Forward
In modern society traditions, myths & legends typically get treated as fantasy or fairytales. The greatest threat to all three in terms of their acceptance is civilization itself, which reinforces the status quo and the publicly accepted and sanctioned narrative. Civilization brings with it a contempt and derision for everything which it cannot understand or doesn’t fit said narrative; greeting such things with skepticism, doubt and rejection. If a myth or legend survives this kind of treatment, it is at risk of being taken up by the entertainment industry which just as like as not would turn it into a clown show in a cartoon or anime. It doesn’t help that they are basically unsusceptible to scientific tests or duplication, and if they survive at all in a civilized nation, they are found in garbled forms, and only amongst remote country folk.
The way that these frequently abrupt or terse traditions have been viewed in general has typically been variously as children’s tales designed simply to instruct or entertain, symbolical, varying from solar deities, nature spirits and guardian entities to rather vague concepts of good and evil, incredible profane or religious explanations of otherwise normal events inexplicable to early man, or as fragmented memories of once-real people and events from primeval history.These frequently abrupt or terse statements were fundamentally meant to convey traditions to essentially illiterate mass audiences in simplified or general form in clear and unambiguous terms of what happened. This doesn’t cut it in a literate, educated, and scientific civilization that also demands the how, when and why.
Therein lies the truth of traditions, myths & legends in that they represent the verbal records and history of illiterate societies and civilizations bereft of written accounts preserving information for future generations. Not that written records are any guarantee of information being successfully passed down through the ages. During my research for this book, I found several glaring examples of written documentation being ‘scrubbed’ or even outright being disposed of for religious or political purposes. Several glaring examples that come to mind are Ovid’s works, The Catalogue of Women, all of Sappho’s works, who was an Archaic Greek poet from Eresos, on the island of Lesbos, and the ‘Christians’ who tried to burn down the Library of Alexandria, a repository of ancient knowledge. Keep in mind that the Muslims weren’t any better, burning books from there to heat public baths several centuries later.
Since we can conclude that there is a high degree of truth in traditions, myths & legends that have survived the attacks of politics, religion and the pressure of collective attitudes and beliefs of a brainwashed/propagandized public pushing the statis quo, that leads to some amazing conclusions that can be deduced from myths and legends regarding what the world was really like. By combining and corroborating information from the ancient verbal and written records of cultures and societies all around the world along with a mountain of supporting scientific studies from archeologists, geologists, botanists, zoologists, anthropologists, paleontologists, astronomers, etc. we find that the history and truth of the world and mankind is far different than we are led to believe. Fortunately for us, the Powers That Be can’t ‘scrub’ them all or the vast amount of supporting evidence in the physical world.
In writing this story I’ve approached it from the perspective that it’s a historical fiction in terms of world building. Most aspects of this story can be considered historical, supported by traditions, myths and legends as well as scientific studies which I’ll try to reference, and explanatory notes where appropriate. The characters in this story are of course fictional, except for the gods and some of the monarchs. Ancient Greek history buffs will quickly realize that most of the characters are hijacked from around 500 BC, with a smattering from before then. In reality, this story takes place way before that time, justified by the theory that what happened before could very well happen again, but in reverse.
