Why humans create myths
Myth is not failed science. It is a way of holding a question that has no settled answer.
It is tempting to read myth as an early, clumsy attempt at explanation — thunder before meteorology, fire before chemistry. That reading survives because it flatters us. It also fails almost immediately: the cultures that told these stories were perfectly capable of practical causal reasoning, and often told the story and the technique side by side.
A more useful reading is that myth encodes what a culture believes about value. The story of Prometheus is not about combustion. It is about whether knowledge that improves life can be taken without cost, and who pays.
This is why myths survive translation badly but travel well. The details localise; the question does not. When a story keeps being retold across centuries, the retelling is usually a sign that the underlying tension has not been resolved — only restated.
Reading myth this way changes what counts as understanding it. The aim is not to decode the story into a proposition, but to notice which difficulty it keeps circling.