User:Yobmod/LGBT themes in mythology
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The literariness of myth, however, is but part of the story. Mythological scholarship has discerned many additional features and functions: Myths explain origins; the genesis of everything from the cosmos, the gods, or mankind to the emergence of a species of flower. They can accomplish in a non-abstractive mode some explanatory functions of philosophy or science; yet the physical sciences and philosophy tend to refute and reject myths, the literary and other arts to adopt, adapt, and invent them.
Variant versions are rather the rule than the exception. Myths may combine with rituals and cults to compose the religious experience of a community. Anonymous for the most part, myths are as if communal dreams emanating from the unconscious of a people. The truth-value varies, with myths believable as literally true within the orbit of the culture that spawns them and deemed erroneous or fictitious elsewhere; yet elsewhere they may also be viewed as imparters of archetypal and psychological verities. Finally, they may mirror, account for, and validate social institutions, such as, for example, the male pederastypederasty that prevailed in ancient Greece.