Top Mythology Flashcards

Mythology is one of the human universals. Every single culture tells stories about how the universe was made, great heroes of the past, and where we are all headed. Some of the most famous myths come from European cultures such as the Greeks, Romans, and Norse (Vikings), who composed epic poems to preserve their myths for future generations. Other cultures told their stories out loud but never wrote them down, meaning we know much less about those mythologies. But we know for sure that people of the past were telling myths and folktales just as people do today.

It’s important to remember, though, that for many of these cultures the stories aren’t meant to take place on a simple time scale. As the Roman writer Sallustius puts it, “these things never happened, but always are.” So myths are metaphors or stories that play out in different ways all around us – they’re not made-up stories about the past, but ways of understanding human nature in the present.
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