never been visualized in actual life because they

are just the fiction stories of primitive minds. These are the common

characteristics that are found in all the mythologies of the world. These

mythologies assume the shape of the religion of that country and

people keep on worshipping these imaginative figures for their whole

life, just like Alexander worshipped Heracles and his mother

worshipped Dionysus.

The source of mythological imaginations.

If someone studies these mythologies carefully he will find that in spite

of great descriptional differences there is some kind of basic similarity

among them which makes one think that they might have comethrough some common source, and it is a fact that they did come from

one common source.

All these mythologies describe about the creation of the world from the

void or the sky. They also describe about the destruction of the world.

They describe about the beginning of human civilization from some

original couple like Adam and Eve. They also tell about gods and

demons or evil spirits. Some mythologies (like that of Germanic people)tell about a huge world serpent holding the earth, and about a certain

distant land of happiness where good people go after death. Some

mythologies tell about a certain region where all the dead people go,

and so on. These are the general descriptions of the mythologies of the

world. These descriptions are vague, bear no philosophical details and


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have no preciseness of the number of gods or goddesses or their living

abodes etc., yet they have a general similarity. They also tell about the

god of rain and thunder, god of fire, god of water, god of wisdom and

god of arts etc.

The prime source from where these ideas originated was, of course, the

stories of the Puranas of Bharatvarsh which travelled through the trade

routes from word of mouth and reached the other countries in a

broken form because they travelled from mouth to mouth. Then, from

there, they travelled to other far-off countries of the world. As a

general instinct, the primitive people also thought that certain invisible

super forces might exist somewhere in the space which cause or

control the natural happenings like disastrous rain, hail, strong

thundering clouds, stormy wind or brush fire etc., which affected their

daily life. When the stories of god of fire or god of rain and thunder etc.

reached these people it supported their basic imaginations, and thus,

all such stories of gods and goddesses that reached these places were

incorporated in their folk tales with their added imaginations. In this

way the mythologies started. They prevailed in the society for a long

time. Later on, when the writing system started, they were written

down in a book form. Thus, among the variations of the descriptions of

the mythologies of different countries, there remains a similarity

because the basic stories of creation, destruction and gods and

goddesses came from one single source, India (Bharatvarsh).

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(6) Characteristics and the Origination of the Myths of the World