God. Creator or Poet?

God. Creator or Poet?

The Latin word “poet” means “creator”. Humans, realizing they are different from animals in the world, have been trying to rationalize things and themselves to the world ever since. Poets and writers used to come up with these far off imaginative ways of how to answer questions of life almost to explain it in a philosophical way. Who were the first humans? How did they come to be? What made the sun and the moon and the stars? Why the animals were made the way they were? What caused night and day, the seasons, the cycle of life itself? Why were some people greedy and some unselfish, some ugly and some handsome, some dull and some clever? As people pondered these questions and many more, they created stories that helped explain the world to their primitive minds. Storytellers told these tales again and again around the fires of the early tribes, by the hearth of humble cottages, before the great fire in the king's hall; they told them as they sat in the grass huts of the jungle, the Hogans of the Navajo, and the igloos of the Eskimo. Their children told them, and their children's children, until the stories were smooth and polished. And so people created their myths and their folktales, their legends and epics; the literature of the fireside, the poetry of the people, and the memory of humankind.

They spoke what made them understand the unknown. However scholars choose to look at them, folktales and myths are literature derived from human imagination to explain the human condition. Literature today continues to express our concern about human strengths, weaknesses, and the individual's relationships to the world and to other people. This thought came up by Euhemerus in 300 B.C. He began the theory that once one war hero became respected and dies, people pass on their name while embellishing their heroic story. Soon, people forgot the fact that this hero was even human. Now, the hero was a God; an immortal God. The vast body of traditional literature was shaped verbally by generation after generation, simply because oral language was then the only language. (Even today, writing is far from universal. Of 2796 languages in the world, all have an oral form, but only about 153 have a written form.