Greek Mythology and Mythology Before It

Greek mythology in itself was of a whole new type of mythology. Other mythologies from other parts of the world before it were drastically different. Aside from the fact that the Gods mirrored humans in semblance, their actions were quite humanlike as well. In addition to that, people who did not like to make up many things originally wrote Greek mythology. The mythology also commonly came to explain things in nature, which is reasonable for people like the Greeks to have, because of their intimacy with nature. If a poet wrote about the birthplace of a God or Goddess being on Earth, the place would actually exist. They based their mythology on things relative to them, things they could understand. The Greeks based their mythology on reality.

The first point I would like to address compares and contrasts the different types of mythologies versus Greek mythology and the emotions they stir in human beings. In my reading, I have found that many mythologies, including Greek mythology, has figures of authority that are horrifyingly fearsome, or have the potential to be. Some deities have animal heads, or come in the form of an animal itself, or some beast in vivid imaginations of the storyteller. Greek mythology differs in this way. The deities are in human form. One could say that the Greek gods are, in a way, humans with superpowers that live forever.

But unbeknownst to most moral manners, the Gods act unlike most mortal men and women, making horrible decisions, and later, being a thing of humor for humans to enjoy. In this sense, the Greek gods are not very frightening at all, in fact, the exact opposites. Zeus, for example, with his ever-ongoing love affairs with others, was a typical object of amusement, as he was always found out. Overall, the Greek gods acted like humans without consciences, but instead, great power, that seemed as friendly as any other human, as compared to deities of other mythology, in which their deities are there to enforce or scare humans into submission, and laughter is inconceivable among humans in regards to the deities.

Greek mythology was innately close with nature. They saw what was around them, and related their mythology to it. Winter came from a tragic occurrence between Demeter and Persephone and Hades. Almost everything could be explained by some phenomenon of the Gods. Lightning bolts were the work of Zeus, bad sea weather and high waves, would be Poseidon. It was never blamed on them, but it was because of them. They saw the work of the Gods in all of nature. In the sea, in the sky, in the afterlife waiting for them, the gods were ever present. But it was not just the gods present. It was nymphs and satyrs and the Minotaur and many others in nature too. The Greeks paid their respects to nature and bowed down to it.

Poets in ancient Greece based their mythology on fact. It sounds awkward, yes, that mythology be based on fact, but that is what they did. They did not make up places; they did not make up people. In Greece, the exact place where Aphrodite sprang up out of the sea foam can be visited. “They had no wish to create some fantasy shaped in their own minds.” This is what the packet states and this is the truth. Why create something out of your imagination when the facts were so fantastic already? It would be redundant. The poets simply told things how they were, believing in every word they wrote, and wrote with the utmost enthusiasm.