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Arthur C. Clarke's third law is often a guiding light here - €Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic€ - or the supernatural.
Now our mythology is either oral and/or written down. Often perhaps a myth had a very long oral tradition before being written down. That could be because human language dates back at least 50,000 years; human writing less than 10,000 years. That could translate to a 40,000 gap between an oral legend and that legend being chiselled in stone. That's a long time. Should it make any difference if a myth dates back 50,000 years, or is relatively brand new, co-existing with the era of human writing? Is writing required as being more credible compared to oral traditions? Is one more accurate than the other?
You might, in the days before writing, tell your grandchildren how you ran a four minute mile (it really was closer to five minutes of course - that's your embellishment bit). Your grandkids tell their grandkids, and now it's less than four minutes. Twenty generations later, you were obviously the fastest human alive and had obviously won lots of Olympic gold medals. Two hundred generations later you are now viewed as a winged deity like the Roman God Mercury (Hermes to the Greeks).
But post-writing; would the above embellishment be likely to happen to that extent? Say your grandkids now carve your four minute mile achievement onto the town square's stele or in hieroglyphs on your pyramid tomb walls. Once that's written down it's a bit hard to embellish that fact from that point forwards. It's now in writing; in fact, in this case, literally carved in stone.
But going back to the oral scenario, would that embellishment, from a near five minute mile (real reality) to being a winged deity €faster than a speeding bullet' (in another context), really have happened? Or would perhaps this be more a case of my embellishing the likely embellishment?
In cultures that just have primarily an oral tradition, it's vitally important that that tradition be passed on from generation to generation with utmost accuracy. Survival depends on it. How so? Well, where are your traditional enemies? You'd better get their location right and pass on that information in spot-on fashion. Where does the Sun set (or rise) when you'd better start harvesting fruit and nuts for the winter? What star patterns are overhead when the rainy season begins? When does the salmon (a food source) run the rapids? When and where do your game animal herds migrate? What, where and when do you preform those ceremonies or rituals you must observe to the letter in order not to anger your gods? Your ancestral tree had better be passed on accurately if you have any eventual claim to the throne.
Now mythologies, whether oral, written down, or a combination of both, don't attach a postscript along the line that says €the contents of this story are fictional and for entertainment and instructional purposes only€. That's quite the contrast to our relatively modern tall tales - our novels and short stories and even more recently, TV shows, movies and other electronic media like video games.
When explicated stated or not, authors and film/TV producers usually have some sort of disclaimer something along the lines of €This is a work of fiction. Any similarity between these characters and any person alive or dead is purely a matter of coincidence.€ A few modern examples illustrate how we're not being taken for a reality ride, since there was never any doubt from the get-go that these characters and events were fictional, and deliberately so.
Steven Spielberg & George Lucas - Indiana Jones and Young Indiana Jones;
Ian Fleming - James Bond and Goldfinger (along with other villains too numerous to mention);
Arthur Conan Doyle - Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Watson and Professor Moriarty among others;
Mary Shelley - Doctor Frankenstein;
J. K. Rowling - Harry Potter and friends;
Mark Twain - Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn;
And there are of course thousands more novels and stories from €Treasure Island€ to €Moby Dick€ to €Gone with the Wind€ to €The Raven€ and on and on and on it goes. But the upshot is that you're never in any doubt that these are make-believe.
Now many of these make-believe characters might be derived from real people, or more likely as not an amalgamation of various people the author knew, or knew of, but that amalgamation is still ultimately fictional, even if the events they feature in at times have an historical reality (like €Gone with the Wind€ and the American Civil War).
Would Homer (Troy) or Plato (Atlantis) state a €this is a work of fiction€ disclaimer? No, because they didn't need to. It wasn't fiction; it wasn't mythology, Ivory Tower scholars opinions to the contrary be damned.
Now here's an experiment. Pick your favourite cultural mythology (Greek; Norse; Hindu; Polynesian; whatever). List all of the mythological characters and events contained therein (you can stop after several hundred if you wish). Now, are all those characters and events the work of some secretive author(s) of pure fiction who failed to provide appropriate disclaimers, and thus have thousands of people with your level of intelligence been duped by those anomous few?
The populace of your chosen culture firmly believed in the existence of those characters, many being deities or demigods (and goddesses) and they went to extraordinary efforts to write down their history, their exploits, their relationships, often undertaking mammoth civil engineering works like raising massive hundred ton stone monuments to them, and not just one, but thousands of them.
There's not just one huge carving of The Sphinx at Giza in Egypt just outside of Cairo, but there exists many dozens of large rock statues of the sphinx creature; ditto for other mythological characters. Many of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were devoted to mythology. I find it odd that so much time, effort and energy was devoted to fictional characters and events - unless of course they weren't fictional.
Now if only one human culture out of many dozens on Earth had such a mythology, you could probably dismiss it as an anomaly - maybe something in their drinking water gives them hallucinations or visions that are all in the mind and thus imaginary and thus fictional. But, when every culture has those hundreds of what we moderns call mythological characters and related events and when those monuments mount into the multi tens-of-thousands, well something is screwy somewhere. Further, many of those mythologies, from many of those cultures - independent cultures separated by time and/or space - not only share common themes like gods, hybrids, giants, shape-shifters, floods, and creation stories but the nitty-gritty details are often uncannily similar.
In conclusion, Troy has been discovered; The Trojan War confirmed; the Atlantis myth has been adequately explained as a massive exploding volcanic eruption on the Mediterranean island of Thera (Santorini) and resulting tsunami that did in the Minoan civilization on Crete. Maybe the Griffin legend was inspired by fossils of the dinosaur Protoceratops as some have suggested, or maybe not. Maybe the Griffin, like dragons and the sphinx really existed. Thousands of mythological characters and events have yet to yield their fictional status for reality, but who's to say truth isn't stranger than fiction, apart from those Ivory Tower scholars that is?
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