Mythology Part I

I’m thinking about doing four of these. The first is a comparison of fairies and aliens. I also want to talk about angles and dragons, the melding of past mythological creatures to create new ones, such as chupacabra, and maybe one about computers.

Mythology is an evolving thing. It must be to suit us. Whatever we don’t understand, we speculate about. Eventually that speculation turns into stories. We then repeat the stories until it becomes accepted fact. But a myth isn’t just a story to explain things, it’s also a mirror. You can learn everything you need to know about a culture by studying its mythology. You can see our fears and dreams, our laws, what we worship and what we despise. That’s why myths change. Modern humans have a completely different mind set from medieval humans. We no longer understand life in the castle. But we still know terror can come when least expected.

On the surface, fairies and aliens appear to be two different beings with nothing in common. But look a little closer and you’ll find they’re not so different after all.

Fairies to Aliens
Fairies- steal babies and leave changelings
Aliens- abduct women who later learn they are pregnant. Weeks/months later the woman discovers she is no longer carrying a child
Fairies live in mushrooms
Aliens fly about in a UFO which is mushroomed shaped
Fairies- steal cow’s milk
Aliens- cause mysterious death or strange behavior of livestock
Fairies- fairy rings
Aliens- crop circles
Both are associated with patterns of bright light
Fairy- from another realm
Alien- from another world
Both come at night (usually)
Fairy- repelled by iron
Alien- protect your brainwaves with tinfoil so they can’t read your mind
Both have time loss or missing time when people encounter them. For example, your car breaks down on a lonely road around midnight. You see a bright ball or light coming down from the sky. It disappears. You fix the car and drive away. The clock on the radio now says 5am. It only took an hour to fix the car. Where were you?
Compare that with a person walking through the forest at night. He sees a light through the trees. He follows it and comes to fairy party. He watches for a while and then continues home. His family has been worried sick because he was gone far longer than he should have been. He thinks the trip took one day and one night. The family says he’s been gone a week.
Both have a culture that is superior to ours. Fairies have finer food and more beautiful women. Aliens have mastered space travel with faster ships. Fairies have a magick we cannot understand and aliens have a science we have not discovered.

I think both are reactions to advancements. I think fairies were supposed to be the things you came across if one went too far into nature. I think the church was supposed to be the “safe” place and nature was everything untamed and ungodly, so it was best not to travel too far into the forest. The alien reaction is the same kind of mindset, only now nature is safe and technology is dangerous. Point too many satellites in the wrong direction and draw the attention of aliens. Both represent sticking with the known world and keeping our heads in the sand so we don’t have to face what we don’t understand.