Welcome to the mythological part of this website!
I must confess that I was not always interested in Greek mythology but
one day I came closer to this world and I started to ask myself many
questions about it. I then got excited about the idea of putting some
order in all this chaos of names, places and different stories and,
fascinated with what happened more than 2500 years ago, I started to study
regularly the mythological stories. I then found myself in a complex world of
gods who are similar to humans in many ways and thanks to whom today we
can have a good picture of the culture, the lifestyle and the social
structures of the ancient times.
People have
always been fascinated about those things that they are not able to
explain: why does it rain or thunder? Why does the ground move? In the
ancient times, man found the explanation for these phenomena in gods who lived in the sky,
and understood every event as a gift or a punishment from the gods. Therefore,
those
who wanted to have a harmonious relation with gods should try to
be in peace with them and by no means judge them or make fun of them. They
were gods with human qualities, such as jealousy, power, temper and also generosity.
Besides, many
mythological characters described in the Iliad or the Odyssey had
children who became big heroes and did great deeds.
Some of these stories
can have a historical origin. Also, a bad social situation, certain events
or even facts resulting from the personal destiny could end up becoming a
story with the time. Some things would be invented, some details changed a
little bit, the time or the scene adapted, and maybe some of the
characters would be created or left apart. It is then not strange that
often a son happens to have two fathers or two mothers, or that the
different sources do not completely agree in which ones were the twelve gods
from the Olympus.
All in all, it is a world that has fascinated me since I started to know
about it. But I still have to read a lot, and many names have still to
pass in front of me that will stay in my mind going around without an
exact place where to be ordered.
My aim is to get other people interested in the subject of mythology, to
break down the typical prejudices such as that it is a boring subject or
that they are just old stories, because, even though they are old, they are
still completely valid.
Finally, I would like to say that I have tried to tell these stories in an
entertaining and enjoyable way. For this I found a very good example in the
really nice stories told by Michael Koehlmeier and his way of telling them.
So, enjoy it!
Mythology / History / School Visit
