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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Theo R Cwithin" data-source="post: 5037985" data-attributes="member: 75712">I don't agree with this.  It seems to me that myth basically counts on the fact that human behavior is not fully understandable to explain why the natural and supernatural worlds are not understandable.  The fact that fey or any other agent in mythology is illogical is not the point of the myth. Rather, it's just that the logic of a given tale doesn't have to go any deeper than that superficial level.  Making these agents in the form of men or animals, in fact, goes a long way toward removing the need for a logical explanation simply because the men and animals they're modelled on are themselves quite irrational!  In other words, the inscrutable motives of men and beasts were sufficient to "explain" the inscrutable motives of everything else.  After all, people back then were just as twisted, evil, generous, erratic, saintly, stupid, wrathful, ugly, lustful, as they are today.   By way of example, lightning is almost always attributed to an angry god; it wasn't important why he was angry.  Just as people often act irrationally when angry, so do the gods, and no further explanation is necessary.  Toadstools grow in circles after it rains because that's where the fairies danced; why they danced was unimportant, because there are lots of human reasons for dancing.  Shoes buried in the threshold keep evil spirits away.  Why is not important; it's enough to know that evil spirits don't like shoes, possibly in the same way people don't like latrines.I don't think it was common practice to try to even ask "why" beyond that level of understanding.  Not because there was some deep-seated dread about the fundamental incomprehensibility of the universe, but just because that casual "common sense" level of logic was enough for people who spent their days scraping by, plowing fields, being ill, carrying water, chopping wood, and trying to keep their kids alive long enough to work the farm in a few years.And, not surprisingly, whenever mankind sat down and really started thinking about such things and trying to logically connect all these disparate facts described by myth, they ended up with civilization, agriculture, engineering, astrology, alchemy.  And, eventually, science-- which, ironically, tells us that nature is much simpler that we ever dreamed.As for Lovecraft, I really think his writings, were more a response to our own age of reason.  He was harkening back to that time when people didn't understand things, and lived in ignorance, but starting at our level of understanding.  The message was that we-- with all our science and technology-- are just as ignorant as the peasants of the middle ages with their fairy tales and superstitions.  We are, in other words, still missing the Truth-- and, moreover, we can never comprehend it.  This is directly in opposition to the old fairytales, in fact:  while the ancients assumed things were understandable by appealing to human or animal motives, Lovecraft says the *real* universe is inherently and hopelessly incomprehensible, so don't even try.   (At least that's what I get out of it; I've never read any critical analysis of his works, or his own notes on the topic.)Anyway, that's 2cp, from someone who really hasn't delved into the subject as deeply as I'm sure a lot of others here have!  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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