What Truths are Hidden in Myths?

As a student going through the typical American elementary and secondary education, I learned mythology; only Greek in junior high. In high school, I learned that the Greeks were not the only people who had myths. I learned that the Romans and Native Americans had myths as well. During my freshman English class – A Survey of Literature – I read a Native American myth called The World on A Turtle’s Back and a Roman myth that had something to do with Minerva.  I learned then that  Minerva was the Roman equivalent to Venus and then my teacher assigned the class to read The Odyssey – not excerpts from the story, but the entire story. During my Sophomore year, I remember reading a one-page story about Native American Myths in my American Literature class. Junior year, I was given a world literature class and we read the Iliad. I never understood why the high school curriculum gave us these stories out of sequence, being that The Iliad comes before The Odyssey. I suppose that it had to do with reading The Aeneid which came afterwards. My teacher stretched out those two stories to cover more than a quarter of the school year. In other words, Roman and Greek mythology covered over 25% of my World Literature class, Hamlet covered another 25%. I did not read an Egyptian myth until I was two years into college.

Years afterwards, when I began to work in the school system, I questioned the curriculum. By then I understood many things about the way school curriculums are set and surprisingly enough, I learned that they are made with a ton more flexibility than people would imagine. I also learned that curriculum is set like a dictatorship in some parts of our country, and in other places it’s a type of cultural caste. I saw how schools in the poor neighborhoods gave reading material far below the reading levels – sometimes for good reason (What’s the point of giving a 10th grade level book to a 7th grade level reader who just happens to be in the 10th grade?). Sense I worked in a selective enrolment school – an insult to the idea of public school system, but I admit a necessary evil – I was able to have the flexibility needed to teach toward state goals that demanded developed critical thinking skills over the need for basic education. As a unit of mythology was part of the curriculum, I took the chance to have students comparison and contrast different myths. This was not my invention, it had been done before, but I chose to them compare and contrast creation stories from Egyptian, Greek, and Native American mythology to the Biblical Christian account. What I discovered in the preparations of these lessons, influenced me, I’m sure, more than the students.

I later developed a theory that is the underlining message to my Men, Djinn and Angels series. In Men, Djinn and Angels – Awakening, it is not fully developed, but by the time, the third book is published, the theory will dominate the story line. It goes like this: First of all, most of the myths Roman, Egyptian, Greek, Sumerian all tell a story about the same people. These people were real and existed during ancient times, perhaps before written records were made. These people were admired, and that admiration became legend and that legend became myth. As the stories were retold multiple times by people who added and changed various details, different characters emerged and various traits from the original person were split and shared among new characters. Creativity was involved in the retelling and in some cases, the original characters were turned into symbols. As we tell the stories and read the stories, we pass down a variety of codes that have some important significances although we may not consciously know what they are.

Let’s take for example the story of the Watchers from The Book of Enoch and compare it to the Titans in Greek mythology. How similar are they? The Watchers were taken by the angels and placed in a prison where they are to remain – some of them for 70 generations – whereas the Titans were placed in Tartarus after their war with the gods. Then we get to compare Nimrod who is mentioned in the Bible and according to historical sources, was captured in a war against a Semitic King, cut into multiple pieces and buried in multiple places so that his followers would not have a burial-place to enshrine. He is called the mighty hunter in the Bible – the same title bestowed on Orion. His death was the same as Osiris and Uranus – both cut into pieces and the pieces scattered. The Babylonians’ Gilgamesh includes The Great Flood, the same as Irish mythology and multiple Native Americans. The Egyptians tell a story of Sekhmet, the lioness goddess who punished all mankind when they turned against Ra. This story does not involve a flood, but it has the same concept – purification of the human race through death and destruction. There are other stories that draw comparisons to the immaculate conception and the birth and resurrection of Jesus that could call into question the authenticity of the Christian belief.

The question that continues to come to my mind deals with the possible meaning to them all. If we could somehow combine history and myth to get a single story, what would we find? Why do we cling to these myths if not for some higher purpose than entertainment? Is it possible that there is some connection between the myths, the multiple religions, quantum physics, occult science, alchemy and the Hermetic principles? I can’t prove it, which is why all of this is just my theory, but I believe that somewhere in the fragments of truth is a deep knowledge that humanity has lost and as a result, we are unable to tap into our dormant abilities. It is written that each generation grows weaker and wiser. This is a very interesting statement as there are multiple ways to show weakness and few to show wisdom.