When I think about semantically central “myths” seen through a western lens, I’m guessing you’re meaning religious stories from the Romans, Greeks, or an oral nativist tradition. Maybe instead of thinking about centrally pedagogic things that also happen to be myths it would be more helpful to think about centrally mythical things that might also happen to be pedagogic.
I’m not a religious scholar, but my perception is that the thing that those three types of story have in common is that they often centre on applying a cognitive model to natural phenomena. Sacrificing a goat to invite a happy fortune is a case of overfitting a dubious cognitive model onto reality.
Perhaps the perennial lesson underpinning say, Poseidon overthrowing the titans in his rise to power, is that the appropriate preparatory heuristic when approaching something as mysterious and dangerous as the ocean is to treat it as though it has hostile intent—to take fewer risks and to prepare for adversity as though it were controlled by a force that is much more familiar than tidal dynamics and meteorological patterns—that of the thought process of an abusive tyrant.
Perhaps Athena cursed Medusa because there are utile reasons why celibacy is important to the orderly relationship between religion and the rest of society.
What I would caution however is that when we’re backfilling justifications why certain narratives exist the way they do, it’s possible to backfill a wide range of frames. These ideas are definitely not the most popular explanations.
Ideas and stories survive on account of evolutionary pressure, not on account of utilitarianism or any inherent wisdom. Most knowledge is eventually proven wrong. Sacrificing goats because you overfitted the mind model onto a random phenomenon is a cost of doing business.
Something I’m less familiar with that I think would be worth your further investigation is oral storytelling traditions in tribal cultures. The written word allows various people to write all sorts of things with less evolutionary pressure about what survives. Oral traditions are limited to memory, and so I would imagine pedagogic stories holding greater weight.
When I think about semantically central “myths” seen through a western lens, I’m guessing you’re meaning religious stories from the Romans, Greeks, or an oral nativist tradition. Maybe instead of thinking about centrally pedagogic things that also happen to be myths it would be more helpful to think about centrally mythical things that might also happen to be pedagogic.
I’m not a religious scholar, but my perception is that the thing that those three types of story have in common is that they often centre on applying a cognitive model to natural phenomena. Sacrificing a goat to invite a happy fortune is a case of overfitting a dubious cognitive model onto reality.
Perhaps the perennial lesson underpinning say, Poseidon overthrowing the titans in his rise to power, is that the appropriate preparatory heuristic when approaching something as mysterious and dangerous as the ocean is to treat it as though it has hostile intent—to take fewer risks and to prepare for adversity as though it were controlled by a force that is much more familiar than tidal dynamics and meteorological patterns—that of the thought process of an abusive tyrant.
Perhaps Athena cursed Medusa because there are utile reasons why celibacy is important to the orderly relationship between religion and the rest of society.
What I would caution however is that when we’re backfilling justifications why certain narratives exist the way they do, it’s possible to backfill a wide range of frames. These ideas are definitely not the most popular explanations.
Ideas and stories survive on account of evolutionary pressure, not on account of utilitarianism or any inherent wisdom. Most knowledge is eventually proven wrong. Sacrificing goats because you overfitted the mind model onto a random phenomenon is a cost of doing business.
Something I’m less familiar with that I think would be worth your further investigation is oral storytelling traditions in tribal cultures. The written word allows various people to write all sorts of things with less evolutionary pressure about what survives. Oral traditions are limited to memory, and so I would imagine pedagogic stories holding greater weight.