I always tried very hard to believe myths but no matter how I spin it I cant. It's all bollocks. I'd attribute most myths to exagerations of animal sigthings, or getting a weird angle on inanimate objects. You have to understand we were up to recent times very religious, in the sense that we didnt know how things originated so the mystery birthed delusions, and with that you have the perfect breeding ground for tales of an old fisherman about some 15 feet demon tuna that he "almost" caught. I really want to believe in the supernatural, like tales of men with extroardinary power, or the after-life, but I just don't.
I bend both ways whIle now in the present days or modern time I just go with the norm the other is I believe it and want hear the truth because most legends and myths are sometimes changed to fit the preferences of the storyteller like most legends about certain individuals went across the battlefield glorious and what not or scary stories made up or changed a myth or legend to scare and wasn't told properly
sadly i am a big realist, and am pretty sure none of the myths are completely true... vampires are mostly there because of superstition of poor people towards really cruel leaders. there had to be a reason they were so bloodthirsty right? well, there was;to inspire fear so as to better control their populace. sadly, people back then were a lot simpler, and a lot of the myths were probably purposefully spread to turn the populace against their leaders, so another could take over. that and the deforming of the older gods of the druids and such. most were depicted as evil, and lots of stories were spread about them. and with all stories spread by word of mouth, they grew worse and worse, wilder and wilder. most were probably started by the roman church, or other religious organisations, in a bid for supremacy. i do believe however, that hidden under the surface of our simple world, are a lot of discoveries and experiments that are deeply hidden from our sight. like research for immortality for example. how can it be that no country is actively researching this? i call bullshit. millions of people disappear every year without a trace, and i am almost certain that a part of them are whisked away by their own countries for research purposes.
Some of the myths/legend are usually based on real life things it just somehow being exaggerated and it became unbelievable. And also due to the passage of time a lot of things might be added/omitted to them too. iirc I've read an article before where on China there was a myth/legend/folklore that a lake was once one a summer palace or something before where fairies and the likes dwell and golds is common. And guess what some people really believe it and they've really found golds and many artifacts beneath that lake
I think the "mysteriousness" of cross-cultural mythology is somewhat overblown. With dragons, to use your example, I can think of at least two factors off the top of my head: for one, the word "dragon" in English refers to entities that were often originally very different (eg. Western dragons and Jianlong) and similarities in mythology developed later when cross-cultural contact made people conflate their traits, and two, multiple cultures have mythological creatures based on the discovery of the fossils of dinosaurs or similar prehistoric beasts which could explain similarities in appearance. A much more mysterious mythological phenomenon, in my opinion, is the universality of myths about a huge flood, but we can still come up with a fairly plausible theory. Soil records don't show the existence of a world-encompassing flood, but much of early civilization was concentrated in the vicinity of floodplains, as the land was the most fertile and thus the best for agriculture. Seeing as floodplains have a tendency to do exactly what their name implies, the populations living in them would all have very vivid experiences with the destruction flooding would bring and come up with stories about it. In the end, it's difficult to prove that something doesn't exist, but we can observe that something DOES, so while we can't say for certain that, say, Zeus doesn't actually exist somewhere, we CAN say that lightning can be produced by electrical discharge between a cloud and the ground.
Exactly. There's no doubt that mythology is often exaggerated, after all these tales often do not only explain, but caution and warn as well. Without anything complex as science, things such as fossils could be viewed as dragons. I believe that is one of the plausible explanations to the phenomenon, but it isn't proven. As you said, it's harder to disprove. My main point though is that mythology is used to explain things, so to the people of the past, mythology was truth/fact to them.
Well, most myth and legends were said to come from folk memories. Most of our pre-modern culture, originally are oral-based tradition culture. We mostly don't know how to read-or-write (other than social elite), so we passed stories and history from mouth to mouth, father to son, son to grandson, and so on. So when a grandpa tell his children about what happened in his time and his rationale for that event, perhaps rationalizing it with spirits or other supernatural forces, and also some embellishment, the same story will be retold by his grandson to his great-greatgrandson, and so on. Like a very long telephone game. Eventually, the story of a someone dead from being hit by a fallen coconut, might get transmutated into a story of someone dead from the revenge of the coconut spirit, since he didn't properly bury the coconut husk. Or a story about how 3 men drowned in a certain rocky beached from strong current, get transmutated into a story of a place which are the palace of Ocean Spirit that demand human sacrifice. What amazing from this folk memories are that in some culture, like the Aborigine, their stories contain animals that had been extinct since last Ice-Age and when some parts of Australia was a bit wetter. So perhaps some folk memories are just real-life history, but got transmutated from passage of times. But, then again, some myth or legends are just the ancient-era equivalents of I-Eat-Tomato storyteller (of course without that you Face and cough blood thingy)