Excessive Literalism in Myth Interpretation?

One thing one has to be careful about in myth interpretation: not
to take myths too literally as history. The posited phase of the
killing of sacred kings seems to me to be that sort of literalism; I
think that the myths held to justify such an inference were
invented to justify offering the Gods something lesser than the
reigning leader. This is because most well-documented leaders
do not consent to being executed at the end of their terms in
office; it's unlikely that their less-documented predecessors
were much different.

A similar kind of myth may be a certain story of Zeus and
Prometheus, in which Prometheus got Zeus to accept the less
tasty parts of a sacrificial animal such as the bones and sinews
and so forth, thus letting the sacrificers eat the big muscles and
other tasty parts. Would this myth reflect a prehistory of offering
the tastiest parts to Zeus and eating only the bones and sinews
and the like? Not necessarily; it may have been invented to justify
keeping the tastiest parts for oneself while seeming like a
faithful worshipper.

Another such example of excessive literalism may be stories of
women ruling; this could be invented by the men to justify their
continued dominance by offering object examples of the
dangers of letting women rule. Thus, in classical Greek sources,
the Amazons were great villains.

In fairness to a more literalist approach, however, women having
a greater status in society might naively be interpreted as female
rule; there is some evidence of Sarmatian women fighting
alongside men, which may have inspired some of the stories of
Amazons.

Finally, some myths seem to be Just So Stories; thus the Adam
and Eve story in the Bible "explains" why snakes crawl on their
bellies -- a long-ago snake was punished for doing some
mischief.

So one ought to avoid all-encompassing theories of the
meaning of myths; a myth can be any of several things --
distorted or misunderstood history (Sarmatian Amazons),
justifications for some practice (offering the least tasty parts), or
explanations of some phenomena (snakes crawling on their
bellies).

-- Loren Petrich