The serpent, the moon, the underworld

Abstract

Mythology is the study of the mind of man who attempts to probe into truth without the possession of clarification derived from complete knowledge of facts. Hence, the imagination takes command of both the person and, often, the community. The stories created by man or received by him from his predecessors, often going back to generations and even centuries of oral tradition, will differ from those of his own people living across mountain barriers and across seas in distant islands. This is caused both by contortions in handling down the original story over the years, and by reinterpretations by the perpetrators of the same story. The very long existence of these versions of the story received the sanction of sanctity: if they existed for so long a time, if the ancestors preserved them, if they were sung by poets taken to be sacred for being divinely inspired, who were the ancient Greeks to eradicate them from memory?