An idea about myth making

fibi ducks

Active Member
I was reading the Odyssey and found Athena talking to Telemachus. She's in disguise as a mortal, and says something like "I will prophesy to you even though I am not a prophet. I will tell you what the gods tell me".Then she tells him that his father is alive and will return and various other things.

Well if that was a plausible thing to say to someone, then it seems any mortal can hear things direct from a god. Now, if we can assume that the gods weren't really turning up and talking to people direct then it seems it would be a voice in the mind, or something like that. I thought about it and remembered an occasion when it became clear to me that someone had lied to me about a year before - I asked and it turned out to be true. If I'd been living in the ancient world perhaps I would have thought that a god had told me? I wondered if anyone else on this forum had experiences of knowledge appearing in their mind in this way? (In an instant, with no apparent reason). Also, if anyone had such a realisation and it turned out to be wrong?

Back to mythology, I suppose someone might have suddenly known that - say - Odysseus wasn't the real father of Telemachus, or something else...and passed this on as having come to them from a god. Far-fetched, maybe, but I'm quite taken with this idea. And I wonder where these apparent insights come from.
 

Myrddin

Well-Known Member
I think these insights may come from the subconscious, because on a subconscious level, we already know. We've learned it somewhere already, but completely forgot about it, and pushed it down into our subconscious. The fact may be that we have forgotten what the initial source was, and therefore we can't quite understand the whim or feeling of this knowledge. I believe that maybe the ancient people, since they not only didn't understand the subconscious but were also quite unaware of its existence, took these senses of knowledge, or insights, as being a message from a god, or God. Just my theory.
 
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